Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  His career had peaked in 1880 when his huge painting The Flight of Cain caused a sensation at the Salon. By casting the biblical fratricide as a slack-jawed Neanderthal, Cormon succeeded in inflaming both defenders of religion and champions of the new science of evolution, thus reaping a whirlwind of notoriety. Two years later, he opened an atelier. Despite his own checkered history as an École student and a taste for nontraditional subject matter (he painted Hindu kings and Wagner heroes as well as cavemen), Cormon fully embraced the meticulous craftsmanship of the classical tradition. Like most atelier masters, he saw himself working in concert with the Salon to train the next generation of artists, and his school mimicked the École model right down to its annual competition or concours. In 1884, he was appointed to the Salon jury—making his atelier even more attractive to ambitious young artists.

  Cormon also embraced the expensive lifestyle of a successful Salon painter. In addition to the atelier, he maintained a large private studio and an apartment. He entertained extravagantly and traveled exotically. The son of a stage manager at the Paris Opera, he loved to dress up in theatrical costumes. At one point, he was keeping three mistresses simultaneously—a feat that earned him more acclaim among his atelier acolytes than either his Salon medals or his stupendous canvases.

  By the time Vincent arrived in 1886, however, Cormon’s star had already begun to fade. In the fast-changing universe of Paris art, his Stone Age scenes had become just another bizarre sideshow in the great quest for a “modern” art. Dealers and collectors moved on. The turn of fortune may explain why Cormon agreed to admit Theo van Gogh’s brother Vincent into his exclusive atelier despite his lack of credentials or accomplishments. As a junior gérant at Goupil, Theo was well positioned to return the favor. How quickly arrangements were made after Vincent’s sudden arrival is not certain. Given the setbacks in Antwerp, he probably took some time to collect himself—recover his health and repair his teeth—before starting. But sometime that spring, he made his first trip to Cormon’s atelier on the boulevard de Clichy, mounting yet another assault on the formal training that he could neither master nor forswear.

  Cormon must have seemed to Theo the perfect choice for this thankless mission. Although sought after for his Academic eminence, the forty-year-old Lyon native was also known as a distracted, indulgent teacher who rarely imposed his view of art on paying students. Like Charles Verlat, the director of the Antwerp Academy, Cormon had shown himself “more sympathetic to novelties than most of his kind,” according to one account. The antics of the Incoherents no doubt appealed to his theatricality; the esoteric subjects of the Symbolists echoed his own fondness for legends and folklore. Only the scientific pretensions of the “spot” painters, like Seurat, elicited his contempt. When he visited the atelier, he would pass quietly among his students offering “only a few well-chosen words of instruction as he paused beside each easel,” one of them later recalled. “He looked at everything with a solicitude that surprised us.”

  Between Cormon’s laissez-passer reputation and Vincent’s renewed pledges of hard work (he promised to stay at Cormon’s for “three years at least”), Theo had good reason to hope that after so many failed attempts to find his brother an artistic home, this one might actually succeed.

  In fact, it was as doomed as all the others.

  Unfortunately for Vincent, the Atelier Cormon did not reflect its founder’s open-mindedness. Because he came so rarely (only once or twice a week) and commented with such restraint, it was left to Cormon’s students to pass judgment on each other’s work, and on each other. For Vincent, as ever, fellow artists proved the most demanding and least forgiving audience. Far more than in Brussels or Antwerp, his classmates at Cormon’s formed a cohesive, exclusionary unit. Most were French. While other commercial ateliers openly catered to rich foreigners, Cormon’s rigorous selection process guaranteed an overwhelming majority of Frenchmen among the school’s thirty or so students. Vincent’s accented French, unpolished after ten years of disuse, marked him more plainly than ever as an outsider.

  Most were young. Students under eighteen were not unknown, and those over twenty-five were rare. As a group, they clung to the antics and intolerance of adolescence. New students—called nouveaux—were mercilessly teased and humiliated in ways that Vincent’s odd manner surely invited, but his prickly dignity could never have tolerated. Nouveaux were forced to do menial chores and endure meaningless trials. They were stripped naked and made to fence with paint-loaded brushes; or trussed up on poles, like pigs on a spit, and carried to the local café, where they often ended up paying the bar tab.

  Most of the students were rich, too: sons of the old aristocracy of breeding or the new one of business. The atelier’s two student leaders perfectly reflected the bifurcation of the French elite, and thus of French art. Louis Anquetin’s father made his fortune as a butcher in Normandy, after marrying into a wealthy family. Twenty-five-year-old Louis would have stood out in any class. A tall, robust Zeus of a man, with a lustrous crown of curls and thick beard, he had learned to ride and draw by age ten, like any gentleman’s son. He kept an apartment and a redheaded mistress on the avenue Clichy, not far from the atelier that he ruled over with innate nobility.

  His fellow student leader represented exactly the opposite sort of evolution. Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was both the beneficiary of an ancient lineage—Counts of Toulouse back to 1196—and a victim of its curse: inbreeding. His parents, first cousins, lived in “an aristocratic floating world of hunting and riding,” according to one biographer. But they begat a child with fragile bones and a misshapen body. Young Henri broke both legs in childhood and never reached five feet as an adult. He would never ride horses—he could barely walk without a cane—but he could draw them. His tremendous facility, combined with an ebullient spirit and a razor wit (“my family has done nothing for centuries,” he remarked; “without wit, I’d be an utter fool”), might have won him a place in the Paris art world even without his freakish appearance or distinguished name. When he met Louis Anquetin at the age of seventeen, he barely rose above the other man’s belt. But the two recognized each other as a breed apart. Lautrec (as Vincent invariably called him) referred to his towering friend as “my great man,” and, after that, rarely left his side.

  ATELIER OF FERNAND CORMON (C. 1885): CORMON AT EASEL, TOULOUSE-LAUTREC WEARING BOWLER HAT WITH BACK TO CAMERA, ÉMILE BERNARD AT UPPER RIGHT (Illustration credit 27.2)

  This unlikely pair ran the Cormon studio as their own personal social club. Anquetin commanded the respect of his fellow students with his Jovian countenance and masterful brush. (He was named one of the “most promising younger painters” at the Salon des Indépendants.) Lautrec exercised both the official power of a massier (the student responsible for recruiting and posing models, collecting fees, and maintaining order) and the unofficial power of a teacher’s favorite. He and Cormon worked together on outside commissions and he always took the place of honor, front row center, when the master paid a visit to the atelier.

  The two enjoyed a liberty with each other that shocked and delighted Lautrec’s classmates. A fixture at Cormon’s open houses, Lautrec also hosted weekly get-togethers at his own studio on the rue Caulaincourt, just around the corner from the rue Lepic, where debates over the new ideas in art flowed as freely as wine. In class or out, he played master of ceremonies, whether leading the boisterous ragging of the nouveaux, teaching his classmates Bruant’s latest song in his booming baritone, or clownishly inspecting the “partes naturales” of potential models from his unique perspective.

  Cormon’s students rallied to the leadership of their “Velasquez dwarf” and his Michelangelesque partner. Young men from good families all, veterans of many social clubs at lycée or university, they fell easily into the classroom raillery and hazing rituals of the atelier.

  Not so Vincent. Prone to anger, quick to take offense, menacingly intense, and untuned to the irony and irreverence of youth, Vi
ncent descended on the atelier like a leaden thundercloud from the North Sea. At the least provocation he would burst into storms of vehement protest and lip-quivering passion. Shouting and gesticulating, he would plunge heedlessly into arguments, pouring out sentences in a wild mix of Dutch, English, and French, according to one witness, “then glance back at you over his shoulder and hiss through his teeth.” Nothing could have been less suited to the sly, carefree atmosphere cultivated by Lautrec in the teacher’s absence than Vincent’s humorless intensity. Lautrec himself, while never cruel to his charges, could have found little of interest in the dour Dutchman. In the right company (especially among his countrymen), Vincent could be sociable, even jovial. But his sense of humor favored broad mimicry and bawdy innuendo—a universe apart from Lautrec’s cynical drollery and self-mocking flamboyance.

  No doubt taking their cue from their massier, Vincent’s classmates responded to the volatile stranger in their midst with a combination of haughty tolerance (dismissing him as “a man of the north [who] didn’t appreciate the Parisian spirit”) and surreptitious ridicule. “What laughter behind his back,” one of them recalled. Whether out of fear, or indifference, or deference to his well-placed brother, they spared him the worst abuses of the nouveaux and simply ignored him as “not interesting enough to bother much about.”

  As in Antwerp, Vincent was forced to seek companionship at the margins of the class, among the handful of foreign students. Fortunately for him, the leader of this tiny band was a genial English speaker a long way from home: an Australian painter named John Peter Russell. Son of a South Seas adventurer and arms manufacturer, Russell had everything Vincent envied: money, friends, leisure, standing, and a striking blond Italian girlfriend, Marianna. (Rodin, for whom she modeled, called her “the most beautiful woman in Paris.”) A tireless reveler, Russell frequented fashionable nightspots like Le Chat Noir and Le Mirliton, often driving his own horse and carriage. On weekends, he promenaded in the Bois de Boulogne with the rest of high society, or sailed his yacht on the Seine. He summered in Brittany and wintered in Spain. A steady stream of visitors (including Rodin, a personal friend, and Robert Louis Stevenson) climbed the grand staircase to Russell’s studio on the impasse Hélène, where the door was always open. He entertained them all with a boisterous, indiscriminate bonhomie that was often mistaken for American.

  Vincent joined the crowd drawn to Russell’s easy hospitality. Brandishing his family connections to Goupil—a real attraction to the commercially ambitious Australian, who still painted in the High Victorian style showcased at Goupil—Vincent visited Russell’s studio on the far side of the Montmartre cemetery. Russell shared the general opinion of Vincent as “cracked, but harmless,” and their relationship never merited a mention in his letters at the time or in his later writings. But he was an indulgent host with a taste for artistic eccentricity—a taste that puzzled his friends (who considered Vincent a “weedy little man”) and dismayed Marianna (who complained that Vincent’s eyes “glittered frighteningly”).

  Vincent imposed on the open-door policy at the impasse Hélène often enough that Russell eventually invited him to sit for a portrait. It was hardly a singular honor. Russell was a talented portraitist who, unlike Vincent, could capture a likeness quickly and surely with pencil or paint, and he practiced his skills at every opportunity. Using the same flattering brush that he often used on society matrons, Russell portrayed Vincent the way Vincent wanted the world to see him: not as a bohemian aesthete, but as an artist-businessman: prosperous and contented as a banker in his dark suit, stiff collar, and stern expression. Only in the eyes—caught in a suspicious, almost menacing sidelong glance—did Russell hint at a darker reality.

  —

  JOHN PETER RUSSELL, Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, 1886, OIL ON CANVAS, 23⅝ × 17¾ IN. (Illustration credit 27.3)

  NOTHING SET VINCENT apart from his fellow students more than his lack of facility. If he had wielded a pencil as wittily as Lautrec or a brush as winningly as Anquetin, his strange appearance might have been overlooked, his blunt manner forgiven. Led by Anquetin, who had drawn exquisitely since his schoolboy days in Normandy, and Lautrec, a precocious illustrator, Cormon’s acolytes put a high premium on drawing, just as their master did. Although tolerant of individuality in painting styles, Cormon, like Verlat in Antwerp, saw draftsmanship as above the to-and-fro of artistic fashion. “If one doesn’t measure,” he said, “one draws like a pig.” His students, no matter what daring new images they admired, all aspired to “draw like the old masters in the Louvre,” according to one of them.

  Eschewing the cumbersome perspective frame that he had come to rely on—and that no doubt embarrassed him in a room filled with freehand draftsmen—Vincent focused with immense intensity on the old challenges of line and proportion. Although nude models were a regular feature of the atelier, he still found himself working mostly from the plaster casts that lined the studio walls. Like Siberdt, Cormon emphasized contour over shading and hatching, and discouraged his students from improvising. “They were to copy strictly what they had in front of them,” one student recalled Cormon’s instructions, “without changing anything.”

  Submitting yet again to the tyranny of reality, Vincent drew, erased, and redrew until a firm, accurate outline appeared, then delicately modeled with chalk and stump and more erasing in an effort to create the kind of precise, polished study that students like Lautrec could produce effortlessly. But his hand still would not, could not, obey. Even his most polished images, whether drawn from the plaster or the nude, emerged from his easel with broadened buttocks, misaligned limbs, enlarged feet, crooked faces, or quivering contours. “We considered his work too unskillful,” recalled a fellow Cormon student; “there were many who could surpass him from that point of view.” Another said, “His drawings had nothing remarkable about them.”

  Painting, too, brought ridicule and rejection. Like the Academy students in Antwerp, Vincent’s Cormon classmates were astonished by the speed and appalled by the disorder of his working methods. He painted three studies to every one of theirs, completing multiple angles on the same pose in a single, relentless assault, not even pausing during the model’s rest period. “He worked in a chaotic fury,” one of his classmates recalled, “throwing all the colors on the canvas in feverish haste. He picked color up as if by the shovelful and the paint ran back along the brush and made his fingers sticky.… The violence of his study surprised the studio; the classical artists were horrified by it.”

  When Vincent wasn’t looking, the other students mocked his flailing strokes. When Cormon stopped at his easel, they fell silent with anticipation and leaned in to hear how the placid master would react to the Dutchman’s latest provocation. But Cormon only criticized Vincent’s draftsmanship and advised him to work more carefully in the future. For a while, at least, Vincent tried to heed the advice. He came to the studio in the afternoons, when all the others had left, and practiced his drawing on the familiar plaster casts, struggling to capture their elusive contours until his eraser wore holes in his paper. Someone who chanced upon him alone in the big studio, locked in his furtive labors, thought he looked “like a prisoner in his cell.”

  By summer, he was gone. He had promised to study at Cormon’s for three years; he stayed less than three months. He may have continued to make occasional trips to the studio on the boulevard de Clichy as late as the fall; but, if he did, he timed his visits carefully to avoid his former classmates. When pressed to describe his brief experience at Cormon’s, Vincent would say only, “I did not find it as useful as I had expected it to be.” After leaving Paris, he never wrote another word about it. So decisive was his failure at the prestigious atelier that the subject never came up in a letter Theo wrote to his mother in June summarizing Vincent’s first few months in Paris. Instead, he spun a farrago of reassurance that Vincent had finally turned a corner, and that life with him was not the burden it had been in Nuenen. “He is much more cheerful than in the
past and people like him here,” Theo reported brightly. “If we can keep it up I think his difficult times are over and he will be able to make it by himself.”

  In reality, Vincent had found failure around every corner. Despite all his efforts that spring, he had not sold a single painting. None of the hundreds of magazines circulating in Paris would pay him for an illustration. Worse still, his attempts to win dealers to his cause had all foundered, despite his brother’s connections in the business. A Cormon classmate remembered how Vincent “used to rage from time to time that though connected with the picture trade no one would buy anything he did.”

  Only Theo’s old colleague Arsène Portier, the same minor dealer who had abruptly withdrawn his support for The Potato Eaters the previous year, paid Vincent the respect of taking some works on consignment. But what else could he do? Living downstairs in the same building, Portier not only saw both brothers every day, but no doubt suffered a relentless haranguing—in person this time, not by letter. When pressed to show the paintings to buyers (he worked out of his apartment), Portier demurred, promising vaguely to mount an exhibition sometime in the future. The only place Vincent had found to actually display his work was a nearby paint supply store called Tanguy’s—described by a contemporary as “a small and shabby boutique”—where they hung unlighted amid the retail clutter with dozens of other customers’ canvases. Even when he tried to exchange his paintings with fellow artists (an old student tradition encouraged by Theo), he met with little success. Only those as obscure and marginalized as he was were tempted by his offers to swap. Better-known painters like Charles Angrand, a friend of Seurat’s, simply ignored his overtures.