Artaud had written art reviews before and always had strong opinions. Delacroix, Giotto, Brueghel, Modigliani, Picasso, Klee — these were among his enthusiasms. On the other hand, for Artaud Matisse was only a “trickster” and Picabia merely “amusing.” But these opinions dated from before the last nine years’ internment at Rodez. Also Artaud himself was drawing and painting constantly these days.
Artaud’s van Gogh essay is a perverse combination of madness and insight. Psychiatrists in general — and van Gogh’s psychiatrist in particular, Dr. Gachet — are the villains of the piece. Though the essay does not survey the paintings in any particular specificity, Wheatfield with Crows, the painting van Gogh worked on two days before his suicide, clearly fascinated Artaud. The introduction, however, begins as close to madness as any writer might want to stray:
One can speak of the good mental health of van Gogh who, in his whole life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear,
in a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp,
just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother.
And this is not an image, but a fact abundantly and daily repeated and cultivated throughout the world…
Soon, however, after a foray against a psychiatrist, Dr. L., it moves on to lyrical insights into the paintings:
Pure linear painting had been driving me mad for a long time when I encountered van Gogh, who painted neither line nor forms but things of inert nature as if in the throes of convulsions.
And inert.
… The latest van Gogh exhibit at the Orangerie does not have all the very great paintings of the unfortunate painter. But among those that are there, there are enough rotating processions studded with clumps of carmine plants, enough sunken roads with overhanging yews, enough violet suns whirling over haystacks of pure gold, enough Père Tranquille and enough self-portraits,
to remind us what a sordid simplicity of objects, peoples, materials, elements,
van Gogh drew on for these kinds of organ peals, these fireworks, these atmospheric epiphanies…
The crows painted two days before his death did not, anymore than his other paintings, open the door for him to a certain posthumous glory, but they do open to painterly painting, or rather to unpainted nature, the secret door to a possible beyond, to a possible permanent reality, through the door opened by van Gogh to a possible and sinister beyond.
It is not unusual to see a man, with the shot that killed him already in his belly, crowding black crows onto a canvas, and under them a kind of meadow — perhaps livid, at any rate empty — in which the wine color of the earth is juxtaposed wildly with the dirty yellow of the wheat.
But no other painter besides van Gogh would have known how to find, as he did in order to paint his crows, that truffle black, that “rich banquet” black which is at the same time, as it were, excremental, of the wings of the crows surprised in the fading gleam of evening…
For no one until then had turned the earth into that dirty linen twisted with wine and wet blood.
The sky in the painting is very low, bruised,
violet, like the lower edges of lightning.
The strange shadowy fringe of the void rising after the flash.
Van Gogh loosed his crows like the black microbes of his suicide’s spleen a few centimeters from the top as if from the bottom of the canvas,
following the black slash of that line where the beating of their rich plumage adds to the swirling of the terrestrial storm the heavy menace of a suffocation from above.
And yet the whole painting is rich.
Rich, sumptuous, and calm.
Worthy accompaniment to the death of a man who during his life set so many drunken suns swirling above so many unruly haystacks and who, desperate, with a bullet in his belly, had no other choice but to flood a landscape with blood and wine, to drench the earth with a final emulsion, both dark and joyous, with a taste of bitter wine and spoiled vinegar… I am returning [Artaud writes, in the midst of one of the essay’s three rather arbitrarily-arranged postscripts, eighteen pages later] to the painting of the crows.
Who has already seen, as in this painting, the earth become equivalent to the sea?
In the eighteen-page ellipsis, and again after it, the essay plunges into a jeremiad against psychiatry and society, studded with references to Artaud’s own stay at Rodez. When the essay ends, we are back in something akin to madness — if not within madness itself. On the closing page, Artaud reviles the bourgeois Parisian public who filed past van Gogh’s paintings at the Orangerie, oblivious to “the hate” with which, in the winter evenings of 1946, they or “their fathers and mothers” so “effectively strangled” the self-slaughtered artist.
The essay ends:
But did there not fall, on one of the evenings I speak of, at the Boulevard de la Madeleine, at the corner of the rue des Mathurins, an enormous white rock that might have come from a recent eruption of the volcano Popocatépetl?
And it is over.
But I suspect the only responsible answer we can give to Artaud’s terminal rhetorical question is: Probably not.
Still, when part of the van Gogh essay was translated and appeared in Horizon magazine in 1948, the young R. D. Laing read it while still a student. He claims that its discussion of psychiatry (which I have not quoted) was a decisive influence in his later thinking about the relationship between psychiatrists and the mad.
During his last year, Artaud was in great demand.
But there is a certain machinery of defeat built into the celebrity of the deranged — who are often wanted for the show they put on, more than for the substance of their work.
On February 1, 1948, Artaud’s last piece, a radio play for four voices, xylophone, gongs, other percussion instruments, and sound effects, To Have Done with the Judgment of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu), commissioned from Artaud for the series Les Voix des poètes, was finally banned by station manager Wladimir Porché, only a day before its announced public broadcast time of February 2 over Radiodiffusion Française. The recording had been made in November, between the 22nd and the 29th. The “play” contained some older poems by Artaud, as well as a majority of new sections, written for the occasion and dictated to Paule Thévenin, a young actress who was at once Artaud’s private acting student, his secretary, the wife of his medical doctor, and — after his death — the editor of his complete works.
Artaud had heard (or thought he had heard; or made it up on his own as an extended metaphor) that, in order to be admitted to public schools in the United States, American schoolboys were forced to give sperm samples that were later stored for artificial insemination in order to swell the ranks of the U.S. military. Artaud’s play begins (and ends) with an outraged protest against this practice in particular and America in general. In between, it once more praises the Tarahumara Indians, excoriates the Mass, reviles sex in general, presents a hymn to shit, declares Artaud’s sanity, and tells us that we must learn to “eat rat daintily.”