Ears to a new relic: it's a Van Gogh work to be worshipped

Genetically regrowing Van Gogh's ear is fascinating, because it returns us to how the artist saw himself: as a martyr of art

• German museum exhibits Van Gogh's ear replica grown from relative's cells

Jonathan Jones

'Will it get its own seat on the plane?' … Vincent van Gogh's ear, art work by Diemut Strebe. Photograph: Diemut Strebe/Sugababe/AP

Vincent van Gogh's ear has returned from the grave – or rather, the ditch or dump where the grisly piece of flesh he severed from the side of his head in December 1888 probably ended up. Van Gogh left it at a brothel in Arles. Presumably the prostitutes chucked it out with the rubbish.

Now it has been regrown from genetic material supplied by the great-great-grandson of Vincent's brother Theo. It is on display at a museum in Germany and Diemut Strebe, the artist behind this resurrection of art's most famous missing body part, hopes to tour it to New York. Will the ear get its own seat on the plane? Will it become an art world star?

Van Gogh's ear is one of the great icons of modern culture. When Allen Ginsberg called a poem Death to Van Gogh's ear! the severed ear of this painter and letter-writer of compulsive beauty and melancholy was already such a totem of popular culture that Ginsberg was sick of it. In the 1956 film Lust for Life, the harrowing ear removal is acted out by Kirk Douglas. This artistic gesture of self-harm has since then become a cliche of extreme creative behaviour.

Did Van Gogh himself see it as performance art? Certainly no performance artist has rivalled its horrific symolism. In his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, painted in January 1889, Van Gogh contemplates himself as he now looks. He turns the bandaged side of his face towards us to show the dressed wound. His eyes are crystalline. His flesh has the hewn look of a medieval wood carving. To judge from this painting, Van Gogh believed he was a martyr, for he displays his injury as if it had been inflicted not by himself but Roman soldiers persecuting some ancient saint.

Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889

Van Gogh wanted to be a preacher or missionary before he ever thought of becoming an artist. He was steeped in the Bible. He identified with north European religious artists such as Hugo van der Goes. That particular 15th-century artist's mental illness and incarceration reminded him of his own plight, and he wrote that he saw a resemblance to himself in a contemporary painting of this artist's ordeal by Emile Wauters, called The Madness of Hugo van der Goes.

Looking at his self-image with a severed ear, I think Van Gogh believed he was a martyr, that his act of violence was somehow religious. That view has been widely shared, even by people who are not consciously religious at all.

For Van Gogh is a modern saint, his suffering – as proven by that ear – a totem of artistic and spiritual authenticity.

If he is a saint, the regrown ear of Vincent van Gogh is a holy relic. Just as the fingers and even heads of saints were kept in medieval cathedrals as precious connections with the Christian martyrs, so Van Gogh's ear is a thrilling relic of the most visionary painter of the modern world.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/jun/04/vincent-van-gogh-ear-genetically-engineered-art