[Empty chairs - Dilemmas of artistic and emotional commintment]

Two paintings by the Dutch-born painter Vincent van Gogh of his own and his friend Paul Gauguin's chair in Arles have had a major impact on twentieth and twenty-first century art, in the visual and photographic arts, literature and film. The literature interpreting the paintings, particularly art history, art psychology and psychiatry, agrees that the two paintings, painted in a psychotic state, can be seen as a coping response to van Gogh's fear of death, a kind of mourning. There is, however, another interpretation of the paintings, which emerges when the two paintings are seen as a unified whole. In this case, the picture refers to the relationship between artistic and emotional commitment, and conveys the message that the painter's artistic mission does not tolerate a partner, and that he must sacrifice his private life for his art. This concept is in line with the basic idea of the poem "Choice" by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Samuel Butler Yeats. In some examples from the history of art, such as Csontváry, Gulácsy and Cézanne, creative and private life are indeed mutually exclusive, but in others, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Bach, Woolf and Joyce, artistic and emotional commitment have proved compatible.