Free Longer Views by Samuel R. Delany

beyond mid-January. Still, most likely, some of what Artaud said the night of the 13th, from the Vieux Columbier stage, about psychiatry, about himself, and/or about van Gogh, became the substance for what he wrote in his essay—if not vice versa.
    Artaud had written art reviews before and always had strong opinions. Delacroix, Giotto, Brueghel, Modigliani, Picasso, Klee—these were among his enthusiasms. On the other hand, for Artaud Matisse was only a “trickster” and Picabia merely “amusing.” But these opinions dated from before the last nine years’ internment at Rodez. Also Artaud himself was drawing and painting constantly these days.
    Artaud’s van Gogh essay is a perverse combination of madness and insight. Psychiatrists in general—and van Gogh’s psychiatrist in particular, Dr. Gachet—are the villains of the piece. Though the essay does not survey the paintings in any particular specificity,
Wheatfield with Crows
, the painting van Gogh worked on two days before his suicide, clearly fascinated Artaud. The introduction, however, begins as close to madness as any writer might want to stray:
    One can speak of the good mental health of van Gogh who, in his whole life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear,
    in a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp,
    just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother.
    And this is not an image, but a fact abundantly and daily repeated and cultivated throughout the world . . .
    Soon, however, after a foray against a psychiatrist, Dr. L., it moves on to lyrical insights into the paintings:
    Pure linear painting had been driving me mad for a long time when I encountered van Gogh, who painted neither line nor forms but things of inert nature as if in the throes of convulsions.
    And inert.
    . . . The latest van Gogh exhibit at the Orangerie does not have all the very great paintings of the unfortunate painter. But among those that are there, there are enough rotating processions studded with clumps of carmine plants, enough sunken roads with overhanging yews, enough violet suns whirling over haystacks of pure gold, enough
Père Tranquille
and enough self-portraits,
    to remind us what a sordid simplicity of objects, peoples, materials, elements,
    van Gogh drew on for these kinds of organ peals, these fireworks, these atmospheric epiphanies . . .
    The crows painted two days before his death did not, anymore than his other paintings, open the door for him to a certain posthumous glory, but they do open to painterly painting, or rather to unpainted nature, the secret door to a possible beyond, to a possible permanent reality, through the door opened by van Gogh to a possible and sinister beyond.
    It is not unusual to see a man, with the shot that killed him already in his belly, crowding black crows onto a canvas, and under them a kind of meadow—perhaps livid, at any rate empty—in which the wine color of the earth is juxtaposed wildly with the dirty yellow of the wheat.
    But no other painter besides van Gogh would have known how to find, as he did in order to paint his crows, that truffle black, that “rich banquet” black which is at the same time, as it were, excremental, of the wings of the crows surprised in the fading gleam of evening . . .
    For no one until then had turned the earth into that dirty linen twisted with wine and wet blood.
    The sky in the painting is very low, bruised,
    violet, like the lower edges of lightning.
    The strange shadowy fringe of the void rising after the flash.
    Van Gogh loosed his crows like the black microbes of his suicide’s spleen a few centimeters from the top
as if from the bottom of the canvas
,
    following the black slash of that line where the beating of their rich plumage adds to the swirling of the terrestrial storm the heavy menace of a suffocation