Shoes

Van Gogh painted these shoes in Paris in 1887. They have become the most famous shoes in the history of art, not because of any intrinsic artistic qualities of the painting but because of the philosophical writings they inspired. The painting is now the sole object of a special exhibition in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, on loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Framed excerpts from the philosophical musings surround it.

Die Welt reported on October 28 that the idea for the exhibition came from the curators of the Cologne museum and the American art historian Geoffrey Batchen. The article was written by Uta Baier.

Van Gogh was not the only painter whose subject was a pair of worn-out old shoes but he may have been unique in intending a connection between them and human existence.

That idea was suggested in 1911, in the first extensive text about Van Gogh by Hendrik P. Bremmer.

It set the tone.

Surprisingly, Van Gogh might have been pleased by the interpretation. Unlike most artists, he did not sneer at critics. To one of them he wrote: “In your article I rediscovered my painting, only richer and more significant.”

In 1935 Martin Heidegger gave a lecture about the painting at the University of Freiburg, under the title “The Origin of a Work of Art.” He declared that Van Gogh had painted the shoes of a peasant women and by doing so had created a metaphor for her life. Art, he wrote in his personal, untranslatable idiom, was the realization of truth. The text was published in 1950.

In 1968 Meyer Schapiro, the American art historian and professor at Columbia University in New York, wrote that Heidegger had not understood the picture. The shoes, he thought, did not belong to a peasant woman at all but to Vincent himself. They were, in fact, a self-portrait, just as a painting of two chairs was a portrait of himself and his friend Paul Gauguin.

For the master of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, this was irresistible. It was almost painful, Geoffrey Batchen wrote in the catalogue of the exhibition, to read Derrida’s analysis of the dispute because of the ease with which he unmasked the true motivations of the two disputants. Heidegger, close to Nature, interpreted the shoes as a romantic meditation about peasant life, Derrida wrote, whereas Schapiro saw in it traces of the immigrant.

Anyway, Derrida wrote, they were not a pair of shoes at all but two left shoes. After speculating about a possible Freudian interpretation which did not help him very much – is one shoe male, the other female? – he decided that the shoes had nothing to do with reality but were an allegory of painting as such. He had rejected the idea that paintings mirrored reality some time before.