Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  But the new mission made a new demand on Vincent’s art: accuracy. The women he wooed wanted portraits that pleased and flattered—idealized but identifiable records of their unique allure—not expressions of the artist’s unique temperament. Vincent had long despaired over his inability to create such “likenesses” (as he called them dismissively), and had always taken care to exempt his portrayals from the particularity required of portraiture. They were “types” or “heads of the people,” he insisted, not portraits: an old fisherman, not the orphan man Zuyderland wearing a sou’wester; “a poor woman with a swollen belly,” not the pregnant Sien Hoornik; “peasant heads,” not the De Groot family.

  Even as he planned his campaign of portrait painting in Antwerp, he dreaded the expectations of his sitters: “I know it is difficult to satisfy people as to the ‘likeness,’ ” he wrote on the eve of his arrival, “and I dare not say beforehand that I feel sure of myself on that point.” Every time a woman sat for him, he struggled with the mandate of reality. He worked and reworked profiles, noses, eyes, and hairlines, searching for the elusive correctness. The need to please overwhelmed the brave rhetoric of “premier coup” and “in one rush” that he had brought back from the Rijksmuseum in October. Only on the margins of an image—in the billowing folds of a blouse or the crenellations of a bonnet or a sweep of hair—could the broad, impetuous brush of Nuenen reassert itself.

  Vincent’s libidinous new mission may have stymied his brush, but it emboldened his palette. The models he wanted most would never have tolerated the “de terre” tones endured by Gordina de Groot. Only once, when an old man wandered into his studio soon after his arrival, did Vincent fall back on the familiar bistre and bitumen of his Nuenen heads. The very first time a woman sat for him, in mid-December, he courted her with bright colors and floods of light. He described the results to Theo: “I have brought lighter tones into the flesh, white tinted with carmine, vermilion, yellow … Lilac tones in the dress.” He placed her not in a Stygian darkness but against “a light background of gray-yellow.”

  To make his colors even brighter and more pleasing, he sought out better paints, convinced that color “is what gives [a portrait] life.” He discovered cobalt blue (“a divine color”), carmine red (“warm and lively like wine”), cadmium yellow (“brilliant”), and emerald green. Instead of mixing them endlessly into grays, he deployed them boldly: a jade green dress with a scarlet bow. He applied the lessons of Blanc and Chevreul to the new mission of flattery: heightening a rouged cheek with a bright green background, or the yellow thrust of a neck with a lavender blouse. In place of fine gradations of tone, he called for “less far-fetched, less difficult color. More simplicity.” He cited as his new goals both the luminous flesh of Rubens’s women and the saturated colors of stained-glass windows. Among the modern works he saw, he singled out the bright, brusque canvases of Henri de Braekeleer, an Antwerp artist who painted women (including prostitutes) in vivid dashes of light-drenched color.

  No matter how enthusiastically he embraced the new hues, new paints, new palette, and new heroes of Antwerp, however, he never lost sight of his ultimate goal. “We must carry things to such a height,” he wrote, rallying Theo to the new mission, “that the girls will begin to like having their portraits painted—I am sure that there are some who want them.”

  BUT FEW DID. Despite his Herculean efforts, the models did not come. In the first month, Vincent reported only a trickle of visitors to his studio: the old man, an old lady, one young woman, and “half a promise” from another. By late December, he was desperate. Using some extra money Theo had sent, he paid a chorus girl from the Café-concert Scala, a Folies Bergères–like revue, to come to his studio and pose. For several weeks, he had watched her perform in the Scala’s tacky Moorish splendor and, he suspected, pleasure select patrons afterward. When she arrived at his studio with her luxuriant black hair, pouty cheeks, and bee-sting lips, Vincent found her “beautiful” and “witty,” but also impatient. Restless from too many late nights, she could not sit still. She refused an offer of champagne (“it doesn’t cheer me up,” she said, “it makes me sad”) and breezily declined his invitation to take her clothes off.

  Unnerved by the rebuffs, Vincent worked feverishly to produce “something voluptuous” to appease his ennuyée sitter: a stark, Rubenesque contrast of “jet-black” hair against a white jacket with a “flame-colored bow,” surrounded by a halolike “golden glimmer” of radiant yellow “much lighter than white.” She left his studio that night with the painting and a flirtatious promise to pose for him again (in her dressing room next time). “Sacrebleu,” he exclaimed to Theo as soon as she left. “I feel the infinite beauty of the study of women … in the very marrow of my bones.” But there is no evidence that they ever saw each other again.

  By the start of the new year, all of Vincent’s bold new plans had come to similar dead ends. Nothing sold: not the big paintings he had brought from Nuenen like The Bible, not his beloved portraits, not even the little city views he had done for that reason only. After a month of trekking through the “chilly and gloomy” streets carrying his wares of castles and cathedrals, he had not found a single dealer who would even show his work, much less buy it. His vows to paint signboards or design menus or find students evaporated in the heat of his passion for prostitutes and portraits. Coveting the success of portrait photographers, he imagined he could ensure more accurate likenesses in his own work by applying paint directly to photographs (“one could get a much better coloring that way”), or simply by repackaging his portraits and selling them as “fantasy heads.” When schemes like these failed, as they invariably did, he blamed tight-fisted buyers, out-of-touch dealers, a moribund market, or the decline of modern art in general. “If they showed more and better things,” he complained, “more would sell.… The prices, the public, everything needs renovation.”

  Next, his body betrayed him. After years of bragging about his hardy “peasant” constitution, Vincent began to complain about feeling faint, “overstrained,” and “far from well.” The proud rigors of his Millet diet in Nuenen came to seem more like deprivations in Antwerp’s bitter, wet winter; but his stomach rebelled against richer fare. He smoked a pipe to calm his digestion, but his gums grew sore and his teeth loosened. He developed a hacking cough. For the first time, he reported losing weight. At some point, he must have suffered rashes, cankers, or lesions—as if all his vague afflictions were manifesting themselves on his flesh. In a port city filled with sailors and whores, Vincent sought treatment for the scourge of sailors and whores everywhere: syphilis.

  Fearing, no doubt, that Theo would see the disease as the wages of his obsession with prostitutes and question his entire portrait project, Vincent hid both the symptoms and the treatments from his brother. He wrote nothing about his visits to Dr. Amadeus Cavenaille on the rue de Holland only a few blocks from his studio; nothing about his treatments at the big Stuyvenberg hospital nearby; nothing about his shame or dread in the face of an uncertain prognosis. But in an era that reflexively linked syphilis and gonorrhea (which Vincent had already contracted in The Hague), and that condemned both equally as “monstrosities” of nature, the diagnosis was inevitable and the treatment certain: mercury.

  Whether administered in the famous blue pills, as a foul-smelling ointment, or in “fumigations” of toxic vapor (Vincent jotted one name for such treatments, “bain de siège” [seated bath], in his sketchbook, along with appointment times), mercury could only ameliorate the disease but not cure it. Meanwhile, it inflicted on its victims a Job-like litany of suffering to rival the disease itself: from hair loss and sexual asthenia to insanity and death. Even in moderate doses, it could cause stomach cramps, diarrhea, anemia, depression, organ failure, and impairment of sight or hearing. Mercury’s signature side effect was salivation—not just unsightly drooling, but buckets of sputum (“liquefied wastes from the sickness”), all of it carrying the unseen spirochete, bathing throat and mouth and gums in new i
nfections until the entire orifice erupted in one huge, fetid ulcer.

  Although he never admitted to the disease or the treatment, Vincent couldn’t keep from his brother the ruin that followed in their wake. His already ailing stomach revolted. His energy drained. For the first time in his life, he complained of “feeling physically weak.” Running constantly with a strange “grayish phlegm,” his mouth and throat filled with sores so that he couldn’t chew or swallow food. Within a few months, his loose teeth began to rot and break off. Before leaving Antwerp in February, he paid a precious fifty francs to have a dentist remove up to a third of his teeth—a horrific ordeal at a time when extractions were done with ratchet wrenches and liquor was often the only anesthetic.

  Christmas 1885 brought a different kind of torment. The ghost of Pastor van Gogh haunted the holiday that he had dominated for so long. Vincent complained that “certain recollections [of the way] Father spoke and behaved toward me” hounded him—just as memories hounded Redlaw in his favorite Dickens Christmas story, The Haunted Man. To escape the voices from the past, he took long walks through the snowy streets to the city’s edge. But he found no consolation in the countryside, either; only “immense melancholy.” He turned inevitably to taverns and brothels for some facsimile of seasonal cheer. Despite Theo’s pleadings, he adamantly refused to write to his mother or sisters, even on Saint Nicholas Day—a blasphemy against faith and family aimed straight at the heart of his dead father. He considered himself doomed to “a perpetual state of exile”—condemned forever to “a family stranger than strangers.”

  The despondency spread to every corner of his life. As Christmas processions made their way through the streets outside his window and skaters filled the flooded Grote Markt, Vincent sat in his empty studio and cursed the world. He cursed the dealers, like Portier, who had failed him; he cursed the models who harried and hurried him; he cursed the prostitutes who refused his money, and the creditors who demanded it. He cursed all those who scorned his claim to being a “real painter.” And, of course, he cursed Theo. In an acid holiday “greeting,” he chastised his brother for his “frigid and unkind slighting and keeping me at a distance,” and lashed out at him for having so often “taken the wrong side”—their father’s side—against him. “Again and again,” he complained to Theo just as he had to Dorus, “you lapse into the old evil with regard to me.” Looking back over the year just ending, he admitted bitterly: “I am not the least bit, literally not the least bit, better off than I was years ago.”

  The bleaker his reality, the more tightly Vincent clung to the fantasy of artistic and sexual fulfillment through portraits. At the very end of December, when he persuaded the girl from the Scala to pose for him, his obsession revived like a phoenix. Against all the weight of failures, that single “success” with a chorus girl rejuvenated his mission. Calling it his “greatest craving” and an “absolute necessity,” he vowed to continue his quest among the prostitutes of Antwerp for a genuine “whore’s expression.” He summoned Theo to yet another ante of patience and sacrifice (“I must be able to spread my wings a little”) and redoubled his promises of financial breakthrough and artistic triumph. “One should aim at something lofty, genuine, and distinguished,” he challenged his brother, “shouldn’t one?”

  But Theo had other ideas.

  IN JANUARY 1886, Theo told Vincent he had to leave Antwerp.

  The brothers had been heading toward a showdown from the moment Vincent arrived. His insatiable demands for more models and more money had thrown them into yet another pitched battle almost immediately. His relentless sexual innuendoes and unblushing accounts of model hunting among the city’s brothels had set off alarm bells from the past. At every hint of concern or displeasure, of course, Vincent flew into rages of protest, accusing his brother of neglecting him, stifling his art, hampering his career, and sabotaging his efforts to “regain some credit.” In some of the most strident language he had used in years, he warned Theo against interfering with his newest obsession. “À tout prix [at all costs],” he wrote menacingly, “I want to be myself. I am feeling obstinate, too, and no longer care what people say about me or about my work.”

  The dispute had come to a head right after New Year’s when Theo threatened to withdraw his support if Vincent did not abandon his absurd and appalling plan to pay prostitutes to pose. The plan not only made no business sense (by giving the portraits to the sitters, Vincent was essentially paying them twice), but also raised the ghost of Sien Hoornik and the possibility of yet another scandal. “We cannot do it,” Theo wrote in early January. “We have no money—there is nothing doing. I tell you ‘No.’ ” But Vincent was undeterred. Exploding in indignation, he called Theo an “impotent dullard and blockhead,” and in a moment of surreal defiance, forbade him from vetoing the plan.

  Vincent’s health was the last straw. More than the furious accusations of meddling or the bitter Christmas denunciations, his vague reports of sickness and boasts of starvation sounded an ominous note. When he wrote that he would use any extra money not to buy food but to “immediately go on a hunt for models and continue until all the money was gone,” Theo had no choice but to intervene. No doubt foreseeing another self-destructive spiral of excess, he called for Vincent to leave the city for his health’s sake. “If you fell ill,” he wrote, “we should be worse off.” Convinced of the reparative powers of nature and unaware of the full scope of his brother’s expulsion from Nuenen, he insisted that Vincent return to the country.

  The demand triggered a fierce storm of protest. Up until then, Vincent had maintained that his stay in Antwerp would be a short one—“a couple of months,” at most. Theo’s directive changed all that. “I do not think you can reasonably expect me to go back to the country,” he fired back immediately, “seeing that the whole series of future years will depend so much on the relations I must establish [in Antwerp].” Frantic to preserve the life of portraits, models, and prostitutes that he still envisioned, he accused Theo of “slackening” and “losing courage,” and cast his staying in Antwerp as both a financial and an artistic imperative. “It would be by far the best thing for me to stay here for a long time,” he now insisted, “for the models are good.… Going back to the country now would end in stagnation.”

  Desperate straits called for desperate measures. In mid-January, Vincent did something he had vowed he would never do again: he enrolled in art school. Not just any art school, but the ancient and prestigious Royal Academy of Art, Antwerp’s answer to Paris’s legendary École des Beaux-Arts. As recently as November 1885, only days before arriving in Antwerp, Vincent had dismissed the idea of Academic training: “They would not want me at the academy,” he said, “nor would I want to go there.” After his humiliation at the Brussels Academy in 1881 and years of bitter arguments with Rappard over Academic technique, his attacks on schools like Antwerp’s Royal Academy had only grown more heated. He vehemently condemned their students as “plaster-of-Paris artists” and ridiculed their teaching as “superfluous” to modern art. “No matter how academically correct a figure may be,” he wrote only six months before enrolling at the Antwerp Academy, “it lacks that essential modern aspect, the intimate character, the real action.”

  But that gospel had been overwritten by a new one. The student of the heath had become the student of female flesh; the disciple of Millet, the disciple of Rubens. Vincent would do anything to protect his mission among the prostitutes of Antwerp. Besides, he might learn something about painting accurate, appealing “likenesses” that would make his search for models easier. To explain this sudden volte-face, he filled his letters to Theo with passionate, pleading, and sometimes conflicting arguments, all of them adding up to a single, simple plea: “Let me stay.”

  Enrolling in the Academy would open up a world of “new friends and new relations,” he wrote, promising an end to years of artistic solitude. “It is a good thing to see many others paint … One must live in the artists’ world.” Rejoining that
world would require him to dress better, he assured his brother, and would revive his “high spirits.” Living in the city would allow him to put both the melancholy of Christmas and the obsessions of the heath behind him, he argued, and living as a student would mean savings on rent (he would drop his demand for a larger studio), on painting materials, and, especially, on models. “I hope that I shall be allowed to paint from the model all day at the academy, which will make things easier for me, as the models are so awfully expensive that my purse cannot stand the strain.” With his “self-confidence and serenity” restored, could success be far behind? “I could not take a shorter cut to make progress,” he assured Theo yet again. “This is the way.”

  In his fever of persuasion, Vincent led his brother to believe that the Academy offered the ultimate prize, nude female models, and hinted that he might abandon his expensive, unhealthy, and unwise search among the brothels of Antwerp if only Theo relented. (In fact, only men posed nude at the Academy, as Vincent surely knew, and beginning students were not permitted to work from models at all.)

  On January 18, 1886, Vincent began classes in the Academy’s distinctive building on the Mutsaertstraat—a Palladian façade affixed to a medieval friars’ church. He told Theo he had enrolled in two courses: an afternoon painting class with Charles (Karel) Verlat, the school’s director, and an evening drawing class, called “antiek,” in which students drew only from plaster casts of antique sculptures. Brushing past his long history of antagonism to schooling of any sort, he sent glowing reports of success and satisfaction (“I am very pleased that I came”). He portrayed himself as a changed man: no longer a belligerent, melancholic loner, but a dutiful student surrounded by artistic colleagues and even friends. He joined two drawing clubs: informal, student-organized groups that met late at night to draw from models, criticize each other’s work, and socialize. “It is an attempt to come into contact with people,” he assured Theo.