Still Life: Vase with Five Sunflowers
Arles: August, 1888 (Destroyed by fire in the Second World War)
F 459, JH 1560
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“La mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh,” Documents, second year, 8 (1930), 10-20; rpt. Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 258-70. English translation: Georges Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 61-72. |
| the sun in its glory is doubtless opposed to the faded sunflower, but no matter how dead it may be this sunflower is also a sun, and the sun is in some way deleterious and sick: it is sulfur colored [il a la couler du soufre], the painter himself writes twice in French. (66) |
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The relations between this painter (identifying himself successively with fragile candles and with sometimes fresh, sometimes faded sunflowers) and an ideal, of which the sun is the most dazzling form, appear to be analogous to those that men maintained at one time with their gods, at least so long as these gods stupefied them; mutilation normally intervened in these relations as sacrifice: it would represet the desire to resemble perfectly an ideal term, generally characterized in mythology as a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs. (66)