Art: Corridor in the Asylum

Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, who suffered the challenges of undiagnosed mental illnesses most of his life, has been posthumously diagnosed as most likely bipolar along with indicators for borderline personality disorder and epilepsy.

He was involuntarily hospitalized after he famously cut off part of his left ear in December 1888, and after he was released he eventually committed himself voluntarily to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in late 1889.

He painted Corridor in the Asylum in September 1889 to express to his brother Theo the hopelessness, fear and despair he felt in his confinement. The long, sharply receding corridor, monotonously repetitive arches and asymmetric vanishing point capture his profound loneliness and sense of isolation that existed in stark counterpoint to the cautious optimism that had led him to this hospitalization.

Characterized by bold colors, dramatic brushwork and heightened emotional intensity, the Post-Impressionist aesthetic gave van Gogh a dynamic visual vocabulary for expressing the clouds of conflicting feelings, emotions and struggles that plagued him, and it gave him a legacy that has continued to move modern viewers for well over a century.

Van Gogh was never able to overcome his struggles with mental illness, and he by suicide on July 29, 1890.