Vincent might have made more exchanges if he had made more friends. But Theo’s assurance to his mother that “people like him here” was only a comforting fiction. The letters and journals of other artists in Paris at the time betray not a hint of Vincent’s presence, despite numerous opportunities for their paths to cross. He began the summer of 1886 as alone in Paris as he had been on the heath. Russell had left for the season, lending his apartment to two Englishmen who proved far less sympathetic hosts. A. S. Hartrick thought Vincent “more than a little mad”; and Henry Ryland reacted to his visits with horror. (“That terrible man has been here for two hours,” Ryland once complained to Hartrick. “I can’t stand it any more.”) Still, desperate to preserve some semblance of professional connection, Vincent continued to visit Russell’s studio until a row over Ryland’s watercolors (Vincent called them “anaemic and useless”) extinguished his welcome on the impasse Hélène forever.
By the fall, he was reduced to writing Horace Livens, the classmate in Antwerp whom he barely knew, to report poignantly, “I work alone,” and to complain, “I am struggling for life and progress in art.” Only six months after arriving, he begged the distant Livens to join him in Paris, or, barring that, to help him escape. “In spring, or even sooner, I may be going to the South of France,” he wrote, anticipating by a year his flight to Provence. “And look here, if I knew you had longings for the same, we might combine.”
AFTER THE COLLAPSE of his plan for Cormon, without friends or colleagues or direction, Vincent quickly retreated into the obsessions he had brought with him to Paris.
The portrait project that had preoccupied him in Antwerp resumed almost without interruption. Among his earliest paintings in Paris were two portraits of the same sitter: a raven-haired matron whose bourgeois dress and fancy bonnet betray the artist’s new bid for respectability. But once he started at Cormon’s, his mania returned to its deeper roots in sex. The atelier sessions provided a steady diet of nudes for Vincent’s voracious hand. Better yet, the studio attracted an almost unbroken stream of models in search of work. They paraded around the atelier for the inspection of all the students, who often voted on their favorites. Because auditions required disrobing, and students were free to poke and prod (to test musculature), such tryouts often dissolved into leering, snickering gauntlets of mutual arousal.
But Vincent wanted more. Long accustomed to the prerogatives of his own studio, he immediately set out to arrange private modeling sessions, only to encounter the same frustrations that had dogged all his previous campaigns. None of the professional models who lined up every day for the atelier’s auditions would accept an invitation to his studio. “[They] did not want to pose for him,” Theo recalled—either for portraits or for figure studies. And certainly not for nudes. Even the women Vincent knew personally, such as Russell’s mistress, Marianna, refused the strange Dutchman’s advances.
Soon enough, he was forced to take his hunt to more familiar regions.
Prostitutes swarmed the broad boulevards and café bars of Haussmann’s new city. The combination of wealth, license, and the opportunity for display made Paris the capital of sexual gratification—and venereal disease—on a randy continent in a libertine era. They went by many names—pierreuse, lor-ette, grisette, gigolette, apéritive—and serviced almost three-quarters of the city’s adult males. Virtually every artist in Cormon’s atelier not only kept a mistress but also made nightly forays into Paris’s libidinous underworld. Even Russell would leave the beautiful (and pregnant) Marianna to enjoy the end-of-empire decadence available on almost every street corner.
Surrounded by so much opportunity, Vincent could hardly contain himself. Books like Zola’s Nana and the Goncourts’ La fille Élisa (both chronicles of prostitution) had filled his head with visions of erotic freedom and sexual athleticism. Even Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, for all his amorous conquests, couldn’t resist the particular pleasures of Parisian whores. In later years, Vincent recalled fondly his model-hunting escapades not just in the city’s bustling brothels but also in the seedy walk-up back rooms where lonely women “screw 5 or 6 times a day.” He spoke knowingly about the relationships between prostitutes and their “maquereaux” (pimps), and described himself as merely a hungry consumer in search of the best cut of beef. “The whore is like meat in a butcher’s shop,” he wrote in 1888, “and I sink back into my brutish state.”
It was probably in his relentless search for models that Vincent first encountered Agostina Segatori. Although too old (about forty-five) to be active in the trade herself, Agostina knew where to find what Vincent was looking for. Since her teens on the streets of Naples, she had lived on the slippery border between modeling and prostitution. By 1860, her seductive look and voluptuous body had earned her passage to Paris, where she posed for a pantheon of the era’s greatest painters, including Gérôme, Corot, and Manet. All of Europe hungered for the easy sensuality of dark-haired Italian girls, often portrayed in fetching native costumes and carrying the symbol of their “gypsy” spirit: a tambourine. Like many former models, Agostina found a sponsor and, in 1885, capitalized on her fading celebrity by opening a café called simply Le Tambourin.
By the time Vincent met her in 1886, she had aged into a savvy, bosomy, bohemian signora, entouraged by a young lover, a thuggish manager, and two blond Great Danes. She presided over her café domain with languorous authority and “imposing charm,” according to one of her legion of admirers. Everything in the big establishment on the boulevard de Clichy, from the tambourine-shaped tables to the waitresses in Italian peasant dresses, played out the theme of exotic, erotic allure that had made her famous. But the allure was more than just stagecraft. Theme cafés like Le Tambourin typically did a booming side business in prostitution. In return for providing a safe environment and a steady stream of customers, owners took a cut of their servers’ after-work earnings. Like the procuress Vincent met in Antwerp, Agostina Segatori “knew a lot of women, and could always supply some.”
Even with Segatori’s help, Vincent’s excursions into Paris’s sordid underbelly produced only a few hasty, eavesdropping sketches. One shows a woman lying naked in bed, her arms behind her head, comfortably advertising her full availability. Another depicts a woman sitting on the edge of a bed languidly pulling up her stockings after sex. Another shows a woman squatting over a basin, cleaning herself. At one of the many erotic theatricals that filled the smoky basements of the boulevards, he captured in furtive pencil and chalk the peep-show scene of a couple copulating on stage, as shameless as a circus act.
JEAN-BAPTISTE COROT, Agostina, 1866, OIL ON CANVAS, 51⅛ × 37¼ IN. (Illustration credit 27.4)
When one particularly homely pierreuse agreed to pose for him, Vincent lavished his art on her overripe body and coarse face. He both drew and painted her as a grotesque odalisque, then celebrated her bestial features in a portrait done in the same earthy hues as his Nuenen peasants—a proud boast of her country-girl sexual prowess. He even sketched her in the same submissive position that Sien had assumed for Sorrow.
But no one, apparently, not even his belle laide Beatrice, would come to the rue Lepic as Sien had come to the Schenkweg. After leaving Cormon’s, Vincent was reduced to painting studies of the little nude statuettes the brothers collected, and, as in Nuenen, forlornly sifting through the contents of his studio for still-life subjects that refracted his frustrations and regrets. He found the perfect metaphor in a battered pair of walking shoes, which he painted in the moody tones and meditative strokes of the Kerkstraat birds’ nests, as if longing for the lost liberties of the heath.
The failure of his hunt for models drove Vincent even deeper into the other burning obsession he had brought with him to Paris: color. His unique witness to the gospels of Blanc and Chevreul, developed in the wilderness of Nuenen only to be swept aside in the commercial and sexual fevers of Antwerp, re-emerged in the summer of 1886 in a fresh burst of evangelical zeal. “Color drove him mad,” a classmate at Cormon’s
recalled. Taking up the banner of “simultaneous contrast” where his rhetoric had left off the previous winter, Vincent startled his fellow atelier students by painting a nude model—the most prosaic of color subjects—against “an intense, unexpected blue” instead of the studio’s drab brown backdrop. The result, according to one witness, was an explosion of complementaries “with violent new tones, one inflaming the other.” And every vehement image came accompanied by a storm of vehement words. “He never stopped talking about his ideas about color,” recalled another Paris acquaintance.
But this time Vincent found himself preaching to a city already ablaze with arguments about color. What was it? How was it perceived? What did it express? Even as Paris celebrated the centenary of Michel Chevreul, the patriarch of color theory, with a torchlight parade (which Vincent undoubtedly attended), artists squabbled over his legacy. The divisionists, led by Seurat and championed by a powerful young critic, Félix Fénéon, wrestled the mantle of optical science away from Impressionism. They recruited scientists to validate their art and hailed the Grande Jatte, which débuted in April 1886, for its “exactitude of atmosphere.” Meanwhile, acolytes of Huysmans’s À rebours declared war on all forms of objectivity, including optics, and claimed for themselves the true grail of color: the power of suggestion. The arguments reached into every corner of the art world, even the Atelier Cormon. In the same year as Vincent’s brief attendance, according to one account, the studio erupted in a dispute over color so intense that the complacent master was forced to expel the troublemakers and temporarily close his school.
Through all the rancor and upheaval around him, Vincent remained true to the gospel of color that he learned on the heath. Through a spring and summer crowded with opportunities to see the images roiling the art world, his devotion never wavered. At the eighth and final Impressionists’ show in May, where he could finally study the works that had triggered the uproar a decade before (except for Monet and Renoir, who boycotted the show—a sign of the turbulent times), Vincent found only confirmation of the verdict he had argued to Theo for years. “When one sees them for the first time,” he later recalled his introduction to Impressionist images, “one is bitterly, bitterly disappointed, and thinks them slovenly, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, bad in color, everything that’s miserable.” After seeing them, he wrote Livens reassuringly, “Neither your color nor mine relates to their theories.” He explained the difference this way: “I have faith in color.”
At the same exhibition he also saw Seurat’s Grande Jatte, the symbolic meditations of Redon, and dozens of works by young artists unknown to him, including Paul Gauguin. But he commented favorably only on a suite of nude women, in pastel, by Degas. Through the Exhibition Internationale in June (where the works of Monet and Renoir were on display), and the equally huge Salon des Indépendants in August (in which almost 350 artists took part), and the exhibition of the Incoherents, Vincent commented favorably on only one work in his letter to Livens that fall: a Monet landscape.
What he missed in the shows, he could see every day in scores of galleries and dealers’ dens: from the storied salesroom of Durand-Ruel, Impressionism’s first champion, where a visitor could spend days viewing the nearly bankrupt dealer’s unsold stock, to the apartment of Arsène Portier, just downstairs, where Manets and Cézannes were available for close inspection. For more exotic fare, any night, he had only to visit one of the many cabarets like Le Chat Noir or Le Mirliton, where the walls were filled with the latest fumiste concoctions (including some by Lautrec), or just walk the streets where frame dealers and paint stores like Tanguy’s offered a babel of imagery in their windows.
Through the blizzard of sectarian reviews and fire-breathing rhetoric, through atelier debates and café chatter, Vincent clung to the view he had brought to Paris from the heath: complementary color was the one true gospel and Delacroix its truest prophet. “Delacroix was his god,” a fellow Cormon student recalled; “when he spoke of this painter, his lips would quiver with emotion.” In his studio, he kept a lacquered box containing balls of brightly colored yarn that he endlessly twined and untwined to test the interaction of colors—exactly the procedure described by Chevreul, who had developed his theories as director of dyes for the royal looms at Gobelins.
Instead of seeking out the Grande Jatte, Vincent returned again and again to the Louvre to view works like The Bark of Dante, Delacroix’s great vision of artistic determination, a painting mythologized in Charles Blanc’s writings. In the same galleries where he ignored so much, he sought out lesser-known images by the Romantic master. Dismissing those, like Anquetin, who considered Monet and the Impressionists the keepers of Delacroix’s palette, Vincent celebrated his own private pantheon of true heirs—painters like the Belgian Henri de Braekeleer and the long-dead Barbizon master Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña—and anointed a little-known Marseille painter, Adolphe Monticelli, as the truest disciple of all.
In the charged atmosphere, Vincent’s contrary certainty riled partisans on every side. “He was always quarreling,” wrote Theo’s friend Andries Bonger, whose comments on Vincent’s work were always met with the same fierce defense: “He persists in replying, ‘but I wanted to introduce this or that color contrast,’ ” Bonger complained, adding tartly, “as if I give a damn about what he wanted to do!” When he visited Tanguy’s to buy paints—a rare opportunity to engage fellow painters—Vincent would linger for hours arguing color theory with the other customers.
He clashed spectacularly with the shop’s owner, Julien Tanguy (known to everyone as Père Tanguy), over the Impressionists’ cheerful palette. Tanguy had not only mixed color for some of the giants of the revolution (including Monet and Renoir), he had appointed himself personal champion for one of their number in particular: Paul Cézanne. The dingy shop’s storage rooms were stocked to the rafters with the unpopular works of the hermetic Provençal master, who had left them there to rot or sell, he didn’t care which. Tanguy, a grizzled old socialist with a sentimental streak, defended both the Impressionists and Cézanne with the fierceness of a Communard, which only incited Vincent to greater storms of vehemence. A customer once saw Vincent emerging from Tanguy’s back room after an argument looking as if “he would erupt into flames.”
Deprived of models but determined to make his case for color, Vincent turned to a new subject: flowers. The choice was both rhetorical and commercial. Theo, too, admired the work of Monticelli, whose brashly colored, heavily encrusted little images of flowers and festive parties (fêtes galantes) had attracted a small but avid following in Paris and elsewhere. Theo not only dealt in Monticelli’s works, he kept several of them for his own collection—conferring on the Marseille artist both the stamp of salability and the lure of fraternal solidarity. When Monticelli died suddenly in June under strange circumstances (it was said he drank himself into insanity and suicide), Vincent’s fervor transformed him into a hero: a L’oeuvre-like martyr for color. He rushed to his studio and began a series of small, impacted still lifes showing flowers in scumbles of pungent reds and yellows. He painted orange lilies on a cobalt field, and ocher chrysanthemums, like suns, jumbled in a ginger jar of unfathomably deep green. Like Monticelli, he rendered even the brightest flowers in craggy impastos and draped them in Rembrandt’s darkest shadows. Every image served both as an homage to Monticelli (and Delacroix) and a rebuke—in rich hues, dramatic highlights, dark backgrounds, and prodigal paint—to all the so-called “modern” colorists.
Determined to prove that his contrary images could also be salable, Vincent took some of them to Agostina Segatori, hoping she might either buy them or at least show them at Le Tambourin. Segatori, who showcased other artists’ works and pitched her establishment as “more museum than café,” took pity on the ardent Dutchman and agreed to hang some of his paintings with the other “works of masters” on her walls. She also began accepting them as payment for meals, and may even have sent him flowers to suggest future subjects—giving Vincent all the
proof of commercial viability he needed.
Fueled by the prospect of more “sales,” by the enthusiasm for Monticelli that he shared with Theo, and by his own devotion to Delacroix, Vincent launched a furious campaign of persuasion in paint. As if illustrating Chevreul’s voluminous studies, he worked his way through the full range of complementary contrasts and tonal harmonies, using blossoms, vases, and backgrounds in ever-shifting combinations: red gladioli in a green bottle; orange coleus leaves against a blue field; purple asters and yellow salvia. From meditations in red with asters and phlox, to harmonies of green and blue with peonies and forget-me-nots, to red-green riots of contrast with carnations and roses, he argued his case with insistent thoroughness. To Livens, he boasted of his color “gymnastics.” Over the course of the summer, he exhausted the greenhouses of Paris: lilacs and zinnias, geraniums and hollyhocks, daisies and dahlias.
He worked with the lightning speed of the Nuenen peasant “heads”—faster than the flowers could wilt in the stifling city heat—turning out a score of images each month. Perhaps encouraged by Segatori’s continued support, he moved to bigger and bigger canvases, but he kept the saturated color, deep chiaroscuro, and sculptural brushstrokes of the unsung Monticelli rather than the all-over light and airy strokes—even dashes and dots—that marked the new art all around him.
Throughout the fall and into the winter, Vincent grew increasingly isolated and defiant. If anything, he built the barricades of mania even higher as the weather grew colder and the flowers fled south. He returned to the subjects of the spring: still lifes of boots, scenes of Montmartre, even the little plaster nudes in his studio. Only now he wrung them through the gospel of complementary color: painting some in vivid contrasts, some in tonal harmonies, some in both. He defied the Impressionists’ sunlight by painting his vignettes of city life under cloudy skies, and rejected their frivolous obsessions with yet more images of Nuenen diggers—only now dressed in blue and orange.
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