Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  In response to the unanimous criticism of the figures in The Potato Eaters, Vincent launched a campaign of drawing that both answered the objections and defied them. He pledged allegiance to a new technique that would render his figures “fuller and broader” and promised to make fifty drawings, a hundred, or “even more, until I have exactly what I want, namely that everything is round and … makes one harmonious lifelike whole.” He sent Theo elaborate explanations of the new technique, filled with sonorous French phrases and the wisdom of eminences like Delacroix and Hébert.

  But the drawings themselves hardly changed. Whether out of stubbornness, or a shortage of models as the July harvest approached, Vincent returned to the same poses he had been practicing since Etten: women bending over to glean corn or dig carrots, thrusting their bottoms in the air; men digging with spades, or raking, or reaping. He defiantly chose the large sheets and single subjects that Theo had been discouraging since Etten. His promises of roundness and wholeness added nothing except girth to the scores of familiar figures that piled up in the studio that summer. He claimed for all these bulging, unbudging images the same “character,” “life,” and “dust” that he claimed for his maligned potato eaters.

  WHEN ANTHON VAN RAPPARD sent a letter critical of the Potato Eaters lithograph in late May, Vincent unleashed a fury of rebuttal that brought their five-year friendship to a tumultuous end. Rappard had dared to specify, in pitiless detail, all the imperfections that Theo would only hint at:

  You will agree with me that such work is not meant seriously.… Why did you see and treat everything so superficially?…How far from true is that coquettish little hand of the woman in the background … And why isn’t that man to the right allowed to have a knee, a belly and lungs? Or are they located in his back? And why must his arm be a yard too short? And why must he do without one half of his nose? And why must that woman on the left have some sort of little tobacco-pipe stem with a little cube at the end for a nose?

  The image had “terrified” him, Rappard wrote, and he castigated Vincent in the harshest terms for betraying the artistic ideals he had thought they shared: “While working in such a manner, how dare you invoke the names of Millet and Breton? Come on! In my opinion art is too sublime a thing to be treated so nonchalantly.”

  Vincent immediately sent the letter back, adding only a curt, scribbled note. But within a week, his indignation exploded in wounded protest. For the next month, he spat out page after page of desperate argument, as if all the disputes of a lifetime hung in the balance. He ricocheted between angry counterattacks and self-pitying pleas on behalf of his art and himself. Repeated claims of indifference (“I leave you to your delusions”) were followed by long paragraphs of academic justification. Elaborate encouragements shared the page with half-mad accusations. He offered defenses from the most technical (“I used corrosives on the stone”) to the most sweeping (“We seek our subjects in the heart of the people”). He declared himself the truer disciple of Millet and predicted his friend’s ruin if they parted ways.

  The more he argued, the angrier he grew, until his tirades regressed to the helpless frustration and hurt of a child’s tantrum. When Rappard suggested that Vincent needed someone to tell him “some home truths,” Vincent flailed back, “I myself am the one to tell myself some home truths.”

  In Rappard’s disapproval, Vincent saw the same dark forces that had always thwarted and persecuted him. “I have had the very same kind of trouble for a great number of years with a great number of people,” he wrote, including “my parents and my whole family.” In his paranoia, Vincent suspected that Rappard’s betrayal had been part of an actual conspiracy against him—a conspiracy orchestrated, of course, by his old Goupil nemesis, H. G. Tersteeg. “What is the real reason you have broken with me?” he demanded. He speculated that Rappard had met secretly with Tersteeg on his recent visits to The Hague and agreed to trade his good opinion of The Potato Eaters for favors from the implacable gérant. Hadn’t Millet been betrayed in just the same way by those attempting to “suppress and refuse” him? Driven by his own escalating suspicions, Vincent had no choice but to demand a full retraction. “This is my last word,” he announced. “I want you to take back, frankly and without reservation, what you wrote.”

  Concerned by Vincent’s unhinged letters, but antagonized by his “despotic” demands, Rappard retracted nothing. Instead, he apparently asked his friend Willem Wenckebach, who was summering again in nearby Heeze, to look in on his distraught friend in Nuenen. The dapper, urbane Wenckebach sought Vincent out among the birds’ nests, broken furniture, and dirty clothes of the Kerkstraat studio. Vincent responded to this gentlemanly outreach with the same unkempt passions that filled his letters, careening between polite small talk and fits of violent rage. Kicking his easel to punctuate his arguments, he railed against the so-called “decent” bourgeoisie one minute and cursed the uncooperative peasants the next.

  When Wenckebach reached to pick up a drawing from the floor, Vincent caught the glint of a gold cufflink. “He looked at me in a contemptuous manner,” Wenckebach recalled later, “and said furiously: ‘I can’t stand people who wear such luxuries!’ This unusual, unkind, and rude remark made me feel most uncomfortable.” On the subject of Rappard, Vincent was unyielding. He would “never admit the justice of [Rappard’s] reproaches,” he told his visitor. Therefore, nothing but a full retraction would suffice to “erase” his friend’s “unmanly” insults. When Wenckebach wondered why he would take such an uncompromising and ultimately self-destructive stand, Vincent answered simply: “It is not good to take the smooth path in one’s life! I never do!”

  Vincent waited for Rappard’s reply. And waited. Finally, Vincent himself broke the silence. “I am willing to look upon the whole business as a misunderstanding,” he wrote, “provided that you realize yourself that you were mistaken.” If Rappard did not retract everything within a week, Vincent added, “I shall personally not be at all sorry to be done with you.” It was the same ultimatum he had issued so often to Theo. But his friend chose the option Theo never could. He found in Vincent’s unreasoning defense of The Potato Eaters the final excuse he needed to walk away from his odd, oppressive correspondent.

  At some point that summer, Vincent took a penciled self-portrait that Rappard had given him and tore it in half. “You are ahead of me in many things,” he wrote; “still I think you went too far.”

  That left only Theo.

  LIKE RAPPARD, Theo bristled under Vincent’s manic onslaught. He had tried every way possible to coax his uncoaxable brother from his fixation on dark colors and dreary subjects. Vincent had recoiled from even the most diplomatic and indirect hints with storms of defense as well as fresh attacks on Goupil, on dealers, on the Salon, on the Impressionists, and on Theo himself. To avoid raising his brother’s ire, Theo had recruited acquaintances like Portier and Serret to beard the unwelcome truth. But Vincent had responded by drawing them, too, into his mania of persuasion, deluging them with the same pleading, bullying letters that filled Theo’s mailbox that summer.

  Far from being grateful for Theo’s exertions, Vincent had rallied his brother to more and greater efforts on behalf of his neglected art. After years of dismissing exhibitions, and one-man shows in particular, he pushed Theo to mount a solo show for him. He demanded that Theo show his work to other dealers: not nonentities like Portier, but prominent dealers like Henry Wallis and Elbert Jan van Wisselingh, his old Goupil colleague. He had begged Theo to approach Paul Durand-Ruel, one of Paris’s most celebrated dealers and an early champion of the very Impressionists that Vincent so often derided. “Let him think it ugly,” Vincent snapped, ignoring the delicacy of his brother’s position. “I don’t mind.” In his fever, he had even suggested that Theo enlist the help of his eternal antagonist, Tersteeg (“he is a man who dares, once he is convinced”)—a notion of breathtaking folly.

  Ever suspicious of Theo’s resolve, Vincent hinted threateningly that if Theo failed in
his duties, he might come to Paris himself and take the promotion of The Potato Eaters into his own hands—a prospect that surely alarmed his discreet, circumspect brother.

  And at the end of every month, as regular as rent, the same cry erupted: “I am absolutely without money,” “I am absolutely cleaned out,” “I am literally without a penny.” At a time when Theo’s own finances were strained by the expenses of his father’s burial and the burdens of an entire family, Vincent’s allowance continued to disappear faster than Theo could send it. “I cannot and may not do otherwise than spend relatively much on models,” Vincent responded defiantly to his brother’s repeated pleas for forbearance. “Far from cutting down on the expenses for models, I think spending a little more is called for, very much called for.” The terrifying risks of Vincent’s profligacy were made clear to Theo in August when his uncle Jan, the distinguished admiral, died penniless and disgraced at the age of sixty-seven after his feckless, epileptic son squandered the family fortune and ran off to America.

  In fact, the situation in Nuenen was far worse than Theo knew. Vincent had lavished money as heedlessly as words in advocating for The Potato Eaters. Rent money, paint money, food money—almost all had gone to his ragged fantasy of a peasant family. Since settling his debts in April with an extra payment from Theo, Vincent had resumed buying everything he could on credit. By the end of July, the dogs were at the door again, especially the paint sellers in The Hague, whose bills he had put off repeatedly. At least one of them had threatened to seize the contents of Vincent’s studio and sell the lot as junk. It was all he could do to fend them off with protests and lies until the end of the month when Theo would visit Nuenen again and Vincent could plead his case face-to-face.

  But Theo had already set his mind against his brother. He signaled his new resolve in advance by refusing to send Vincent an extra few guilders to prepay the freight on a third crate of paintings. He failed to take any of Vincent’s work with him on his stop in Antwerp, as Vincent had urged him to do. And finally, most piercingly, he brought with him to Nuenen a new friend, a colleague at Goupil and fellow Dutchman, Andries Bonger. With his gentle manner, self-effacing intelligence, and guileless affection, “Dries” represented a repudiation, in every way, of the overweaning brother Theo had grown up with. Vincent, who had always resented his brother’s friends, sent pouting, scornful notes to the parsonage from which he was banished. “I am rather busy, as they are reaping the corn in the fields,” he wrote, putting off their reunion a little longer. “You must not be offended when I go on with my work.”

  But nothing could temper or delay the inevitable explosion when they finally confronted each other. It was sparked when Vincent warned Theo about the family embarrassment that would result if his paint bills were not paid. Unable to contain the resentments that had built up through all the months of dunning arguments on behalf of The Potato Eaters, Theo not only rejected outright Vincent’s request for extra funds, he told him he could no longer count on the same level of support. Indeed, he warned that his subsidies might end altogether. “Bear in mind,” he said gravely, “that under the pressure of certain circumstances I may feel obliged to cut the towrope.” Vincent raged in defense, rearguing a whole summer’s worth of letters. He scoffed at his brother’s financial woes and ridiculed his bourgeois pretensions, saying, “In my opinion you don’t in the least belong among the rising men.” He took the opportunity to launch yet another doomsaying assault on Goupil and the “tulip mania” of art dealing.

  Rather than shy from Vincent’s attacks, as he had all summer, Theo rose for the first time to meet them, blow for blow. As if responding to years of unanswered arguments—against painting, against color, against light, against convention, against Goupil, against their father—he lashed out at the “selfishness” of Vincent’s relentless offensives against the world. He was fed up with his brother’s righteous reproaches and cruel “truths.” He accused Vincent of trying to discourage him, of wanting to see him fail, of being more his “enemy” than his friend. Resurrecting the incendiary charge from the previous year, he challenged Vincent’s good faith, and told him bluntly that he did not trust him in the battles that lay ahead. “I see quite clearly that I cannot count on you,” he said. No matter what he did for Vincent in the future, no matter how much money he sent, no matter how hard he worked to sell his paintings, Theo concluded, Vincent would reward him only with “stinking ingratitude.”

  Vincent wrote afterward that the conversation “made me utterly disconsolate.”

  Theo left Nuenen early so he could stop in Amsterdam to meet Andries Bonger’s family members. Among them was Dries’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Johanna.

  BLINDING HONESTY and the threat of abandonment drove Vincent only deeper into delusion. As if the argument with Theo had never happened, he casually laid plans to take even more models (“always the best policy”) and sent his brother an elaborate budget that called for an increase in his regular allowance from one hundred back to one hundred and fifty francs a month. “Let’s keep that little painting business of mine in good shape,” he wrote cheerfully. As if Anthon van Rappard were still a friend, he resumed their correspondence: first with a joking letter that dismissed their dispute as a silly theological spat; then with the opposite: a long, barbed, petulant brief for a return to the status quo ante (“I deem it desirable for us to remain friends”) that stood steadfastly by The Potato Eaters (“I render what I see”). His entreaties pried one last letter out of Rappard before the friendship lapsed into total and permanent silence.

  As if the summer had never happened, Vincent imagined a welcoming audience for his paintings somewhere. He saw a “reaction setting in” among both artists and public against the tyranny of fashion. More and more, they would demand “modern” pictures, by which he meant paintings that “show the peasant figure in action…That is the very essence of modern art.” He predicted a “peasant uprising” against Salon juries, and claimed a mandate from Millet to follow on the successes of the summer. “I cannot stop working at the height I have risen to now,” he announced. “I must push on.” He rallied Theo to work with more animation on behalf of his art, urging “now is just the moment to try to do something with my work.” He planned showings in Antwerp and Holland as well as Paris. “One must not call it a hopeless struggle,” he exhorted. “Others have won, and we shall win too.”

  He summoned his brother to this fantasy of past and future with an image as charming as a child’s parable. Comparing his career as a painter to a lifeboat being towed behind the “big ship” of Theo’s career as a dealer, Vincent envisioned a day when their roles—rescuer and rescued—would be reversed:

  At present I am a tiny vessel which you have in tow, and which at times will seem to you so much ballast … But I, who am the skipper of my tiny vessel, ask in this case that—far from having the towrope cut—that my little boat be kept trim and well provisioned, in order that I may do better service in times of need.

  In September 1885, Vincent van Gogh had his first public show—in the shop window of his most relentless creditor, a paint store in The Hague called Leurs. Vincent claimed his shameful place in Leurs’s window as a career coup and imagined it as a victory for all his months of argument. “I am too firmly convinced of being on the right road,” he declared one week after Theo’s visit. “I want to paint what I feel and feel what I paint.”

  CHAPTER 25

  In One Rush

  IN HIS MONTHS OF TENDENTIOUS ARGUMENTS ON BEHALF OF THE POTATO Eaters, Vincent had talked himself into a new art. Extremities of temperament and rhetoric had flung him far from the course on which he had originally set out five years earlier in the Borinage, when art seemed the only point of reentry into the bourgeois world that had expelled him. Instead, his fevered defenses had landed him on a distant, unknown shore: a place without “true” color or line; a place where hues clashed and objects took shape unhindered by nature’s narrow-mindedness.

  The art that Vi
ncent described did not exist yet: not in his books or portfolios of prints, not on the walls of any galleries or museums, and certainly not on Vincent’s easel. Nothing could have been further from it than the turgid, tenebrous image that set the storm in motion, or the scores of paintings and drawings with which he had tried to justify it. Hardened in opposition to his brother’s advisements to bright colors and mired in yet another fantasy of family, Vincent clung to the aggrieved palette and rejected subjects of The Potato Eaters long after his Odyssean vision had left them behind.

  In the fall of 1885, two events, impossibly different—a trip to a museum and a sex scandal—combined to finally break the grip of the past. Together—one pulling, the other pushing—they drove Vincent out of Brabant, freeing him to explore, for the rest of his brief life, the strange new art he had already defiantly imagined.

  VISITORS TO AMSTERDAM’S Rijksmuseum on October 7, 1885, expected to encounter slow-moving crowds. The grand new building on the Stadhouderskade had opened less than three months before with a spectacular ceremony featuring chorus, orchestra, and fireworks. For years before that, the whole country had buzzed with controversy as Pierre Cuypers’s fantastical masterpiece slowly rose at the edge of the old city. Many Protestants (including the king, who boycotted the opening ceremony) saw in its cathedral windows and Gothic echoes yet another Roman conspiracy (led by the Catholic Cuypers)—an affront in iron filigree and variegated brick to the pious dignity of the Dutch Republic. Others, like Dries Bonger, thought it merely vulgar. “It is such a pity that this great building turned out to be such a disappointment,” he wrote after seeing it with Theo in August. “There it stands for all eternity, to the annoyance of future generations.”