Breaking News: Vincent Van Gogh may have been murdered.

Verne Strickland Blogmaster / Oct. 17, 2011

THE BELOVED ARTIST -- A PASSIONATE BUT TROUBLED GENIUS -- HAS LONG BEEN SUSPECTED OF HAVING TAKEN HIS OWN LIFE. I WOULD PREFER TO BELIEVE THIS NEW THEORY ABOUT HIM.

Vincent Van Gogh: Self Portrait

There are two facts that even your average school child can tell you about Vincent Van Gogh: he cut off his ear and he killed himself. But now two Pulizer Prize-winning authors have a new book that throws that second fact into question. If Vincent Van Gogh didn't kill himself what are they going to tell us next, that Pluto isn't a planet?


In their new book Van Gogh: The Life Steve Naifeh and Greg Smith reportedly make a whole new case for how Van Gogh ended up with a bullet in his stomach. A teenage boy did it. It is always the kids, isn't it?

“No physical evidence of the shooting was ever produced,” they write. “No gun was ever found.” Van Gogh, who “knew nothing about guns,” left no suicide note, and the bullet entered his upper abdomen “from an unusual, oblique angle — not straight on as one would expect in a suicide.” The authors hypothesize that he was shot by a friend’s teenage brother, who carried a gun and “had a history of teasing Vincent in a way intended to provoke him to anger.” (The artist, for his part, “had a history of violent outbursts.”)

We don't know how to feel about this. But we guess we'll wait until we've read the book (out next week) or at least watched this Sunday's 60 Minutes interview with its authors to form an opinion.

http://gothamist.com/2011/10/14/breaking_vincent_van_gogh_may_have.php