As in Drenthe—the last time Vincent feared he had “lost all chance for happiness … fatally and irrevocably”—he turned to Theo. This time, the cry arose not from the lonely heath but from the crowded streets of Antwerp. And instead of an exhorting demand—“Join me”—it was a plaintive, heartbreaking plea: “Let me join you.”
Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1886, OIL ON CANVAS, 12⅞ × 9¼ IN. (Illustration credit 26.4)
THE TWO BROTHERS had been fighting over Vincent’s coming to Paris since 1880—even though neither one wanted it to happen. Theo had issued invitations on and off, invariably when Vincent’s art or spending careened out of control and consolidating their living expenses seemed the only hope of stretching his salary to support them both. But his invitations were always issued with a sigh of resignation and an edge of reprimand, never in a spirit of genuine welcome. And for that very reason, Vincent had never accepted them. Instead, he invariably waited until Theo withheld money or support, then used the threat of coming to Paris to maneuver him into concessions.
Round and round they went—in the Borinage, in Brussels, in Drenthe, in Nuenen—daring and bluffing each other to stalemate each time, until Paris had assumed a significance far beyond its place as the mecca of artists everywhere. To Theo it had come to represent the frustration of his long effort to guide Vincent toward self-sufficiency; to Vincent, it meant the surrender not just of his independence, but of all his heated claims of artistic principle and ultimate success. To both, it had become an admission of failure.
The latest round had been fought as recently as January. In his delusional determination to save his portrait project, Vincent had urged his brother yet again to quit Goupil and open a gallery in Antwerp. When Theo responded by demanding that Vincent return to Holland instead, Vincent immediately threatened to descend on Paris—“without any hesitation.” And it would not be cheap, he warned. He would need to “work regularly from the model as much as possible”—and the models would not be free, as they were at the Academy. In addition, he would need “a rather good studio where one can receive people.”
Theo offered a compromise: if Vincent went to Nuenen for a few months to help their mother pack for a move to Breda, he could then come to Paris and perhaps work in a prominent studio. He dangled the name of Fernand Cormon, an atelier master long known to Vincent for his loose rules and nude models. But Vincent refused the bait. He angrily dismissed Theo’s objections to Antwerp, reaffirmed his satisfaction with his life there, and defiantly declared his intention to stay “for at least a year.” As for Paris, he said tauntingly, “we aren’t that far yet.”
But all that changed in early February. As in Drenthe, Vincent emerged from his breakdown a different man. After months of the dutiful drip-drip of weekly letters, he flooded his brother with seven long, pleading missives in just two weeks. Gone were the scolding defenses and strident demands for money. Instead, he filled page after page with dense, imploring arguments—not that he should stay in Antwerp, but that he should come to Paris. “If it could be arranged so that we lived in the same city,” he wrote in a complete reversal, “it would certainly be by far the best.”
He not only approved of Theo’s plan for the Cormon studio, he penned long paragraphs proclaiming it “critical” to his artistic project. His barbed demands for a separate studio were replaced by calls for caution and savings. A single room would be sufficient, he assured Theo. “Anything will do.” As for Antwerp, he apologized for not making more progress and humbly conceded “disappointment” in his time there—another complete reversal. Although he never admitted to the debacle at the Academy (he led Theo to believe he was still registered), he retreated from the fiction of success he had spun and offered his brother a rare glimpse of his true world. “If I did not go [to Paris],” he confessed, “I am afraid I should get into a mess, and continue to go in the same circle and keep on making the same mistakes.”
Now, nothing mattered more than reuniting with Theo. “Union is strength,” he cried, resurrecting the call from Drenthe. He summoned the vision of the Rijswijk road (“It is such a splendid idea that, working and thinking together”), and tearfully cited other brother pairs who had “joined hands.” He pictured their life together in Paris in yearning images of domesticity, just as he had in Drenthe. “I do not think it would do you any harm to come home to a studio in the evening,” he wrote Theo. “I have wanted it to be this way between us for a long time already.” He promised his brother everything from better health to a better chance at happiness, if only he would agree.
Not even marriage—to Jo Bonger or anyone else—could daunt Vincent’s vision of perfect solidarity. “I wish we both might find a wife before long,” he imagined, “for it is high time.” As in Drenthe, he sealed his plea with vows of hard work, improved health, and good behavior, punctuated by outbursts of desperate longing. “After so many lost illusions we must feel sure that we can carry it through,” he wrote, “we must know our own minds perfectly, we must have a certain confidence after all.”
Theo surely foresaw, in Vincent’s fevered pleas themselves, the disaster that loomed. He had spent the last five years suffering his brother’s fanatic heart, his wild swings of weeping nostalgia and cautionless zeal, his alternating spirals of anger and self-abuse. Already old at twenty-eight, Theo could not have held out any hope for real change. Their bitter, unending contest would soon come to his city, his job, his friends, his home. All he could do was delay. He threw up excuses—his lease did not expire until June, there was no room in his apartment, it was too expensive to rent a second apartment—and pushed again for Vincent to go to Nuenen, at least until June.
“Brabant is a useless detour,” Vincent scoffed, in a worrisome reminder of his changeability.
When Theo suggested that Vincent could use his time in the country to paint landscapes, Vincent claimed the absolute necessity of drawing from plaster casts “without interruption”—an ominous reminder of his intransigence.
Finally, Theo did what he always resisted doing: he told Vincent no. He could not come to Paris immediately. He would have to wait until summer.
But Vincent could not wait. Only days after receiving Theo’s answer, he boarded the night train to Paris. He left his rent, his paint bills, and his dentist unpaid. He told his brother nothing of his plan. The first Theo heard of it was a hand-delivered note he received at his office the next day. “Mon cher Theo,” it began.
Don’t be angry with me for arriving out of the blue. I’ve given it so much thought and I’m sure we’ll gain time this way. Shall be at the Louvre from midday onwards, or earlier if you like.… Come as soon as you can.
We’ll sort everything out, you’ll see.
Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, 1887, OIL ON PANEL, 14 × 10⅝ IN. (Illustration credit col3.1)
CHAPTER 27
Against the Grain
VINCENT WENT DIRECTLY FROM THE GARE DU NORD TO THE LOUVRE. He had told Theo to meet him in the Salon Carré, the gilded wedding cake of a room that had given birth to the vast institution called the Salon. In this one room were displayed as many of the museum’s greatest masterpieces as would fit on the walls—Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Rembrandt’s Holy Family, Holbein’s Erasmus, Veronese’s giant Marriage at Cana, and scores more—all stacked and tightly fitted together like bits in a mosaic.
Only nine months earlier, the room had echoed with the wails and moans of mourners making their way to the Arc de Triomphe, where a huge black catafalque had been erected under Napoleon’s great arch. Victor Hugo was dead. Over two million people filled the streets that day, more than the entire population of the city. From the Louvre’s west-facing windows, a river of humanity stretched as far as the eye could see, flowing past the ruins of the Tuileries and pooling in the Place de la Concorde, site of the Revolution’s razor. As the funeral cortège passed through the vast square, the crowd swelled like a tide, climbing up every tree, fountain, lamppost, and kiosk to get a gl
impse of the grand procession that climaxed in a simple pauper’s hearse—Hugo’s parting provocation.
The old socialist lion had achieved a new kind of divinity by debunking the old. Through the better part of a century of bourgeois consumerism and contentment, he had kept the torch of idealism—the flame of the Revolution—alight and aloft. He had battled backsliding governments and resurgent religion, outraging everyone from Louis Napoleon to Dorus and Anna van Gogh with his celebrations of godlessness and criminality. Indeed, he had proudly staked out his place as a noble outlaw at war with society, a prophet of doom to the prosperous and a Moses to the dispossessed, clinging to his vision of truth in a dark and doubting era.
By 1885, when Hugo was laid to rest in a deconsecrated Pantheon accompanied by a twenty-one-gun artillery salute, the world had changed. While his outcast-as-hero status lived on as a model to artists of all kinds, including Vincent van Gogh, his confidence in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit did not. The senseless slaughter of the Franco-Prussian War, the chaos of the Commune, the dislocation of technological changes, the buffeting of economic cycles, and the bafflement of scientific advances, all combined to make any ambitions to higher truth seem like mere bourgeois vanity. Who could maintain Hugo’s idealism in the face of Poincaré’s proof that time and space were not fixed (overturning Newton’s comfortable universe); Pasteur’s discovery of deadly unseen agents; or Flammarion’s mapping of unseen worlds in the night sky—to say nothing of capitalism’s incalculable barbarism?
Uncertainty bred fear. As the end of the century loomed, Hugo’s utopian optimism had turned to apocalyptic dread. His funeral itself struck many as a millennial marker: the huge black-draped Arc, a fitting metaphor on which to close a century that seemed doomed to end badly. The pervasive fatalism expressed itself in a desperate, demagogic politics. A military strongman, General Georges Boulanger, made promises of stability and security that were greeted with wild and menacing public acclaim. A newly empowered popular press alternately stirred the “patriotic” frenzy and pandered to readers’ fears with alarming reports of criminality and corruption. Anarchists’ bombs, both verbal and incendiary, provided the final proof that the end of civilization was near.
By 1885, most writers and poets had fled the high ground that Hugo had defended so stoutly—spooked, like everyone else, by the specter of meaninglessness. Some, like Zola, made a separate peace with the dark forces of modernism. Embracing the positivist promise of salvation through science, they marshaled the “facts” of everyday life into searing indictments of bourgeois complacency—the same enemy that Hugo had long battled with gripping fictions and soaring rhetoric. But a younger generation of writers found cold comfort in the naturalists’ limited world of observable phenomena. How could note-taking, even the brilliant note-taking of Zola, capture the roiling stew of human emotions or the mystery of existence? Wasn’t the ultimate reality not the observable one but the felt one; not the “real” world but the perception of the real world? If there was meaning to be found in life—and that “if” was crucial—then surely it could only be found in the tortured labyrinth of the psyche. Surely art’s truest mandate was to map that labyrinth: to express directly, unvarnished and un-tempered, the elemental reality of human consciousness.
But how to fulfill that mandate? How could one express in words a reality that was both unobservable and individual? Everyone agreed on the question, but no one agreed on the answer—thus proving the dilemma. Some, like Mallarmé, continued to believe that traditional words and forms, the stuff of Hugo, could meet the challenge of exploring this new dreamlike inner world. Others insisted that the new reality demanded a new language. The old precision of words was a chimera, they claimed. Words were, in fact, more like scents, or tones, or colors. Using them to inform or describe, as Zola did, was a fool’s errand. Their real purpose could only be to stimulate the senses, engage the heart, or stir the soul. Sensation, emotion, inspiration. These were the elusive “essences” of life—art’s only deserving subject.
In 1884, J. K. Huysmans, a former Zola acolyte (and nephew of Vincent’s high school art teacher), published a manifesto of the new ideas: a thinly veiled autobiographical tale of a reclusive aesthete engorging his senses on every strange and forbidden indulgence. In the year before Vincent arrived, À rebours (Against the Grain) rocked the literary world of Paris. To some writers, however, like the poet Paul Verlaine, any words, even autobiographical words, seemed pitifully insufficient. An estranged son of the bourgeoisie, Verlaine wandered from dissolution to scandal to self-destruction in a tortured living out of his inner life. At the moment of Vincent’s arrival, not far from the Louvre, Verlaine lay sickly, drunk, and dissipated in a prostitute’s flat in the Latin Quarter. But in the new, inverted world of Parisian letters, he was acclaimed a hero.
Critics coined a new term for these avatars of excess, whether real or fictionalized: “Decadents.” The writers themselves couldn’t agree on a better name. In 1886, someone proposed “Symbolists”—the label history would ultimately attach to them—but that was rejected as too literate, too literal. What bound them together was not a word—feckless, faithless words—but a common contempt for convention, a love of scandal, and a shared belief that only the eccentric outcast—whether aesthete, criminal, or madman—pursuing his own inner path, could express the deepest mysteries of life.
Artists, too, had peered into the abyss and come away with divided minds. The nostalgic naïveté of Barbizon pastorals and Millet peasants had long since lost its allure to young painters impatient for the future. In the decade since Vincent left Paris in disgrace after his fall from Goupil, the Impressionists’ long struggle for legitimacy (and sales) had moved from insurgency to vindication to eclipse. Their relentless descriptions of sunlight and bourgeois ephemera seemed more and more a confectioner’s art—pretty, optimistic, and meaningless—to artists and critics hungering for expressions of the fin-de-siècle darkness.
Driven by the fractious literary world, with its chaos of competing ideologies each supported by its own partisan critics and mouthpiece reviews, progressive artists splintered into shifting, bickering factions.
Some attacked the Impressionists for not going far enough in embracing the scientism of the future. Led by Georges Seurat, the son of a customs official and a disenchanted Beaux-Arts student, they argued that color could be divided up into its constituent elements and then reassembled by the observer’s eye as it reacted to a work of art. Drawing on positivist philosophers as well as the scientific color theories of Blanc and Chevreul, they rejected the old way of mixing colors on the palette and claimed that a more vivid effect could be achieved by dividing each stroke into smaller “points” of purer color and applying each one separately.
Seurat had spent most of 1885 eagerly preparing a great “manifestation” to prove this theory of divided color. He went again and again to make preparatory drawings at an island in the Seine called La Grande Jatte, a favorite Parisian spot for recreation and promenading. He advertised these preparations to his followers as an elaborate scientific project, involving precise measurements of color and light, and he gave the huge painting that took shape slowly, point by point, in his studio, a suitably descriptive title: Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte). Seurat dubbed his new method “chromoluminarism,” but even his own followers preferred simpler names like “divisionism” or “pointillism.”
Another group attacked Impressionism for the opposite reason: because it relied too much on science. No rules, no matter how scientifically formulated or applied, could express the elusive meanings and deep mysteries of life—art’s ultimate subject. Their leaders were not young: Odilon Redon was a forty-five-year-old provincial aristocrat when Huysmans’s À rebours brought the art world’s attention to his eccentric charcoal Noirs—disturbing, hallucinatory images that eschewed color altogether in their pursuit of mystery and meaning. Gustave Moreau had t
urned sixty by the time young disillusioned artists—again alerted by À rebours—began seeing in his mysterious renderings of Greek myths, Bible tales, and children’s fables an escape from the literalness of modernism.
Encouraged by these and other examples, and urged on by Symbolist writers and critics, artists began rummaging in the attic of the culture’s collective unconscious for the “reality” in otherworldly images, and for pictorial devices that conveyed the essential otherworldliness of real life. They wrapped their subjects in gauzy, dreamlike atmosphere or bathed them in theatrical light in order to transform the everyday into the monumental; the natural into the supernatural; the specific into the mythic. By refocusing Impressionism’s view of reality from surfaces to essences, these artists (whom history would also label Symbolists) hoped to reenchant both art and life—to fill the hole left by religion and unfilled by science.
Still another group of artists, especially younger ones, had given up on both science and enchantment. Instead of compromising with or transcending the absurdity of modern life, they embraced it. Children of the postwar malaise, artists in their twenties, especially, found the entire artistic enterprise unconvincing and irrelevant. They entertained each other with ferocious mockery of the Academic system and irreverent skepticism of all art’s claims to higher truth. Their anarchic cynicism expressed itself less in art than in actions. They formed mock-solemn societies that ridiculed not just the usual bourgeois enemy but any attempt to enlighten or reform it. They lampooned the Impressionists with an exhibition of “drawings made by people who don’t know how to draw” and derisively dubbed themselves “the Incoherents.”
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