But the creation of his magnum opus had been nothing at all like that. An agony of starts and stops and doubling back, The Potato Eaters had been calculated and adjusted innumerable times in a painstaking process that stretched over several canvases and as many months. Paint built up in thick layers as he waited for previous “mistakes” to dry so he could cover them with varnish and try again. The preparatory heads, with their swirling bonnets and dashed-off faces, may have been done at a breakneck pace, but those were mere études—studies to be hoarded in the studio or sent en masse to Paris to prove his work effort—certainly not to show or sell. No matter how many times he urged on himself, and others, the virtues of working boldly “in one rush,” Vincent had never been able to break from the ideal of tableaux—well-painted pictures of flawless finish and mystifying means—as an artist’s truest expression.
The Rijksmuseum changed all that. “What struck me most on seeing the old Dutch pictures again,” he wrote, “is that most of them were painted quickly; that these great masters…dashed off a thing from the ‘premier coup’ [first stroke] and did not retouch it so very much.” Looking at these familiar images for the first time as products of labor rather than objects of admiration, Vincent could unwind each passage and replay each stroke: the attack, the finish, the angle of the brush, the weight of the hand. He could track every gesture and revisit every decision in the light of his own experience.
He found in the happy fire of Hals’s brushwork, in particular, the fulfillment of all his calls to “paint in one rush.” For a moment, the thrill of it even jolted him out of his defense of The Potato Eaters. “What joy to see a Frans Hals,” he wrote, seeming to forget his own painting’s endless groomings. “How different it is from those pictures where everything has been carefully smoothed down in the same way.” Vincent found the same license everywhere he looked, in images as different as a Rubens sketch and a Rembrandt portrait—passages “done with a single stroke of the brush without any retouching whatever.” And he found them not pinned on a studio wall but framed in gold and enshrined in Cuypers’s cathedral of tableaux.
Vincent couldn’t even wait until he left Amsterdam to test the new freedom. On three eight-by-ten-inch panels he had brought in a small paint box, he finally gave his hand the courage of his arguments. In a blur of brushstrokes, he captured three snapshots of the rainy city: its river skyline, its forested quays, its vast new rail station. He caught them “on the wing,” as he put it, working on his lap or at a café table. When Kerssemakers arrived at the station on October 7, he found Vincent sitting at the window in the third-class waiting room “fervently working” on one of his little pictures, “surrounded by a crowd of conductors, workmen, tourists, etc.”
Forced by the small scale to use smaller brushes, he fell naturally into the blazing shorthand of his letter sketches, dashing off images like glimpses from a moving train. But they were no longer just études. Vincent called them “souvenirs”—a word he had reserved in the past for his most meticulous renderings—and he treated them like tableaux. As soon as he returned to Nuenen, he packed up two of them, barely dry, and sent them to Paris in a crate marked “V4,” accompanied by a proud boast: “If in an hour’s time I want to dash off an impression somewhere, I am learning to do so in the same way as others who analyze their impressions … It is pleasant work to dash something off in a rush.”
Back in the Kerkstraat studio, he took his broad brush and carried the argument even further. Emboldened by his visit to the Rijksmuseum, and by a newfound passion for eighteenth-century art, Vincent gave himself over to the sheer materiality of paint. His new heroes—artists like Boucher and Fragonard—championed painting, not peasants. Their airy, pastel-colored works celebrated nothing more profound than the frolicsome fantasies of the ancien régime, but they applied paint with a combination of daring economy and presto brushwork that Vincent vowed to emulate. He found in their “brusqueness of touch” and “spontaneity of impression” a new defense of both his rough art and its rough author. Others might call their summary image-making “foolishness,” he argued, but “it cannot be imitated by cowards and weaklings.” In a leap of imagination, he linked their rococo facility to the volcanic creativity of another hero, the great Delacroix. The ideal, said Vincent, was to paint “comme le lion qui dévore le morceau” (like a lion devouring its meat).
He especially admired their mastery of enlever (literally, “to lift up”), a maneuver of the brush—a flick of the wrist—that leaves sharp peaks of paint at the ends or edges of a stroke. At the Rijksmuseum, he had seen the distinctive reflection and felt the rippled contour of enlever strokes in the works of Golden Age painters like Hals. Now he began practicing the technique in his own studio, loading his brush with more and more paint, running it back and forth to coax the color into higher and higher ridges, trying to make it do what the thinned, muddy paint of The Potato Eaters would never do.
Eventually, he turned his new skills to an image—a different kind of still life. From his studio collection of stuffed animals, he took a bat, frozen in flight, and placed it in front of a light so that the thin membrane of its wings glowed like a Chinese lantern. Using a broad brush loaded with bright orange and yellow, he distilled the subtle shadings of the illuminated wings into a fabric of distinct brushstrokes, woven spontaneously in a single pass. “At present it comes quite easily to me to paint a given subject unhesitatingly,” he wrote to his brother, “whatever its form or color may be.”
But bold color and dashing technique were not the only changes forced on Vincent by the events of 1885. In his defense of The Potato Eaters, he had advanced another radical claim for his art that fate now demanded he make good. By relentlessly equating his art and himself, he had seized the high ground of modernism staked out by Zola: the singularity and primacy of artistic temperament. But he had delivered mostly untutored echoes of nostalgic favorites like Israëls and Millet. For all his demands to “paint what I feel and feel what I paint,” he had steadfastly refused to put himself under the lens of his own art. When his peasant models fled, they took with them his only escape from the self-accounting that he always dreaded. He continued to resist the most obvious form of introspection—self-portraits—but the lack of models set him inexorably on that inward path.
His search for new subject matter had led him only briefly to traditional still life subjects (jugs, bowls, tankards) before he moved on to objects that held special meaning for him, like potatoes, apples, and birds’ nests. In landscapes, too, he quickly abandoned generic vistas and returned to the parsonage, his mother’s garden, the stand of pollard trees—all places with meaning. He had already risked this kind of intimate imagery once, under duress, in early June, when he painted the old churchyard where his father was buried. Immediately after the pastor’s death, Theo had suggested it as the perfect subject for a memento mori. Despite having drawn and painted the graveyard and its condemned tower many times already, Vincent at first resisted the suggestion, pursuing instead his single-minded vision of peasants around a table. Not until the last minute, with demolition imminent, did he finally set his easel in front of the stripped stone husk and allow himself to peer deeply at this scene of extraordinary personal significance.
When he did, he saw both his father’s funeral (“I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial is”) and his own fall from grace. “Those ruins tell me how a faith and a religion moldered away,” he explained, “strongly founded though they were.” But his brush told a deeper story than his words. The old tower looms massively in the foreground, almost filling the canvas, its great masonry corner buttresses rooting it to the earth like a granite outcropping. This is no temporary structure. No demolition will erase it from the treeless field in which it sits, or release its grip on the graves at its feet. Despite the clichés of lowering skies and circling birds, Vincent had created not an epitaph, but a premonition: a portrait of a stone ghost that would always haunt his horizons.
The Ol
d Church Tower at Nuenen, JUNE-JULY 1885, OIL ON CANVAS, 25⅝ × 34⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 25.2)
Looking around his studio in November for a subject to replace the faithless peasants, Vincent found an object that invited him to probe the unhealed wound only touched in The Old Church Tower at Nuenen. A huge Bible sat amid the discarded clothes and dried-up specimens. It had belonged to his father. Because the church kept the pulpit Bible and his widow kept the family Bible, this magnificent tome, with its copper-reinforced corners and double brass clasps, was the only Bible passed down when Dorus van Gogh died. And it passed not to Vincent, but to Theo. It came to be in Vincent’s studio only because his mother, in an act of wanton insensitivity, had asked him to mail it to his brother in Paris. Clearing an open place in the clutter, Vincent spread a cloth over a table, set the Bible on it, and unhooked the clasps. The huge book fell open in the middle, to Chapter 53 of Isaiah. He pulled his easel up close, so that the open book almost filled his perspective frame. He propped up the spine to show more of the linen pages with their dense double columns of text. At some point, he decided to enliven the composition with another object. Sifting through his piles of books, he selected one of the bright yellow paperback Charpentier editions of the French novels he loved, and placed it on the edge of the table, at the foot of the giant Bible.
Then he began to paint.
Vincent’s fanatic brush found significance everywhere. He designated the yellow novel as Zola’s La joie de vivre and with provocative care lettered in its title, author, and place of publication—Paris. In a few strokes, he captured its dog-eared cover and well-worn pages—a challenge to his father’s flawless, formal Bible. The yellow defiance of Zola elicited a violet response. Vincent mixed and mixed the two complementaries on his palette in search of a gray to express the narrow-mindedness of Dorus’s gospel. When he finally achieved the color he was looking for—a deep, pearly lavender gray, equal parts Veronese’s wedding banquet, Hals’s bourgeois militiaman, and the dead flesh of Rembrandt’s corpses—he “detonated” it on the canvas in a hail of vandalizing brushstrokes in place of the neat blocks of text.
Still Life with Bible, OCTOBER 1885, OIL ON CANVAS, 25⅝ × 30¾ IN. (Illustration credit 25.3)
But the text answered back. The words of Isaiah in front of him were well known to Vincent: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” The painfully resonant scripture, combined with the defiant juxtaposition of gospels, opened up the entire landscape of the previous two years, and Vincent’s brush recorded it with a candor that he hardly ever allowed himself in words: the fights with his father, sex with the peasant girls like Gordina, the Mouret-like pursuit of Margot Begemann in the shadow of the parsonage, his persecution by the priests, the betrayal of the peasants. Onto the pages of fathomless gray, he introduced accents of blue and orange—another contest of opposites summoned up from somewhere other than the table in front of him. He executed the identical clasps in opposite ways: one, lying to the side in a tremulous ripple, the other standing bolt upright in a single menacing stroke. As he finished the book and the draped table, the clash of complementaries played itself out in an argument of broken tones applied with an increasingly broad and confrontational brush. To complete this chronicle of rejection, grief, self-reproach, and defiance, Vincent added at the last minute a new object—an extinguished candle—the final snuffing out of the rayon noir, and a confession that he could never make any other way.
He immediately reported the new painting to his brother, accompanied by a proud boast: “I painted it in one rush, during a single day.”
Through this seamless, spontaneous interweaving of personal preoccupations and artistic calculations, private demons and creative passions, Vincent had achieved an entirely new kind of art. And he knew it. His letters churn with the false bravado of uncertainty—of a man who finds himself suddenly either on the edge of a new world or at the end of a long limb. He could not invoke Zola often enough to make the doubts go away. “Zola creates, but does not hold up a mirror to things, he creates wonderfully, but creates, poetizes, that is why it is so beautiful.” He wreathed his new liberties in the science of Blanc, as well as in medieval notions of immanence. His goal, he said, was to find “ce qui ne passe pas dans ce qui passe” (that which endures in that which fades). “To think of one thing and to let the surroundings belong to it and proceed from it,” he argued, “surely that is real painting.” Even as he advertised the modernity of his new, personal “symbolism,” he imagined it as a rebirth of the Romanticism on which he was weaned. “Romance and romanticism are of our time,” he insisted, “and painters must have imagination and sentiment—which lead to poetry.”
Indeed, Vincent was the most reluctant of pioneers—more shunned than shunning; ostracized from the art he loved by the shortcomings of his hand just as he was ostracized from his families, both real and adopted, for the nonconformity of his behavior. He spoke of the new poetry in his brush in mixed tones of anticipation and resignation. “As I have been working absolutely alone for years,” he wrote in November, “I shall always see with my own eyes, and render things originally.” He wanly consoled himself that Millet, too, was a “symbolist” in this new way, but he knew that he had left the safety and reassurance of all his former favorites behind. He defended his years of drudgery in the mines of verisimilitude with unrepentant nostalgia, even as he acknowledged his ultimate failure there. “One can never study and toil too much from nature,” he wrote after completing The Bible. “For years and years I myself have been so engaged, almost fruitlessly and with all kinds of sad results, [but] I should not like to have missed that error.” In a poignant farewell to Realism, he conceded almost wistfully that “the greatest, most powerful imaginations have made things directly from nature that strike one dumb.”
One of the few authorities from his past that Vincent did not invoke to comfort his leap into the unknown was also the most eloquent. In an 1872 essay on poetry that both Vincent and Zola read, the philosopher Hippolyte Taine had described with astonishing prescience the imagery at the end of Vincent’s tortuous journey:
Less a style, indeed, than a system of notation, superlatively bold, sincere and faithful, created from instant to instant, out of anything and everything in such a fashion that one never thinks of the words but seems to be in direct touch with the gush of vital thought, with all its palpitations and starts, with its suddenly checked flights and the mighty beating of its wings.… It is queer language, yet true even in its least details, and the only one capable of conveying the peaks and troughs of the inner life, the flow and tumult of inspiration, the sudden concentration of ideas, too crowded to find vent, the unexpected explosion into imagery and those almost limitless blazes of enlightenment which, like the northern lights, burst out and flame in a lyrical mind…
Trust the spirit, as sovereign nature does, to make the form; for otherwise we only imprison spirit, and not embody. Inward evermore to outward—so in life, and so in art, which still is life … Poetry, thus conceived, has only one protagonist, the soul and mind of the poet; and only one style—a suffering and triumphant cry from the heart.
AT THE END of November, only a week before Saint Nicholas Day, Vincent left Nuenen. It was, by all accounts, a bitter, acrimonious, and unwilling departure. Defying all his reassurances to Theo, the scandal over Gordina’s baby did not die down. The townspeople never stopped believing he was the father. If anything, the clamor for his departure only grew louder, as Vincent battled his accusers with bellicose taunts and new provocations. (After one of his trips to the city, he brought back a supply of condoms and distributed them among the “country lads.”) To the end, he blamed his troubles solely on clerical intrigue and public hysteria. “I am greatly handicapped by the neighbors,” he complained; “people are still afraid of the priest.”
Nor could he find succor at the parsonage. The new scandal had pushed his mother from a chill of animosity into a freeze of hostilit
y. Despite often lingering nearby to draw or paint, he was never invited inside to share a hot meal, even as the winter drew on and the holidays approached. Vincent exacted his bizarre revenge with a premonition that his mother would soon follow her husband to the grave. With all the vehemence of a curse, he predicted that “death will come unexpectedly and softly, just as it came to Father,” and warned Theo insistently, “there are many cases of a wife’s not outliving her husband by long.”
The crisis came to a head when Vincent’s landlord, the sexton Schafrat, refused to renew his lease on the Kerkstraat studio. “In this studio, just next door to the priest and the sexton, the trouble would never end,” Vincent wrote, “that is clear, so I am going to change this.” At first, he planned just to rent another room nearby and wait for the controversy to blow over—a fantasy that lasted only a few days. He thought of returning to Drenthe—a sure sign that the pressure to leave Nuenen had become unbearable. Finally, he proposed to take the sales trip to Antwerp that he had so often postponed, and perhaps stay and work there for a while. But only for a few months. “I know the country and the people here too well and love them too much,” he said, “to be positively leaving them for good.”
Van Gogh Page 65