Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Even as he tormented the painting with alterations, he covered it in a relentless varnish of words, desperately trying to shape Theo’s reaction before sending it off. “I’ve held the threads of this fabric in my hands all winter long and searched for the definitive pattern,” he wrote, “and although it is now a fabric of rough and coarse appearance, the threads have nonetheless been chosen with care.” He complimented its lively color and “originality.” He framed its flaws in the pathos of its subjects (“It comes from the heart of the peasant’s life”) and the righteousness of his purpose. “I wanted to convey a picture of a way of life quite different from ours, from that of civilized people,” he explained, cutting off objections to its crudeness.

  On the eve of sending it off, a last wave of panic swept over him. He worried about the painting’s size, and nervously suggested painting it all over again on a much smaller canvas. He worried about its darkness, and invoked a pantheon of masters to support the desperate notion that light paintings were not as light as they looked and dark paintings, like his, not as dark. He worried that Theo would reject the work outright, and entertained not sending it to him at all. He fretted miserably over the correct freight charges, imagining that if any were due on arrival, the painting would be more likely to disappoint. Always convinced that his work looked best when viewed in the context of quantity, he sent a package of ten painted studies to prepare Theo’s eye, and soften his heart, for the long-promised picture.

  Finally, on May 6, he shipped the painting to Paris, packed in a cheap crate that he boldly marked “V1.”

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  THERE HAD NEVER BEEN the slightest chance that Theo would like The Potato Eaters. Vincent had labored for a month—indeed, for a winter—on a painting that defied years of gentle urgings to light, color, and charm. How Vincent could have argued so vehemently for and invested so much hope in such an image must have mystified Theo as much as the image itself did. He had openly criticized his brother’s messy, slapdash technique the year before. They had been engaged in an on-and-off argument about his “drab” palette since Vincent took up a brush. Was it reasonable—was it rational?—to respond to Theo’s Salon offer with a painting so determined to displease?

  The Potato Eaters, APRIL 1885, LITHOGRAPH, 10¼ × 12⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 24.3)

  As usual, Theo dared not speak his mind. Worried about his widowed mother and her continued vulnerability to Vincent’s misbehavior, he put family peace far above personal candor. Tactful from birth, subtle by disposition, and trained in the rarified diplomacy of Parisian retail, Theo had negotiated the perils of his brother’s enthusiasm for this strange image with typical finesse throughout its long gestation. When he first heard about it at their father’s funeral, he said little, if anything, but signaled his displeasure by neglecting to take any of the preparatory drawings home with him. Once back in Paris, he relayed discouraging news about the public’s (not his) indifference to Millet’s (not Vincent’s) work. He followed Vincent’s absurd instruction to show the image to Le Chat Noir and reported the editor’s refusal with studied neutrality. He objected to the high cost of making a lithograph of the image (not to the image itself); and after seeing a copy, criticized it only on technical grounds (“the effect is wooly”). He had balanced his own conspicuous coolness with Portier’s tepid comment about “personality,” and sent pacifying reports to their mother, which he knew Vincent would read. “I was happy that I could give Vincent good news recently,” he wrote her in April. “He has not sold anything yet, but that will come. In any case it is certain that when someone like [Portier] sees something in it, there will be others who will think likewise.”

  When he received the painting, Theo promptly sent his brother a letter that both flattered his peasant subjects (“One can hear the clogs of the guests clacking”) and called him to task for lapses in draftsmanship and murky colors. To soften even those glancing blows, he enclosed an extra payment of fifty francs and sent their mother another inflated reassurance. “Several people have seen his work,” he wrote, “and especially the painters think it is highly promising. Some find a lot of beauty in it, especially because his figures are so true.” (Theo only ever mentioned showing The Potato Eaters to one painter, Charles Serret, an aging genre painter of his acquaintance. “[Serret] could see that it was done by someone who has not been working long,” he reported to his mother, “but he found much in it that was good.”)

  Theo preferred to convey his harshest critique through indirection and example. He had already tried several times to steer his brother toward the art of Léon Lhermitte, a Salon artist renowned, both as a painter and as an illustrator, for his images of peasants at work. He had sent Vincent some Lhermitte prints in response to the lithograph of The Potato Eaters, hoping no doubt to discipline his brother’s heavy-handed drawing and awkward figures with the example of Lhermitte’s meticulous draftsmanship and dynamic poses. Vincent lavished praise on the prints (“full of sentiment … superb”), but ignored the lesson. Theo tried again after receiving the finished painting, enclosing a review of the 1885 Salon that hailed Lhermitte as “Millet’s successor” and praised both artists for the light and color of their work.

  In the same letter, Theo recommended to Vincent Fritz von Uhde’s Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me. He could hardly have found an image more a rebuke to Vincent’s bestial cave dwellers than Uhde’s delicate, sweet updating of the Gospel story, showing a line of ragged peasant children shuffling toward a seated Christ. Each is individualized in gesture and expression, without a hint of exaggeration or caricature. Although rendered in the same “green soap” palette as The Potato Eaters, Uhde’s scene is bathed in a soft light that both reveals the dark interior and touches the towheaded children with golden highlights. Despite its impeccable technique, the painting glows with emotion—what Vincent would call “true sentiment.” Like Millet, Uhde had managed to convey the sublime nobility of his humble subjects without resort to drab color or coarse drawing.

  Vincent found in his brother’s suave scoldings all the provocation he needed to join the battle he always sought. He would not be denied his martyrdom for art. “I believe the fuller of sentiment a thing one makes is,” he wrote, further equating art and artist, “the more it is criticized and the more animosity it rouses.” With his peasant fantasy and Millet messianism, he had raised the stakes so high that concession was unthinkable. Rebuffing all of Theo’s examples as “cold” and “orthodox,” he insisted on the uniqueness of his art and the individuality of its creator. “Let us paint,” he pleaded, “and, with all our faults and qualities, be ourselves.” For the rest of the summer, he battered Theo with rebuttals and new outbursts of argument, each bent on the delusional goal of reversing his brother’s judgment on The Potato Eaters; and thus on him.

  LÉON LHERMITTE, La moisson (The Harvest), 1883, OIL ON CANVAS, 92 × 104⅜ IN. (Illustration credit 24.4)

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  THEO’S CRITICISM OF the painting’s colors triggered an especially fierce storm of dispute. No subject had been more worked over in their arguments, and no objection was more predictable. But Vincent addressed his brother like a schoolmaster on the first day of class, drilling him on the basics of “scientific” color theory that he had been studying all winter in books like Charles Blanc’s Les artistes de mon temps and Grammaire des arts du dessin (Grammar of the Visual Arts), also by Blanc, the Michelet of color. He had sent Theo lengthy transcriptions from both books in April, as if preparing for this very battle.

  All of nature was composed of only three “truly elementary” colors, according to Blanc: red, yellow, and blue. Combining any two of these “primary” colors produced one of three “secondary” colors: orange (red + yellow); green (yellow + blue); or violet (blue + red). Drawing on the work of the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Blanc peered deep into the relationships among these six interlocking hues. He attached great significance to the fact that each secondary color was missing one of the pr
imary colors: orange lacked blue; green lacked red; violet lacked yellow. He referred to the relationship between these pairs of unrelated colors as “complementary”—they completed each other—but he found in their interaction a fierce struggle for separation and supremacy: blue against orange, red against green, yellow against violet. The eye read their struggle as “contrast.” The starker their opposition—the closer their proximity, the brighter their tone—the more violent the struggle, the more intense the contrast. Blue never looked bluer than when set next to orange; red never looked redder than next to green; yellow never yellower than when opposed by violet. At their most vivid, Blanc warned, these juxtapositions could heighten the contrast “to such a violent intensity that the human eye can hardly bear the sight of it.”

  Blanc offered corollaries for controlling these fierce clashes of complementary colors. (Blanc framed all his “rules” in the language of battle, no doubt another attraction to Vincent.) One could mix them in unequal proportions so that “they only partially destroy each other,” producing a grayish ton rompu (broken tone) that favored one or the other of the constituent hues. The ton rompu (gray-green, for example) could then be juxtaposed to its complementary (red) to create a less intense contrast (an “unequal fight”), or to a ton entier (pure tone), like blue, to create a tonal harmony. Thus even the subtlest variations of tone could, theoretically, create distinct contrasts (gray-green and red-gray) or unifying sympathies (green and green-gray), and all the shades of conflict in between. Following Chevreul, Blanc called these rules about the interactions of colors “the law of simultaneous contrast.”

  These were the “rules” of color, Vincent announced to his brother: scientific, unchanging, unchallengeable. Blanc had done for color “what Newton did for gravitation,” he said. “Those laws of color are a ray of light … absolutely certain.” To prove it, he cited everything from the colorful works of Blanc’s hero, Delacroix, to the bright plaids of Scottish tartans. “[They] get the most vivid colors to balance each other,” Vincent explained, “so that instead of the fabric being a jumble, the overall effect of the pattern looks harmonious from a distance.” He insisted again and again that The Potato Eaters observed all of Blanc’s rules and therefore any criticism of its color was necessarily “arbitrary” and “superficial.” Where Theo and others saw monotone darkness, Vincent claimed a cornucopia of colors—broken but still vibrant—waging little guerrilla wars of contrast. For his impenetrable browns and grays, he claimed skeins of delicately modulated broken tones, juxtaposed in ways that untutored eyes simply could not appreciate. The painting’s “green soap” tone was, in fact, a multicolored cheviot of hues, he insisted, “woven” by his brushstrokes “into a harmonious whole.”

  In response to Theo’s criticism of the drawing in The Potato Eaters, Vincent made exactly the opposite argument. Instead of championing the rules, he furiously railed against them. Consistency was always an early casualty in Vincent’s persuasive terrors, but his defense of The Potato Eaters cracked open a rift of contradiction that had run through his artistic ambitions from the start. Deprived of natural facility, he had always clung to the faith that hard work and mastery of the rules, from Bargue to Blanc, would be rewarded with success. He defensively ridiculed the notions of “innate genius” and “inspiration,” while exalting his own meager tools: “drudgery,” “science,” and most of all, energy. But in the face of continuing frustration and failure, he had always left open another way of defining success. If an artist had sufficient passion, he argued whenever self-doubt overwhelmed him, nothing else mattered: not ability, not technique, not sales, not even the art itself. Criticizing the pictures in the 1885 Salon, Vincent wrote: “They give me neither food for the heart nor for the mind, because they have obviously been made without a certain passion.”

  The Potato Eaters had been borne on yet another wave of optimism about labor’s just rewards. Vincent had approached the painting like an Academy chef d’oeuvre, with months of arduous preparatory sketches. In the weeks leading up to its completion, he had reaffirmed his faith in the “fundamental truths of drawing … which the ancient Greeks already knew, and which will continue to apply till the end of the world.” He had fretted ceaselessly over correcting every detail of the painting “in order to make it exact.” He pointed out how his drawing had improved in the final version, and assured Theo repeatedly that the figures had been drawn “with care and according to certain rules.” Indeed, he insisted on their correctness and blamed Theo for seeing the subjects wrongly. “Don’t forget those people do not sit on chairs like those in Café Duval,” he admonished.

  Only after Portier and Serret added their voices to Theo’s criticism (Serret had pointed out “certain faults in the structure of the figures”) did Vincent abandon his claim to “lifelike” figures and fall back on his last line of defense: passion. In a furious about-face, he dismissed conventionally correct drawing and correct figures as “superfluous—even if drawn by Ingres himself”—and declared defiantly: “I should be in despair if my figures were good.” He praised the “almost arbitrary” proportions of caricature and scoured the vast gallery in his head for examples of “inaccuracies, aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality—lies, if you like” that marked the work of “true artists.” Art demanded more than correctness, he intoned. It demanded a truth “truer than the literal truth.” It demanded authenticity, honesty, intimacy, modernity—“in short, life.”

  To Vincent, still in thrall to Sensier’s Millet, “life” meant only one thing. Whatever its technical shortcomings, The Potato Eaters expressed peasant life as it really was: peasant life, not “perfumed” with color or “polished” with correctness, but “smelling of bacon smoke and potato steam” and “reeking of manure”; peasant life as he, and Millet, had actually lived it—not as imagined by city-dwelling painters whose “splendidly done figures … cannot but remind one of the suburbs of Paris.” He schooled Theo with a passage from Sensier’s book about Millet’s masterwork, The Sower: “There is something great, and of the grand style in this figure, with its violent gesture, its proud raggedness, which seems to be painted with the very earth that the sower is planting.” In his fever of justification, Vincent grasped this poetic metaphor as a universal principle. “How perfect that saying of Millet’s about the peasants is,” he wrote. “These peasants seem to be painted with the soil they sow.”

  He repeated this mantra again and again, using it to exempt both his colors and his figures from all the “ordinary rules” imposed by “dupes of convention.” His paintings had the “dust of the cottages” on them, he bragged, as well as the flies of the field:

  I had to pick off a good hundred or more flies from the four canvases you’re about to receive, not to mention dust and sand, etc., not to mention the fact that if one carries them through heath and hedgerows for a couple of hours, a branch or two is likely to scratch them.

  Throwing Theo’s sly hints back in his face, Vincent derided the notion that “bright painters”—Impressionists with their confectionary colors and floods of light—could ever express the “filthy, stinking” reality of peasant life; or that academically correct draftsmen could show “diggers that dig, peasants that are peasants, or peasant women that are peasant women.” Only the dark palette and coarse figures of The Potato Eaters could honestly express the “truer truth” of the peasants’ meager existence. And only a painter who lived and suffered among them could bear witness to that truth. “Everything,” he insisted, “depends on how much life and passion an artist is able to express.”

  In every howling defense of his abused image, one can hear Vincent pleading an even more urgent cause. “What kind of man, what kind of visionary, or thinker, observer, what kind of human character stands behind canvases extolled for their technique?” he demanded to know. “Were [they] made with a will, with feeling, with passion, with love”? He reminded Theo of Zola’s injunction to “cherchez l’homme” (look for the man) in the work—to �
�aimez l’artiste” (love the artist) more than the painting.

  As always, Vincent’s art followed where his arguments led. Throughout the summer of 1885, in an outpouring of work that matched the outpouring of words, he hectored his brother with images in support of The Potato Eaters. He seconded its dark colors with a series of even darker paintings: a landscape “under a starless night, dark and thick like ink”; a churchyard “in the evening”; and a peasant cottage like the De Groots’ “by night.” The thatch-roofed cottage, of a type already disappearing from the Brabant countryside, offered Vincent not only an appropriate subject for his nocturnal palette (with the last rays of sunset instead of lamplight), but also a chance to demonstrate his special feeling for the lives of its inhabitants. “Those ‘peasants’ nests’ remind me so much of the wren’s nest,” he wrote Theo, vowing to paint a whole series of similar images and to find “more beautiful hovels far away on the heath,” like a peasant boy searching for birds’ nests.

  Head of a Woman, MARCH 1885, OIL ON CANVAS, 16⅞ × 13⅛ IN. (Illustration credit 24.5)

  At the same time, he painted more “heads,” some even darker than the dusty diners at the De Groot table; some even more caricatured and coarsely rendered. He sent Theo yet another portrait of Gordina, slashed out by heart in bold, unhesitant strokes, and claimed it as proof of his Millet gospel: “I haven’t yet made a head so much ‘peint avec de la terre’ [painted with soil],” he wrote, “and more will follow.” Soon afterward, another crate arrived in Paris, crammed with dark paintings and proudly labeled “V2.”