"But there is a certain element of 'I'm not going to stop what I want to do,'" said a great-grandson of the artist, Joachim Pissarro, an art historian at Hunter College. "You don't want to over-analyze the impact."
Indeed, Pissarro's late cityscapes of Rouen and Paris, regarded as masterpieces, were painted from indoors behind a window to protect his eyes.
The idea that disease and its consequences might lead an artist down fruitful paths has prompted great interest in Van Gogh. His suicide at 37 followed seizures and nervous distress variously attributed to epilepsy, bipolarity, schizophrenia and substance abuse.
Marmor rejected speculation that Van Gogh's affinity for yellow in his paintings came from "yellow vision," caused by taking digitalis to treat supposed epilepsy. "He could not have taken enough of it to have that effect," Marmor said. "It's too toxic. He loved yellow throughout his career."
A biochemist at the University of Kansas, Wilfred Arnold, also dismissed theories that "madness" made for a better artist. Arnold has suggested that Van Gogh suffered a congenital liver-centered metabolic disease that can provoke episodic derangement, depression, hallucinations, disability and abdominal distress. Between crises, Van Gogh behaved normally and painted spectacularly, Arnold said, but when he had a crisis, he courted death.
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