We, artists in love with order and symmetry, isolate ourselves and work to define one single thing.
Puvis knows that very well, and when he, so wise and so just, decided to descend good-naturedly into the intimacy of our very own epoch, forgetting his Elysian Fields, he made a very fine portrait, the serene old man in his bright, blue interior, reading the novel with a yellow cover — a glass of water beside him, in which a watercolour brush and a rose. And also a society lady, like those the De Goncourts portrayed.
The Dutchmen, now, we see them painting things just as they are, apparently without thought, the way Courbet painted his beautiful naked women.
They make portraits, landscapes, still lifes. One could be stupider than that and commit greater follies.
If we don’t know what to do, my dear old Bernard, then let’s do the same as them, if only so as not to allow our scarce mental powers to evaporate in sterile metaphysical meditations that aren’t up to bottling chaos, which is chaotic for the very reason that it won’t fit into any glass of our calibre.
We can — and that’s what those Dutchmen did, desperately clever in the eyes of people wedded to system — we can paint an atom of chaos. A horse, a portrait, your grandmother, apples, a landscape.
Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on? Degas lives like a little lawyer, and he doesn’t like women, knowing that if he liked them and fucked them a lot he would become cerebrally ill and hopeless at painting. Degas’s painting is virile and impersonal precisely because he has resigned himself to being personally no more than a little lawyer, with a horror of riotous living. He watches human animals stronger than himself getting a hard-on and fucking, and he paints them well, precisely because he doesn’t make such great claims about getting a hard-on.
Rubens, ah, there you have it, he was a handsome man and a good fucker, Courbet too; their health allowed them to drink, eat, fuck.
In your case, my poor dear old Bernard, I already told you last spring. Eat well, do your military drill well, don’t fuck too hard; if you don’t fuck too hard, your painting will be all the spunkier for it.
Ah, Balzac, that great and powerful artist, already told us very well that for modern artists a certain chastity made them stronger.
The Dutchmen were married people making children, a beautiful, very beautiful occupation, very natural.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer. I’m not saying that among your new Breton studies there aren’t some virile and strong ones, but I haven’t seen them yet and so wouldn’t be able to talk about them. But — I’ve seen those virile things, the portrait of your grandmother and the still lifes — judging from your drawings I have vague doubts whether these new studies would have the same vigour, just from the virile point of view.
These studies that I’m talking about first, you see it’s the first swallow of your summertime as an artist. If we want, ourselves, to get a hard-on for our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to fucking only a little, and for the rest to be, according as our temperament demands, soldiers or monks. The Dutchmen, once again, had morals, and a quiet, calm, well-ordered life.
Delacroix, ah, him — ‘I,’ he said, ‘found painting when I had no teeth nor breath left’. And those who saw this famous artist paint said: when Delacroix paints it’s like the lion devouring his piece of flesh. He fucked only a little, and had only casual love affairs so as not to filch from the time devoted to his work. If in this letter, on the face of it more incoherent, and taken on its own without its connections to the previous correspondence and above all, friendship, than I should wish — if in this letter you find that I have some anxieties — concerns in any case — for your health, foreseeing the hard ordeal that you’ll have to go through in doing your service, obligatory, alas, — then you will read it correctly. I know that the study of the Dutchmen could only do you good, their works being so virile and so spunky and so healthy.
Personally, I find continence is quite good for me. It’s enough for our weak, impressionable artists’ brains to give their essence to the creation of our paintings. Because in thinking, calculating, wearing ourselves out, we expend cerebral activity.
Why exert ourselves in spending all our creative juices when those who pimp for a living and even their simple, well-fed clients work more to the satisfaction of the genital organs of the registered whore in this case than we do? The whore in question has my sympathy more than my compassion.
Being exiled, a social outcast, as artists like you and I surely are, ‘outcasts’ too, she is surely therefore our friend and sister. And finding — in this position — of outcast — the same as us — an independence that isn’t without its advantages — all things considered — let’s not adopt a false position by believing we’re serving her through social rehabilitation, which is in any case impractical and would be fatal for her.
I’ve just made a portrait of a postman — or rather, two portraits even — Socratic type, no less Socratic for being something of an alcoholic, and with a high colour as a result. His wife had just given birth, the good fellow was glowing with satisfaction. He’s a fierce republican, like père Tanguy. Goddamn, what a subject to paint à la Daumier, eh? He was getting too stiff while posing, and that’s why I painted him twice, the second time at a single sitting, on white canvas, background blue, almost white, in the face all the broken tones: yellow, green, purples, pinks, reds, the uniform Prussian blue trimmed with yellow.
Write to me soon if you feel like it; am very encumbered and haven’t yet found time for figure sketches. Handshake.
Yours truly,
Vincent
Cézanne is as much a respectably married man as the old Dutchmen were. If he has a good hard-on in his work it’s because he’s not overly dissipated through riotous living.
657 | Arles, Wednesday, 8 August 1888 | To Theo van Gogh (F)
My dear Theo,
I’ve just sent off 3 large drawings, as well as some other, smaller ones and the two lithographs by De Lemud.
The vertical small farmhouse garden is, it seems to me, the best of the three large ones. The one with the sunflowers is the little garden of a bathhouse.
The third, horizontal, garden is the one of which I’ve also done some painted studies.
Under the blue sky, the orange, yellow, red patches of flowers take on an amazing brilliance, and in the limpid air there’s something happier and more suggestive of love than in the north. It vibrates — like the bouquet by Monticelli that you have. I’m annoyed with myself for not painting flowers here. Anyway, even having already produced about fifty drawings or painted studies here, I feel as though I’ve done absolutely nothing at all. I’d gladly content myself with being nothing but a pioneer for other, future painters who’ll come to work in the south. Now the harvest, the garden, the sower and the two seascapes are croquis after painted studies. I believe that all these ideas are good, but the painted studies lack clarity of touch. One more reason why I felt the need to draw them.
I wanted to paint a little old peasant who had an enormous resemblance to our father in his features. Only he was more common, and verged on caricature. Nevertheless, I would have been enormously keen to do him just as he was as a little peasant. He promised to come, and then he said that he ought to have the painting for himself, and so I had to do two the same, one for him and one for me. I told him no. Perhaps he’ll come back some day. I’m curious to know if you knew the De Lemuds.
At the moment there are still plenty of fine lithographs to be had, Daumiers, reproductions of Delacroix, Decamps, Diaz, Rousseau, Dupré, &c. Soon, though, it’ll be over, and what a great pity that this art tends to disappear.
Why is it that we don’t hold on to what we have, the way doctors and mechanics do? Once something has been discovered and found, they keep the knowledge of it; in these wretched fine arts we forget everything, we hold on to nothing.
Millet gave us the essence of the peasant, and now, yes, there’s Lhermitte, it’s true ther
e are one or two more, Meunier . . . . and have we now more generally learned how to see peasants — no, hardly anyone knows how to polish one off.
Isn’t it partly the fault of Paris and the Parisians, fickle and disloyal like the sea? Well then, you’re damned right to say, let’s go quietly on our way, working for ourselves. You know, whatever becomes of sacrosanct Impressionism, I’d still myself have the wish to do the things that the previous generation, Delacroix, Millet, Rousseau, Diaz, Monticelli, Isabey, Decamps, Dupré, Jongkind, Ziem, Israëls, Meunier, a heap of others, Corot, Jacque . . . could understand.
Ah, Manet was really really close to it, and Courbet, to marrying form and colour. Me, I’d be quite happy to stay silent for 10 years doing nothing but studies, then do one or two figure paintings.
The old plan, so often recommended and so rarely carried out.
If the drawings that I send you are too stiff, it’s because I did them in such a way as to be able later, if they’re still there, to use them as information for painting.
This vertical small farmhouse garden is superbly coloured in reality. The dahlias are a rich and dark purple, the double row of flowers is pink and green on one side and orange almost without greenery on the other. In the middle a low, white dahlia and a little pomegranate tree, with flowers of the most brilliant orange red, yellow-green fruit, the ground grey, the tall reeds — ‘canes’ — of a blue green, the fig trees emerald, the sky blue, the houses white with green windows, red roofs. In full sun in the morning, in the evening entirely bathed in shadow cast by the fig trees and reeds. If Quost was there, or Jeannin . . . . What can you say, to encompass everything you’d need an entire school of people working together in the same area, complementing each other like the old Dutch: portrait painters, genre painters, landscape painters, painters of animals, still-life painters.
Must also tell you that I made a very interesting tour round the farms with someone who knows the area. But you know that in the real Provence it’s more often small peasant farming à la Millet than anything else.
MacKnight and Boch don’t understand much of it, or rather, nothing. Now if I myself am beginning to see it a bit more clearly, I’d need a good long stay to do it.
At times it nevertheless seems likely to me that I’ll have to make the journey myself if Gauguin doesn’t manage to sort out the mess he’s in, if we want to put the plan into practice. And then so be it, I’m still among peasants anyway, it’s the same. It’s even my opinion that we should try to keep ourselves ready to go to him, because I believe that he could soon be in terrible straits again if, for example, his landlord won’t give him any more credit.
That’s so predictable, and his distress could be so great that it might be urgent to put the partnership into practice. For me there’s only the one-way journey, and the prices over there that he has mentioned are in any case considerably lower than what one inevitably spends here.
I’m counting on having your letter on Saturday morning. I’ve bought two more canvases, so I now have just 5 francs left, and it’s already Wednesday evening.
Here, in days with no money, there’s just one more advantage over the north, the fine weather (because even the mistral is fine weather to look at).
Really glorious sunshine, in which Voltaire dried himself off while drinking his coffee.
You can’t help feeling Zola and Voltaire everywhere. It’s so full of life! In the style of Jan Steen, in the style of Ostade.
There would certainly be the possibility of a school of painting here. But you’ll say that nature is beautiful everywhere if one goes into it deeply enough.
Have you read Madame Chrysanthème yet, have you made the acquaintance of that pimp ‘of a surprising courtesy’, Monsieur Kangourou? And of the sugared peppers, the fried ices and the salted sweets?
I’ve been very, very well these last few days; in the long run I believe that I’ll belong to these parts in all respects.
In the peasant’s garden I saw the figure of a woman carved in wood, originally from the prow of a Spanish ship.
It was in a grove of cypresses, and it was pure Monticelli.
Ah, these farmhouse gardens with the lovely big red Provence roses, the vines, the fig trees; it’s quite poetic, and the eternal strong sun, in spite of which the foliage stays very green.
The tank, out of which clear water flows that irrigates the farm through channels forming a little canal system. An old, pure white Camargue horse drives the machinery. No cows on these little farms.
My neighbour and his wife (grocers) strongly resemble the Buteaux, for example.
But here, farmhouse and cheap grog-shops are less gloomy, less tragic than in the north, because the heat &c. makes poverty less hard and melancholy. I’d so much like you to have seen this part of the country. Well, first we’ll have to see how the Gauguin business turns out.
I haven’t told you yet that I’ve had a letter from Koning; I wrote to him a week ago. I can easily see him coming back sometime. Is Mourier still there?
I’d be quite surprised if that book by Cassagne was no longer in existence. They’d certainly know it at Latouche’s or at the artists’ colourman in Chaussée d’Antin. Or know where it is.
If I should ever happen to give drawing lessons, or have to talk with painters about the principles of technique, I’ll have to have it to hand.
It’s THE ONLY genuinely practical book that I know, and I know a little from experience how useful it is.
Mourier, MacKnight, even Boch, all of them would need it, and how many others. MacKnight keeps coming.
I’ve worked on another figure of a Zouave, sitting on a bench against a white wall, which makes the fifth figure.
This morning I was at a washing-place with figures of women as broad as Gauguin’s negresses.
One in particular, in white-black-pink.
Another all yellow; there were a good thirty of them, young and old. I hope to send you still more croquis of painted studies.
Hoping to have news from you soon. Handshake.
Ever yours,
Vincent
660 | Arles, on or about Monday, 13 August 1888 | To Theo van Gogh (F)
My dear Theo,
Yesterday I spent the evening with that second lieutenant, and he plans to leave here on Friday, then he’ll stay one night in Clermont, and from Clermont he’ll send you a telegram to tell you by which train he’ll be arriving. Sunday morning, in all probability.
The roll that he’ll bring you contains 36 studies; among them there are many with which I’m desperately dissatisfied, and which I’m sending you anyway because it will still give you a vague idea of some really fine subjects in the countryside.
For example, there’s a quick sketch I made of myself laden with boxes, sticks, a canvas, on the sunny Tarascon road; there’s a view of the Rhône, in which the sky and the water are the colour of absinthe, with a blue bridge and black figures of ruffians; there’s the sower, a washing-place and still others, not at all successful and unfinished, especially a large landscape with brushwood.
What’s happened to the Souvenir de Mauve? Having heard no more about it, I was inclined to believe that Tersteeg may have said something disagreeable to you, to let you know that it would be refused, or some other unpleasantness. Naturally, I wouldn’t get worked up about it in that case.
At the moment I’m working on a study like this:
[Sketch 660A]
660A. Quay with sand barges
boats seen from a quay, from above; the two boats are a purplish pink, the water is very green, no sky, a tricolour flag on the mast. A workman with a wheelbarrow is unloading sand. I have a drawing of it too. Did you receive the three drawings of the garden? They’ll end up by not taking them at the post office any more, because the format’s too big.
I fear that I won’t have a very fine female model. She had promised, then as it appears, she earned a few sous with some riotous living and has better things to do. She was extraordinary; h
er expression was like that of Delacroix. And a strange, primitive bearing. I take things with patience, for want of seeing other ways of enduring them, but it’s annoying, this constant aggravation with models. I hope to do a study of oleanders in the next few days. If we painted smoothly like Bouguereau people wouldn’t be ashamed to let themselves be painted, but I believe it’s made me lose models, that people found that it was ‘badly done’, it was only pictures FULL OF PAINTING that I was doing. So the good whores are afraid of being compromised, and that people will laugh at their portraits. But it’s enough to make you almost lose heart when you feel that you could do things if people had more good will. I can’t resign myself to saying, ‘grapes are sour’; I can’t get over the fact that I don’t have more models. Well, we must be patient and look for others.
Now our sister will come soon to spend some time with you; I have no doubt that she’ll enjoy herself.
It’s a rather sad prospect to have to say to myself that the painting I do will perhaps never have any value. If it was worth what it costs I could say to myself, I’ve never concerned myself about money.
But in the present circumstances, on the contrary, one will soak it up. Ah well, and all the same, we must still continue and try to do better.
It very often seems wiser to me to go to Gauguin instead of recommending to him the life down here; I so much fear that in the end he’ll complain of having been inconvenienced. Will it be possible to live at home here, will we manage to make ends meet? Because that’s a new venture. In Brittany, now, we can calculate what it will cost, and here I have no idea. I continue to find life quite expensive, and you don’t get very far with the people. Here there would be beds and some pieces of furniture to buy, and the expenses of his journey and everything he owes. That seems to me to risk more than is proper, when he and Bernard spend so little in Brittany. Well, we’ll have to make up our minds soon, and for my part I have no preferences. It’s a simple question of deciding where we have the most chance of living cheaply.
Ever Yours Page 86