Van Gogh’s boots were his own, not a peasant’s, undermining Heidegger’s reading.

Evidence

Whose shoes: Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Still Life as a Personal Object: a note on Heidegger and Van Gogh’ (1968), and ‘Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh’ (1994) in his Theory and Philosophy of Art (New York: G. Braziller, 1994), 135–42, 143–51. See esp. 136–8, on the shoes being Van Gogh’s own, and 145, citing fellow student François Gauzi’s account of Van Gogh buying old shoes at a Paris flea market — ‘the shoes of a carter but clean and freshly polished. They were fancy shoes. He put them on, one rainy afternoon, and went out for a walk along the fortifications. Spotted with mud, they became interesting.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1555

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Heidegger-Van Gogh shoes debate — relevant to any history of art-as-world-opening and to Schapiro’s art-historical empiricism clashing with philosophical speculation. — connects to: Van Gogh’s peasant shoes demand a two-stage reconstruction to be read properly

Broader Connections

• Van Gogh’s peasant shoes demand a two-stage reconstruction to be read properly #responds-to (0.88)