Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  PLASTER ROOM AT THE ANTWERP ACADEMY (Illustration credit 26.2)

  Banished, too, was the angry iconoclast who had alienated family and friends with his odd, tyrannical ideas about art. When instructors gave him “severe” advice, Vincent reported, or criticized his efforts, he took it not as a provocation, but as an opportunity. “I get a fresh look at my own work,” he wrote sunnily. “I can judge better where the weak points are, which enables me to correct them.” Not even the academy’s intense concentration on drawing from plaster casts (the very issue that had caused his final break with Mauve) could darken Vincent’s narrative of contentment. “On looking at them carefully again,” he wrote of the school’s vast gallery of plasters, “I am amazed at the ancients’ wonderful knowledge and the correctness of their sentiment.”

  His point could not have been clearer, but he underlined it for his wary brother: “Maybe I shall feel at home here after all.” Less than two weeks after his first class, he wrote Theo a long, pleading letter:

  I most urgently beg you, for the sake of a good result, to lose neither your patience nor your good spirits; it would be fouling our own nest if we lost courage at the very moment that might give us a certain influence if we show that we know what we want, and dare to do something and to carry it through.

  No less an authority than director Verlat had advised him to stay in Antwerp for at least a year, Vincent claimed, drawing nothing but plaster casts and nudes. “I shall then go back to my other outdoor work or my portraits quite a different man,” he pledged. More than anything, he needed practice, and “that is a question of time,” he wrote. “It is to my advantage to stay here for some time.… I repeat, we are on the right track.”

  In fact, catastrophe was already upon him.

  CHARLES VERLAT INTERVIEWED every student who was admitted to his painting class. His decisions were not easy to predict. He had a vigorous, inquiring mind and “a taste for the new and unknown,” according to one biographer, but also strong convictions and an irascible temperament. He saw himself both as a champion of Flemish culture and as a shepherd of young artists everywhere—he admitted legions of foreigners, especially Englishmen, to the Academy’s classes. Although schooled in Paris and steeped in the rigid academism inherited from previous centuries, he believed in nurturing talent of all kinds and understood the limits of artistic training. “Artists are born, not made,” he conceded. Although he admired Ingres, Flandrin, Gérome, and other stars of the French Academic firmament, he had befriended the rogue Courbet in his youth, and even exhibited with him. His career had been marked by controversy and failure as well as success and eminence. He eschewed “fashion” in artistic movements but accepted the lesson of the new art: that artists should be allowed freedom to find their own creative styles. Polish mattered less, he said, than the ability to “breathe life into something and clearly render [its] character and feeling.”

  With his portfolio full of crude drawings and roughly brushed portraits, all of them rendered with “character and feeling” but little polish, Vincent might have presented the director with a genuine dilemma. The previous fall, a vast overhaul of the Academy’s rules had thrown many of the old standards into disarray, opening up admission to a wider range of candidates. The Anglophile Verlat might have looked favorably on Vincent’s accomplished English; and the names Van Gogh, Goupil, Mauve, and Tersteeg would have stood out on any résumé. Even if Verlat had been disposed to take a chance on Vincent’s earnestness and pledges of hard work, however, he hardly ever permitted new applicants to enter his class directly. He routinely sent artists with far more training for at least a few weeks in antiek to prove their mastery of drawing, which he considered “more useful” to a painter “than knowing how to read and write.” It would have been truly extraordinary for a newcomer like Vincent to be admitted immediately into the master’s life painting class.

  And, indeed, he wasn’t. Contrary to Vincent’s repeated claims to Theo, he never did gain admission to Verlat’s class. Whether he was rejected, or he never applied (the school term would end soon), Vincent had begun his Academy career with a desperate deception. He was allowed to register for the evening antiek drawing class, a decision in which Verlat may have had a hand, but he would not be allowed to paint at the Academy, nor could he work from a live model. Yet his letters continued to ply Theo with boasts of hard work in “painting class,” the joys of “seeing the nude again,” and the challenges of “getting along with” his demanding new instructor. “I have now been painting at the academy for a few days,” he wrote, “and I must say that I like it quite well.”

  According to one eyewitness account, Verlat’s first encounter with the strange new Dutch student came quite suddenly and unexpectedly, sometime after that reassuring report. In what must have been a last-ditch effort to make good his story to Theo, Vincent appeared one day with his paints and palette in the Academy’s painting studio just after Verlat had posed two male models, naked to the waist, in the position of wrestlers. In a room crowded with sixty painters behind their easels and canvases, the teacher did not at first notice the interloper among them. But others did. “Van Gogh arrived one morning, dressed in a sort of blue smock,” recalled a fellow student, interviewed several decades later.

  [He] began painting feverishly, furiously, with a speed that stupefied [us]. He had laid on his impasto so thickly that his colors literally dripped from the canvas onto the floor.

  When Verlat saw this work and its extraordinary creator, he asked in Flemish, somewhat bewilderedly, “Who are you?”

  Van Gogh answered quietly, “Wel, ik ben Vincent, Hollandsch.” [“Well, I am Vincent, a Dutchman.”]

  Then, the very academic director, while pointing to the newcomer’s canvas, proclaimed disdainfully, “I cannot correct such putrid dogs. My boy, go quickly to the drawing class.”

  Cheeks flushed, Van Gogh contained his rage and fled the classroom.

  Whether at Verlat’s order or not, Vincent did enroll in a second drawing course immediately after the scene in the painting studio. It was yet another antiek class that confined him to the Academy’s collection of plaster casts. (The course he had initially enrolled in was also finishing the term, and Vincent had already clashed bitterly with its instructor, François Vinck.) The new class, which met in the afternoon rather than the evening, took up where Vinck’s left off. Only, for Vincent, the stakes had doubled. If he could not succeed there, he would have nothing to tell Theo but lies.

  But the same problems that had dogged him for years followed him into the big sculpture court. The monumental milky-white plaster models that stood in the center of the room, carved into high relief by the brilliant light of a gas reflector lamp, frustrated his hand as surely as the restless poor of The Hague and the peasants of Nuenen. And on the Schenkweg and the Kerkstraat he didn’t have Eugène Siberdt looking over his shoulder. A fastidious martinet in pince-nez and pompadour, Siberdt didn’t know what to make of the “disheveled, nervous, and restless man” who, according to a classmate, “fell like a bomb” in his showcase of classical perfection. They approached each other cautiously at first, but a collision was inevitable. “I irritate him,” Vincent grumbled, “and he, me.”

  Siberdt gave his students an entire week of classes—sixteen hours—to finish a single drawing. Vincent worked with a fury that startled and distracted the room, filling up sheet after sheet without retouching, tearing up drawings that frustrated him or just tossing them over his shoulder. Siberdt circulated through the class encouraging students to study the plaster models intently and “prendre par le contour” (seize the contour)—that is, find the lines that perfectly expressed the profile, proportion, and form from which all else sprang. He forbade the use of any fudges that might interfere with the search for the perfect line: no maul sticks, no hatching, no stippling, no tinting with stumps or chalk. “First make a contour,” he directed. “I won’t correct it if you do your modeling before having seriously fixed your contour.”
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  But Vincent knew only fudges. All of his figures emerged from the fire of trying—from relentless attempts, using every means and material available, to create a convincing image. Where Siberdt demanded simplicity—black lines against a white background—Vincent could give him only shadows. Where Siberdt demanded perfection, Vincent could produce only approximation. Confronted with the smooth anatomy and elegant torque of a fifth-century B.C. discus thrower, Vincent drew a fleshy, big-hipped sower, its musculature drawn with folds as deep as an orphan man’s overcoat, set against a background hatched and shaded from gray to almost black. When Siberdt tried to correct his strange ways, Vincent objected so vehemently that Siberdt thought he was “mocking his teacher.” Vincent escalated the confrontation by spreading his heresy of “vigorous modeling” among his classmates and calling Siberdt’s methods “absolutely wrong.”

  Within weeks, if not days, the dispute came to a head. When the class was presented with a plaster of the Venus de Milo as a model, Vincent took his pencil and drew the limbless, naked torso of a Brabant peasant woman. “I can still see it before me,” recalled a fellow student, “that thickset Venus with an enormous pelvis … an extraordinary, fat-buttocked figure.” Another student remarked that Vincent had transformed a “beautiful Greek goddess” into “a robust Flemish matron.” When Siberdt saw this defiant provocation, he attacked Vincent’s sheet with his crayon, making corrections so furiously that he tore the paper. Vincent rose to the challenge. “[He] flew into a violent rage,” according to a witness, “and shouted at the horrified professor: ‘You clearly don’t know what a young woman is like, God damn it! A woman must have hips, buttocks, a pelvis in which she can carry a baby!’ ”

  Standing Female Nude (Seen from the Side), JANUARY 1886, PENCIL ON PAPER, 19¾ × 15⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 26.3)

  By some accounts, that was Vincent’s last class at the Academy.

  Still, he labored on, trudging every night to the two drawing clubs that met until the early hours of the morning, one of them in a historic old house on the Grote Markt. Students had formed these loose, roving workshops-cum-socials precisely in order to escape the oppressive restrictions of the Academy system. Members chipped in to pay for models and pints of beer all around. Women were not only permitted to pose nude, they were boisterously encouraged (although they could not become members), but more often the crowd had to settle for a man, or even one of their own number. Lubricated by drink, talk, and tobacco, club gatherings were rowdy, friendly, and unstructured—a perfect medium for artistic experiment.

  But even here, far from the “spiteful” rigidity of his teachers, Vincent found only failure and rejection. From the moment he burst through the Academy doors carrying his roll of odd paintings and drawings under his arm, his fellow students shunned his company and amused themselves over his “unbelievably peculiar” ways. Years later, one of them could still recall his first startled impression of the strange visitor from the heath.

  He came rushing in like a bull in a china shop and spread his roll of studies out all over the floor.… Everyone crowded around the newly arrived Dutchman, who gave more of an impression of an itinerant oilcloth dealer, unrolling and unfolding at a flea market his marked-down samples of easily foldable tablecloths.…

  Indeed, what a funny spectacle! And what an effect it had! The majority of the young chaps laughed their heads off.

  Soon, the news that a wild man had surfaced spread like wildfire throughout the building, and people looked on Vincent as if he were a rare specimen from the “human wonders” collection in a traveling circus.

  Vincent tried at first to win over his tormentors, most of them a decade or more his junior. In a year of labor strife that would spark the first general strike in Belgium’s history, he eagerly shared with them his experiences among the miners of the Borinage and rallied them to a similar artistic solidarity. Rebuffed as a “freak,” he turned inevitably to the clubs’ other outsiders, especially the large contingent of Englishmen with whom he shared both a language and an exile. Like him, they had left the severities of their home academies for the looser rules and naked models of Antwerp. One evening, he even sat for a quick watercolor portrait by a young English student named Horace Mann Livens.

  But it wasn’t clear whether Livens intended to record his weathered face or mock it. Other clubmates later recalled gleefully how Livens’s portrait perfectly captured Vincent’s “flat, pink head, yellow hair, angular mask, pointed nose, and ill-cut beard.” Of all his fellow students, Livens was the only one with whom Vincent ever corresponded after leaving Antwerp. From Paris, six months later, he sent a single, plaintive missive (“You will remember that I liked your color, your ideas on art and literature,” he wrote, “and I add, most of all your personality”). The letter to the twenty-three-year-old Livens opened not with “Dear Horace” or “Amice,” but with a stiff greeting: “My dear Mr. Livens.”

  Recoiling from the impatience of his teachers and the intolerance of his fellow students, Vincent increasingly withdrew into silence. He still came to the clubs every night, clinging to the last remnant of the artistic life that he had promised Theo. But he mostly sat in the corner furiously scratching out his defiance in pencil and charcoal. Whether drawing a bored workman or a haughty fellow student, Vincent made his arguments in energetic strokes, jagged contours, deep shadings, free hatching, and multiple materials—a proud reclothing of the peasants of Nuenen. When he finally got a chance to draw a naked woman, he avenged himself on teachers and classmates alike with an angular, muscular monument of flesh and fertility.

  Far from winning converts, these provocative images only drove the wedge deeper between Vincent and his fellows. They read enmity in his silence; arrogance in his persistence. “He pretended not to notice [us],” one of them recalled, “but only withdrew further into that stoic silence which soon earned him a reputation for self-centeredness.”

  By early February 1886, Vincent’s fiction of life in Antwerp was collapsing on all sides. He had been ejected from one class, humiliated in another, and angrily awaited the ax in a third. His fellow students spurned his company and mocked his art. He had found no sympathetic dealers, no connections, no amateurs willing to pay him for lessons. He went through the motions of submitting a drawing to the competition, the concours, that concluded the term, but mocked himself for trying (“I am sure I shall place last”). Still, he could not have been prepared for the judges’ recommendation that he be sent down to an “elementary level” course to draw with ten-year-olds.

  Meanwhile, Theo grew more and more impatient with his lack of progress. He began to question everything from the difficulty of Vincent’s courses to the mettle of his resolve. Their exchanges over money grew sharper as Vincent’s unaccounted expenses (medicine, treatments, alcohol, tobacco, prostitutes) mounted, and the possibility of sales faded. At the same time, the object of all Vincent’s efforts, and much of his money, slipped further and further from his grasp. He never heard from the Scala girl again, nor did any of his plans for portraits of “hussies” or other “intercourse with women” materialize. His deteriorating health and shrinking purse combined to put every sexual outlet out of reach save one.

  The teeth that he had often cited as symbols of his virility rotted and broke off. His cheeks sank, his stomach ached, his indestructible body went weak and feverish. But he couldn’t tell Theo why. Instead, his letters continued to brag of “keeping courage,” “making progress,” and “avoiding a real illness.” Torn between reassuring his brother and preparing him for the looming collapse, he sent a flood of conflicted letters: bitter complaints about the abuses he suffered wrapped in claims of calmness and serenity and confidence in the future. “I keep feeling satisfied with having come here,” he insisted. “There is something of resurrection in the atmosphere.”

  As the gap between his real life and his imagined life grew wider, the deception grew deeper. As in Drenthe, when the paradise in his letters fought the hell in his hea
d, something had to give.

  “It is an absolute breakdown,” he reported in early February. “It overtook me so unexpectedly.”

  What triggered this collapse? Was it another ambush of metaphor, as in Drenthe? Or perhaps something more dramatic? At least once that winter, Vincent was seen drunk in public. Another time, for unknown reasons, he jotted the address of a local police station in his notebook. He may have been caught off guard by a hint in one of Theo’s letters about a possible courtship of Johanna Bonger. In the context of the brothers’ estrangement, news like that would have raised the direst threat of all: abandonment. Or perhaps it was something simple and quotidian, like a too-long look at the cadaverous, gap-toothed face in the mirror. “I look as if I had been in prison for ten years,” Vincent wailed, as if seeing himself for the first time. “There is something stiff and awkward about me.”

  For weeks afterward, the image of decay haunted him. He tried to blame the breakdown on poor food, too much smoking, and delicate nerves. “Nervous people are more sensitive and refined,” he protested. But in more unguarded moments, talk of nervousness yielded to fears of insanity. What else could be expected of a man who had “dined for years on la vache enragée [mad cow],” he wondered. At times, he pretended to believe that improving his outward appearance would solve all his problems. But at other times he conceded that the strange visage in the mirror betrayed “a difficult and harassed life, much care and sorrow and no friends,” and that nothing could “cure or save” him. He wandered the winter streets hounded by images of death and dying: from the graceful exits of great artists (“they die the way women die … hurt by life”) to the preemptive suicide of a young girl racked by consumption. Death hovered over his easel as well. Sometime that winter, somewhere in Antwerp, he placed a canvas in front of a skeleton, put a cigarette between its teeth, and slashed out his first self-portrait.