Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  But at the same time he invoked his special rights as a partisan of Octave Mouret to “break the stagnation” of women, and continued to maintain that he had done Margot a favor by rescuing her from the melancholy of a loveless life. (“She had never really loved before,” he explained.) His own actions may have been impulsive, even foolish, he said, but they were at least manly actions. “Aren’t those who never do anything foolish,” he challenged, “even more foolish in my eyes than I am in theirs?”

  Unlike Mouret, Vincent insisted that he really did love Margot. “I believe without question,” he declared, “that she loves me [and] I love her.” But in his belated protestations, as in all his claims of injury and injustice, one can hear Vincent fending off the persistent inner voice of self-reproach. He steadfastly withheld the details of his involvement from his parents, and ordered Theo to do the same. He invented elaborate deceptions to hide the full, humiliating truth from his brother. Instead of admitting that the Begemann family had roundly rejected his proposal, he led Theo to believe that marriage remained a viable option, dependent only on Margot’s health and the permission of her doctor—a sad echo of his earlier claim that Sien’s doctor had “prescribed” marriage. And while he vehemently proclaimed his love and defended the propriety of his actions to his brother, he never said a word about Margot to Anthon van Rappard. Reporting on a trip to Utrecht in late September, Vincent told Theo that he spent “almost the whole day with [Margot].” But to Rappard he claimed that he spent the day shopping for prints.

  By the beginning of October, Vincent had arranged for Rappard to visit Nuenen again later that month, and Margot Begemann’s name had virtually disappeared from his letters.

  But not even Vincent’s stoutest denials could stop the events of September from resonating backward through the pains and failures of the past. “Domestic happiness,” he wrote Theo bitterly, “is a beautiful promise society makes, but doesn’t keep.” His furious arguments could put off the guilt he felt over Margot’s “sad story” for a time, at least (it would resurface at the end of his life), but they could not protect him from fear. In Vincent’s relentless dissection of Margot’s “critical nerve disease”—her “neuritis,” her “encephalitis,” her “melancholia,” her “religious mania”—he was already exploring the dark place into which he felt himself slipping. “There are things in the depths of our souls,” he confessed in a moment of introspection unknown to Octave Mouret, “that would cut us to the quick if we knew about them.”

  BY THE TIME he arrived in mid-October, Rappard must barely have recognized his hale companion of the previous spring. Vincent stood on the platform of the Eindhoven train station pale and gaunt as a ghost. He had not slept a full night or eaten a full meal in a month. He complained of weakness, melancholy, and “anguish.” “There are many days when I am almost paralyzed,” he wrote. Vincent’s parents, who had lobbied for Rappard’s visit in hopes of providing their “feverish” son with some distraction, may have written him in advance, as they wrote Theo, preparing him for what to expect. “We have had difficult days again with Vincent.… He is very irritable and over-excited … sad and unhappy.” Melancholy had led to drink and drink had led to “violence,” Dorus warned. “There is a question whether we can go on living together.”

  Forewarned or not, Rappard yielded to yet another campaign of invitation, this one even more frantic than the last. It had begun the day his previous visit ended and continued through the summer with exchanges of books, declarations of solidarity, and promises of models. Vincent painted version after version of the painting he had seen in Rappard’s studio in December, of a woman spinning, and advertised them to his friend. The tone of desperation was set early, in August, when Vincent scolded Rappard for his desultory correspondence. The next month, the two scuffled over Vincent’s intrusive artistic advice. “Remember, I am making the painting, not you!” Rappard wrote, in a rare show of spleen that sent Vincent into a fit of defensiveness. Rappard had no idea why Vincent’s pleas for him to visit reached a new pitch of intensity in late September.

  They spent the cool days just as they always had, making long excursions into the countryside, knocking on doors and “discovering new models.” They visited Vincent’s art lover, Hermans, so Vincent could show off his lone commission. They sketched and painted outside when they could (“there are splendid autumn effects”), but they also spent many hours in the Kerkstraat studio, where Rappard busied himself at his easel (“he is up to his ears in work,” Vincent reported to Theo) while Vincent basked in rare companionship and fantasized that Rappard would be the first of many artists to visit his Brabant studio.

  But nothing was the same as before. In the previous six months, Rappard’s Old Woman at the Spinning Wheel had been awarded a silver medal at the International and Universal Exhibition in London, and another of his works had been shown at the National Exhibition in Utrecht. “[He] is doing very well,” Vincent acknowledged to Theo, comparing his friend’s work to Courbet’s. “It is damned well done.” Rappard had journeyed to Drenthe again and returned, not in disgrace and despair, but with “a good crop of studies.” As if to remind Vincent of their diverging paths, Rappard insisted they take a trip to Heeze, a small town southeast of Eindhoven, to visit a friend from Utrecht, Willem Wenckebach, another dapper artist-aristocrat, fellow medal winner, and Rappard’s regular companion on sketching trips. Afterward, Vincent muttered to one of his students, “I do not like these highborn people.”

  It was inevitable that they fought. After almost two weeks of short days and claustrophobic nights, Rappard bristled at Vincent’s bullying criticism and complained about his “manner of working”—an accusation that could have embraced everything from his crude technique to his unconventional work habits to his rough treatment of models, but surely rang with class distinction and disapproval. At some point, they may both have realized that this was the last time they would see each other.

  After the stinging rebuke from the Begemanns, Rappard’s withdrawal—and his successes—combined to loose the demons of guilt and self-reproach that Vincent had kept at bay with visions of la joie de vivre. When he finally lashed out, he chose as his target not his guileless friend, or even his distant brother, but the original source of all his grief and pain. At a family dinner, with Rappard looking on in horror, Vincent provoked a fierce argument with his father. “Suddenly the son got so furious,” Rappard recorded in a rare surviving account of his time with Vincent, “that he rose from his place with the carving knife from the tray in his hand and threatened the bewildered old man.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The Waternix

  ROM PARIS, THEO WATCHED HIS BROTHER’S LATEST UNRAVELING WITH desperate dismay. Every letter from his parents brought hints of fresh outrages and new fears. “Vincent is very irritable … His actions are increasingly unaccountable.… He is sad and finds no peace … We hope for Higher Help.” Theo had seen the crisis coming the year before when he pleaded with Vincent to come to Paris from Drenthe rather than continue his torturous homeward trek. Even after Vincent arrived in Nuenen, Theo had done everything in his power to mediate with money and words an antipathy well beyond either’s reach. Despite a busy year at the gallery and even a trip to London in August, he had found time to make two visits to Nuenen that summer: twice the usual burden of oversight and worry. Now, despite his efforts, it had come to this: public scandal and reports of domestic violence.

  Vincent had written, too; but since the brothers’ fierce argument that spring, his correspondence had dried to a grudging trickle. Once or twice a month, a curt letter arrived in Theo’s mailbox, suspiciously devoid of personal news and often missing the customary affectionate closing, “met een handdruk” (with a handshake). Even in this wary summer lull, however, the brothers continued to wage the battle over Vincent’s art that had begun in March. They argued about technique, with Vincent defending his drawings (and himself) from Theo’s charges of crudeness by invoking the “stately sim
plicity” of Golden Age masters like Ruisdael as well as recent favorites like Jozef Israëls and Charles de Groux. When Theo pointed out that Vincent had not yet submitted a watercolor to the Society of Draftsmen in The Hague (as he had promised to do after his trip to Drenthe), Vincent launched into a guilty fit of rebuttal. “I quite forgot it … I am not very keen on it … I have not one watercolor on hand…[It is] already too late for this year … I am in no mood for it.” Instead, he announced yet more paintings and drawings of weavers directly defying Theo’s disapproval. But mostly, they argued about color.

  Vincent had long felt insecure about using color. The debacle with Mauve, the expense of paint, the intractability of watercolor, and his huge psychic investment in black-and-white imagery had combined to delay any real progress in color for almost two years. “I have sometimes wondered why I was not more of a colorist,” he mused in August 1883. “My temperament decidedly seems to indicate it—but up till now it has developed very little.” Except for a few glorious experiments in the late summer of 1882, he had little to show for all his chronically unpaid bills for tubes of color.

  Even when he tried, as in Drenthe, he could not leave the grisaille world of the Schenkweg studio behind. Just as he “painted” with charcoal and pencil—relentlessly hatching, shading, and smudging to imitate the vibrancy of color—he subdued his palette to a rainbow of grays, rarely using hue to do more than distinguish one object from another. He invented elaborate justifications for this reticence, arguing that he had to keep his colors in “a lower key”—“below the intensity of nature”—in order to preserve the “delicate gray harmonious color” of the whole. In his vast gallery, he found many champions (from the ubiquitous favorite Georges Michel to the elusive Max Liebermann); and, as always, he framed his muted images in a kaleidoscope of color-filled descriptions.

  For all these reasons, Theo’s criticism of the Drenthe watercolors in March (“not any good”) had struck Vincent a wounding blow. When his brother visited Nuenen in May and repeated the criticism standing in the Kerkstraat studio, Vincent’s response was immediate and galvanic. “As to drab color,” he declared as soon as Theo left in a letter filled with underlining, “one must not judge the colors of a painting separately.… Colors can be very luminous in a picture that, when considered separately, are in fact of a rather dark, grayish tone.” It was the opening salvo in a debate that would propel his art on a defiant, yearlong descent into darkness.

  Throughout the summer, in a series of unusually monothematic letters, Vincent channeled all his anger over past slights and all his fears about coming revelations into this single argument. He copied out pages of his recent reading from Charles Blanc’s Les artistes de mon temps (The Artists of My Time), summoning no less an authority than the titan Delacroix in his defense of “gray and dirty tones.” When Theo recommended the French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose luminous, pastel vision of Arcadia, The Sacred Wood, had captivated the 1884 Salon, Vincent shot back with the wisdom of Jozef Israëls (“start with a deep color scheme, thus making even relatively dark colors seem light”) and a storm of contrary models: from the chiaroscuro of Velázquez (whose “shadows and half-tones consist mostly of colorless, cool grays”) to the cloudy skies of the Barbizon.

  Nothing could have been further from Vincent’s turgid, tenebrous views of life on the heath than Puvis’s idealized depictions of the “doux pays” (pleasant land), with their classical figures and chalky, serene color. No doubt sensing this, Vincent roundly rejected Theo’s advocacy of Puvis’s “silvery tones” and passionately defended his two favorite oil colors, “bistre and bitumen”—both browns—lodging the same complaints of neglect and pleas for patience on their behalf that he had made so often on his own:

  They possess such very remarkable and peculiar qualities … They require some effort in learning to use them, for they must be used differently from the ordinary colors … Many are discouraged by the experiments one must make first and which, of course, do not succeed on the very first day one begins to use them.… At first I was awfully disappointed in them, but I could not forget the beautiful things I had seen made with them.

  When Theo tried to reopen consideration of the Impressionists, Vincent recoiled even more sharply. Claiming both ignorance (“I have seen absolutely nothing of them”) and indifference (“I am little curious about or desirous for other or newer things”), he dismissed Impressionism as nothing more than the elevation of charm over substance. “I do not disdain [it],” he said disdainfully, “but it does not add very much to the beauty of what is true.”

  When Theo continued to press Impressionist arguments about avoiding black and capturing the effects of sunlight, Vincent’s opposition only hardened. He challenged the manliness of the Impressionists and invoked everything from the “unutterably beautiful” laws of color to the “infinitely deep” music of Beethoven in defense of his “dingy” art. Far from avoiding black, he announced yet another search, in paint this time, for an even blacker black—“stronger effects [and] deeper tones than pure black itself.” And he airily rejected as “impossible or ugly” any attempt to capture sunlight in paint. Only four years before setting his easel under the brilliant sun of Provence, he condemned all such “summer sun effects” and reaffirmed his devotion to shadows, silhouettes, and twilight.

  AS IF IN TANDEM, Vincent’s life followed his art into the darkness. The dramatic events of September swept aside the summer debate over color (it would return with a fury the following year) as Vincent once again provoked the world into near-universal condemnation. No one, not even his amorous brother, accepted Vincent’s elaborate Mouret justifications for leading Margot Begemann astray (“I would sooner perish of passion than die of boredom”). As word of the kindhearted spinster’s fate at the hands of the pastor’s degenerate son leaked into the community, Vincent withdrew into surly isolation.

  His letters to Theo sank into a slough of despondence (“I know well enough that the future will always remain very difficult for me”) punctuated by fierce eruptions of vitriol, often in long postscripts, as guilt condensed into anger. “I cannot swallow everything,” he wrote. “[It is] really too outrageous … Things can’t go on like this.” He cast Theo in the most damning role he could imagine—an enemy of the Revolution—and spun an elaborate conceit about two brothers fighting each other, perhaps killing each other, atop the barricades of the most heroic of all struggles. The stirring imagery briefly revived the dream of Drenthe (“try to know for yourself where you really belong”), but his thoughts always returned to the present—the “infinitely meaningless, discouraging, hopeless” present. His plans for the future, too, ricocheted between defiant threats to return to The Hague and despairing nostalgia for the black country.

  Rappard’s visit the next month plunged Vincent into a different hell. He had always felt intensely competitive with his aristocratic friend, repeatedly insisting that “we are just about on the same level” and vowing to “keep up with him.” But two weeks of working together had exposed all that as delusion. In fact, a huge gap had opened between them. Rappard’s silver medal, his exhibitions, his social life, his suave friends and supportive family, all had conspired to shut Vincent out. The pain of that exclusion had suffused all the bickering over technique that filled their correspondence the previous spring. In October, the sight of his friend producing “beautiful” painted studies, one after another, all “damned well done,” sent Vincent into a paroxysm of competitiveness, part despair and part determination. “One comes to a dead end,” he declared, “and must renew oneself.” He wrote Theo letters filled with hyperventilating defenses of the past and breathless, almost babbling, impatience for the future: “I must strike while the iron is hot… not lose a moment … work must be done at full speed … I must show very shortly that I have again accomplished something.”

  In a frenzy of ambition, he pledged himself anew to the conventional goals that had always eluded him. “I warrant you,” he wrote im
mediately after Rappard’s departure, “something will happen before long—either I shall exhibit or I shall sell.” With Rappard as his inspiration, he took his easel and paint box into the cold November countryside and painted a series of pleasant, conventional landscapes: a poplar lane in golden autumn hues, a country road, multiple views of the local mills.

  To show his new resolve, he bought new clothes (“I am more particular about my clothes than before,” he assured Theo), and offered “facts and figures” to prove that he would soon start earning a 20 percent return on Theo’s money (“taking a sound view of business matters”). No doubt recognizing that he could never catch up to Rappard without Theo’s help, he sued for peace, or at least a pause, in the brothers’ escalating feud. “We must make progress,” he wrote, reviving the fraternal “we” of fonder days. “We must get a move on.… Side with me—not in a neutral way, but in an energetic, positive way.… Dear brother and friend, stir up the fire.”

  As in Drenthe, Vincent filled the void between longing and dread with delusion. Without telling Theo, he wrote forceful letters to both Mauve and Tersteeg summoning their cooperation in his desperate new initiative. “Give me another opportunity to paint some studies in [your] studio,” he demanded of Mauve. In exchange for owning up to past errors, Vincent imagined, Tersteeg would “renew old relations,” and Mauve would give him “hints for correcting and improving my work.” He envisioned himself again as a successful young artist, like Anthon van Rappard, apprenticed to a solid, serious painter and reconnected to the art world of the formidable gérant. “I am just taking steps to promote the direct progress of my work,” he explained to Theo, who must have been both dumbfounded and appalled by his brother’s overtures. “I will harp on it till Mauve gives in.”