Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  It took another three months of abuse for Theo to act. “There was a time that I loved Vincent and that he was my best friend,” he wrote to sister Wil in March, “but that is now in the past. I wish he would go and live by himself, and I will do my best to make that happen.” Even then, he resisted Wil’s call for him to cut the cord completely. “If I told him he must leave,” Theo despaired, “it would only be a reason for him to stay.” He may have chosen to move out temporarily himself, rather than confront his brother. But eventually the message was received. In April, Vincent applied to the Dutch consulate in Paris for a permit to return to Antwerp.

  —

  ONLY WHEN THE invisible ties had been stretched to the breaking point did Vincent spring to repair them.

  As in the past, he reached out with art. Theo had always pushed his brother to do landscapes, adamant about both the reparative power and the commercial appeal of nature’s beauty. But those calls had rung hollow to Vincent ever since Theo had rejected the heathscapes from Drenthe as too derivative of the brothers’ childhood favorite, Georges Michel. In the thrall of Millet and the fervor of The Potato Eaters, Theo’s advocacy had come to look increasingly like obstructionism—designed merely to frustrate Vincent’s passion for figure painting. That impression seemed confirmed in Antwerp when Theo pushed him to return to Brabant and paint landscapes rather than come to Paris to gratify his craving for nude models. In response, Vincent dismissed plein air painting as unchic (“[Parisians] care little for outdoor studies,” he insisted) and claimed that working outdoors was bad for his health.

  In the year since, he had hardly ventured beyond the precincts of the rue Lepic apartment. He documented his neighborhood and the view from his window (just as he did in every new home), but rarely visited even a park. In a city obsessed with escaping itself in the summer heat, he spent the entire summer holed up in his studio, painting bowl after bowl of withering flowers.

  But all that changed in early 1887. Before the trees had even budded, Vincent lugged his paint box and equipment over the butte, past Montmartre’s ramshackle margins, past the crumbling fortifications that girdled the old city, and through the ring of factories and warehouses that circled the new one. Finally, about three and a half miles out, he hit the banks of the Seine—not far from the Île de la Grande Jatte, the summer playground immortalized by Seurat.

  Over the next months, at points all along this route, he marshaled his paints and brushes and his conciliatory eye in an all-out campaign to reclaim his brother’s favor. Forsaking years of strident rhetoric and uncompromising images, he embraced the art that Theo had advocated so long in vain: Impressionism. It was a reversal abrupt and dramatic even by Vincent’s volatile standards. He planted his easel on the broad boulevards and suburban highways, beside industrial monuments and banlieue vistas—all subjects favored by the new art but long ignored by him—and painted them in the bright colors and drenching sunlight that had been the subject of so many heated debates on the rue Lepic.

  Especially on the banks of the distant Seine, where spring came early, he made amends for his years of obstinacy. He filled canvas after canvas with the Impressionists’ signature images of bourgeois leisure: a Sunday rower on a glistening river, timid waders at the water’s shallow edge, a straw-hatted stroller on the grassy riverbank, a boatman resting in the shore’s dappled shade. He painted tourist landmarks like the Restaurant de la Sirène, a Victorian pleasure palace that loomed over the little riverside town of Asnières, just downriver from La Grande Jatte. During the high season, the Sirène’s long verandas filled with spectators for river regattas and day-trippers fleeing the stifling city. He painted the huge bathing barges anchored just offshore and the fashionable waterside restaurants set with linen and crystal and bouquets of flowers—scenes as far from the hovels of Nuenen as imagination could take him—all rendered in the pastel tones and shadowless, silvery light he had decried so vehemently, in words and images, only months before.

  Throughout the spring and into the summer, he returned again and again to the same area around Asnières—outings that had the added benefit, if not the intention, of absenting him from the apartment. Theo “look[ed] forward to the days when Vincent would wander off into the country,” Dries Bonger recalled. “He would get peace then.” Liberated from his long resistance, and desperate to find the key to his brother’s favor, Vincent tried virtually every technique in the Impressionists’ repertoire, all of which he had studied carefully, even in rejection.

  His experiments with Impressionist brushwork had already begun earlier that winter in still lifes and portraits, like the ones of the Scotsman Reid. Because the gospels of Millet and Blanc were relatively silent on the application of paint, his brush was free to test the new art’s texture even as he continued to attack its fainthearted palette. Already in Antwerp, the dense, featureless surface of The Potato Eaters had given way to the enlever contours of his portraits, and these in turn to the scumbled encrustations of the previous summer’s flowers. As early as January 1887, he experimented with both the thinner paint and the more open compositions of Impressionists like Monet and Degas. In the spring, he abandoned altogether the heavy impastos and compacted surfaces of the past and set out to try his hand at the whole complex calligraphy of brushstrokes that distinguished the new art as much as its color or light.

  The paintings of spring and summer were filled with the fashionable shorthand of dashes and dots. He tried them in every size and shape: from bricklike rectangles to comma-like curls to bits of color no bigger than flies. He arranged them in neat parallel ranks, in interlocking basketweaves, and in elaborate, changing patterns. Sometimes they followed the contours of the landscape; sometimes they radiated outward; sometimes they all swept across the canvas in the same direction, as if blown by an unseen wind. He applied them in tight, overlapping thickets; in complex confederations of color; and in loose, latticelike skeins that revealed the underlayers of paint or ground. His dots clotted and clustered, filled large areas with perfect regularity or exploded in erratic swarms.

  In his race to make up for lost time, he jumped back and forth over ideological chasms that brought other artists to blows, often combining Divisionist dots and Impressionist brushwork in the same image. Eschewing or ignoring Seurat’s optical claims, he mixed the colors on his palette exactly as he had always done, rather than apply them “pure” and trust the viewer’s eye to blend them. His pointille came and went, faded in and out from painting to painting, even within paintings, as his patience for the painstaking method waxed and waned.

  On days too cold or wet for the trip to Asnières, he practiced all these new liberties on an old and elusive subject: himself. Risking only cheap sheets of cardboard or scraps of paper not much bigger than postcards, he painted the dapper, chapeauxed image in the mirror in every combination of palette and brush: from monochrome scrawls to delicate cameos in pastel pinks and blues; from sketches in broad slashes to mosaics of brushwork in every pattern, density, and dilution. Finally, he committed himself to a real canvas and rendered the familiar visage in a hail of tiny brushmarks that barely touched the canvas, using paint almost as insubstantial as watercolor, and hurtling to finish it so fast that the last flicks of background blue fly off the vibrating figure like sparks off a flame.

  In all these experiments, Vincent had an advantage he could not have anticipated. Years of seeing with an etcher’s eye had prepared him unknowingly for the fractured image making of the new art. He had long since mastered the interweaving of solids and voids: rendering contour and texture through hatching and stippling; manipulating form through the density and direction of markings. To school his hand in the new styles, he had only to recruit these old skills in the service of his new understanding of color—to substitute Blanc’s matrix of simultaneous contrasts and kindred hues for the binary interplay of his beloved black- and-whites.

  By connecting these two wellsprings of picture making, the jabbing images of that spring and summe
r finally freed Vincent from the unforgiving linearity of realism and opened up his paintings to the spontaneity and intensity of his best drawings.

  As if celebrating this triumphant synthesis, he took a huge canvas (at three feet by four feet, as big as The Potato Eaters) and filled it with a drawing in paint: a view of the Montmartre butte that he passed every day on his route to Asnières. As closely observed as the carpenter’s yard on the Schenkweg or the pollard birches in Nuenen, the ragged patchwork of vegetable gardens brings the chalky hillside to exuberant life. Color breaks in everywhere—green hedgerows, red rooftops, boards weathered lavender by the sun, pink sheds and powder-blue pickets, the radiant yellow stubble of harvested plots—rendered in thousands of unique marks by Vincent’s tireless brush, from the vivid stipples of rosebushes to the tiny hatching of distant fences to the broad strokes of hazy blue sky. A lime-white road, glaring in the summer sun, fills the bottom of the picture, then winds dramatically to the distant crest of the butte where a mill without sails stands alone on the horizon, stripped to its violet bones.

  For Vincent, everything about the picture was a repudiation of the past: the absence of figures and shadows; the relentlessly bright, clear colors; the peremptory brushwork; the paint so thinned that it lies on the canvas like pastel, showing the white undercoat between every stroke, as ubiquitous and blinding as the chalky ground. If The Potato Eaters was a meditation on darkness, La butte Montmartre was a reverie of light.

  In his explorations of the new art (a self-education that telescoped ten years of artistic innovation into a few frantic months), Vincent had help from another unexpected source. At twenty-three, Paul Signac was a decade younger than Vincent—younger even than Theo—but already fluent in all the many dialects of imagery that competed for the allegiance of young artists in Paris. He had made Manet a hero as a teenager; seen the light of Impressionism in high school (while Vincent was still laboring in the mines of the Borinage); and written for Le Chat Noir by the time he turned twenty. An inexhaustible reader, he had consumed not only the Naturalist literature that Vincent loved, but great swaths of philosophy and art theory, and could converse on them with a precocious facility that admitted him to virtually any intellectual or artistic circle he set his sights on. As a founder of the juryless Salon des Indépendants—a refuge for all artists neglected by officialdom, not just Impressionists—Signac created a vast network of friends that he cultivated with proselytic fervor.

  He and Vincent had lived only a few blocks apart for a year, but never met. Vincent certainly knew of Signac by reputation: he had seen his work at the Indépendants’ show the previous summer, and probably again at their next exhibition in April 1887, which included almost a dozen of Signac’s canvases. By all accounts, though, their first real encounter came quite by accident on one of Vincent’s day trips to Asnières. Signac, the son of a wealthy shopkeeper, kept a studio at his family’s house there (in addition to both an apartment and a studio in Montmartre), and the return of spring lured him to the riverbank just as it did so many Parisians. Two painters, both working on the same short stretch of riverfront, could hardly help but meet.

  Despite his gregarious nature, however, Signac did not pursue the connection with any apparent vigor. By his own account, he saw Vincent only “several times” over the rest of the spring: a morning of painting outdoors, lunch at a local bistro, perhaps, and at least once a long walk back to the city. His brief reminiscence portrays Vincent as a somewhat clownish and not necessarily welcome companion on his country excursions. “He shouted, gesticulated and brandished his big canvas which was still quite wet,” Signac recalled, “smothering himself and passers-by with paint.” Once they reached the city, their paths parted. Signac never introduced Vincent to any of his wide circle of friends nor invited him to the soirées he hosted every Monday night at his residence, just a short walk from the rue Lepic apartment.

  Of course, Vincent didn’t need the young Signac to show him the “new” Impressionism. He had seen it scores of times, starting with the Grande Jatte itself, probably at both its exhibitions in 1886. Like many young artists, Vincent’s Cormon classmates Anquetin and Lautrec had fallen under Seurat’s Pointillist spell that same summer. Their works, as well as those by Signac and other acolytes, were on view throughout the following winter and spring. Even those who resisted the new style, like John Peter Russell, argued about it endlessly.

  So Vincent had undoubtedly seen the art and heard the ideas many times before he encountered the cocky young painter on the banks of the Seine. But Signac was a charismatic spokesman, an incorrigible explainer, and Vincent was a man bereft of companionship for whom a hands-on demonstration, a word of encouragement, or a cordial compliment could work wonders. Their interaction, however brief or awkward, touched his imagination in a way no exhibition could. Vincent expressed his gratitude in paint. Whether in Signac’s company or merely for his approval, he painted at all the Neo-Impressionists’ favorite spots along the Seine, including the Île de la Grande Jatte itself, eagerly mimicking the dense pointille, strict color rules, and radiant light of his young mentor. Finally, he sealed their connection with a self-portrait done exactly as Signac would have done it—all disciplined dots and color juxtapositions.

  But as soon as his occasional companion left Paris at the end of May, Vincent’s brush abandoned the strictures of Pointillism and returned to the goal that had driven him out of the city and into the countryside in the first place. In a series of shady, close-up vignettes of forest floor and rural path, he cast aside Signac’s rules, Monet’s subjects, even Blanc’s complementaries, and returned to the intimacies of his earliest landscapes—the cozy glimpses of nature that had always pleased his brother most: a lush carpet of undergrowth at the base of an ivy-laced tree; a sunlit clearing seen through a dense latticework of young saplings; a field of summer wheat at the moment when a gust of wind churns the stalks into waves and startles a partridge from its hiding place.

  After the silk cravats and smart felt hats of his self-portraits, after the glowing reports of advantageous relations with the young gentleman Signac, these affirmations of nature’s reparative powers touched the final talisman of Van Gogh family amends, capping Vincent’s months-long push to win back his brother’s lost devotion.

  But it wasn’t enough. Theo certainly recognized the change in his brother’s art and welcomed his long-overdue embrace of Impressionism. “[Vincent’s] paintings are becoming lighter,” he reported to sister Lies in May; “he is trying hard to put more sunlight in them.” And the images of nature worked their parsonage-garden magic, moving Theo to flights of poetic appreciation for “nature’s vast magnificence.” Vincent’s long absences from the apartment, combined with the ministrations of a new doctor, had also revived Theo’s health, at least temporarily. Whether because of the changes in Vincent’s art, or the improvements in his spirits, or just the coming of spring (“man, just as nature, thaws out sometimes when the sun shines,” he wrote), Theo reached out to his brother. “We have made our peace,” he reported to sister Wil in April. “I hope it will last … I have asked him to stay.”

  But on the most important judgment of all, Vincent had failed to win a reprieve. If anything, the trials of the winter had only redoubled Theo’s determination to marry. The months of ominous illness and battles with Vincent had turned his natural melancholy into a deep dread of living out his remaining years deprived of “interaction with sympathizing souls.” In letters to his sisters, he poured out his loneliness and desperation. He complained of “difficult days” when it would “mean so much to know that there is somebody who wants to help”; of times when he felt “all alone,” facing impossible challenges with “no way out.” He exhorted them, and himself, to “find what your heart desires so that you may always feel warmth around you.” He warned them, and himself, that “perfect happiness is not of this earth.” For him the answer was plain enough. “I intend to ask for Jo Bonger’s hand,” he declared. He had not seen her s
ince the previous summer—had not even written her—but “she could mean oh so much to me,” he imagined. “I could trust her in a very special way, like nobody else.”

  In May, just after his thirtieth birthday, Theo announced his intentions. He would go to Amsterdam “as soon as possible” and beg Jo Bonger to marry him.

  The news, expected though it was, plunged Vincent into despair. Even as his palette and brush continued to capture the bursting sunshine of the Paris summer, his spirits sank into darkness and depression. He talked of suicide, and suffered paralyzing nightmares. He ruminated on death in two painted studies of a stark, Yorick-like skull. As in Nuenen, where he never left the studio without a flask of cognac, he found solace in drink. The route to and from Asnières was lined with cafés and bistros where he could end the long, hot workdays, as so many Parisians did, in the cool, sweet-green oblivion of absinthe.

  Like Theo, he had only his sisters to tell his misery. In a letter so bitter and cynical that it must have alarmed the naïve twenty-five-year-old Wil, he lamented his “lost youth” and cursed the “diseases” of “melancholy and pessimism” that tormented him. He responded to some poetry she had sent for his review with a coruscating denunciation of all artistic aspirations. Down that road, he warned, lay nothing “sacred or good,” but only futility and disillusionment. As if on cue, word arrived from Nuenen that everything he had left behind in the Kerkstraat studio, including studies and drawings and even his precious portfolios of prints, were to be sold at auction to pay the debts he had also abandoned.

  He agonized over the source of his misfortune and misery. He claimed his plight as the curse of neglected artists everywhere, doomed to suffer the fate of “a grain between the millstones”—a seed snatched from the soil before it could ripen or germinate, or a flower “trampled underfoot, frozen or scorched.” He brooded on his own culpability, invoking Zola’s theories of degeneracy and determinism to defend himself from unspoken reproaches. “Evil lies in our own nature,” he protested, “which we have not created ourselves.… Vice and virtue are the products of chemistry, like sugar and bile.” But ultimately he couldn’t hide the true source of his terror. “If I didn’t have Theo,” he wrote, “it would not be possible for me to achieve with my work what I ought to achieve.”