I arrived about 5 minutes late for the Rohde trial. As I stepped into court I was flushed with peak hour traffic stress. The hair on the back of my neck was still up. My heart was beating a mile a minute and suddenly, that square box all of of watched on our various screens…I found myself in that box. Suddenly there they all were – and there was Rohde, in his last hour on the stand. He was explaining that he wasn’t aware that he was bleeding that night. Day 44 of the Rohde trial was doozy, the irony is, on this day of all days, the livestream was gone – seconded by the all-absorbing Van Breda case, down the hall in Court 1.
Late as I was, the timing wasn’t bad. Van Niekerk was about to ask Rohde to demonstrate the gown. How had Susan been wearing it when she died. Court 22 is a helluva lot smaller and more intimate than Court 1. It also all happens on one level, whereas Court 1 has huge shelves for chairs, and an upstairs gallery that makes the whole room feel like a ship from Jan van Riebeeck’s era. Court 22 is so small, and there is such a small handful of people inside, it’s hard for them to not look at you. I’ve sat in on weeks of the Van Breda case and made eye contact…I can count the number of times on one hand [including today]. On Day 44, Rohde’s 6th day on the stand [his 4th under cross-examination as far as I know] there were fireworks.
For starters Rohde had his back slightly turned to the prosecutor as Van Niekerk addressed him, a habit he’d initiated since the day before. What you can only see when you’re there, is how it all fits together, and so, I was surprised that when Rohde answered, he didn’t address anyone. He didn’t look at anyone. He sort of looked into the no man’s land below where the Judge was sitting, and slightly to the right of her. It was very bizarre. His shrugging, eyebrow wiggling and involuntary blinking was excessive today, perhaps the most of the entire trial.
Van Niekerk poked Rohde full of holes, asking him, for example, if he possessed a screwdriver [the tool the handyman used to open the bathroom door]. When Rohde answered that he thought he did, but wasn’t sure if he’d ever used it, you could hear a toilet flush. It was Rohde’s credibility going down the drain.
At one point, the Judge was stern with Rohde, cutting in and telling him to answer the question as it was put to him. I noticed her lips clenching slightly in frustration. It’s a pity this moment wasn’t captured on the livestream either. It was a very sharp and stern rebuke from the Judge.
There were a bunch of moments worth highlights from Day 44, but since I’m writing a book on Rohde, I’ll highlight just 2.
The Gown
You might recall from yesterday’s testimony that Rohde was adamant that his wife was clothed. Rohde claimed she was clothed [normal], but the handyman said she was naked. Both are somewhat true, based on the crime scene photos I saw. Susan was clothed in a gown, in the sense that she was lying on it. But she was naked in the sense that her breasts – everything – was visible. Why is Rohde so pedantic about whether she was dressed or not? Simple. If she was naked, it speaks to murder, to being killed in a way that one has no control over, and what’s more, the murder is so violent, one is “stripped” of what one is wearing. It’s also possible Rohde may have taken off her clothes himself, after murdering her, and washed traces of himself from her body. Then added the gown afterwards.
On the other hand, if Rohde was clothed [in the gown] then the narrative that she got up and consciously decided to end herself gains a little more credibility.
During court today, Van Niekerk basically told Rohde, you said she was clothed – okay, show us how she was clothed… I was pretty gobsmacked that he basically just put the white gown sample onto the model as if it was everybody’s business – there you go. Gown on. Not even hanging off one shoulder? For Rohde it was no big deal. Susan was wearing a gown; so he puts a gown onto the model.
But there’s a problem. Besides the belt being in the other room, there’s the potential problem of bloodstains not on the inside of the gown, but the outside. This could be seen when photographing the gown up close during the adjournment. This suggests that the gown was worn inside out. If so, then who is more likely to have pulled the gown onto Susan inside out, Susan, or the murderer trying to cover up her murder, and dress her, but not paying attention to the little detail of whether the robe was inside out or not?
2. An Emotional Moment?
Van der Spuy was also very flustered during Day 44. He asked for an adjournment, then seemed to ask for an extension on the adjournment. I left the court briefly as Rohde’s father was about to enter it. We had one of those moments where I’m moving left to allow him to pass, but then he moves the same way, and we end up sort of checkmating one another. I didn’t know the man was Rohde’s father, or the woman behind him his mother, I was informed a few moments later. But it puts things into a different perspective to know his parents are there, listening to him, believing him, evidently supporting him no matter what. Susan’s family, however, don’t appear to be in court.
In the above image, it’s the man and woman standing in the corner, the man has a reddish sweater on, the woman a cream-colored jacket. The pair seemed a little haggard, or perhaps they’re just elderly. When I took the photo [above], the man seemed aware of it, and turned to avoid the camera.
I was just returning to my seat, after photographing the front of the court, when Rohde entered the door. We ended up passing one another in the carpet space between the door and the dock. It’s a chilling moment, walking by a man accused of murder.
When Rohde was in the dock, I took a few photos of him. I don’t know whether he was nervous, trying to purposefully ruin the photo or involuntarily pulling a face, but as I photographed him his face – as far as I could see – contorted and gyrated dramatically. And then he looked at me, or glared, as it seemed to me.
But the real emotional moment seemed to come a few minutes later. The Judge had remained absent throughout, while various cliques started talking amongst themselves. I was chatting to a News24 videographer who wanted to know if I could speak Afrikaans. He wanted to know the Afrikaans word for “gown”.
Then, a moment later, Rohde disappeared. He was in the dock, obviously, but it was impossible to see him. I stared for a short while, wondering what was going on. Just then, a grey-haired fellow sauntered by the dock, leaned over and greeted Rohde like they knew each other. Rohde gingerly sat up straight, looking as if he’d gotten out of bed. I could be wrong, but my impression was he had keeled over to have a private moment, perhaps he was in tears, perhaps he was simply feeling overwhelmed. That was the last thing I saw before I ducked back into Court 1.
On Day 45 I will attend the Rohde trial exclusively.
More than likely the livestream will also be available.
Nobody knows why Henri committed mass murder, not even on Day 69 of his mammoth trial. Since the state didn’t need to prove motive, they didn’t. Henri was convicted of intentionally murdering his family, and attempting to murder his sister. The law doesn’t require that anyone explain why he did it, it’s sufficient to prove simply that he intended to. That may be sufficient for the law, but it’s not sufficient for human beings.
The case felt very unsatisfying today in court, although it has to be said, before Henri himself arrived, the court was very festive, with lawyers, family and journos making jokes and chattering excitedly. One could hardly imagine a young man’s life was hanging in the balance.
Over the past few days folks in the media have been speculating about “why”, some getting warm, as they say, some merely stirring up the cliches you invariably hear about any crime or criminal that shakes our world: evil, psychopath, monster.
Henri is none of these things. But one really has the sense that Henri has made peace about what he did, even if no one else has, which suggests that he had very good reasons [for him] to do what he did. So what were they?
The Judge, confronted with a presentable, pleasant, soft-spoken, reasonable young man [for the most part], was disinclined to pronounce judgment today, even though advocate Botha basically told him “I got nothing more”. Desai even offered him a chance to confer with his client, and Botha, surprisingly, spurned the offer.
It’s for this reason that Judge Desai was reluctant to pronounce sentence today, or even tomorrow. June 6th, Wednesday, was the original day set aside for sentencing, but evidently the Judge needs an extra day to mull this case cover. If Botha can’t provide him with something to think about, perhaps the Judge will come up with something on his own.
Interestingly, in court today Henri spent by far the most time not looking at the Judge, but looking down. I’m not sure whether he was reading a letter, reviewing messages on a cellphone or taking notes [or none of these], but for the first time in this trial, he didn’t look at the Judge throughout the proceedings. There were moments when he glanced up, but for the most part he seemed resigned to his fate. I wonder whether that wasn’t an instruction from counsel, to look down, to appear defeated. Conversely, when an accused has been convicted, making eye contact with a Judge that has convicted you, may seem confrontational. Aggressive.
Ironically, he was less sleepy and doped-up than on the day of the verdict. It seemed to be just another day for Henri in court… Well, except that it wasn’t. It wasn’t just another day. It was a day after spending two weeks in jail. Henri didn’t seem the worse for wear, but that’s exactly the point: Henri is trying to show himself [and the world], that he’s his own man, that he’s a man. What more than that?
I’ve also heard a few people saying “Henri just snapped”. I don’t believe that for a second. Murders don’t just happen by accident. Even accidents don’t happen by accident. To illustrate my point I’m going to refer to two examples, one from my own experience, the other from Henri’s:
The Wrong Turn
This morning was a disaster. It was the first time I arrived at court [for the Rohde trial] late in very many visits. One might say I arrived late because I took a wrong turn. Yes, you could say that, just as you could call Henri a psychopath, and feel that suffices as an explanation. It doesn’t.
So what’s my reason for being late this morning; what lies behind the wrong turn? Didn’t it just happen? Well, it did and it didn’t. It’s a very tricky road from where I’m staying in Woodstock, back up to the N2 highway. There’s only one road, and if you take the wrong turn you end up going on the N2 away from Cape Town. That’s what I ended up doing. Another turn had me entering the belly of the city, right where I didn’t want to be. It wasn’t that I didn’t know my way, I did, and I arrived on time two weeks ago despite staying more than 120 kilometres outside the city, in Hermanus.
So what happened? I’m sure you’re not interested in my personal issues, just as the court isn’t interested in Henri’s personal issues. They want a quick, easy solution. He murdered his family because he didn’t get a car for Christmas, or some such nonsense. When you care about the personal nonsense, you get a real sense of the emotional dynamic that resonates. As a true crime writer, this is what I’m fishing for, and where I’m fishing, evidently no one else is.
I can tell you I was extremely bitter and upset as the clock ticked by and I was still stuck in traffic this morning. I was livid. But traffic is an interesting thing. If you don’t try to be clever, you tend to get where you need to go, just like everyone else. Just stay in your lane, be patient, and head in the direction you need to go, like everyone else. If you’re immature, angry, impatient or nervous, you make mistakes – like I did. Part of the reason for the mistakes was leaving the hotel much later than I planned, leaving no room for error. When there was an error I had only myself to blame, and yet I wished I could blame someone else. Young people, when they have the same burning resistance to being stuck in a bad decision [their’s or someone else’s] can also lash out.
My point is, the lashing out didn’t just happen, it comes from an attitude, a laziness, a lack of preparation, perhaps even a lack of attachment to the real world. To be honest, I only had about four hours sleep last night. I couldn’t switch off for some reason. When my alarm went off, I put it on snooze about three times. There’s my mistake. If I had more time, I’d have had plenty of time to make mistakes and adjust. But I left things to the last moment.
There’s another aspect to Henri, which you’ll only understand if you’re familiar with my personal circumstances. As I freelancer, and full-time writer, I have to be self-motivated, and I have to get what I come for when I take the trouble to attend trial. This trip has cost over R4000, including flights and car rental, but excluding accommodation, which has been fortuitously paid for using a friend’s hotel points [so that part is free]. So when you’re stuck in traffic because you were a dumb, sleepy and lazy fuck, you clench your fists in anger and shout at your windscreen. But it doesn’t do any good. It’s your own fault. Man up to it, and do better next time. Some don’t. For some they pay for a wrong turn for the rest of their lives, but it’s hubris to say if only I went the other way, everything would have turned out sweet.
In reality, you probably have a wrong turn coming. The issue is how do you deal with it when it happens? Do you get angry, do you lash out, do you give up, or do you take responsibility. Do you accept personal blame [account to yourself], express regret and remorse and resolve to do better? Because there’s always another chance to do better [or fuck up even worse]. That’s life.
Do you see how we need to see the “wrong turn” as part of a complicated process, which on the one hand involves the complexities of traffic, and the nuances of rush hour, and on the other, the psychologies and attitudes of the genius behind the wheel [who is very likely to be an idiot on some other day – it has to happen!]
Criminals too, don’t just happen, they are part of a process of becoming too. If Henri had lashed out and had a weird out-of-body experience after a very random thing, he wouldn’t have obstructed justice as smoothly and persistently as he tried to do. Also, he would have battled to save Marli’s life. He didn’t. So what was going on with him?
2. What’s really eating at Henri?
This section deserves to be very long, even book length. The bad news is, I’m not going to write very much here because I’ve analyzed Henri’s motive exhaustively in a trilogy of books, and a fourth is on the way either tomorrow or Thursday. The good news, is I’ll touch on two aspects very briefly here. You’re welcome.
a) Henri and Danielle’s weight loss
Sitting in court today, Julian Jansen was beside me, and remarked on how incredibly thin Danielle has become. Anorexic thin. So much, she’s hardly recognizable. Henri also, has lost a lot of weight.
Julian wondered why both have lost so much weight. I think the answer is that the verdict and sentence has hollowed them out in a sense, physically, psychologically, emotionally. They’ve had months away from court, but each day away has had an inevitability about it, that the freedom they cherished was about to be stripped away, and nothing on Earth could prevent that.
Henri’s relationship with Danielle is also significant. There’s something tragic about it – the two star-crossed lovers, caught in a tragic bind with a happy ending extremely unlikely. I think Henri’s found himself in her, and through her, and vice versa. The fact that both have withered away towards the end of the trial speaks volumes. Psychologically, I think if they didn’t see this result coming, they feared it, and at the very least were excruciatingly aware of the possibility of it.
b) The Van Breda Family Dynamic [Including meat-and-potatoes sibling rivalry]
The day after the murders, Henri was supposed to go on a scuba diving course in Mozambique, for three weeks. The day after that, Rudi was scheduled to fly back to the University of Melbourne. You want to know why Henri felt angry, no, a rage, against his family? Part of it was how much he was out of step with Rudi.
Here’s a reminder who Henri was in January 2015; how he looked, and how he was.
Henri probably blamed Rudi for this, as well as himself, as well as the world and his family. One thing is clear, his brother was completely outshining him and there was nothing he could do to clear the deficit. No way to catch up. Rudi had many friends and many beautiful girlfriends. Henri had virtually no friends and no girlfriends. He had no prospects whatsoever, and his father kept reminding him of that…
Henri didn’t want to go scuba diving, his aunt Leenta says as much in an interview she did with Huisgenoot magazine, and given the outcome, it makes sense that he was pretty pissed off about something. Where did Henri want to be? Have you ever been to Melbourne? It’s been voted one of the world’s best cities many times over. It is a beautiful city, a far better and nicer and sweeter city than Cape Town. Its university is also streets ahead of UCT. But you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t dig into Henri’s [and Rudi’s] backstories. You wouldn’t know what Henri knew he was missing out on. Just as those who saw me fuming in my little rental car this morning, thought I was an asshole with a Gauteng registration plate. You won’t know until you pay attention. You won’t know until you find out who the person is, live in their world, walk in their shoes.
Henri’s world in 2015 was the world of the student. Do you remember your student days? Well, Henri was a student and he wasn’t. His brother was going back to the land of milk and honey, while he was going to fucking Mozambique. Does Henri strike you as the outdoorsy type, the guy who likes adventures on the seven seas? But Henri did want to be back in Australia and on the night of the murders, it suddenly became clear that he was on a different road, and he was likely never getting where he wanted to go. When you’re a student, that’s crushing…
The key to understanding Amanda Knox is knowing how she delights at being the center of attention. In the opening seconds of this video one senses that giddy joy in being at the epicenter of her own story. She’s completely unaware that her involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher does actually involve another person. Invariably Knox pays lip service to Kercher, by ticking off a few boxes. Kercher was friendly, a nice person, and with that done, she’s now free to marinade in her own story.
Anyone who has listened to Knox’s audiobook, in which Knox herself narrates her story, will have picked up what a performance artist she is. Even though Knox didn’t actually write her memoir herself, she sort of pretends she did. She regales the reader, in her mind, with her breathless adventures, and wows her audience with her impressive command of Italian. Because that’s what matters.
Was it Donald Trump who tweeted something along the lines of: Amanda Knox went to Italy to learn Italian. Well, she learned Italian…
It’s not enough to say Knox has an abnormal fixation with herself. It’s not sufficient to say she’s a self-centered narcissist. We have to ask why? What’s the seat of that deep psychological need, always, desperately wanting to be noticed? We may assume Knox was born that way, and that’s at least partly true. I mean, in the sense that as she grew up, she felt increasingly neglected. She was perhaps a very conscientious school kid, and I think she’s very conscientious in terms of dotting i’s and crossing t’s, in the academic sense. But a broken marriage and her mother jumping ship to shack up with a young stud, given the moral confines of the school community in which she was raised, created a psychological conundrum.
Knox soon found she was competing with her own young stepfather for her mother’s attention. She also learned how scandal could get you love and attention, something she experienced with her own mother. And she learned how to keep one’s cool, and surf the wave of scandal. We shouldn’t forget, though, that Knox’s insatiable appetite for attention was rooted in the excruciating inadequacies of a young daughter, and then a young teenager who, no matter how rigorously she obeyed the rules, simply couldn’t earn the love she needed. Every child deserves to be loved by their parents. When that love is simply not there, or replaced by a kind of cold, anal, homework ethic, then a hole forms in the soul of that person, a hole that can never be filled. It’s like a bucket with a hole in it. You can keep filling it, but it will always end up empty.
What Meredith Kercher did, was remind Knox in her fairy tale abroad about that hole. Kercher had two loving parents, who maintained very close contact with her despite them being divorced and her being abroad. Knox realized divorce wasn’t an excuse for her own parents to take such a minimal interest in her interior life.
One fathoms the shallowness of it all when eavesdropping on Knox’s mother visiting her in jail, just days after the murder. Her daughter’s implicated in a brutal murder, and yet the conversation – about lip balm, a nice new digs in Italy, and silly news reporters – couldn’t be more superficial. If this was all a joke to Edda, some issue that needed to be dealt with, like a test that needed to be marked, we can see how Knox would have no clue how to deal with complicated emotional or financial issues in her own life, other than to lie and mislead endlessly on these topics. She was simply extremely naive, and caught up in fantasies and fairy tales, primarily Harry Potter, but wasn’t a terrible storyteller either.
Now, I don’t mean caught up like a normal person. I mean so caught up, so immersed, that fiction begins to supplant reality. It’s someone who is completely out of touch with the real world, and with society, and all of this is exacerbated by an uptick in substance abuse – alcohol, marijuana, other recreational drugs [heroine perhaps, cocaine…]. Add to all this a sexual dimension, and a newfound “power” over Italian yobs, then one can see how being the center of attention in Italy could have gone to Knox’s head. From having a slew of Italian deplorables running after her, to the media salivating on her every outfit, her every kiss and smile, that’s not such a long walk in the walk after all, is it? That Amanda and this Amanda are still one and the same.
Society’s obsession with her mirrors Knox’s obsession with herself, and, ironically, our own fixations with ourselves.
At about 4:55 in the video, Knox whines about not knowing how “big and all-encompassing” the media obsession regarding her was, until she “got out”. That’s not true. And far from being a victim of the media, her PR worked very skillfully to turn the tide in the media, especially from across the Atlantic, in her favor. And it worked. Not only did it work, it set the tone for her world record breaking publishing deal. So, far from the media being a wolf at her door, the media really saved her, and paved the yellow brick road that got her back home.
04:55:I finally saw it, I finally saw in the flesh…where…on the way out of the prison, I am being chased by paparazzi.
Shakedown: One has to do a sort of double-take here, as if a bang to the head might fix the glitch in our processors. Because this really IS alternate reality. In Knox’s reality, as soon as she was acquitted, as soon as the prison doors cranked open, she’s suddenly confronted by a phalanx of media, rapacious like wolves, their camera lenses gleaming like so many teeth and claws.
None of it’s true, but to expose the ruse for what it really is, and how cleverly the untruths are disguised in vague comments, we must slow it down and go through it bit by bit.
In the video, while Knox is talking, we see her being acquitted, and the tears and emotion following. The first factual issue to establish is when did this happen? Knox appealed her December 25, 2009 conviction in a trial that ran from November 2010 to her acquittal on October 3rd, 2011. The footage shown in the Facebook video are scenes outside court following her acquittal in October, 2011.
Note the date at the far right, top corner. Gosk was reporting from Seattle on October 4th, eagerly awaiting the return of America’s innocent sweetheart. Below that, holding her hand to her face, that’s Knox at Seattle airport, about to give a press conference [we’ll come back to that]. Top left, that’s the scene outside the court. Most of those people aren’t paparazzi, but students loudly protesting against Knox’s acquittal.
Say what?
On October 4th, the BBC summarized the media’s response to Knox’s acquittal. Fortunately, the BBC also provided samples from the European media, and not just American outlets. The above link is well worth serious study. At the screengrab below it’s made explicit:
Never before has the media aspect of a trial so outstripped the judicial aspect. The English media, who are on the side of the victim, the poor Meredith Kercher, renamed the pretty Amanda “Foxy Knoxy” just to underline her elusive craftiness. The American media, on the other hand, all support her… If you add this to the mess of the investigation and the disavowal of the expert [analysis], you see how far the story [and the court case] has gone off the rails of a judicial investigation and onto the more fanciful, popular ones of TV.
I guess Knox forget to add that part. And the American media washed like a tsunami over the other media, soon engulfing it. But what did Corriere della Sera mean when they said:
Simply that this was the first time the media dominated the result of a court case. That sounds to me like the media played in Knox’s favor, doesn’t it?
Coming back to the photo of the large crowd outside the court, following Knox’s acquittal. What was happening there? In fact, of the three defendants, Knox had been sentenced to the most time in jail, not only for murder but for defeating the ends of justice and falsely accusing her boss. None of her co-accused did any of that, only Knox.
Now have a look at La Repubblica’s coverage, for October 4th:
After all that, let’s come back to Knox’s alternate reality, and why it’s alternate reality. What did she say on that video again?
I finally saw it, I finally saw in the flesh…where…on the way out of the prison, I am being chased by paparazzi.
The video is showing a mob outside the court, and reporters in Seattle. Where were the paparazzi when Knox left the prison? Well, there was at least one photographer stationed near the prison who managed to snap this photo.
Far from being hounded by paparazzi, when Knox arrived in Seattle, the first thing she did was give a press conference.
That dude with the beard, giving Knox a friendly punch of support, is none other than Dave Marriot, the man Knox’s father turned to just three days after her arrest, and a decision Kurt Knox described as the the best he’d made regarding his daughter’s predicament. Hiring an elite PR guru so soon after her arrest tells you a lot about what Kurt Knox thought about his daughter, and also, how urgently he felt he had to defend his own prestige – at the time Kurt Knox was a vice president of finance at Macy’s.
I finally saw it, I finally saw in the flesh…where…on the way out of the prison, I am being chased by paparazzi.
Do you see what she’s doing? She’s pretending to be wholly unaware of the Knox side of the paparazzi equation – where the media was organized, websites and blog sites were set up, all to defend Knox’s image. Her Facebook and MySpace pages were quickly deleted for the same reason – anyone think Knox was unaware of this?
Her lawyers were aware of it. The Italian court was aware of it.
The British tabloids took to calling her Foxy Knoxy, adopting a nickname she had used herself on her Facebook and MySpace pages. (Her family said later that the nickname referred to her soccer skills, not her love life.) But by the time she was freed from an Italian prison on Monday, her public portrayal was very different: Many media accounts in the United States, at least, portrayed Ms. Knox as a nice young woman, a linguistics major at the University of Washington, who had fallen victim to the Italian justice system while on her junior year abroad.
No one can say for sure whether the painstaking and calculated rehabilitation of her image helped sway the Italian courts. Ultimately, it was an official report casting doubt on the DNA evidence in the case that led to her exoneration. But the media frenzy was mentioned by both the prosecution and the defense last month in court.
One of the prosecutors, Giuliano Mignini, complained in court of “the media’s morbid exaltation” of Ms. Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who had also been convicted of the murder, along with a second man, Rudy Guede. “This lobbying, this media and political circus, this heavy interference, forget all of it!” he told the court, according to The Associated Press. Ms. Knox’s lawyers countered that their client had been “crucified” in the news media.
But the judges and jurors didn’t forget the media noise buzzing in and outside court, filling up the airwaves. And Knox’s lawyers were right; their client had been skewered by the Italian and British press, and rightly so. But that’s what made it so weird. On one side of the Atlantic [the Marriot side] Knox was an innocent angel, on the other, she was a she-devil. These contrasting narratives neutralized one another, and created doubt, which is gold to a defense case.
That being said, Knox was found guilty of slandering her boss, and her four year sentence upheld, so technically her acquittal didn’t mean she was innocent, just found to be not guilty of murder. So even the court that ultimately set her free, nevertheless regarded the attractive American student, as a liar.
So Knox saying, repeating, in 2018 that she “finally” saw it, “finally” saw the media in the flesh is a clever way of pretending she didn’t know about the media if she didn’t see it. Well, we know even before her acquittal, Knox was corresponding directly with journalists like the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone from inside prison.
It was important that she hijack the UK narrative, because it was very negative towards her. So by having a UK journo from the fairly reliable Guardian at her beck-and-call was something of a coup.
At the same time, Knox’s mother was giving the same guy – Hattenstone – exclusive interviews. She did it following Knox’s original conviction, and after giving her own character evidence for her daughter in court, in June 2009, they didn’t have much to lose. Edda infected the UK narrative with “her side” of the story, and ultimately, the influence campaign and interference worked.
Hattenstone, believe it or not, was in Knox’s home in Seattle, reporting en plein air, as it were, when Knox faced the 2014 court verdict. In the same Guardian article, Hattenstone is clear about corresponding with Knox “since 2009” – in other words, for at least two of her four years in jail. Do you think Knox was only corresponding with Hattenstone? And would Hattenstone [and her parents, and her lawyers, and the PR man Marriot] not have updated her regularly on the media sentiment surrounding her? Would she not have regularly asked, and followed the news, from her in situ television?
I finally saw it, I finally saw in the flesh…where…on the way out of the prison, I am being chased by paparazzi.
5:27:I thought [after her acquittal] I was just going to go home. And for me, like, [looks up] it was just so overwhelming, the smell, I smelled home [starts crying] and it smelled like home. I smelled the grass, and the Earth and the rain. And it smelled so different than the place that I’d been in for so long, and…[looks up]…I was so overwhelmed by the smell, and then suddenly I was like, I guess I have to talk to a hundred people…
Video clip from October 4th, 2011 press conference at Seattle airport:I’m very overwhelmed right now. I was looking down from the airplane, and it seemed like everything wasn’t real [bursts into tears]. My family’s the most important thing to me right now [well, them and Dave Marriot]…and I just want to go, and be with them.
Shakedown: What is it with murder defendants and smells? When Oscar Pistorius [now a convicted murderer] did his PR, he spoke in a crybaby voice of smelling Reeva Steenkamp’s blood, as if by smelling it, he proved how sensitive he was to her death, and to her blood, presumably. It didn’t work.
When Knox trembles and sniffs as she talks about the smell of the rain [doesn’t it ever rain in Italy] it’s easy to feel emotional. But what are we being led to feel emotional about? That Nature’s touch is tender, or that Knox’s touch is? It’s a deception.
So what do we make of Knox pontificating about smell? She’s returned triumphantly to Seattle, and all she can do is smell. She can’t see anything, seems not to want to hear questions, she’s deaf and dumb to all, except smell.
In her memoir, Knox also spoke of being “hit immediately by the wet earthiness of Seattle…” I’ve no doubt that this is true. The issue is why are you talking about the most superficial crap, when the real issue is did you kill Meredith Kercher, and if you didn’t, why were you convicted? What happened? All of this smelliness is a distraction from those inquiries. And just as Oscar Pistorius howled with anguish whenever the prosecutor asked him difficult questions about his intentions in front of the toilet door, Knox also knows just when to turn on the water works.
What she really needs is an interviewer who says: Hold on, what the fuck are you so emotional about now, eleven fucking years later? Why isn’t it a happy memory, the memory of coming home, beating a 25 year prison sentence. Who cares about the rain and the dirt, how do you feel about your conviction for slander being upheld? Are you going to appeal that? Is it true that your mother is being accused of slandering the Italian police?
Why does thinking back on how you beat the Italian court system make you cry? Tell us, instead, how those emotions helped you win your case, how the sentimental PR flew your flag, how feelings flying in the face of very compelling circumstantial and forensic evidence, won your case for you?
Explain how the PR campaign after your conviction changed, and what lessons were learned that fed into winning your acquittal? How did your dress code change, in court, from the first trial to the appeal? Who was in charge of choosing your outfits, and Sollecito’s? Was cutting your hair, and Sollecito cutting his, also part of trying to appear more appealing in your appeal?
Who cares what she thinks about smells, what matters is what she thinks about being found not guilty of murder. How did that happen? But, she doesn’t want to talk about that. She wants America to see her the way they’ve read about her, as the poor American victim tortured by the Italian justice system.
…suddenly I was like, [crybaby voice] I guess I have to talk to a hundred people…
Taking to hundreds of people – that’s never been a problem for Knox. These Knox is taking appearance fees to talk to hundreds of people.
Even then, though, she was a person who sometimes sang at the top of her voice in restaurants, and as the comments in the previous post attest, headbanged to classical music despite being surrounded by [one images] a mature, cultured audience. Her constant loudness annoyed the hell out of her housemates. Even in prison, Knox strung her guitar and sang.
In court, Knox had no problem standing up and addressing the judge multiple times, in fluent Italian. A few days after Kercher’s murder, Knox was back in class, happy to read out her homework assignment to class. Her family, including her younger sister Deanna, gave press statements on the steps of the court, even went on Oprah, following her acquittal. Knox followed her acquittal with an exhaustive book tour, taking on the American talk show circuit. She was interviewed by heavyweights like Diane Sawyer and Chris Cuomo.
…suddenly I was like, [crybaby voice] I guess I have to talk to a hundred people…
Knox has since starred in her own eponymous movie, and she’s still at it.
Sorry, when was appearing in front of people something that ever scared her, or something she didn’t want to do? Through the murder of Meredith Kercher, Knox got to be exactly who and what she wanted to be: the star of her own show. Suddenly she’d been propelled out of insignificant anonymity, and who cared why, this was all about her and she loved it. She could act out and everyone would watch, take notes…how wonderful!
Meanwhile, at the press conference, Marriot and Knox met for the first time. Knox, probably saying exactly what he’d told her to say, her affect, precisely as he’d instructed her, said she just wanted to go home and be with her family; well, she’d been with them for many months in Italy. They’d been with her each day in court, and visiting her in prison. But it played well on TV.
06:13:And while I was overwhelmed with this, I was being asked to be ready to stand up to the judgement of others. [Soft, sympathetic piano music playing in the background]. I don’t get to be anonymous, ever. Ever. [Clip of Knox browsing for books on a public sidewalk]. And I think that’s a thing that people don’t get to think about very often. Because most people get to be anonymous at least…sometimes.
Knox was so desperate to be private, she wrote a book about her experience, providing details about her sex life in it, in the fact the word sex or sexy appears 116 times in her memoir.
…I was overwhelmed with this, I was being asked to be ready to stand up to the judgement of others… I don’t get to be anonymous…
People who want to be anonymous don’t court the limelight. People who are overwhelmed don’t hire PR people and teams of lawyers. As for being “ready” to stand up to judgement, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, Knox had accused her own boss, defied the police, even did gymnastic or yoga poses in the corridor of the police station while she and Sollecito were being questioned about Kercher’s murder.
In Italy, after the murder, the only person who wanted to go back to normal was Knox herself. All of Kercher’s friends left Perugia, and the villa itself emptied and closed. But Knox wanted to go back to school, wanted to continue living where she was, wanted to remain in Italy as if nothing happened.
Today, Knox continues to act in precisely that way – as if nothing has happened, and as if the notoriety surrounding her, is all about her. It’s not. The only reason people care about Amanda Knox is because of Meredith Kercher, because of the trauma she suffered when she died.
I was looking down from the airplane, and it seemed like everything wasn’t real…
Knox’s relationship with reality wasn’t that great in 2007, and today, has she really come into her own as a real person, living a real life, in the real world? Does she have a family? Does she have a job in the real world that doesn’t involve regurgitating her assumed Victimhood [a myth in itself]?
According to the latest version of herself, Knox has always wanted to be anonymous, that’s what Meredith and her weren’t fighting about, and why she wrote a book, and why she continues to trade on the legacy of the Kercher murder.
At the end of the day, that’s all she is, an afterthought, an echo, to someone else’s life.
There are still 2 minutes remaining of the Scarlet Letter video. I’ll post more analysis in a third blog post, so watch this space.
Finding one’s way to the true Vincent van Gogh, it turns out, is like searching for a needle in a haystack. The problem isn’t that there’s not enough information, but the opposite: there’s so much hay that it’s all-too-easy to get muddled and mixed up.
Take the ear narrative. Even the newspapers of Van Gogh’s day couldn’t agree on whether he was Polish, whether he carried the severed ear holding it against his head, or wrapped in a newspaper, or what exactly he said to Rachel when he gave it to her. No one is certain who Rachel was either. A prostitute or a “respectable” cleaning girl?
To be fair, finding one’s way to the truth about anyone isn’t necessarily simple, or easy. Even those who have their hearts on their sleeves – on social media for instance – aren’t necessarily telling us who they are, as much as who they wish us to see. In a real sense, Van Gogh’s frenetic output of expressionist art was like so many Facebook posts, telling the world where he was, and what he saw. He was also very fond of selfies; even after cutting off his ear, he wasted little time in painting himself wrapped in a bandage. In fact he did so twice, both times the bandaged ear facing towards the viewer.
Tiré de l’ouvrage “Arles en photos et cartes postales anciennes : 1890-1981” de René Garagnon. – Arles : impr. Berthier, 1984.
Because of the mystery surrounding the ear [primarily why he did it], many have turned to these painted selfies as “self-harm” notes. It makes sense to do that, even if the analysis sometimes gets a little kookoo. That’s what I want to expose here: the experts trying to reconcile art history with a true crime scenario.
In a previous post, I provided a glimpse of my analysis of the bandaged ear portraits. In this blog, I want to look at the myth surrounding Still Life with a Plate of Onions. This painting [below], was executed around January 7th, 1889, very soon after Van Gogh cut off his ear and was discharged from hospital. Take a good, long look at it. What does it say to you about self-harm? Does it say anything?
Now, if you click on the YouTube clip below, it opens at 39:09, precisely the moment the Van Gogh’s Ear documentary interrogates the heresy of this particular still life. Check it out.
BBC: We’re now closer than ever before to the true picture of what drove Vincent, the night he cut his ear. And there’s also evidence, in the paintings, for what was really on his mind…it has proved a mine of clues for experts, as to Vincent’s state of mind that night…
According to the Kröller-Müller Museum, an hour’s drive south east of Amsterdam, which today holds Van Gogh’s Still Life with a Plate of Onions, the objects in the painting are:
…the plate of onions, the pipe with tobacco, the bottle of wine or absinthe, the pot of coffee, the calendar with the burning candle, the stick of sealing wax, the box of matches, the book Annuaire de la santé about good nutrition and hygiene and a letter from Theo.
The BBC quotes the museum, which holds the second largest collection of Van Gogh’s art [90 paintings and over 180 drawings] prevaricating over the portent of the letter from Theo. That letter, painted upside down, is the reason – they say – Van Gogh sliced off his ear. In it, Theo [GASP] tells his brother he’s decided to marry Johanna.
Vincent van Gogh
Jo van Gogh with Vincent II
Theo van Gogh
Think about that for a moment. Has one of your siblings ever announced their plans to get married? How did you react? Ever want to cut off your ear because someone else is getting married?
The Kröller-Müller Museum reckon Van Gogh’s reaction to this news was to cut off his ear. It doesn’t really ring true, unless one throws a large helping of madness into that theory. So that’s what they do; he was mentally unstable and this news drove him over the edge. Gauguin just happened to be there. See, the argument goes, Van Gogh had a reason to cut off his ear, but another part of that reason was that he was beyond reason. See, it doesn’t make sense.
The myth is sticky because it’s based to some extent on truth. Theo was Vincent’s patron, so Theo getting married, meant there was a potential threat to his patronage. But here’s where the art history psychology turns to crap. At the same time Theo was Vincent’s patron, he was also sponsoring Gauguin. If Theo was struggling to pay anyone’s bills, he wouldn’t have consented to pay Gauguin’s way as well as his brother’s – board, lodgings, paint supplies.
If there was a reason to cut off his ear, it would be a letter from Theo saying, Hey bud, sorry, no more money. Please get a real job. In the hundreds of letters they exchanged, that never happened. Theo kept the faith in his brother until the very end. Theo didn’t waver when the older Van Gogh admitted himself to an asylum, nor when Theo actually married, nor even when the couple had their first child.
A better signal for Van Gogh that finances were being stretched, would have been a letter to Gauguin, from Theo, saying, Hey bud, sorry, no more money. Please wrap up at the Yellow House and good luck.
In The Murder of Vincent van Gogh, I make the case that by cutting off his own ear, Van Gogh actually incurred massive expenditures for Theo – medical, the exorbitant cost of sending a telegram, and the expense of Theo having to travel down from Paris to Arles [from the north of France to the south] to come to the aid of his brother.
In his letters, after the ear incident, to Theo and Gauguin, Van Gogh was extremely anxious about these “unnecessary” expenses, and accusatory to Gauguin, telling him he should never have sent a letter to Theo, let alone summoned him all the way to Arles [Theo only stayed a day or two before returning to Paris].
If the older brother was worried his brother might shortchange him, then cutting off his own ear, and ratcheting up the financial damage certainly wasn’t helping that cause. So why do it?
Because he was mad?
If he was mad why was he so conscious of the debits and credits in the Van Gogh Bros bank account? If he was so irresponsible to cut off his ear, would he really care about the cost of a telegram? Do mad people routinely sit down and churn out meticulous, handwritten letters, day after day, with carefully executed sketches alongside?
I don’t want to cover too much of that territory here. The museum is correct in that every painting does reveal the psychology of the artist. Where they’re mistaken, I believe, is firstly in selecting Still Life with a Plate of Onions as the best painting to analyze his psychology, and secondly, in their subjective interpretation of the painting itself.
In my view, there couldn’t be more direct on-the-chin insights than in the two bandaged-ear self-portraits. These should be the first and second priorities to figuring what the artist is saying about his psychology as it was in Arles, in early January, 1889.
It’s not that Still Life with a Plate of Onions isn’t symbolic. The real issue is what do the symbols mean?
Sometimes we don’t see the symbols for what they are, we see what the symbols mean through our own filters. And so whatever narrative you’re fed, that’s going to fuel your bias when viewing his art.
The better way to interpreting the art is to know the narrative of the artist inside out, and also to contextualise his use of symbols in other paintings. It sounds complicated, but yellow, for example, is an identifying symbol. Size suggests importance and priority. Lights, like the sun, stars or a candle, indicate revelation or truth, or the Life Force.
With that in mind, let’s re-examine Still Life with a Plate of Onions.
I appreciate the Kröller-Müller Museum interpreting this to mean Van Gogh returned from hospital, and set out the simple things on a table, in order to order his mind, settle himself, anchor his identity in simplicity. The perception is skewed, contaminated with the idea that Van Gogh was mad, and that his minded needed ordering.
I have another theory. Just as the self-portraits with the bandaged ears aren’t about a madman settling himself, neither is this still life. What’s being communicated isn’t an artist painting something in order to calm himself down, what he’s doing is painting a not-so-sublte accusation. He’s pointing the finger at the person who sliced off his ear, and his none to happy about it.
Paul Gauguin’s self-portrait is titled Les Miserables. He has himself ensconced in Van Gogh’s Yellow House, with flowers buzzing irritatingly, mockingly around him. Meanwhile his friend, Émile Bernard, looks on, perhaps green with envy, or like a stamp sitting on the edge of an envelope. Gauguin looks bitter and moody in this portrait. Gauguin dedicated this self-portrait to Vincent van Gogh, apparently identifying with Victor Hugo’s anti-hero, a man who remains true to his personal morality despite being vilified by society. Bernard would later accuse Gauguin of stealing his ideas, and later returned the favor, painting a self-portrait of himself, with Gauguin watching him from a picture on a wall.
On one side of the table is an empty bottle of wine, on the other, a large green jug. Right in front of the bottle, is Van Gogh’s pipe. Van Gogh was rather attached to his pipe, he insisted on smoking it even after he’d been shot – that happened eighteen months after this painting.
On the other side of the table, beside the green jug, is a candle. Now, if you look at the chairs painted by Van Gogh in December 1888, just a month earlier, and a few days before he lost his ear, those paintings are also highly symbolic.
Van Gogh portrays Gauguin through rich tones of green and brown. On the cushion of the chair that symbolises Gauguin is an erect candle – the same blue candleholder is depicted in both executions. On Van Gogh’s chair, his pipe. The pipe and tobacco is right in front of the empty bottle of wine, representing Van Gogh.
In the still life, what I see, is the empty bottle of wine, and that side of the table, representing Van Gogh. The other side, represented by the green and brown jug, and the candle, is Gauguin. Make sense? So far so, good, now – what about the rest?
In the center of the table is a plate with four onions. Two artists, two smelly onions. Two onions are in the plate, and two, outside of it, one on the one side, the other on the other.
The onions inside the plate sort of have their heads leaning in opposite directions, an indication that the artists’ temperaments – towards life and art – were diametrically opposite. I may be reading in too much, but the two onions in the plate and the two onions outside, going their separate ways, seems to be symbolic of the artists being on the same plate, so to speak, and then, having too much on their plates, causing them to depart. And yet, in a sense, they’re apart while still on the same plate…
There’s a lot more to say about that, and the pact of silence the two reached after the incident, but let’s deal with the onion laying on the book, Annuaire de la santé, which the museum says is about good nutrition and hygiene.
The onion on the side of the plate is almost like an ear on the side of the head. The significance, in my view, of the book, echoes the significance of Van Gogh painting books in other works, including the painting he executed after his father’s sudden death.
This one:
The bible in that painting, is a tribute to his father, a respected Protestant minister. The little, scrabby book in the corner, is a little dig at dad’s legacy. We can see, even in the trauma of his father’s death, Van Gogh’s not above adding his two cents. This is Van Gogh placing himself in proportion to his father, even in death. His father’s book is enormous, dour and authoritative, Van Gogh’s is small, but an enervated yellow. Van Gogh’s father disapproved of him, and so the little book by Emile Zola, is like a modest rebuttal. A little like getting in the last word.
Van Gogh also painted books in his famous Portrait of Dr. Gachet, though curiously, the painting believed to be a fake, excludes them. Once again, everything is there for a reason, including the toxic digitalis plants, their significance explained in detail in The Murder of Vincent van Gogh.
Through these analogous works, I’m simply trying to emphasise that Van Gogh inserting a book, or books into his paintings, isn’t for fun. The books say something about his philosophy about life, and in this instance, completely missed by the historians, museum and art experts is a book about health and hygiene. What is the father of expressionism, a guy flowing with words and expressing himself in symbols and colors, what’s he saying through this book?
Van Gogh places his modest little onion on that voluminous book, while Gauguin’s enormous onion with a huge plume, hugs the edge of the plate while a few black roots worm out of its rear.
Van Gogh seems to be saying: I’m basically a healthy guy, mentally and physically, empty bottles of wine notwithstanding. And since the huge health book casts a blue shadow, and even nudges directly against Theo’s letter [which is also in opposition to the direction of the book, like the onions in the plate], he seems to be suggesting conflict regarding his health. The letter is moving away from Van Gogh’s version of himself, and yet moving in his direction, like an arrow.
What? Suggesting conflicted versions about his mental health? That may seem an obvious contention, obviously there was controversy around Van Gogh’s health at the time of the ear incident. Well, it’a a lot more obvious than it seems. Van Gogh’s reinforcing the idea that he was healthy – mentally and physically – while Gauguin was calling him a lunatic. Van Gogh was healthy – he was taking long walks daily into the countryside. Was he a lunatic? Well, he wasn’t always easy to get along with, and he wasn’t always sober.
Let’s examine the painting one last time. Is there anything else that stands out?
Perhaps the most obvious message is the size of the kettle. It’s the biggest object in the painting, although there’s some subtlety in it. The pot seems smaller because it’s right at the back, the furthest away from the viewer, but it’s because it’s far away that one must intuit it’s actual size compared to everything else.
Most of the green pot is hidden under the rim of the table, and for that matter, so is most of what’s inside it. It’s really the only object, besides one edge of the bottle of wine, that’s so completely obscured.
Is there any significance to the handle of the candleholder, and the handle of the pot, facing the same way, with the front pointing towards the same side of the plate as the large, extravagant onion? Away from the book? Away from Theo and for that matter, Van Gogh himself? I think there is.
Last by not least is the stick of sealing wax. Sealing wax – used to seal letters. Why is it on the far side of the table, not beside the letter? Notice the matches, the sealing wax, and the light of illumination are all on Gauguin’s side of the table.
For those uncertain of the history between Van Gogh and Gauguin, Gauguin got the last word [and then some] on the whole ear incident. He got the last word with Theo, and because he headed to the art capital [Paris], he also got the last word with the art establishment.
When Van Gogh died, Gauguin didn’t pitch up either, but once again, he got the last word, reiterating that Van Gogh was a madman whom he didn’t wish to associate himself with. Gauguin maintained this narrative throughout his own life, while also crediting himself as a seminal influence on Van Gogh.
The sealing wax is emblematic of sealing someone’s fate. Gauguin’s departure from Arles sealed the fate of Van Gogh’s dream to start a Southern Studio. But even Van Gogh had no idea to what extent his fate had already been sealed when he executed this painting.
Within days he was kicked out of the Yellow House, and banished from the town of Arles. After all the bad press regarding his ear, the entire town became agitated and riled up. Gossip and rumor took over.
The folks residing near the Yellow House in Place Lamartine gathered a bunch of signatures, which they handed to the mayor. They succeeded in having Van Gogh booted out of town for being a clear and present danger to society.
With nowhere else to go, Van Gogh admitted himself to an asylum. How many mad people do you know of, who’ve done that? To understand how this happened, one must be aware of Van Gogh’s options: they were very limited. But you didn’t get rid of Vincent van Gogh that easily. He’d figured out that it made economic sense to be a patient, sincepatients could hang around for free while they were receiving treatment.
Van Gogh was treated as a patient in that he could stay there, but wasn’t regarded as a regular nutter. As such, he could come and go, and paint pretty much when it suited him, which was a fairly good result given the precarious circumstances he found himself in.
Eighteen months later, however, he was dead, and with him, the true story about what happened to his ear, and why, disappeared into thin air.
Starry Night Over the Rhône was painted in Arles, a 1-2 minute walk from Van Gogh’s Yellow House studio. Van Gogh executed this picture in September 1888, before Gauguin arrived.
“[Gauguin] created a life for public consumption as part of his campaign to make his exhibitions – and therefore his future – a success.” ― Nancy Mowll Mathews
There was one thing, and only one, besides them both being artists, that Vincent and Gauguin had in common. They both had money difficulties. In a way, Vincent had an easier career, given the almost uninterrupted patronage of his brother. For Gauguin it was much tougher, especially since he came from privilege, even worked as stockbroker, and then suddenly had to deal with the effacement of poverty.
Gauguin did sell some of his works, including three pictures in 1888, but overall, he only became popular and successful after his death. I have already mentioned Gauguin was bitter, suffering with advanced syphilis and penniless at the time of his death, so much so he was driven to attempt suicide. The question is, was Vincent similarly twisted and tortured by the rigours of failure and moneylessness?
Although Vincent didn’t have it easy, the main difference with Gauguin was that Vincent had been struggling for far longer. He was used to it. He was a self-effacing kind of guy. One might even go so far as to say martyrdom was a default setting for Vincent. Is there any artist who worked as hard, or as long, for his art as this one?
In a December 2014 article published in Vanity Fair, the word “martyr” is mentioned four times. These instances are worth close and careful study:
…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…Boosted by the gripping tale of his final act of martyrdom, Van Gogh’s celebrity took off like a rocket…[Ultimately]Vincent chose to protect them as a final act of martyrdom.
The article ends with a quote from the curator of the Van Gogh Museum no less, saying that what happened to Van Gogh is “self-evident”:
“Vincent’s suicide has become the grand finale of the story of the martyr for art, it’s his crown of thorns.”
One could also argue that Vincent chose struggle and hardship [in the same way that he volunteered for treatment at Saint-Rémy], while Gauguin did his best [or is it worst] to avoid these hardships. One artist avoids effacement like the plague, the other is self-effacing to the point of martyrdom. But if this is true, then Vincent was a lot more resilient in life than he’s given credit for. Well, resilient people don’t kill themselves.
Money forms an important backdrop to the ear incident, the shooting in Auvers and our new theory of resilience. We know how fraught the financial situation was leading up to that fateful Christmas in 1888. We’re less clear on how money played into the dynamics eighteen months later, or indeed, for the decades following his death.
Since we are dealing with the world’s most valuable artist, with canvases that today are worth tens of millions, it’s vital we investigate both ends of this spectrum – how Vincent dealt with having no money, and how and why the world decided he should be worth more than any other artist. Was he really a martyr, in the absolute sense, he’s been made out to be?
There seems to me to be the same inversion at work here, where the madder and more troubled the artist, the more valuable his work [as it applies to Vincent van Gogh]. The mirror provided by interminable financial struggle reflects his obsessive commitment and mad frustration. The poorer he was, the greater the struggle, the more valuable, and valiant, his efforts. Conversely, if Vincent was less mad, less of a martyr, and not quite as deprived as he’s depicted, then his story is less inspiring and his art “self-evidently” less impressive, and less valuable.
Now let’s test the authenticity, and the portent, of the money narrative.
A Peek inside the Purse
More than half of Vincent’s correspondence to Theo contains references to the word “money”. A handy tool in the webexhibits archive, allows one to track the instances money comes up in their correspondence. It comes up in 372 letters. At a glance one can see that…
The Murder of Vincent van Gogh is available for purchase here.
I didn’t plan on writing a book about Vincent van Gogh, in fact, if anything, I planned not to. I was on holiday after writing Slaughter, a 522 page behemoth of a book, and an incredibly draining book that squeezed a lot out of me. A lot of emotion, a lot of psychological focus, it basically hollowed me out to write it. So, when I took time off after Slaughter, I meant it.
Part of the holiday from writing involved re-balancing, especially fitness. I gained a huge amount of weight while nailing Slaughter down, and the alarm bells rang when I went over 100 kilograms – the first time ever. So I used my time off by day, to hit the gym, squash courts, tennis courts and getting back into regular Park Runs. By night, I ended up watching some of the documentaries I’d put on the back burner. One of them was Loving Vincent.
I’d seen the previews, and read some of the reviews, so I expected to be impressed by this film, the first fully oil-painted animation motion picture. What I didn’t expect, was the plot of the film. It was a true crime investigation set in the France of Van Gogh’s day, occupied by the same characters, a year after his death. It was the last thing I expected, but it certainly piqued my interest.
After the film raised a number of serious problems with the mainstream narrative [all rooted in historical fact], I trusted Loving Vincent to resolve the various riddles it had presented along the investigative/speculative journey. When it didn’t, I felt cheated, and I wasn’t the only one, but I felt something else. I saw there was clearly the machinations for a true crime case here, only, I wasn’t sure if I pursued them, what they would point to, if anything.
And so, simply being curious, I started watching more documentaries, just for fun, and reading what I could find online. The more I watched, the more it became a kind of addiction. It was very compelling. I was very surprised how much uncertainty and controversy there was around the major milestones in Van Gogh’s life history: the murkiness around the ear slicing, the mystery surrounding his madness, and best [or worst of all], the strange intrigue surrounding his death.
In this extract from Lust for Life, published in 1934, and itself a derivative from another book on Van Gogh’s letters, the author claims that apart from a few exceptions, his narrative “is entirely true”. It wasn’t even close. The film version, which appeared in 1956, perpetuated and reinforced Stone’s mistakes.
It was laughable just how wrong early authors like Irving Stone got the story, but it made sense that someone very early on screwed up, and that the world ran with the screwed up version of events. It really surprised me that Van Gogh’s art never became what it is today because it – the art – was able to stand on its own. Instead, it was the stories – especially his letters – surrounding the art, that seemed to give it added value. So how much were these stories true, and particularly the film Lust for Life, which set Van Gogh up in the American market? How true were they?
Lust for Life depicted Van Gogh as a suitably miserable, suicidal wretch. What the author and filmmakers were doing, though, was reverse engineering the end [the suicide] to fit the narrative. So they cherry-picked quotes and incidents that matched the suicide narrative. Van Gogh being Van Gogh, that wasn’t hard to do. And so, this was how Kirk Douglas portrayed Van Gogh – as so lonely, so much of an outcast, he’d sit alone while the town partied, tear his hair and burst into tears…
Lust for Life, the almost “entirely accurate” early version, also depicted crows flying into Van Gogh’s alleged last painting, literally colliding with the artist and the canvas, leading Van Gogh to change it from a wheatfield, to Wheat field with Crows. Then, immediately after that horrible experience, Van Gogh scribbles a suicide note [which the wind blows away one imagines], and shoots himself.
There’s a serious problem with this incredibly dimwitted portrayal – it’s the question of how Wheat field with Crows magically made its way back to the artist’s room after he shot himself? Did he paint it, shoot himself, then carry the art work back to his room, careful not to get any blood on it?
See, if Irving Stone was any kind of decent true crime writer, he’d have thought these things through. Nevertheless, the mythology stuck, and so today, the mainstream seem to think Wheat field with Crows [also titled Wheatfield with Crows] is the last painting Van Gogh painted [it’s not], and so it’s heavily symbolic – those crows meant he was telling the world what he meant to do.
In reality, Van Gogh’s art equipment disappeared at the same time the gun did, which is why mystery surrounds where the shooting happened. Why would that be a mystery, unless someone else was hiding something…
Also, the Lust for Life scenario depicting a suicide note is false. Yes, we’d expect an expressive letter-writing machine like Van Gogh to write a suicide note, only, there isn’t one. Why not?
No suicide note. The weapon – gone. The painting equipment he’d taken with him that day – also gone. And then the forensic evidence. Why would someone who wanted to kill himself, prolong his agony by shooting himself in stomach, and from a really weird angle? If he’d made a mess of the first shot, why not shoot himself again, properly?
Okay, so things were a bit dodgy, and didn’t quite add up, but Van Gogh said he cut off his ear, and said he’d shot himself. Why would say that if he hadn’t? That was the pertinent question that deserved an authentic answer. To get to it would require a deep dive, and that would take time and effort.
And so I dug some more. There were plenty of resources that simply recycled what other resources said, just as Lust for Life [the film] recycled the dodgy narrative of the book. As I unearthed more and more dramatisations, and older narratives, I realised just how unsettled and uncertain the Van Gogh narrative was. It had been evolving, swinging like a pendulum from one narrative to the next, one scientific discovery, one witness version to the next. What was needed was to integrate all of this information, and filter through it in search of something that held together, something that made sense.
Since I’m no art historian, I didn’t think that was something I particularly felt like doing. And if this wasn’t true crime, what was the point in establishing exactly what happened on the night he cut off his ear?
As I absorbed more and more information, again, just because I found it interesting, I began to see – intuitively at least – the possibility that if Van Gogh didn’t cut off his ear, then the madness and suicide narrative might be bogus too. All three narratives sort of reinforce one another. If you remove any of one of them, the others become quite shaky. And so, I wondered if – theoretically – it was possible to disprove any of them and thus all of them…
There was something else about Loving Vincent…a particular character that had given me an uneasy feeling. And it turned out, this sinister aspect to the narrative wasn’t cinematic license by the filmmakers, many other authors and eyewitnesses mentioned the same thing. So there was this mismatching behavior at the scene of the suicide/murder…what did it mean?
I started researching the ear narrative. This was easy to do, because Bernadette Murphy had written a book, which also had a companion documentary explicating her findings.
Murphy basically showed how the ear narrative evolved, from Van Gogh slicing off the whole thing, to a large piece, to a small piece… So what had actually happened? It seemed a pointless investigation, because Van Gogh had said he’d cut off his ear – did it really matter how much ear? Well of course it did – the more ear he cut off, the more mad he had to be, right?
As I followed the various rabbitholes I realised how much research material there was on this case. I’d expected pretty much everything to be very general hearsay, but since this is the world’s most expensive artist, I was happy to be proved wrong. And so, this was the game changer for me. The archive of evidence, versions, testimonies, was like Mount Everest. For the kind of true crime interrogation I like to do, you need a mountain to mine through, to strip down to the precious, essential ores, to expose those hidden veins of glittering gold.
I was surprised to find forensic reports and police statements. But more than anything, more precious than anything, was the virtually daily archive from the artist himself – through his letters, and through his paintings.
Since I’d written a long-form series of magazine articles profiling more than a dozen South African masters, including my great grandfather, I knew I was up to the task of analysing Van Gogh’s art. I had no idea where such an analysis would take me, but the psychological train had left the station, and I was very curious where it was heading…
Remember the sinister fellow I referred to above? He sketched this picture [below left], of Van Gogh dead, on his deathbed. In this sketch you can see the side of his face missing the ear [his left ear]. The artist was a shitty artist, which is why you tend to see what you want to see. Some people see the ruined flesh where there’d been an ear, others see the curve of the pinna. Thanks to Bernadette Murphy’s research [published in 2016] she unearthed a sketch laying this matter to rest. Sort of. The physician who treated Van Gogh produced this sketch [below on the right], clearly showing that pretty much all of the ear was sliced off.
Murphy didn’t seem particularly interested in who sliced the ear off, and even less interested in the suicide versus murder narrative. But she’d done enough for me to have a few vital pieces to set up the framework of a psychological puzzle. In another narrative, Van Gogh: The Life, [published in October 2011], more psychological puzzle pieces were proffered. The prize-winning investigative journos cunningly and compellingly disproved the suicide narrative, thus opening the door to an alternative. Again, I don’t think their version works, but their theory disproving the suicide narrative indicated I wasn’t alone in making an educated guess that that narrative was bogus.
But why be so vague about it? Either he killed himself or “others” killed him? That’s quite a big “or” for one of the world’s most famous, beloved and most valuable artists?
Again, the hurdles remained: why would Van Gogh lie about his ear, and why would he lie about killing himself…
The fact that these questions could be juxtaposed side-by-side were a vital psychological clue, the significance of which only became explicit later. Forensic evidence proved to be extremely compelling against the suicide scenario – not only had Van Gogh been shot in the stomach, but downward, away from the heart… Why would anyone do that? Because they were mad?
The more I read, the more shaky the whole narrative was becoming. I was sure I could disprove the suicide narrative, and confident there was a case that Van Gogh hadn’t cut off his own ear. I’m not going to go into that here, because the whole Gauguin scenario is a huge can of worms in and of itself. The stickier thing was the mad-tortured artist narrative. How did one deal with that, because, after all, Van Gogh’s life speaks for itself, and so does his art… That, of course, was the solution. In order to interrogate his madness, how crazy he might have been, or how sane, meant digging through those letters, examining those paintings chronologically, and working through the meat and potatoes of Van Gogh’s life.
I started The Murder of Vincent van Gogh suspecting I’d hit a dead-end that would send me back the way I’d come, with my author’s tail between my legs, and an apology. But the intuitions I set out with, bore unexpected fruit. I produced a compelling scenario that identifies a murderer, a motive and a context that resonates deeply with Van Gogh’s reality, and the contextual reality of his time. It makes sense psychologically, and explains the many odd things related to the artist’s final hours and death.
In the JonBenet Ramsey case, I suspected the problem wasn’t the caliber of research, but the lens that was shaping all of it. Was the same thing corrupting the truth here?
I considered the possibility that art historians and prize-winning researchers were simply too unfamiliar with true crime to be able to contribute meaningfully to it, which meant, maybe, I could. Many who are very close to true crime remain baffled by it, including lawyers, court reporters and some shitty true crime authors. Was that the case here, or was I being an arrogant shit?
The book has been edited by a Dutch-based editor familiar with Van Gogh’s story, but who was nevertheless blown away by the findings. So was I, and that’s not trying to blow a horn, I think anyone who approached this case through the lens of true crime, integrated the information and interpreted it, leaning on the shoulders of Naifeh-Smith and Murphy for some support [and knowing when not to], would have reached the same conclusion.
I do believe the evidence clearly supports the fact that Van Gogh didn’t kill himself, but was intentionally and deliberately murdered. The ear incident mirrors this; Van Gogh didn’t cut off his ear, someone else sliced it off. And finally, Van Gogh wasn’t mad. I’d hoped to disprove at least one of these three narratives, I didn’t expect to field a narrative smashing all three bogus skittles.
When the book was finished I couldn’t help feeling a hollow sense of why? Not why was he murdered, why lie about it? It occurred to me that the world 130 years ago, and across that span of time, hasn’t changed much when it comes to being economical with the truth. I use that word deliberately. How come the true story around the world’s most expensive artist has been hidden for so long? Who stood to gain from manipulating the masses into thinking Van Gogh was madder, more tortured and suicidal than he was, when he wasn’t? Well, can’t you guess?
Due to a glitch with WordPress, the embed code for the original video [currently at almost 500 000 views] doesn’t work. This analysis should be viewed while watching the video, which you can do at this link.
00:01 [Smiles]:I think a lot of people think I’m used to talking about this, and the fact that it’s still [gulps emotionally] bothers me…[looks at the ceiling for inspiration] is good because otherwise ummm…[looks blankly at the ground] I wouldn’t be able to convey it…honest-ly.
Shakedown: For her first question, Knox’s interviewer asks what she’s nervous about. It’s a good question. What does she have to be nervous about when it’s a show by Amanda Knox, starring Amanda Knox, about Amanda Knox?
Knox begins with what appears to be nervous giddiness, but she’s smiling. There’s a nervous glee about it, delight, even. Knox kicks off by setting the record straight. She thinks that a lot of people think she’s used to talking about this…the anonymous this being the murder of her 21-year-old British housemate, Meredith Kercher. Kercher lived in the room right next door to Knox in a small villa in Perugia Italy. They were both foreign students, both young women, both studying Italian, Kercher was further along the lines of her studies than Knox, had a better room with a better view, and had a proper boyfriend in Italy before Knox did.
But the bottomline was innocent or guilty, prime suspect or key witness, Knox was supposed to be the best witness to whatever happened to Kercher, not only because they lived together, but because the house had evacuated that holiday weekend, at the time of Kercher’s murder, meaning of the villa’s residents, only the two foreign girls were in town that weekend – Kercher and Knox. Since only Knox lived to tell the tale, and sell it for a record $4 million, and she’s been doing that ever since, it matters what her version of events it. The thing is, Knox has confused that with her mattering.
People, she says, think she’s used to talking about this…and the implication is, she isn’t. She looks suddenly, suitably emotional, after smiling openly just seconds earlier. She’s not used to talking about Meredith, you see…because she’s a sensitive person, and also a victim in the story. Her sensitivity speaks for itself. How could a a sweet, sensitive person murder someone else? And if talking about it bothers her, how could she be capable of murder? [On the other hand, if talking about it, writing about it, making a living from telling the story of how she didn’t murder Kercher doesn’t bother her, then would murdering her really bother her?]
The fact is, Knox has been talking about the Kercher murder ever since it happened. In the days following the murder she sent a group email to everyone she could think of, she wrote a series of contradictory confessions, she made several long phone calls and was wire-tapped talking at length to folks she hadn’t spoken to in weeks, rationalizing her behaviour. She kept the Ialian police busy for hours, as they tried to untangle actionable information from the endless verbal diarrhea and bullshit.
While awaiting trial, Knox received a diary, which she filled up with self-indulgent versions of herself, including the Damascus moment when she suddenly remembered everything for the umpteenth time. So this newfound sensitivity to discussing this case eleven years later is bogus.
What’s a lot clearer, is the enormous amount of PR that was generated in this case, by the Knox camp, and in which Knox herself and her family were vital participants. Media shy people don’t hire powerful PR people to tell them how to dance in front of the cameras. People who wish to court and manipulate and profit from the attention, however, do exactly that.
How they dressed mattered, and repeating the same aphorisms over and over again, until they became post-truth, vital. The whole outside-court narrative was an important strategy, because in Italy, juries aren’t sequestrated from hearing the news. And so, if the public and the media narrative can be altered, so can the minds of juries. It took a while, and a lot of dosh, but that’s what ultimately happened in this case. The influence campaign worked.
Far from Knox not talking about this, whenever she takes to the public stage, this is what she wants to talk about.
As for not being used to it, Knox studied drama in high-school, and her memoir is replete with examples, from Knox herself, who wished [craved actually] to be the center of attention. It annoyed Meredith and her two Italian flatmates, Laura and Filomena, it made Meredith’s British friends feel uncomfortable, and even her one-time lover, Sollecito, found her loud spontaneity at times, insufferable – including when it happened in his own home.
When Knox was in court, she was strong enough to stand up, and address her Italian judges in Italian, telling them her version of events in a slew of spontaneous declarations.
When Knox was in prison, her prisonmates didn’t get along with her either. Knox also accused the dude running the prison of sexual abuse, and the police interrogating her of being abusive. She accused her own boss of committing the murder she’d been implicated in.
All of this was true in Perugia in 2007, and it’s still true today. With Amanda Knox, someone else is invariably to blame, and right now, it’s the media.
A final point on this first comment. Someone very close to me died when I was a teenager. The thought would never occur to me to say I’m glad her death still bothers me, because that allows me to be honest about my feelings about it. Why wouldn’t I be honest? Why wouldn’t I be able to say what I felt and still feel about it?
The next clip in the video jumps to a voiceover from a 2007 news bulletin.
No one could explain the exact sequence of events…
00:51: I think people forget that I was having the time of my life in Italy. [Glances up] Wandering the city when the flea market came to town, eating roasted chestnuts…
Shakedown: Once again, Knox admits to thinking about what people think of her, a lot. In her first two sentences she mentions the same thing twice, what people are thinking. About her. She’s here to “set the record straight” on the same thing, for the umpteenth time. There are books films, four separate trials, and hundreds of articles, but Knox is here to change reality, change how people think about her. That’s what’s important.
And, so, here it is…
Knox was having the time of her life, but not “wandering the city” in search of “flea markets” and not “eating roasted chestnuts” either. So what was she doing? Knox was from a very strict Jesuit-type school in Seattle, and in America, drinking laws meant she was too young at age 20, to drink alcohol. Not so in Perugia. Marijuana was “as common as pasta”, as she put it in her memoir, and she peppers her account of Kercher’s murder with smoking or rolling the odd joint, whether with Sollecito, or other boys.
Also, Knox worked at the time as a waitress in a bar. Her boss wanted to fire her because she flirted more than she worked. Nothing is wrong with any of these behaviors, the only thing that’s off is Knox not being honest about them. Isn’t she here to reclaim her story, and set the record straight? Then why not do that? Why this banter about flea markets and roasted chestnuts, in the context of an infamous and brutal murder? Why this rainbow filled fairy tale and not the truth?
So we see how immediately Knox can’t be truthful about who she was in Italy, or what she was doing. Was she going to flea markets and eating chestnuts [which anyone can theoretically do, anywhere in the world], or was she fucking as many Italians as she could, getting drunk, getting high, basically doing what expat students are known to do, and why they decide to leave home and study abroad in the first place?
Now, what’s the deal with Knox looking up and to her right during these interviews? She does this twice in the first minute of the Scarlet Letter.
This pattern of staring straight up to the ceiling while being interviewed on camera is nothing new for her. Knox did it most memorably when Chris Cuomo asked Knox if she’d murdered Kercher. Knox looked right up, this time to the left [into memories] then looked down and couldn’t hold back a huge grin.
Did you murder Meredith Kercher?
HUGE SMILE.
Typically when people look up and to the right they are lying or tapping into their imagination.
…when right-handed people look up to their right they are likely to be visualising a “constructed”, or imagined, event. In contrast when they look to their left they are likely to be visualising a what is known as a “remembered” memory. For this reason, when liars are constructing their own version of the truth, they tend to look to the right.
The same article refers to verbal hesitations [honest-ly] and excessive hand gestures, as symptoms of deceit.
Notice the mismatch between smiley glee talking about how much it bothers her referring to the thing [Kercher’s murder] and the straight-faced, stern, hands handcuffed to her waist description of how I was having the time of my life in Italy. Yes, someone got in the way of that time of your life, not so?
1:10:I was 20, Meredith [oh, you can say her name?] was 21 [slight wink or wince as she says it]…I was the one who barely spoke Italian, I was the one who was overly enthusiastic about everything and Meredith was like [blurts out laughing]…okay, let’s have pizza [throws her arms into air, laughing open-mouthed].
Shakedown: Again, is there any sense of authentic discomfort talking about Meredith? When she does she can’t stop laughing. And what she says about Meredith couldn’t be less meaningless. She’s 21 years old, Knox is 20, and Meredith suggests…they get pizza.
Notice Knox’s use of semantics [she’s a journalist, so it’s not an accidental choice of words either]:
I was the one…
I was the one…
This suggests Knox as the one who is the odd one out, the outsider, the one always in trouble, but also Knox the way she sees herself in her world. I was the one…I am the one…this is about me…
Knox’s emotional range in 2 minutes is extraordinary: from tearful contemplation, to imaginative rumination, to laughter – in seconds. If this is annoying to watch, how unbearable was it to live with?
1:15:And it was great [suddenly serious again], and I really appreciated her…[can’t find the right word]…just being there…and being…[has to look up again for inspiration, I appreciated her for being…?] uh…[looks up to the right]…this warm welcoming presence [as if Knox has remembered what to say on the subject of Meredith, not remembering Meredith as a real human being that once lived.]
1:34: [Upbeat again] I was into this classical Italian music, and so, when this- um, I saw this flyer for a classical music concert, that was going to be at my university. I was like – Yes! I invited Meredith to come along with me. And…we went to the music concert, sat next to each other…And I just made eye contact with…this…Italian guy…who…was…a nerdy…Italian guy [grins].
Shakedown: And so that concludes information about Meredith. Now, back to me. I was interested in I got the flyer…I invited Meredith…Actually, Meredith was probably more interested in music, especially classical music than Knox, and since Meredith had invited Knox everywhere up to that point, [Knox invited Meredith to the bar where she worked, that was pretty much it] Meredith probably invited Knox to the concert, not the other way round.
It’s interesting how Knox feels she has to say that she and Kercher sat next to each other. Also noteworthy that the first thing Knox does at the concert isn’t listening to the music, or share anything with Kercher [Kercher’s already gone in her mind], she makes eye contact with an Italian dude.
It’s likely both Sollecito and Kercher knew a bit about classical music. Sollicito because he was Italian, and the son of an affluent doctor, Kercher because her taste in music was more eclectic than Knox’s. Her favorite song at the time of her death was U2’s With or Without You. Kercher was also more interested in classical subjects like history, than Knox.
Besides this, we have Knox’s playlists from the time of the murder, and there’s just regular pop-music on it, the kind of Nirvana type stuff students listen to when they’re high.
Knox’s MySpace page, in which she refers to herself as Foxy Knoxy, hardly even refers to music amongst her interests.
In a real sense, Meredith was more accomplished in the musical genre than Knox. Meredith had been invited to appear in a well-known music video in Britain.
Also, I doubt Knox found a flyer at her university and gave it to Kercher. More likely it was the other way round. Knox’s job at the bar was to hand out flyers, something she admits in her memoir was a real drag. Also, Knox attended a language school, whereas Kercher was at the far more prestigious and much bigger University of Perugia. The latter had about 20 000 students, while Knox’s school had less than 2000 students enrolled. So it was far more likely that Kercher found a flyer about an Italian classical music show, than that Knox found one in the small confines of a language school where there were mostly foreign kids.
Knox goes all wishy washy and regurgitates the same crap about her blissful romance. What this has to do with Kercher or anything else is anyone’s guess, but it does reinforce this core sense that when it comes to Knox, everything must be about her, and her having what she wants, including how reality must appear when it comes to her story. She must look right, in a story where she’s implicated in someone’s murder. This may seem logical, but it’s not simply someone who wishes to simply clear their name, this is someone who wants to luxuriate in the attention, in the wash and rinse, of the media, speculating about her role in a murder. You’d imagine an innocent person wanting to dispassionately and soberly go through evidence and perhaps make helpful suggestions for the investigators or prosecutors. Instead, she gravitates endlessly into the fickle and fake details of her own narcissism. She tells a fairy tale about herself at the expense of a murdered young woman who she clearly doesn’t give a fuck about. And that’s the point. It’s narcissism that takes no prisoners. It’s me-me-me at the expense of you.
This level of inadequacy and insecurity, so many years later, versus Meredith’s mature, socialized and more successful integration into the expat life reveals why there might be a motive for murder. Jealousy. Envy. It’s you at my expense and I’m going to reset the scales, and turn the tables.
Knox spends a lot of time describing her puppy-love with Sollecito. Going into detail about smiles and looks, and looking emotionally happy as she goes through it. Oh yeah, meanwhile Kercher left the concert to join her friends. Kercher’s seat is taken by Sollecito, and ten days later, Sollecito’s DNA would be left on Kercher’s bra strap, which was deposited under her bloodied corpse in her bedroom, under a duvet. There’s also some evidence pointing towards the possibility of Knox’s DNA found on the same bra hook.
2:32:I was in puppy love, and we did everything together.
Shakedown: Not quite. They didn’t spend Halloween together; in fact Knox didn’t seem to spend it with anyone. Not with Kercher or her friends, and not with her boyfriend, who was working on his thesis. During the ten days of their romance, Knox also spent at least one day completely apart from Sollecito. Other witnesses, like Filomena, reported that Knox was having second-thoughts about Sollecito, feeling guilty about cheating on her American boyfriend… As for Sollecito, in his memoir he describes being irritated and unable to sleep, because Knox tended to wake up early and play music.
2:40:Knox is asked: At this time, did you have any inkling, that your life would never be the same? Knox looks down, her one hand wringing in the grasp of the other. Then she slowly says: No.
Shakedown: Still careful, still counting her words on the simplest of questions.
2:45: I felt like I was alone in the world…
Shakedown: Not quite. Knox lived with Sollecito for the next few days after Kercher’s murder. They went out to dinner with friends. When the police called saying they wanted to see Sollecito, he irritably told them when they were done with dinner. Knox and Sollicto were famously caught going lingerie shopping during this same period. While all of Kercher’s friends fled Perugia, Knox wanted to stay on, even completing her homework and handing it in. Handwritten, there wasn’t a single crossed-out word. Knox’s family and friends were calling her constantly, advising her to go to the embassy, while Knox said everything was fine.
I felt like I was alone in the world…
I’m sure that’s how Kercher felt while she was being murdered in her own bedroom.
3:17:I was in a jail cell [leaning forward, looking down], and I did not have access to international news…[blinks, then looks up, to her right]…what I didn’t understand, for a very long time…was that…the courtroom…and the media…were feeding each other.
Then the interview reveals how the media unfairly stereoptyped Knox as a sexual deviant. The media made-up the fact that Knox was a sexualised nymphet.
3:55:They came up with this whole theory, with a sex game, that I orchestrated, that ended [Knox flicks her head angrily] in Meredith’s murder.
Shakedown: When Knox refers to they, she means the prosecutors. The prosecutors, following the evidence, felt that this wasn’t just a murder, but torture with a sexual dimension to it. Did the prosecutors also pluck this idea out of thin air? Like the staged-burglary, the staged sexual assault had a lot pointing towards it. If the staged-burglary had a broken window [but nothing stolen], the staged-sexual assault had Kercher naked post mortem [her clothes and bra were removed after her throat was cut], her body moved and her legs pulled open. Now, if you wanted police to think someone else killed your roommate, one way was to associate the crime with an intruder breaking in from the outside [as opposed to someone on the inside, committing murder]. Incidentally, the JonBenet Ramsey case, Oscar Pistorius case and the Madeleine McCann case all invoke the idea of windows ushering in phantom intruders who leave no traces of themselves.
The reason the cops suspected a sexual dimension was because the victim was found naked, her thighs propped on a pillow, and covered in blood. Her body was positioned in a way to suggest sexual violation. The only “problem”, if that is the right word, is that like the staged burglary, there was no evidence of an actual sexual attack. No sperm or body fluids. No bruising on the inner thighs. No severe trauma to Meredith’s genitals, no sign of rape.
So the court was quite right to look into this aspect, and to investigate it. Obviously, the idea of a sexual attack on Kercher was intended to draw the narrative away from a female attacker, because how many murder-rapists of women are other women? Of course, only the most deceitful, despicable, misleading, manipulative and mendacious scum-of-the-earth criminal would do something like this, to cover their tracks. Only the world’s biggest shitbag would come up with something like this to cover up a crime. Most other criminals would remove the body from the scene and dump it somewhere else. Whoever did this was a brazen liar, someone capable of appearing on camera with the world watching, and lying [almost] straight-faced.
4:15: It didn’t…really…hit me…though…how big…and all-encompassing…the media was [shrugs] until I finally got out.
Shakedown: That’s strange that she didn’t know, because the court room was chock-full of reporters and cameramen each day of the trial. That’s unusual. Most trials don’t have a lot of reporters sitting in on them, let alone a full-house sitting in on everything. There were so many reporters covering Knox’s case, some had to sit in the metal jail cells reserved for especially dangerous criminals standing trial.
The other thing is Knox had a television in her prison cell, and her mother frequently visited her to tell her about the news, what the lawyers were advising, and what the media were saying.
EDDA: Well, the world…the world is making you out to be this…massive killer…monster.
KNOX: Are you serious?
EDDA: Oh yeah, oh yeah. And I have had…our house, everyone in the family, in the German family, have been assaulted by the media. It’s gone CRAZY!
Later in the same intercept from November 2007:
EDDA: …they are bombarded by the media, and they say: hold on! You know, the your friends, and Madison was … they were very warying and she …
KNOX: Why? They talked with Madison?
EDDA: Yes, and she said: “Amanda I know wouldn’t do such a thing”, your friends have said “Impossible 100%”.
KNOX: They talked with my friends?
EDDA: With everyone, Amanda.
KNOX: How did they find my friends?
EDDA:They [the media] traced my cell number, I don’t know how, and “NBC News Twenty Twenty “caught me as I was leaving today from the apartment, the secret apartment that I occupy in Perugia.
KNOX: What?
EDDA: Uh-uh … The lawyers have said something interesting, they said: Amanda found herself involved in something much bigger than her because…This is all a huge crap on an international level.
KNOX: I didn’t do anything…I can speak Italian.
EDDA: My God! What?
KNOX: I speak Italian.
EDDA: Do they know?
Later in the same excerpt, Knox’s mother conveys more speculation in the media, directly to Knox.
KNOX: My fingerprints on her face? I sure hope it isn’t true, because how can it be true? I didn’t do anything.
EDDA: Yes.
KNOX: It’s serious evidence, my prints on her face.
EDDA: I know.
KNOX: How can this be true?
EDDA: I just … I mean, there’s a lot of crap in the papers.
KNOX: This is in the papers; if they tell me that the police have evidence that there are…my fingerprints on your face, I don’t know what to say.
What the police found were at least fifteen bruises in the shape of fingers, all over Kercher’s face. The point of these bruises were to prevent Kercher from being heard while she was restrained, and to keep her mouth closed while her throat was slit. Investigators determined these bruises matched the size of a woman’s fingers; they were too narrow to be that of a man.
We’re around the halfway mark of the video clip; that’s a few minutes, enough of a sample to ask: how much of that looks like honesty?
If this blog garners enough attention and commentary, I’ll do a Part 2.
Some people reckon Vincent van Gogh was the original king of selfies. In Paris, in 1886 he did around eleven self-portraits, the following year [still in Paris], he churned out another seventeen. In Arles, in 1888 and early 1889, he produced just five, two of them with the famous bandage around his severed left ear.
Over the next year, while in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, his selfie output dropped even further, to just three. This is strange, because if there was a time for introspection, it was during those interminable months alone in the madhouse. But unhappy people, like unhappy artists, tend to be camera shy, not so? In the final two months of Vincent’s life, in Arles, he didn’t paint a single self-portrait either. But what does all this have to do with severed ears?
Given the controversy surrounding “the ear incident”, Van Gogh’s 35-or-so self portraits are a valuable archive. Does he paint the side of his face missing the ear after December 1888? Does he see himself as mad? What is he saying?
When we examine the two self-portraits painted within days of losing his ear, we notice a few things different about them. For one, he’s wearing strange headgear – a blue beret – in both post severed ear selfies. In all his self-portraits, there are about eleven where he depicts himself wearing a hat of some kind, in other words, a hat features in a third of of his self-portraits. The hats are invariably yellow straw hats, used by the artist when he was outdoors as a sun shield.
All the Arles selfies are drawn showing Van Gogh’s left side, while all of those painted afterwards [just three], in Saint-Rémy, are painted from the right.
In The Murder of Vincent van Gogh I go into a lot more detail about the circumstances and psychology of Van Gogh leading to the ear incident at Arles, and the aftermath. I won’t be doing much of that here. What I want to highlight here is one fairly obvious fact, and it has to do with Vincent’s housemate in the Yellow House, for just on two months in Arles – Paul Gauguin.
The whole scenario of the two artists who don’t know each other, suddenly living with one another cheek by jowl in a foreign city, reminds me of Meredith Kercher and Amanda Knox in Perugia. And look how that ended. Kercher was stabbed to death in the throat of her own room, and Knox emerged as a suspect, but ultimately dodged being found guilty of Kercher’s murder.
The time scale is also similiar; just as Kercher had spent several weeks in Perugia settling down and getting orientated before Knox pitched up, Van Gogh did the same in Arles. Then Knox arrived and within about six weeks Kercher was dead, and the entire villa [a bloodbath] had to be abandoned by everyone. The same happened to the Yellow House. The main difference is Knox wasn’t allowed to leave, while Paul Gauguin did, two days after the ear incident.
Tiré de l’ouvrage “Arles en photos et cartes postales anciennes : 1890-1981” de René Garagnon. – Arles : impr. Berthier, 1984.
The mainstream narrative holds that Van Gogh cut off his own ear. There’s been some uncertainty about how much ear – the whole ear [meaning he was very mad], a piece of ear [meaning he wasn’t so mad], or someone else carved off the ear with a rapier [meaning he wasn’t mad at all, just horrible to live with].
The best source for what really happened to Van Gogh’s ear, however, is Van Gogh himself. He does write about it, but once again, I dealt with that in detail in The Murder of Vincent van Gogh, including the latest historical evidence related to the ear narrative.
What I will say is there’s a strange arrangement between Gauguin and Van Gogh after the incident, where both artists sort of agree not to talk about it [Gauguin doesn’t honor the agreement and goes behind Van Gogh’s back, telling everyone who will listen what a lunatic his former housemate is…]
There’s also the issue where Gauguin exits the Yellow House and bugs out to Paris taking two of Van Gogh’s most prized paintings – his depictions of sunflowers. [One would later be auctioned for tens of millions of dollars, a new world record in its time, eclipsing the previous record by a factor of 4]. Van Gogh was clearly pissed off by this, which is why he wrote to Gauguin asking for them back, and bitching to Theo about the whole deal. So there’s lots of intrigue, but for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on those self-portraits painted just after the ear incident. It couldn’t have been fun; it was mid-winter and the wound under those bandages was probably still throbbing and oozing blood. An artery had been severed near the top of the pinna, which almost caused the artist to bleed to death.
It all seems to be in the eyes, doesn’t it? In the left image, notice how the horizon between red and orange actually directs the viewer to the line of Van Gogh’s eyes, as does the smoke from his pipe. The smoke over the crimson background also seems to be suggesting “things aren’t always what they seem.”
But look closer at the other portrait, and there’s a suggestion in the Japanense picture at the rear, that she is pointing towards the eyes.
At this scale it’s clear it’s not the hand or fingers of the Japanese lady at all, but the open beak of bird, perhaps a stalk, crying out in the direction of Van Gogh’s blazing green eyeball. And that’s the other thing – the green.
Going through Van Gogh’s self-portraits, these two have an abundance of green, don’t they. Van Gogh’s actually clothed in it, even the wall behind him and his face, in the second image, is green.
Could all that green, even the green in the eye of the beholder, have anything to do with that expression: being green with envy? And yes, the English idiom translates to Dutch.*
Er zit iets zwarts in het groen van je oog.///There’s something black in the green part of your eye
Remember, these were two artists living side by side and clearly, not getting along. Van Gogh said as much in his letters to Theo, and Gauguin made no bones about it either.
So the two artists didn’t get along because Vincent was mad, or was Gauguin mad [angry] because of…well, envy? I’m not the only one casting these aspersions, though…
What pray tell did Gauguin have to be envious about? Well, Van Gogh’s motivation for one. He felt it was becoming a competition, and certainly outputwise, and on the spectrum of inspiration, Van Gogh was streets ahead. Van Gogh also had a patron, in his brother, who basically paid his brother’s way so he could paint to his heart’s content. Interestingly, Gauguin arrived in Arles as another sponsored artist, sponsored by Theo, but falling short perhaps in their eyes, and who knows, perhaps his own too.
Much of this has a mirror dimension in the Meredith Kercher/Amanda Knox case. There has been speculation that Knox was jealous of Kercher, who was a more likable and attractive girl, more settled, more socialized, and had the lion’s share of friends and if she wanted, boyfriends. Knox was later the prime suspect in Kercher’s murder, but was at pains to argue that she and Meredith had been friends to the end. Like Gauguin, Knox wasn’t at home but sleeping somewhere else when the incident in question happened, and both were the “last to know” something had happened.
Here’s the mainstream depiction of Van Gogh cutting off his own ear. It’s preceded, of course, with a row with Gauguin. In Gauguin’s version of events Vincent actually approached him with a razor. Gauguin merely turned around, looked at Vincent, prompting Van Gogh to turn tail, run home and cut off his ear. But does that really ring true?
While researching The Murder of Vincent van Gogh it was easy to get caught up and distracted in the various versions of Van Gogh. In the above depiction the filmmakers seem to have forgotten the events took place just before Christmas in 1888; midwinter in Arles, and a miserable period otherwise, when the Mistral blows through the twisting streets like nobody’s business. So there is no way Van Gogh would be walking around without a shirt on.
Over the past 130 years, there have been countless versions of the ear incident; from art historians, biographers and documentary filmmakers to journalists and authors – everyone has a theory. None of these folks are true crime aficionados though, and none of them are approaching these incidents [the gouged ear and the his death] as criminal incidents. Why not? The French police arrived on the scene on both occasions precisely because a man’s blood was spilled. And even in suicide, it’s important to establish a motive for murder; the murder of the self is still murder, there’s still a motive.
Turning to those self-portraits, what does Van Gogh say about the whole deal? What does he say beyond a look in the eye?
Incredibly, earlier that same month, December 1888, the month of the ear incident, Van Gogh painted two chairs; one symbolizing himself, the other symbolizing Gauguin. This is not in dispute. Van Gogh’s chair is modest, simple and plain [like the man], Gauguin’s is sort of lavish, earthy and has an exotic feel about it. Van Gogh’s chair feels like yellow straw, much of it has a golden vibe about it, Gauguin’s chair [and the wall behind it] is a rich green. It’s important to see the original colors of these art works, because after more than a century, the colors have faded, concealing the original intent, the original code, embedded in the paintings.
Now it’s important to note, the chairs were painted in December before the ear incident, and both chairs were emblematic of the artists. Look at how green Gauguin’s chair is. The seat is a puffy cushion in rich green and gold lint. Behind the chair is a forest green wall.
When Van Gogh painted a portrait of Gauguin, he also used green [on his coat, and the wall] to personify Gauguin. He also has Gauguin turned away from him, preoccupied with his own thoughts, his own world…
Now look at the self-portraits after the ear incident. For the first time in any of his portraits, Van Gogh is clothed in a really thick, green coat. Look closer and the green coat has specks of gold in it. Van Gogh may have agreed with Gauguin, in their letters, not to talk of the incident, but the self-portraits, when the emotions were still running high, speak volumes. The injured Van Gogh looks out, but how much of his green eyes are Van Gogh’s eyes, and how much are they a reflected green [off the room, and his coat]. In other words, he’s not only clothed in Gauguin’s envy, but how the world sees him, is through Gauguin’s disparaging [and envious] eyes…
If these contentions are true, if Van Gogh didn’t cut off his own ear, if Gauguin sliced it off with one of his swords, then we have to ask: was Van Gogh as mad as he’s been made out to be? Was he even mad to begin with? And if he wasn’t mad, was he suicidal?
Unfortunately the clip above cuts off before Van Gogh [played by Andy Serkis] refers to being driven to the heights of his art, by his illness. What did he mean by “illness”? Madness, or something else?
The Murder of Vincent van Gogh is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited at this link.
*Van Gogh was a bookworm, and wrote to Theo about enjoying Shakespeare. The “green with envy” idiom originates from Shakespeare’s Othello, a work Van Gogh was undoubtedly familiar with.
“Beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”
You mustn’t think that I’m sending the letter back to insult you, but I find this the quickest way to answer it clearly. And if you didn’t have your letter back, you wouldn’t be able to understand what my answer refers to, whereas now the numbers guide you. I have no time, I’m waiting for a model today.
Because I have only a little time, I knew no better means of answering your letter than to answer one thing and another like this, point by point.
(1) I didn’t ‘contrive’ to do it, on the contrary, when Pa was here,1Mauve, Pa and I talked about my renting a studio in Etten – spending the winter there – coming back to The Hague in the spring. Because of the models and because I’d arranged to work there, and it was beginning to go well.
All the same, I’d have liked to prolong my stay in The Hague a bit, since I was here anyway, but nonetheless I seriously intended continuing my studies of the Brabant peasant types. And when I was crossed in realizing that plan, after M. had been consulted and I had already written to him about the studio in question (a shed which needed some repairs), I couldn’t suppress my anger.
Please remember one of my letters to you in which I wrote to you in broad terms about my plan to continue those studies.2 I mean the letter in which I asked you to say a few heartfelt words to impress upon Pa and Ma how important my work in Etten was to me &c. I remember the words I used: it really would be too bad if a whim of Pa were to make me give up work which is now progressing so well and which I’ve been working on for months. Think about it yourself – despite Mauve’s help, I’m in far more trouble here than at home, and I truly don’t know how I’ll get by.
2) That expression that I contrive to make Pa and Ma’s life miserable is actually not yours, I’ve known it for a long time as one of Pa’s Jesuitisms, and also told Pa and Ma that I considered it a Jesuitism and didn’t take the slightest notice of it.
Pa regularly comes up with some such saying if someone says something to him that he doesn’t know how to answer, and says, among other things, ‘you’ll be the death of me’, while calmly reading the newspaper and smoking his pipe. So I take such expressions at their face value. 1v:3
Or else Pa gets incredibly angry and is used to people being afraid, and it surprises Pa if people don’t give way to his anger.
Pa is very easily hurt and irritable and full of obstinacies in domestic life and is used to getting his way. And the category ‘the conventions and rules of this house’, which I’m supposed to observe, includes literally everything that comes into Pa’s head.
3) ‘Fighting with an old man isn’t difficult &c.’ Because Pais an old man I’ve spared him a hundred times, and tolerated things that are well-nigh intolerable. Well, this time it wasn’t fighting but simply saying ‘enough’, and because he wasn’t listening to reason and common sense I said it outright for once, and it’s very good indeed that Pa has finally heard one thing and another spoken plainly that others sometimes think as well.
4) That it won’t be put to rights quickly. For appearances’ sake I straightened things out by writing again to Pa to say that I’d rented a studio, that I also wished him a happy New Year, that I hoped that in that new year we should no longer fight in that way or in any other manner. I’m not doing any more about it, I don’t have to do any more about it. If this last scene were the only one of its kind, it would be different, but it was preceded by other scenes, when I’d said to Pa, in a calmer yet resolute way, many things that His Hon. systematically brushed aside one by one. So as regards those things I said in anger, I think the same things in a calmer mood, only then I refrain from saying them out of diplomacy or I say them in another way. But all diplomacy abandoned me when I got angry, and, well, now I’ve finally said it. I’m not asking for an apology, and as long as Pa and Ma take this attitude I won’t take any of it back. If, later on, they possibly become a bit more humane and sensitive and fair, then I’ll be glad to take it all back. But I doubt if that will happen.
5) That Pa and Ma can’t stand it if there’s bad blood &c. That’s true inasmuch as they create a desert around themselves and are making their old age miserable, even though it could be good and satisfying. But as to those expressions, ‘I can’t stand it’, ‘this will be the death of me’, ‘my life is a misery’, I no longer take any notice, because it’s only a mannerism. And if they don’t change, I fear, as I already said, that they’re in for many miserable and lonely days.
6) That I’ll regret it &c. Before things got as bad as they are now, I felt a great deal of remorse and sorrow, and tormented myself because things were going so badly between Pa and Maand me. But now that it’s come to this, well, so be it, and to tell you the truth I’m no longer sorry but can’t help feeling relieved. If I realize later that I did the wrong thing, yes, then of course I’ll regret it, but I still don’t exactly see how it would have been possible to act otherwise. When someone tells me in no uncertain terms, ‘leave my house, the sooner the better, within the half-hour rather than the hour’, well, old chap, then I’m out in less than a quarter of an hour, and won’t come back again either. It really is too bad. For financial reasons, and so as not to cause you or anyone else any more trouble, I wouldn’t have left so easily of my own accord, you surely understand that, but now that they and not I said ‘go away’, well, the path I must take is clear enough. 2r:4
7) As far as Mauve is concerned – yes of course I’m very fond of M., and sympathize with him, I like his work very much – and I consider myself fortunate to learn something from him, but I can’t shut myself up in a system or school any more than Mauve himself can, and in addition to Mauve and Mauve’s work, I also like others who are very different and work very differently. And as far as me and my own work are concerned, perhaps there’s a similarity sometimes, but certainly also a distinct difference. If I love someone or something, then I mean it, and there is definitely passion and fire sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that I systematically find only some people perfect and all the others worthless – God forbid.
8) Free-thinking: actually that’s a word I loathe, though I’m sometimes forced to use it for want of something better.
9) The thing is that I’m doing my best to think things through and try to take reason and common sense into account in what I do. And it would be totally inconsistent with that if one wanted to reduce someone to nothing. So it’s entirely true that I sometimes said to Pa ‘do consider this or that fully’, or ‘this or that doesn’t hold water in my opinion’, but that isn’t trying to reduce someone to nothing. And I’m not Pa’s enemy if I tell him the truth for once, not even when I said it angrily in salty language. Only it didn’t help me at all, and Pa took it badly. Does Pa mean that I said that the morality and religious system of the clergymen and academic notions aren’t worth tuppence to me since I’ve learned many of their tricks, then I certainly won’t take it back, because I really mean it. It’s only in a calm mood that I don’t talk about it, but it’s something else if one tries, for instance, to force me to go to church or to attach value to it, then of course I say it’s absolutely out of the question.
10) Does Pa’s life count for nothing? I already said that if I hear someone say ‘you’ll be the death of me’, and all the while that man is reading his newspaper and half a minute later starts talking about goodness knows what advertisement, then I find such an expression rather inappropriate and unnecessary and pay no attention to it. As soon as those words or suchlike are repeated to others, who then start to look upon me as something of a murderer or even a parricide, then I say, such calumnies are neither more nor less than Jesuitisms. So there you have it. Besides, now the murderer has left home and so, in a word, I take no notice of it, and I even think it ridiculous.
11) You say ‘I don’t understand you’. Well, that I certainly believe, because writing is actually an awful way to explain things to each other. And it takes a lot of time, and you and I have rather a lot to do. But we must have a bit of patience with one another until we see and speak to one another again.2v:5
12) Write to me again. Yes of course, but first I have to agree with you on how.
Do you want me to write in a sort of business style, dry and formal and picking and choosing my words and actually saying nothing?
Or do you want me to go on writing just as I’ve been doing recently, telling you everything that pops into my head without being afraid to let fly, without mincing my words or holding back.
I prefer to do the latter, namely write or say plainly what I mean.
And now I’ll end my direct answer to your letter because I still have to speak to you about drawing &c., and I prefer to talk about that. Please bear with me if I pretend for the time being that Pa and Ma don’t exist, it would have been much better if I’d spent this winter in Etten, and it would have been much easier for me, particularly for financial reasons. If I were to think and fret about it, it would make me despondent, so that’s it, it’s over. Now I’m here and I have to manage somehow. If I were to write to Pa about it again, it would be adding fuel to the flames, and I don’t want to get so angry again, and I’m throwing myself with all my might into life and things here, what else can I do? Etten is lost and Het Heike, but I’ll try to regain something else instead.
Now I thank you very much indeed for what you sent.
I don’t need to tell you that I really have a great many worries besides. Naturally my expenses are more than in Etten and I can’t set to work with half as much energy as I should like and should be able to if I had more at my disposal.
But my studio is turning out well. I wish you could see it, I’ve hung up all my studies, and you must send back the ones you have because they might prove useful to me. They may be unsaleable, and I myself acknowledge all their faults, but they contain something of nature because they were made with a certain passion. 2v:6
And you know that I’m now struggling to make watercolours, and if I become adept at it they’ll become saleable.
But Theo, you can be certain that when I first went to Mauve with my pen drawings and M. said, you should try it with charcoal and chalk and brush and stump, it was damned difficult for me to work with that new material. I was patient and it didn’t seem to help at all, and sometimes I grew so impatient that I trampled on my charcoal and was wholly and utterly discouraged. And yet, a while later I sent you drawings made with chalk and charcoal and the brush,3 and I went back to Mauve with a whole batch of such drawings which of course he criticized, and rightly so, and you too, but all the same I had taken a step forward.
Now I’m going through a similar period of struggle and despondency, of patience and impatience, of hope and desolation. But I must plod on and anyway, after a while I’ll understand more about making watercolours.
If it were that easy, one wouldn’t take any pleasure in it. And it’s exactly the same with painting. Moreover, the weather is bad, and this winter I haven’t yet gone out for pleasure. Still, I enjoy life and, in particular, having my own studio is too wonderful for words. When will you come and have coffee or tea with me? Soon I hope. You can stay here too, if necessary, that would be nice and companionable. And I even have flowers, and a couple of boxes of bulbs. And I’ve also acquired another ornament for my studio, I got a great bargain on some splendid woodcuts from The Graphic, some of them prints not of the clichés but of the blocks themselves. Just what I’ve been wanting for years.
The drawings by Herkomer,4Frank Holl,5Walker,6 and others. I bought them from Blok, the Jewish bookseller,7 and chose the best from an enormous pile of Graphics and London News for five guilders. Some of them are superb, including the Houseless and homeless by Fildes2r:7 (poor people waiting outside a night shelter)8 and two large Herkomers and many small ones, and the Irish emigrants by Frank Holl9 and the ‘Old gate’ by Walker.10 And especially a girls’ school by Frank Holl11and also that large Herkomer, the invalids.12
In short, it’s exactly the stuff I need.
And I have such beautiful things with a kind of restfulness in my house because, old chap, even though I’m still a long way from making them so beautifully myself, still, I have a couple of studies of old peasants and so on hanging on the wall that prove that my enthusiasm for those draughtsmen is not mere vanity, but that I’m struggling and striving to make something myself that is realistic and yet done with sentiment. I have around 12 figures of diggers and people working in the potato field,13 and I’m wondering if I couldn’t make something of them, you also have a couple of them, including a man putting potatoes in a sack.14Anyway, I don’t know what yet, but whether it’s now or later, I must do it sometime, because I took a look at it this summer, and here in the dunes I could make a good study of the earth and the sky and then boldly put the figures in. Though I don’t value those studies so very much, and hope of course to make them very differently and better, but the Brabant types are distinctive, and who knows how they might be put to use. If there are some among them you’d like to keep, then by all means, but I’d very much like to have back those you don’t value. By studying new models I’ll automatically become alert to the mistakes in the proportion of my studies of this summer and, taking that into account, they can easily be of use to me. When your letter took so long to arrive (for because it went first to Mauve I got it even later), I had to go to Mr Tersteeg and he gave me 25 guilders to last until I received your letter. Perhaps it would be good if I, with your knowledge, or you, with my knowledge, were to settle a few things with Mr T. Because you understand, Theo, I must know as definitely as possible where I stand, and I have to work it out in advance, and know that I can or cannot do this or that. So you’ll be doing me a great favour by entering into a definite agreement, and I hope you’ll write to me about it soon.
Mauve has promised to recommend me for an associate membership of Pulchri,15 because there I’d be able to draw from a model two evenings a week and would have more contact with artists. Later on I’ll become a regular member as soon as possible. Well, old chap, thanks for what you sent – and believe me, with a handshake,
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh Arles, 17 January 1889
My dear Theo,
Thanks for your kind letter and also for the 50-franc note it contained. Even though you yourself might be able to answer all the questions at the moment, I do not feel capable of it. I want very much, after consideration, to find some solution, but I must read your letter again, etc.
But, before discussing what I might spend or not spend during a complete year, it might help us to go into the expenses of the current month alone.
It has been altogether lamentable in every way, and I should certainly count myself lucky, if at last you would give some serious attention to the way things are now and have been for a long time.
But what is to be done? It is unfortunately complicated by lots of things, my pictures are valueless, they cost me, it is true, an extraordinary amount, even in blood and brains at times perhaps. I won’t harp on it, and what am I to say to you about it?
Meanwhile, let’s get back to the present month and not talk of anything but money.
On December 23 I still had in hand one louis and 3 sous. The same day I received from you the 100-franc note.
These are the expenses:
Given to Roulin to pay the charwoman for the month of December 20 frs.
The same for the first fortnight in January 10 frs.
Paid to the hospital 21 frs.
Paid to the attendants who dressed the wound 10 frs.
On my return paid for a table, a gas heater, etc, which had been lent me and which I had taken on account 20 frs.
Paid for having all the bedding washed, the bloodstained linen, etc. 12.50 frs.
Various purchases like a dozen brushes, a hat, etc., etc., say 10 frs.
So on the day or the day after I came out of the hospital, we have already arrived at a forced expenditure on my part of 103.50 francs, to which must be added that on that first day I had a joyous dinner with Roulin at the restaurant, quite cheerful and with no dread of renewed suffering.
In short, the result of all this was that by the 8th I was broke. But a day or two later I borrowed 5 francs. That barely takes us to the 10th. I hoped for a letter from you about the 10th, but, this letter did not arrive till today, January 17th, the time between has been a most rigorous fast, the more painful because I cannot recover under such conditions.
Rey told me that being very impressionable was enough to account for the attack that I had, and that I was really only anaemic, but that I really must feed myself up. But I took the liberty of saying to M. Rey that if the first thing for me was to get back my strength, and if by pure chance or misunderstanding it had just happened that I had had to keep a strict fast for a week – whether he had seen many madman in similar circumstances fairly quiet and able to work; if not, would he then be good enough to remember occasionally that for the moment I am not yet mad.
Now considering that all the house was upset by this occurrence, and all the linen and my clothes soiled, is there anything improper or extravagant or exorbitant in these payments? If I paid what was owing to people almost as poor as myself as soon as I got back, did I do wrong, or could I have been more economical? Now today on the seventeenth I at last received 50 francs. Out of that I am paying first the five francs borrowed from the patron at the café and the ten meals taken on credit during the course of last week, which makes 7.50 francs.
I also have to pay for the linen brought back from the hospital and then for this last week, and for shoe repairs and a pair of trousers, certainly altogether something like 5 frs.
Wood and coal owing for December and to be bought again, not less than 4 frs.
Charwoman, 2nd fortnight in January 10 frs.
______
26.50 frs.
Net amount left me tomorrow morning after settling this bill 23.50 frs.
It is now the seventeenth, there are still thirteen days to go.
Ask yourself how much I can spend in a day? I have to add that you sent 30 francs to Roulin, out of which he paid the 21.50 rent for December.
There, my dear boy, are the accounts for this present month. It is not over.
Now we come to the expenses caused you by Gauguin’s telegram, which I have already expressly reproached him for sending.
Are the expenses thus mistakenly incurred less than 200 francs? Does Gauguin himself claim that it was a brilliant step to take? Look here, I won’t say more about the absurdity of this measure, suppose that I was as wild as anything, then why wasn’t our illustrious partner more collected?
But I shan’t press that point.
I cannot commend you enough for paying Gauguin in such a way that he can only congratulate himself on any dealings he has had with us. Unfortunately there again is another expenditure perhaps greater than it should have been, yet I catch a glimpse of hope in it. Must he not, or at least should he not, begin to see that we were not exploiting him, but on the contrary were anxious to secure him a living, the possibility of work and…and…of decency?
If that does not obtain the heights of the grandiose prospectuses for the association of artists which he proposed, and you know how he clings to it, if it does not attain the heights of his other castles in the air – then why not consider him as not responsible for the trouble and waste which his blindness may have caused both you and me?
If at present this theory seems too bold to you, I do not insist on it, but we shall see.
He has had experience in what he calls “banking in Paris” and thinks himself clever at it. Perhaps you and I are not curious at all in this respect.
In any case this is not altogether in contradiction with some passages in our previous correspondence.
If Gauguin stayed in Paris for a while to examine himself thoroughly, or have himself examined by a specialist, I don’t honestly know what the result might be.
On various occasions I have seen him do things which you and I would not let ourselves do, because we have consciences that feel differently about things. I have heard one or two things said of him, but having seen him at very, very close quarters, I think that he is carried away by his imagination, perhaps by pride, but…practically irresponsible.
This conclusion does not imply that I advise you to pay very much attention to what he says on any occasion. But I see that you have acted with higher ideals in the matter of settling his bill, and so I think that we need not fear that he will involve us in the errors of the “Bank of Paris.”
But as for him…Lord, let him do anything he wants, let him have his independence?? (whatever he means by that) and his opinions, and let him go his own way as soon as he thinks he knows it better than we do.
I think it is rather strange that he claims a picture of sunflowers from me, offering me in exchange, I suppose, or as a gift, some studies he left here. I will send him back his studies which will probably be useful to him, which they certainly won’t be to me.
But for the moment I am keeping my canvases here and I am definitely keeping my sunflowers in question.
And if he is not satisfied with the exchange he has made with me, he can take back his little Martinique canvas, and his self-portrait sent me from Brittany, at the same time giving me back both my portrait and the two sunflower canvases which he has taken to Paris. So if he ever broaches this subject again, I’ve told you just how matters stand.
How can Gauguin pretend that he was afraid of upsetting me by his presence, when he can hardly deny that he knew I kept asking for him continually, and that he was told over and over again that I insisted on seeing him at once.
Just to tell him that we should keep it between him and me, without upsetting you. He would not listen.
It worries me to go over all this and recapitulate such things over and over again.
In this letter I have tried to show you the difference between my net expenses, directly my own, and those for which I am less responsible.
I have been miserable because just at this moment you have had this expense, which did no one any good.
Whatever happens, I shall see my strength come back little by little if I can stick it out here. I do so dread a change or move just because of the fresh expense. I have been unable to get a breathing spell for a long time now. I am not giving up work, because there are moments when it is really getting on, and I believe that with patience the goal will at last be reached, that the pictures will pay back the money invested in making them.
Roulin is about to leave, as early as the 21st. He is to be employed in Marseilles. The increase in pay is microscopic, and he will be obliged to leave his wife and children for a time; they will not be able to follow him till much later, because the expenses of a whole family will be heavier in Marseilles.
It is a promotion for him, but it is a poor consolation that the Government gives such an employee after so many years work.
And in point of fact, I believe that both he and his wife are heart broken. Roulin has often kept me company during the last week. I quite agree with you that we mustn’t meddle with medical questions, which do not at all concern us. Just because you wrote a line to M. Rey saying that you would give him introductions in Paris, I understood you to mean Rivet. I did not think I was doing anything to compromise you by telling M. Rey that if he went to Paris, I’d be pleased if he took a picture to M. Rivet as a keepsake from me.
Of course I did not mention anything else, but what I did say was that I myself should always regret not being a doctor, and that those who think painting is beautiful would do well to see nothing in it but a study of nature.
It will always be a pity, in spite of everything, that Gauguin and I were perhaps too quick to give up the question of Rembrandt and light which we had broached. Are De Haan and Isaäcson still there? Don’t let them get discouraged. After my illness my eyes have naturally been very sensitive. I have been looking at that “Croque-mort” [undertaker] of De Haans, which he was good enough to send me the photograph of. Well, it seems to me that there is a real touch of Rembrandt in that figure, which seems to be lit up by the reflection of a light coming from the open tomb in front of which the croque-mort is standing like a sleepwalker.
It is done with great subtlety. I myself do not try to get effects by means of charcoal, and De Haan has taken for his medium this very charcoal, again a colourless substance.
Although this letter is already very long, since I have tried to analyse the month’s expenses and complained a bit of the queer phenomenon of Gauguin’s behaviour in choosing not to speak to me again and clearing out, there are still some things that I must add in praise of him.
One good quality he has is the marvellous way he can apportion [divide up and share] expenses from day to day.
While I am often absent-minded, preoccupied with aiming at the goal, he has far more money sense for each separate day than I have. But his weakness is that by a sudden freak or animal impulse he upsets everything he has arranged.
Now do you stay at your post once you have taken it, or do you desert it? I do not judge anyone in this, hoping not to be condemned myself in cases when my strength might fail me, but if Gauguin has so much real virtue, and such capacity for charity, how is he going to employ himself?
As for me, I have ceased to be able to follow his actions, and I give it up in silence, but with a questioning note all the same.
From time to time he and I have exchanged ideas about French art, and impressionism…
It seems to me impossible, or at least pretty improbable, that impressionism will organize and steady itself now.
Why shouldn’t what happened in England at the time of the Pre-Raphaelites happen here?
The union broke up.
Perhaps I take all these things too much to heart and perhaps they sadden me too much. Has Gauguin ever read Tartarin in the Alps, and does he remember Tartarin’s illustrious companion from Tarascon, who had such imagination that he imagined in a flash a complete imaginary Switzerland?
Does he remember the knot in a rope found high up in the Alps after the fall?
And you who want to know how things happened, have you read Tartarin all the way through? That will teach you to know your Gauguin pretty well.
I am really serious in urging you to look at this passage in Daudet’s book again.
At the time of your visit here, were you able to notice the study I painted of the Tarascon diligence, which as you know is mentioned in Tartarin the lion hunter?
And can you remember Bompard in Numa Roumestan and his happy imagination?
That is what it is, though in another way. Gauguin has a fine, free and absolutely complete imaginary conception of the South, and with that imagination he is going to work in the North! My word, we may see some queer results yet.
And now, dissecting the situation in all boldness, there is nothing to prevent our seeing him as the little Bonaparte tiger of impressionism as far as…I don’t quite know how to say it, his vanishing, say, from Arles would be comparable or analogous to the return from Egypt of the aforesaid Little Corporal, who also presented himself in Paris afterward and who always left the armies in the lurch.
Fortunately Gauguin and I and other painters are not yet armed with machine guns and other very destructive implements of war. I for one am quite decided to go on being armed with nothing but my brush and my pen.
But with a good deal of clatter, Gauguin has nonetheless demanded in his last letter “his masks and fencing gloves” hidden in the little closet in my little yellow house.
I shall hasten to send him his toys by parcel post. Hoping that he will never use more serious weapons.
He is physically stronger than we are, so his passions must be much stronger than ours. Then he is a father, he has a wife and children in Denmark, and at the same time he wants to go to the other end of the earth, to Martinique. It is frightful, all the welter of incompatible desires and needs which this must cause them. I took the liberty of assuring him that if he had kept quiet here with us, working here at Arles without wasting money, and earning, since you were looking after his pictures, his wife would certainly have written to him, and would have approved of his stability. There is more besides; he had been in pain and seriously ill, and the thing was to discover the disease and the remedy. Now here his pains had already ceased.
That’s enough for today. If you have the address of Laval, Gauguin’s friend, you can tell Laval that I am very much surprised that his friend Gauguin did not take a portrait of myself, which I had intended for him, away with him to be handed over. I have another new one for you too.
Thank you again for your letter, please do try to realise that it will be really impossible to live thirteen days on the 23.50 francs which I shall have left; if you could send 20 francs next week, I would try to manage.
With a handshake, I will read your letter again and will write you soon about the other things.
Nobody knows why Henri committed mass murder, not even on Day 69 of his mammoth trial. Since the state didn’t need to prove motive, they didn’t. Henri was convicted of intentionally murdering his family, and attempting to murder his sister. The law doesn’t require that anyone explain why he did it, it’s sufficient to prove simply that he intended to. That may be sufficient for the law, but it’s not sufficient for human beings.
Okay, so things were a bit dodgy, and didn’t quite add up, but Van Gogh said he cut off his ear, and said he’d shot himself. Why would say that if he hadn’t? That was the pertinent question that deserved an authentic answer. To get to it would require a deep dive, and that would take time and effort.
Some people reckon Vincent van Gogh was 
Given the controversy surrounding “the ear incident”, Van Gogh’s 35-or-so self portraits are a valuable archive. Does he paint the side of his face missing the ear after December 1888? Does he see himself as mad? What is he saying?
#SHAKEDOWN 