Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Their art relied heavily on words, especially wordplay, as if they no longer trusted images alone. What little work they produced mixed parody, provocation, adolescent humor, profanity, and polemics into images as randomly explosive as anarchists’ bombs: drawings made with the artist’s foot; paintings of nudes described as “léchée” (licked); all-white and all-black paintings with winking titles (Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night); constructions that combined traditional images with actual objects affixed to them (a worn shoe stuck to the portrait of a postman). One artist repainted the Mona Lisa with a pipe in her mouth and wreathed in smoke (anticipating by several generations Marcel Duchamp’s similar defacement after the next great war).

  They found many ways to vandalize the old pretensions of “high” art. They incorporated into their work the tawdry subjects, garish colors, and unrefined sensibilities of commercial advertising (in which some of them were employed). They borrowed imagery from “low” aesthetic genres like fashion magazines, street posters, calendars, and cartoons, as well as the cheap but colorful prints sold by the thousands to working people and plastered everywhere in cafés, wine shops, and public urinals. Artists like the Incoherents proudly acknowledged the meaninglessness of their endeavors (“the subject is nothing,” Paul Signac explained) and gave their subversive approach to art—and life—a name that perfectly reflected both its origins in café badinage and its blithe insubstantiality. They called it fumisme—roughly, blowing smoke.

  In a culture defined by consumerism and self-contempt, the fumistes’ nihilist aesthetic quickly became all the rage. Artists’ clubs that began as little more than café conclaves mutated into popular entertainments (cabarets artistiques) where impresarios like Rodolphe Salis and Aristide Bruant marketed the outré bohemianism of avant-garde art to the haut monde of Paris society and gaping tourists. They took names like Café des Assassins, Cabaret des Truands (criminals), and Cabaret de l’Enfer (hell). At the most famous of them, Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat, an obscene pun on a slang term for the female genitalia), the fashionable clientèle sat in cramped rooms decorated in “atelier clutter” attended by waiters dressed in the green-and-gold livery of the French Academy. The proprietor, Salis, insulted his guests with Republican égalité, favoring even the most genteel with a frisson of the artistic life by “treating them like pimps and whores,” according to one account.

  The artists themselves eagerly played their part in this self-annihilating parody. It was the era of publicity and self-promotion; an era when even a tarty actress could rise to unheard-of celebrity as “the divine” Sarah Bernhardt (a Chat Noir patron); an era when any artist with a scandalous story or an outrageous image, and a critic or publicist to flak it, could aspire to a level of conspicuity unimagined by Salon favorites of the past. With so much to gain, and the future of art—and everything else—so much in doubt, the new generation of artist-entertainers barely noticed or cared that they had succumbed to the same bourgeois ethos they so mercilessly pilloried every night at Le Chat Noir. Of only one thing were they certain: if art was to have a future—and that “if” was crucial—it would have to travel by a new road, as they had blown up all the old ones.

  This was the art world that awaited Vincent van Gogh in Paris. Only a few years after the Impressionists drove the first wedge into it, the great monolith of the Salon—with its hegemony over public taste and intellectual discourse—had shattered into a kaleidoscope of noisy, competing partisans, fueled by ideas noble and mean, existential and commercial, evangelical and self-serving: a world sustained on the oxygen of café arguments, clamorous reviews, and the certainty that history would lavishly reward the art and ideas that triumphed, and ruthlessly discard the rest.

  The disintegration of the artistic avant-garde horrified and disgusted Émile Zola. He saw in it the frustration of his great naturalism project. In L’oeuvre (The Masterpiece), which Vincent began reading in serialized form on the eve of his arrival in Paris, Zola chastised all artists, even the Impressionists he had once championed, for their failure to find a single, emblematic art for the new era. Using the fictional story of Claude Lantier, a near-mad painter obsessed with the creation of a perfect work, Zola rejected both the Symbolists’ surrender to the supernatural and Seurat’s impersonal science. To create a true modern masterpiece, he argued, an artist would have to give more of himself (“What was Art, after all, if not simply giving out what you have inside you?”)—even if, as in Lantier’s case, that meant insanity and certain death. He challenged artists of every stripe to meet his challenge. The entire century had been and would remain “a failure,” he thundered, until the mandate of modern art had been fulfilled—until someone, somewhere, found inside himself an art at once literal and poetic, real and symbolic, personal and enchanted.

  VINCENT ARRIVED IN Paris with only one mandate: to please Theo. He had come unannounced, unexpected, and unwelcome. For years he had pictured the brothers’ reunion as a perfect and inevitable fulfillment—increasingly, the only one possible. Now that it was upon him, he was terrified of disappointment. “What I am not sure of is whether we shall get on personally,” he confessed to Theo only weeks before his departure from Antwerp. “If we were together soon, I might disappoint you in many things.”

  To avoid that fate, Vincent immediately rededicated himself to the goal that he had so often abandoned: bourgeois respectability. He sought out a barber to give his beard the smartest new trim and a tailor to fit him for a new suit to match his dapper brother. He finished the arduous task of fixing his teeth, and had a modern Paris dentist fit him out with the latest in wooden dentures. Casting aside the last self-abnegation of the heath, he indulged in a regular Parisian diet of restaurant fare. In these and other ways, he did his best to blend in with the fashionable crowds that bustled outside Theo’s little apartment on the rue Laval. Situated just off the grand boulevard de Clichy in a busy theatrical district, the street was well known to all of Paris society. Only a few doors away, Le Chat Noir filled the neighborhood with stylish revelers until well past midnight.

  But Vincent’s renewed ambition also brought renewed demands. Theo’s cramped flat not only posed a threat to the brothers’ comity, it also proved completely unsuitable to Vincent’s vision of “a rather good studio where one can receive people if need be.” He may have been forced to stop painting altogether for lack of space. Before arriving in Paris, eager to join his brother, Vincent had temporarily dropped his demand for a studio. He even offered to live by himself in a garret for the first few months and wait a year before securing a separate workspace. But Paris’s lures and Theo’s cosmopolitan lifestyle soon rekindled old longings. He probably began militating for a bigger apartment as soon as he arrived, and without doubt he took the lead in finding one—a process that he had rehearsed often in his fantasies. “If one wants to start a studio,” he wrote from Antwerp, “one must consider well where to rent it, where one has the greatest chance of getting visitors, and making friends, and getting known.”

  The spacious fourth-floor apartment at 54, rue Lepic fit these specifications like a tailored suit.

  First, it was located in Montmartre, the community where Vincent had lived during his last stay in Paris. Rising from the boulevard de Clichy, Montmartre spread up and over the famous butte of the same name, a limestone promontory that thrust into the Seine valley from the east, forcing the river to take a great westward loop around it. From the crest of the butte, with its crenellation of windmills, one could see the Seine on three sides—slicing through the dense city to the south; washing the river playgrounds of Asnières and La Grande Jatte to the west; then disappearing into a wasteland of factories and banlieues to the north.

  In the ten years since Vincent lived there, Montmartre had kept its reputation as an artistic refuge from the big city—a marginal place where people came to indulge in marginal activities, a “half-wild” quarry town where rich men secreted their mistresses, and artists enjoyed a special liberty in their studio
s and in their habits. But now, like the rest of bohemia, Montmartre had acquired a new bourgeois cachet. Now, the margins had become the new fashion, as artists and intellectuals flocked to the knowing fringes. Zola and the Goncourts set novels here (and later chose to be buried here); Salon painters like Alfred Stevens brought their clients here (“society women [were] highly excited at the thought of going up to Montmartre,” according to one account); and popular chansonniers like Bruant sang the praises of the “martyr’s hill” to packed houses here.

  The building that Vincent chose, on a bend in the rue Lepic, was perfectly poised at the intersection of old and new Montmartre, village and city, fringe and fashion. It sat just below the butte’s final steep rise—before the streets turned to stairs and the sidewalks ended in chalky paths. Beyond the bend, the bright new limestone buildings yielded to wind-beaten old shacks and ragged greenery, and the paths led sightseers to the few surviving windmills, now stripped of their sails and reduced to tourist attractions by the coming of steam.

  Built in 1882, the nondescript five-story apartment house had been designed specifically to exploit the same demand for boundary-hopping that filled the seats of Le Chat Noir every night. It repackaged the old bohemian Montmartre for the new boulevard taste. Great oak outer doors led to a quiet passage and a view of the garden in back. Guests entered the vestibule through the elaborate iron-and-glass inner doors, where a concierge greeted them. The apartments—only two to a landing—boasted huge rooms (by Paris standards), herringbone parquet floors, black Belgian-marble mantles, and tin tubs. Modern conveniences included gas heat and light in every room and, most astonishing in a city where even good buildings offered only a single outdoor tap, two faucets—one in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. (Chamber pots remained a standard feature in all but the richest households.)

  Theo and Vincent’s apartment had the special advantages of a high floor, far removed from the smells of the street, washed with sunlight and open to Montmartre’s famous breeze. Everywhere in Paris, height signaled status: the higher one’s floor, the higher one’s social standing. The builders of 54, rue Lepic shared their renters’ disregard for the lower classes, too. The “kitchen” consisted of a tiny room at the back with a single gas burner on a wooden table. But Vincent didn’t care: Theo had agreed to hire a full-time kitchen maid, enviously described by a friend as “a cook in optima forma.”

  In June, as soon as the rue Laval lease expired, Vincent moved the brothers into their fashionable new aerie. He took the smallest of the three bedrooms for his own, saving a larger one for his studio. Fulfilling fantasies of fraternal domesticity he had harbored since Drenthe, he doubtless took charge of the decorating—not just arranging the furniture and planning window treatments, but also hanging Theo’s collection of paintings, prints from both their portfolios, and some of his own work.

  As soon as the move was complete, as if to celebrate his new home and new life, Vincent took up Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, the story of another ambitious outsider who climbed to the heights of Paris society from a humble start in Montmartre. Like Octave Mouret, Georges Duroy charms and dares his way into the hearts of men and the beds of women (thus earning his nickname, Bel-Ami—a winning fellow). Vincent found comfort in Maupassant’s “light-hearted” vision of the uphill road ahead—and, no doubt, inspiration in Duroy’s ultimate, dizzying success. He pronounced Bel-Ami “a masterpiece” and recommended it as an antidote to all “civilized people [who] suffer melancholy and pessimism”—including himself:

  I, for instance, who can count so many years of my life during which I lost any inclination to laugh—leaving aside whether or not this was my own fault—I, for one, feel the need for a really good laugh above all else. I’ve found it in Guy de Maupassant.

  A winning new life demanded a winning art. Gripped yet again by the vision of a successful joint enterprise with Theo, and desperate to justify his unbidden arrival, Vincent threw himself into the task of creating works that would sell. He started by illustrating menus for restaurants, fulfilling a pledge he had made in Antwerp. For one upscale establishment, he transcribed the entire bill of fare (“Cervelle Beurre noir,” “veau marengo,” “gâteau de riz au Kirsch”), and bordered it with a scene straight out of Bel-Ami: fashionable Parisians strolling through a park.

  Reviving his ambitions from The Hague, he peddled illustrations to the myriad magazines and illustrated papers that filled the newsstands of Paris, many of them published by cafés and cabarets like Le Chat Noir. He carefully calculated the subject matter, size, setting, and mood of each drawing, gauging it to a specific potential client. For Le Mirliton, Aristide Bruant’s popular club not far from the rue Laval, he chose as his subject a denizen of the very demimonde that Bruant celebrated in his songs and in his magazine: a grotesquely obese woman walking her little dog. He set her on the sidewalk just outside Le Mirliton, with landmarks carefully drawn in, and, for good measure, inscribed the drawing with a verse from one of Bruant’s own songs. For Le Chat Noir itself, he created a tiny illustration the size of a calling card—perfect for menus, napkins, stationery, or their famous magazine—showing a dangling skeleton and a crouching black cat locked in a macabre stare.

  The move to a studio of his own in June opened up another money-making possibility: tourist pictures. Every day a steady stream of sightseers made their way up the rue Lepic, the primary route to the summit of Butte Montmartre, to see the famous view of Paris from its crest. Only a block uphill from the brothers’ apartment, the Moulin de la Galette—a bustling entertainment complex of restaurant, dance hall, and park—attracted crowds day and night with food, drink, and the cahut, a lewd variant of the cancan. The complex incorporated two of the three remaining windmills on the mount, the Radet and the Blute-Fin. The latter’s precarious belvedere offered the most spectacular view of all: a panoramic metropolitan vista unlike anything anybody had seen in an era when flight was still an exotic rarity.

  Self-Portrait, 1887, OIL ON CANVAS, 16⅛ × 13⅛ IN.; (Illustration credit 27.1)

  Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, 1886–87, OIL ON CARDBOARD, 16⅛ × 12⅝ IN.; AND

  Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, 1887, OIL ON PANEL, 14 × 10⅝ IN.

  The view was Montmartre’s signature landmark, as closely linked to it in the public imagination as Antwerp was to its cathedral, and Vincent attacked it with the same mercenary fervor. Many streets in his neighborhood afforded spectacular views from their higher reaches, as did the windows of the rue Lepic apartment. From the windy lookout of Blute-Fin to the noisy construction site of Sacré Coeur, he carried his easel up and down the mount in search of fresh angles on the vast vista.

  At some point, Vincent turned around and fixed his perspective frame on the butte itself. He saw in its sentinel windmills and seedy clutter more to interest his searching eye than in the smoky, unchanging panoramas. Even more important, he saw the potential for sales. Tourists snapped up prints of Montmartre’s unique country-in-city landscape—not just the windmills, but the old quarry, the twisted streets, and the shantytown on the ridge. Dedicated magazines ran page after page of such illustrations. Vincent repeatedly drew and painted the picturesque mills (both from a distance and close-up); the street outside the Moulin de la Galette (with its signage carefully lettered in); and the crazed patchwork of huts and gardens at the crest of the butte. He painted them in the muted tones of Mauve and the Hague School—the most salable images he knew. He even tried them in watercolor—an ever-frustrating but affordable medium. “One must sell cheap to rise,” he said, “or even at cost. Paris is Paris.”

  Sometime that spring, Vincent celebrated his new incarnation in a new way: he looked in the mirror. Instead of a convict with broken teeth and sunken cheeks, he saw an artist Bel-Ami—a young man still, but not unseasoned (his hairline receding), dressed not in the loose blue smock of Millet but in a sturdy wool jacket, high-buttoned vest, and silk cravat. Here was a man who cared for himself properly: beard barbered, hair curled,
teeth tended; a man who carried himself with dignity: chin up, chest thrust out. Without the telltale brushes and palette, he could have been a businessman, a Paris art dealer perhaps, distractedly smoking his Prince of Wales pipe, looking back with a skeptical gaze.

  Only then, and for the first time, Vincent painted what he saw in the mirror.

  He liked what he saw so much, in fact, that he painted at least four more versions of the image in the mirror over the next few months, each one bigger, better attired, and more prosperous-looking than the last.

  But the centerpiece of Vincent’s bourgeois rebirth in Paris wasn’t his salable art, his new clothes, his new teeth, or even the bright new apartment on the rue Lepic. It was his enrollment in the atelier of Fernand Piestre, the artist known as Cormon.

  THE SALON SYSTEM may have lost its hegemony by 1886, but not its popularity. A vast industry, with Goupil still in the lead, churned out thousands upon thousands of genre scenes, rural idylls, oriental fantasies, and historical vignettes for a larger and richer audience of collectors than ever before. The demand for these polished, pleasing images had overwhelmed the old state-sponsored Académie system for training artists, with its competitive elitism and aristocratic bias. Meanwhile, the same prosperity that drove the booming art market had also produced a surplus of young men (and a very few women) with the money, education, and leisure to pursue their artistic ambitions.

  To address both these unmet demands, an alternate form of art schooling had sprung up in major cities across the Continent, but especially in Paris, the birthplace of the Salon. Called ateliers (for the skylighted attics where artists often worked), or simply studios, these private schools varied in size, in prestige, in rigor, and, of course, in fees. But they were all children of the École des Beaux-Arts—employing the same time-honored teaching methods and pledged to the same goal of proficiency as their more exalted parent. Almost all their founders and instructors had graduated from the École. Many were former Salon stars who parlayed their prize medals, sometimes even just a single succès d’estime, into the franchise of an atelier. Cormon was one of these.