Everybody knows the story about Van Gogh cutting off his ear to give to his girlfriend (I occasionally hear that it was actually a prostitute who he fell in love with).
Back in elementary school, my art teacher taught my class that the story about him giving it to a girl was false, and he actually gave it to one of his MALE friends. I’ve never heard this version of the story before in my entire life, which always made me wonder if my teacher was full of it or not, or if he posessed some secret knowledge of Van Gogh that has not leaked out into the world.
After reading that biography, I’m not sure this is as funny as it once seemed, but the New Yorker once ran a cartoon, drawn in the Van Gogh style of streaks and smears, of a young man standing on a doorstep of a cottage. He has a bandage around his head and a small package in his hand that he is offering to a demure young lady who has answered the door. The caption was, “Oh, Vincent, you shouldn’t have!”
Van Gogh and Gauguin were rooming together in Arles. Things were not going well. They were fighting all the time, Gauguin attempted suicide, and Van Gogh got all creepy stalkerish, going into Gauguin’s room at night and staring at him in bed until Gauguin woke up. Finally, one day right before Christmas 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh were eating at a little cafe when they erupted into an arguement. Van Gogh threw a glass of absinthe into Gauguin’s face and stormed off. When Gauguin ran after him, Van Gogh pulled a razor-blade on him, but Gauguin stared him down and Van Gogh put his blade aside and left. Shaken, Gauguin decided to book into a hotel rather than go back to their house.
That night Van Gogh showed up at a brothel where he finds a prostitute named Rachel, whom Gauguin had introduced him to. He handed her a package, saying, “Keep this object carefully,” and leaves. She opens it to find, you guessed it, his ear. Well, part of his ear. Van Gogh goes home and passes out in bed. The police find him laying in a blood-soaked bed, there’s some confusion, and for a while everyone thought he was dead. He lived, of course. Gauguin promptly skipped town as soon as he could.
See Albert Lubin’s Stranger on the Earth, which is where I got this basic information. This version of events relies heavily on Gauguin’s testimony, which may be a little biased (and in his first relating of events, Gauguin omits the whole ‘he pulled a razor-blade on me!’ part).