Are There Visions and Ghosts in Van Gogh Paintings?

“There are no ghosts in the paintings of Van Gogh, no visions, no hallucinations. This is the torrid truth of the sun at two o’clock in the afternoon.” This quote that Antonin Artraud, stated from, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, explains the way in which Van Gogh approached his artwork. He believed in the dry truth and as a result his work was remarkably straightforward in the messages that he portrayed. While visiting Paris, France this past April, I was fortunate enough to have visited Musée d’Orsay, a museum that contains mostly French art from 1848-1914 and houses a large collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces and 19th century works from the Louvre [The Oxford Companion to Western Art]. I was also favored in having the opportunity to see the Vincent Van Gogh/Antonin Artaud exhibition, The Man Suicided by Society. The exhibition captured Antonin Artaud’s text about Van Gogh’s, “exceptional lucidity that made lesser minds uncomfortable,” or better known as his mental illness that had a major effect on his artwork [Musee d’Orsay]. In this exhibition, Vincent Van Gogh’s works visually present his life experience having spent 9 years in a mental institution and the way his imbalanced mind played a direct role on the outcome of his artwork. The darkness of Vincent Van Gogh’s illness that had a major impact on his art, was a form of expressionism which led to a collection of works that both told his life story, and later, led to his own suicide.
Van Gogh’s works have been deeply considered and examined to unfold the mysteries of his mental illness. It was in Arles, southern France of 1888 where Van Gogh was an accomplished artist on his own, but still not having had much notice, when his me...

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...ded after his death, it was Artaud that claimed, “No, Van Gogh is not crazy, he was pushed to suicidal despair by a society which rejected his works.” Whether or not Artaud’s theory is correct, Vincent Van Gogh was in fact very ill and his paintings are famous for how lucid they are in illustrating the way his mental illness affected him. Van Gogh’s post-impressionist style is very unique of the late 19th century in France and most of his work was done with impasto technique as a way of expression. It is recognizable that his illness had a larger impact on his paintings’ subject matters than the style they were painted in. Vincent Van Gogh’s fame mostly came after his death, and while his paintings did help him to express himself, they now live on to visually translate the true, unwritten stories of his life and the effects paintings have with a mental illness.