My Van Gogh is not ill, nor mad, nor even brilliant. He is dead. This characteristic – fairly widespread among artists born in the 19th century – takes on special significance in his case, since Vincent van Gogh seems to have become the most living dead person in Arles.

Before becoming a visual artist, I was interested in legends, in anthropology and to some extent in occultism. I am familiar with revenants, whether the ones in the Icelandic sagas or the zombies of Haiti. In 2015 I published my second novel, Temps mort, which is about the difficulty of returning. For the cover, we used a self-portrait of an undead Van Gogh, created for the Zombies exhibition held in 2014 at the Collectif E3 gallery. Since my arrival in Arles, the painter-pilgrim has inspired me to make several works on the theme of the rejected Vincent’s return to the city. The fantasy figure of the deceased fits naturally into a city of wind and sun that is also built on top of a large necropolis.

One year ago the Fondation asked me to create a set of drawings about the presence of Van Gogh in Arles, including even in promotional merchandising goodies. I find this popular appropriation of Van Gogh’s person fascinating: a commercial sacrilege that is at time ridiculous. But I also propose to consider it a form of haunting. Because it is not easy to get rid of a revenant. This latter is defined by an enormous appetite and by the impossibility of satiating its emptiness. As an artist, I cannot help but explore this living absence, this paradoxical presence – rather like touching with your tongue the gap left by an extracted tooth. Masked or unmasked, my gaunt Van Gogh staggers along the road, his face changing like those of apparitions. A mighty painter afflicted by a bad death, he becomes a spirit that we can invoke, a Loa voodoo painting, a fetish. There is nothing morbid or depressing in this colourful carrion: on the contrary, humour, life and detachment take root in it, so as to transform the soil of a tomb into the fresh blossom of an almond tree.

Born in 1976 in Bordeaux near the Public Garden, in a district populated with birds, carp, old men and gardeners, Thibault Franc studied philosophy. Rather than turn to teaching, he experiments with other modes of interaction and other forms of knowledge, through botany, martial arts, trips to Africa, and a studio at street level, first in Bordeaux and then in Arles. His artistic and literary creations serve as apprehensions of a fragmented world. Through his assemblages of related images or composite objects, he attempts to reverse entropy and contain centrifugal forces. His delight in misappropriating words, forms and objects is not indulged at random, but is consciously anchored in a geographical region and around its local mythologies.

le-mort-le-plus-vivant-de-Arl

Vincent qu’on assassine

Vincent van Gogh, Autoportrait au chapeau de feutre gris, 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Premonition of an ending

Vincent van Gogh, “Champ de blé aux corbeaux”, 1890, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

In the letters that he writes to his friends and family, Vincent van Gogh speaks of his art, his thoughts and his contemporaries. 

For Antonin Artaud, this correspondence was tantamount to “the revelation of a mournful and appalling tale”, part of which Gérard Eppelé proposes to outline in this public reading. To this end he has selected, from among Vincent’s many letters, key passages indicating the artist’s premonition of an approaching ending: that of a life which would close, for the Dutch artist, one 29 July at Auvers-sur-Oise.

Gérard Eppelé will be sharing with us an “epistolary collage” that includes references to Rimbaud and Artaud as well as extracts from letters written as from spring 1889, when Van Gogh left Arles for Saint Paul de Mausole. 

Born in 1929 in Cherbourg, Gérard Eppelé spent his childhood up to 1942 in Morocco. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse, in 1952 he worked in cinema as a painter decorator. In 1959 he moved to Vence, began painting and became assistant to Jean Dubuffet, who enabled him to hold his first exhibition in Alphonse Chave’s gallery. A resident of Arles since 1998, Gérard Eppelé has held many exhibitions in France and abroad. Up to 1992 he also taught at the Villa Arson.

The talk will be followed by an aperitif.

The life, work and illnesses of Vincent   

Vincent van Gogh, “Saint Paul’s Hospital in Saint-Rémy de Provence”, 1889, Musée d’Orsay

Jean-Marc Boulon is a psychiatrist and medical director of the Saint-Paul psychiatric hospital. He is also president of the “Association des sites, monuments et paysages de Saint-Rémy de Provence” and the Valetudo association, whose aim is to demystify mental illness and to place art and culture in the service of health care. 

Inspired by his vision and by a letter written by Vincent to his brother Theo, Dr Boulon has created the Valetudo association in order to offer art-therapy workshops to patients as part of their treatment. An exhibition of the resulting artworks is mounted every year in the exhibition/sales centre at Saint-Paul de Mausole monastery. It was in this same psychiatric hospital that Van Gogh spent 53 weeks, on a voluntary placement, between May 1889 and May 1890.

An iconoclast, Jean-Marc Boulon is convinced that art is a means of giving more than we possess and that to give is to receive. In keeping with his practice, his talk will draw upon his numerous discussions with fellow clinicians on the illnesses suffered by Van Gogh. 

The talk will be followed by an aperitif.

Van Gogh’s Arles

Between personal testimony and open dialogue with Bice Curiger, Jean-Paul Capitani revisits the places and the people painted by Van Gogh during his stay in Arles from February 1888 to May 1889. Most of the Arles buildings and structures documented in Vincent’s work have now disappeared. Looking at Trinquetaille bridge or Langlois bridge as the artist painted or drew them, and comparing this with the face they present today, we can see how much the city has changed. The portraits that Vincent painted in Arles, such as his Seated Zouave of 1888, testify to Van Gogh’s passion for the human figure, which he studied throughout his career.

Born in Arles in 1944, Jean-Paul Capitani is an agronomist by training. He is today the director of the publishing company Éditions Actes Sud.

Vincent, mad about literature

Among all the passions that inspired Van Gogh, one of the earliest, most enduring and most ardent was his love of literature. His letters bears frequent witness to this, as does his painting, which on several occasions takes literature as its central or partial motif.
We shall try to understand what served to spark and fuel such a passion in the case of an artist who was also, if not a writer, a man for whom writing was an activity inseparable from that of reflecting upon his life and his work as an artist. 

Writer, poet, and qualified philosophy teacher, Pierre Parlant is the author of numerous critical essays, non-fiction prose and poetic texts. His most recent publications include Les courtes habitudes – Nietzsche à Nice (2014), Exposer l’inobservable (2014) and Ciel déposé (2015). 

Van Gogh and Cézanne : landscape concepts and life stories

The intimate injunction to talk about ‘my Van Gogh’ rather than Van Gogh prompts me to review some of the feelings and personal thoughts inspired by 40 years of sociology and by walks through the Aix and Arles countryside ‘in the footsteps’ of Cézanne and Van Gogh. 

Is the difference in the way in which these two painters treat the light of the South connected to the difference – pronounced, to say the least – in their respective degree of immersion in the local region and community? Why are Aix and its environs often described by the media as ‘Cézannian sites’, whereas the surroundings of Arles are never branded as ‘Van Gogh-ian’?
From rejection to adulation. Looking at different studies, we find that the social mechanisms of devaluation–revaluation of an artist or a territory depend on cultural and symbolic arguments that are practically identical.

Bernard Picon is a sociologist and Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS. He lives in Arles, where he has established an interdisciplinary research team studying environmental issues from the point of view of human-nature interactions. In 2008 he published L’espace et le temps en Camargue.

Photo credit:
Vincent van Gogh, The Harvest, June 1888
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)