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FROM THE MAGAZINEDECEMBER 2014 ISSUE

NCIS: Provence: The Van Gogh Mystery
For many decades, suicide was the unquestioned final chapter of Vincent
van Gogh’s legend. But in their 2011 book, Pulitzer Prize-winning
biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith offered a far more
plausible scenario—that Van Gogh was killed—only to find themselves
under attack. Now, with the help of a leading forensic expert, the
authors take their case a step further.
BY GREGORY WHITE SMITH AND STEVEN NAIFEH

NOVEMBER 7, 2014

Van Goghs 1889 selfportrait.
WHODUNIT? Van Gogh’s 1889 self-portrait. BY DEAGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES.
Alone figure tramps toward a field of golden wheat. He carries a canvas,
an easel, a bag of paints, and a pained grimace. He sets up his kit and
begins to paint furiously, rushing to capture the scene of the swirling
wheat as a storm approaches. Murderous crows attack him. He flails them
away. As the wind whips the wheat into a frenzy, he races to add the
ominous clouds to his canvas. Then the threatening crows. When he looks
up, his eyes bug out with madness. He goes to a tree and scribbles a
note: “I am desperate. I see no way out.” Gritting his teeth in torment,
he reaches into his pocket. Cut to a long shot of the wheat field
churning in the storm. The sudden report of a gun startles a passing
cart driver. The music swells. “The End” appears against a mosaic of
famous paintings and a climactic crash of cymbals.

It’s a great scene, the stuff of legend: the death of the world’s most
beloved artist, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Lust for Life was
conceived in 1934 by the popular pseudo-biographer Irving Stone and
captured on film in 1956 by the Oscar-winning director Vincente
Minnelli, with the charismatic Kirk Douglas in the principal role.

There’s only one problem. It’s all bunk. Though eagerly embraced by a
public in love with a handful of memorable images and spellbound by the
thought of an artist who would cut off his own ear, Stone’s suicide yarn
was based on bad history, bad psychology, and, as a definitive new
expert analysis makes clear, bad forensics.

In 2001, when we visited the Van Gogh Foundation archives, in Amsterdam,
for the first time, we had no inkling of the surprise that lay at the
end of our 10-year effort to write the definitive biography of Vincent
van Gogh. The only bias we brought with us that day was “Please, God,
let him be straight!”

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Our 1998 biography of Jackson Pollock had drawn a lot of flak for its
conclusion that the legendarily macho painter had homosexual yearnings
(on which he occasionally acted). The evidence was overwhelmingly
convincing; how could we not address it? Nevertheless, some critics
denounced “the accusation” as an outrageous slur. They even argued that
we had brought out the pink in Pollock because we were gay, on some sort
of posthumous recruitment drive. Preposterous as this was, we didn’t
want to go through the gauntlet again. (Spoiler alert: Vincent was most
definitively straight.)

The archives occupy an old town house next door to the Van Gogh Museum.
We had been warned to expect a chilly reception. Van Gogh is a national
hero. Who were we? For starters, Pulitzer Prize or no, we spoke not a
word of Dutch. Nevertheless, the two archivists, Fieke Pabst and Monique
Hageman, welcomed us warmly. Before long, they were bringing us stacks
of folders, offered with a smile and a few encouraging words, such as
“We thought you might find these interesting, too.” We spent weeks
copying file after file, many of which contained documents only in
Dutch, which we would later have to have translated.

It took about five years of such efforts before the museum conferred on
us the rare privilege of a visit to “the Vault.” Somewhere in the bowels
of the Van Gogh Museum (the location has since changed) there was a
large, windowless room with concrete walls and cruel warehouse lighting.
Against the walls were stacks of the high-tech aluminum “crates” used to
transport the museum’s treasures to exhibitions around the world.

The senior curator for drawings, Sjraar van Heugten, unlocked the Vault
door and took us inside. He slid a Solander box onto a tabletop and
opened it to reveal a stack of drawings that Van Gogh had made early in
his career. The letters were there, too. The actual letters. We held
them in our (gloved) hands. On the top of a filing cabinet stood a
copper bowl featured in one of his most famous still lifes. Over there,
the plaster nude figure that appeared in dozens of drawings and
paintings. Suddenly, we realized we were surrounded not just by the
products of his imagination but by the objects of his daily life, and we
felt the almost religious spell attached to him. But, meanwhile, our
digging in the archives was beginning to undermine one of the pillars of
that faith: the story of how the artist died.

Van Gogh himself wrote not a word about his final days. The film got it
wrong: he left no suicide note—odd for a man who churned out letters so
profligately. A piece of writing allegedly found in his clothes after he
died turned out to be an early draft of his final letter to his brother
Theo, which he posted the day of the shooting, July 27, 1890. That
letter was upbeat—even ebullient—about the future. He had placed a large
order for more paints only a few days before a bullet put a hole in his
abdomen. Because the missile missed his vital organs, it took 29
agonizing hours to kill him.

None of the earliest accounts of the shooting—those written in the days
immediately after the event—mentioned suicide. They said only that Van
Gogh had “wounded himself.” Strangely, the townspeople of Auvers, the
picturesque community near Paris where he stayed in the last months of
his life, maintained a studied silence about the incident. At first, no
one admitted having seen Van Gogh on his last, fateful outing, despite
the summer crowding in the streets. No one knew where he would have
gotten a gun; no one admitted to finding the gun afterward, or any of
the other items he had taken with him (canvas, easel, paints, etc.). His
deathbed doctors, an obstetrician and a homeopathist, could make no
sense of his wounds.

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And, anyway, what kind of a person, no matter how unbalanced, tries to
kill himself with a shot to the midsection? And then, rather than finish
himself off with a second shot, staggers a mile back to his room in
agonizing pain from a bullet in his belly?

The chief purveyor of the suicide narrative was Van Gogh’s fellow artist
Émile Bernard, who wrote the earliest version of artistic self-martyrdom
in a letter to a critic whose favor he was currying. Two years earlier,
he had tried the same trick when Van Gogh cut off part of his ear.
Bernard spun a completely invented account of the event that thrust
himself into the sensational tale. “My best friend, my dear Vincent, is
mad,” he gushed to the same critic. “Since I have found out, I am almost
mad myself.” Bernard was not present at the time of Vincent’s fatal
shooting, but he did attend the funeral.

If later accounts are to be believed—and they often are not—the police
briefly investigated the shooting. (No records survive.) The local
gendarme who interviewed Vincent on his deathbed had to prompt him with
the open question “Did you intend to commit suicide?” To which he
answered (again, according to later accounts) with a puzzled
equivocation: “I think so.”

That account, like almost all the other “early accounts” of Van Gogh’s
botched suicide, rested mainly on the testimony of one person: Adeline
Ravoux, the daughter of the owner of the Ravoux Inn, where Van Gogh was
staying in Auvers, and where he died. Adeline was 13 at the time. She
did not speak for the record until 1953. When she did, she mostly
channeled the stories her father, Gustave, had told her half a century
earlier. Her story changed constantly, developing dramatic shape, and
even dialogue, with each telling.

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Around the same time, another witness stepped forward. He was the son of
Paul Gachet, the homeopathic doctor who had sat for a famous portrait by
Van Gogh. Paul junior was 17 at the time of the shooting. He spent most
of the rest of his life inflating his own and his father’s importance to
the artist—and, not incidentally, the value of the paintings father and
son had stripped from Vincent’s studio in the days after his death. It
was Paul junior who introduced the idea that the shooting had taken
place in the wheat fields outside Auvers. Even Theo’s son, Vincent (the
painter’s namesake and godson), who founded the museum, dismissed Gachet
Jr. as “highly unreliable.”