Patrick Heelan's interpretation of Van Gogh's "bedroom at arles"
pp. 233-238
in: Babette Babich (ed), Hermeneutic philosophy of science, van Gogh's eyes, and God, Berlin, Springer, 2002Abstract
I am intrigued and greatly impressed by Patrick Heelan's analyses of van Gogh's "Bedroom at Arles" (1888: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, de la Faille 482).1 Heelan has surely unearthed a most important finding. The questions that occurred to me in reading his account arose in the spirit of wanting a fuller statement of his analysis of pictorial perspective. The paramount issue for me was this: Is the analysis meant to provide a correct "reading" of this particular painting (possibly, of others very much like it, the Chicago Art Institute's version for instance); or is it meant to sketch a paradigm of "task-oriented" (phenomenological) space, hence normative constraints drawn from the lived-world that govern (or should guide) its "correct" pictorial representation?
