Hillel Goldberg, Nov 26, 2020, Opinion.
https://ijn.com/who-murdered-van-gogh/
We all know about Vincent Van Gogh.
Brilliant artist.
Crazy. Cut off his own ear. Killed himself.
Never sold a single painting in his lifetime, though now his paintings fetch hundreds of millions of dollars.
Tragic.
Focus on one specific piece of the conventional wisdom: killed himself.
Of course, everybody knows this.
But is it true?
Consider these facts about Van Gogh’s suicide:
There was no crime scene ever established in the field where he supposedly shot himself in the stomach.
There was no police report.
No witness to his supposed self-inflicted wound.
No murder weapon found (nor an exit wound, nor a bullet).
No written medical report.
No forensic analysis.
No autopsy.
No medical treatment, despite the fact that Van Gogh lived 30 hours after he allegedly shot himself and was close enough to Paris to receive medical treatment in a hospital there. Van Gogh was well enough when he returned from the field to climb the 17 stairs to his room and smoke his pipe. He didn’t look like a man on his way to death. Yet, he was denied medical treatment by his doctor, who said that Van Gogh was a lost cause.
The story of Van Gogh’s suicide is based on the report of Paul Gachet, Jr., who was not an eyewitness to most of the last 30 hours of Van Gogh’s life, after he had supposedly shot himself. Paul Gachet offered his account of those 30 hours only years later, after the people on the scene had died.
They could not be interviewed to corroborate or contradict his account.
There was one exception, an eyewitness to the events of Van Gogh’s death in the Ravoux Inn in Auvers-sur-Oise upon Van Gogh’s return from the field. She was Adeline Ravoux, “The Lady in Blue” in a Van Gogh portrait.
She contradicted Gachet’s suicide narrative, after it had taken hold internationally.
Paul Gachet’s father, Dr. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, was Van Gogh’s physician, called to Van Gogh’s bedside after his wound. Dr. Gachet did not treat Van Gogh, saying he was beyond hope. According to the doctor’s son Paul, the doctor compassionately stayed with Van Gogh all night long. The actual eyewitness, Adeline Ravoux, contradicts this, saying that it was her father who stayed with Van Gogh.
This was not likely a case of “he said, she said,” because Paul Gachet, Jr., peddled his story of Van Gogh’s suicide actively, for decades, but before Ravoux said anything. She spoke up only when someone discovered that she had been an eyewitness and decided to interview her.
I have thus far summarized only the opening perspectives on an event in 1890 as much given to conspiracy theories as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. One main difference between the two deaths is that Van Gogh’s took place some 70 years before Kennedy’s in 1963, which means 70 more years for the Paul Gauchet narrative to take hold.
The other main difference between the deaths is that in Kennedy’s case the murderer is known, the crime scene is known, the murder weapon is known, the nature of the fatal wound is known, a video of the murder exists — none of which is true in Van Gogh’s case (except the name of the murderer, if it was Van Gogh).
On the other hand, there is a plethora of evidence as to the last weeks of Van Gogh’s life. It is possible to ascertain a lot more credible information about the people in his life than about the people in Lee Harvey Oswald’s life. It is possible to devise a fairly accurate configuration of Van Gogh’s close, casual and antagonistic relationships in the last weeks of his life.
Dr. I. Kaufman Arenberg of Denver has dedicated 30 years of research to achieve what he deems an act of posthumous justice. He believes that the forensic evidence clearly shows that Van Gogh did not commit suicide, could not have committed suicide, but was murdered, whether by gun or by knife.
He believes that Van Gogh’s murder in a very small town with a very clear social structure was covered up by people who held prominent positions in that power structure and could control news and narratives.
He believes that the motives behind those who murdered Van Gogh are not obscure but eminently clear.
To this end, he has written Killing Vincent: The Man, the Myth, and the Murder (Nostradamus, 2019).
Dr. Kaufman believes, in short, that a great injustice has been done to Van Gogh’s memory.
Kaufman has spent years gathering and assessing evidence that Van Gogh wanted to marry Gauchet’s daughter, and she wanted to marry him, but the doctor forbade the marriage because Van Gogh was inferior socially, morally and professionally. (After Van Gogh’s death, the Gauchet daughter never married and sunk into a lifelong depression.)
Kaufman believes that the narrative of Van Gogh’s suicide is full of holes. To cite but one of a slew of examples Kaufman examines, the attribution of a murder weapon to Van Gogh — based on the discovery of a rusted pistol some 60 years after the fact (!) in the general area where Van Gogh is said to have shot himself — is impossible to credit.
Kaufman cites reports of loud arguments between Van Gogh and Dr. Gachet and his son.
Kaufman offers all of his forensic evidence (based on his medical training) and his critique of the Gachet narrative tentatively, pending a disinterment of Van Gogh. Is there a bullet in the casket? If so, which gun would have discharged it? Kaufman has analyzed all of the guns known to have been in the town at the time of Van Gogh’s death. Van Gogh, by the way, was not known to have owned any of them.
This uncertainty notwithstanding, Kaufman believes there are sufficient holes in Paul Gachet’s narrative, and sufficient information in the eyewitness testimony and from other sources, to say that Van Gogh was murdered — and who the murderer was.
This is a non-fictional whodunit.
Why should I reveal his conclusion?