Van Gogh didn’t kill himself?

The authors of a new life of Vincent Van Gogh knew they’d stir controversy by disputing the widely-held belief that the artist killed himself with a pistol while painting in a French wheat field. In “Van Gogh: The Life,” a 976-page doorstopper published this week, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith say it’s more likely that the celebrated Dutch post-Impressionist painter was the victim of an accidental shooting. The suspected perpetrators: a couple of teenage bullies obsessed with American cowboys and playing with a gun, and protected on his deathbed by Van Gogh claiming an act of suicide. “I must say, we feel we are in the middle of a whirlwind that we didn’t quite anticipate,” Naifeh told AFP by telephone from Aiken, South Carolina where he and Smith live and work. “We anticipated this would generate, not quite this level of furore– but certainly some level of furore.”

One of most recognised artists of all time, Van Gogh suffered prolonged bouts of mental illness and depression. He famously sliced off part of his ear, and only sold one painting before his death in July 1890 at the age of 37. “To us he’s part of our visual DNA,” said Naifeh, but in his time Van Gogh’s fluid, vibrant style “looked garish and almost absurdly intensely coloured” — and it was inevitable that the artist was a troubled loner. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which collaborated with the authors, calls the shooting theory “interesting” and “spectacular,” but adds it is too soon to jettison the long-held suicide version of events. “The two authors have not found new facts; they have just interpreted them differently,” said its curator Leo Jansen, a friend of the biographers who has endorsed “Van Gogh” as “the definitive biography for decades to come.”

The idea of death by suicide was planted in popular imagination by the 1956 movie “Lust for Life,” based on an Irving Stone novel, with Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh melodramatically shooting himself at his easel. Wounded in the abdomen and bleeding profusely, Van Gogh supposedly dragged himself about one mile (two kilometres) back to the inn in Auvers-sur-Oise where he was staying, dying in his attic room. “The sadness will last forever” were reputedly his last words. But with the tenacity of homicide detectives, Naifeh and Smith uncovered nuggets of evidence that point — inconclusively, they acknowledge — in the direction of manslaughter.

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