The Lure of Van Gogh's Severed Ear

Today in breaking art history news, two German historians who've spent a lot of time reviewing the police reports, say that the infamous story of Van Gogh severing his own ear after a fight with fellow artist Paul Gauguin is in fact, false.

The actual culprit? Gauguin himself. (GASP.)

The two historians, Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, have published their theory in a book Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, basing their conclusion on "inconsistencies" in the evidence--Gauguin's personal accounts, Van Gogh's letters, and police reports.

Curators at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam are sticking to the original self-mutilation story, but I'm interested in why this debate has such a following in the first place. Does it really matter who cut off Van Gogh's ear and why? The myth of the artist as a slightly-mad creative genius still has currency in today's concepts of what makes great art so great. Why does "brilliant" so often go hand-in-hand with "troubled"?

What do you think? Would Van Gogh still be the post-Impressionist hero he is today if he hadn't had a reputation for being such a loose canon?

Vindication for Wannabe Arcaeologists Everywhere

As I've mentioned, I wanted to be an archaeologist for a long time as a child, which naturally means I spent a lot of time in my backyard digging, hoping I'd find a dinosaur or something.

Vindication for me and other child-archaeologists came today when a cache of Stone Age tools, estimated to be about 13,000 years old, were discovered in a suburban Colorado backyard. The tools are cutting implements (with enough blood residue on them to identify the animals they killed) that were buried by the hunters.

The only let-down of this story is that it wasn't the homeowner's 7 year old kid that found them, but a landscaper hired to dig a fishpond.

Art Links

-A new show at the Guggenheim, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, deals with American artists' dialogue with Asian aesthetics. The show is on now through April 19th.

-The YSL sale at Christie's this week performed up to expectations, and just might be the thing to save the art world from the scary, scary recession.

-An interesting new exhibition about Nazi propaganda, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda, is opening at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The review of the show in the New York Times is a great introduction to the show, which will be on view through 2011.

-Not even the Met is impervious to the recession, announcing today the closure of 15 of its satellite shops. The Met will also institute a hiring freeze and start looking into the possibility of a "head-count reduction."

-An interesting look into the financial side of the art world in this article about Art Capital, in today's NYT.

-Iraq's refurbished National Museum re-opens with a fresh coat of paint, though with many of its treasures still lost to the looting that occurred with 2003's American invasion.

Zed the Mammoth from La Brea

When I was just a wee child, my ultimate career goal was to be an archaeologist because I was a huge dinosaur geek.

I'm still sort of a dinosaur geek, which is why I'm posting this, even though it's not totally art-related. Researchers from the Page Museum, while digging in an underground parking garage of LACMA (see? art-related.) found a mammoth skeleton in 2007 that they've named Zed, who is complete save for one missing leg. They've recently started excavating his bones.

They also found the skeleton and the skull of a prehistoric American lion, bones of wolves, saber-tooth cats, ground sloths (which are the coolest of all North American megafauna), bison, and a bunch of late Pleistocene era insects, plants, and sea creatures.