Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Other artists were drawn to the borning flame of enterprise on the rue Lepic and the entresol, but only Bernard bid for Theo’s favor by directly courting his strange and difficult brother. The rest, like the students at the Antwerp Academy or Cormon’s studio, merely tolerated him, out of deference or fear of a bad report. When they congregated at a café or at someone’s studio (Guillaumin’s and Lautrec’s were favorites; never Vincent’s), they seldom included him in their conversations. “[Vincent] arrived carrying a heavy canvas under his arm,” recalled a participant in one such gathering, “and waited for us to pay some attention to it. No one took notice.” In direct encounters, they scoffed at his naïve enthusiasms and chaffed at his prickly self-righteousness, but feared his volatile temper. They rarely visited his studio and dreaded his visits to theirs, having heard stories of how “[he] would tear off his clothes and fall on his knees to make a point clearer, and nothing would calm him down,” according to the account of one such visit.

  Camille and Lucien Pissarro, perhaps the most regular callers at the brothers’ apartment, once encountered Vincent on the rue Lepic coming back from a day of plein air painting. In a fit of eagerness to show his latest work, Vincent dropped his load of equipment in the middle of the busy sidewalk and lined the wet canvases up against the wall “to the great amazement of passersby,” Lucien recalled. On the basis of this and, no doubt, other such incidents, Camille concluded that Vincent was almost surely on the road to madness. Guillaumin came to the same conclusion when Vincent visited his studio and immediately started criticizing his paintings of men unloading sand. “Suddenly he went wild,” Guillaumin told an early chronicler, “shouting that the movements were all wrong, and he began jumping about the studio, wielding an imaginary spade, waving his arms, making what he considered to be the appropriate gestures.” The scene reminded Guillaumin of a painting by Delacroix: Tasso in the Madhouse. But civility to a madman was a small price to pay for a chance to show on the entresol.

  Meanwhile, Vincent obliviously pursued his vision of an “entourage of artists” guided and supported by the brothers Van Gogh. He made introductions, wrote letters, arranged exchanges, and dispensed relentless advice on how fellow artists could advance their careers. He hinted that Theo was prepared to provide regular monthly stipends to some artists (just as he had to Vincent)—the fantasy of every painter in the feast-or-famine world of living by the brush. He urged them to “set aside petty jealousies” and summoned them to “unity and strength,” just as he had so often summoned his brother. “Surely the common interest is worth the sacrifice of that selfishness of every man for himself,” he preached. Borrowing a coinage, probably from Lautrec, he tried to unite the fractious group under a new name: artists of the “petit boulevard” (side street), as opposed to successful Impressionists like Degas and Monet, who had already won their place in the galleries of the “grand boulevard.” It was the perfect caption from a man who lived by captions: rallying his fellows not to their divisive art, but to their shared aspirations.

  Hovering over every call to solidarity and sacrifice, of course, was the promise of reward: “If you work hard,” he wrote Bernard, “I think you might end up by having a certain stock of pictures, some of which we shall try to sell for you.” It was that promise that kept Lautrec circling despite his inevitable disdain for the coarse and earnest Dutchman, so different from his smooth and subtle brother. On one outing to a café, Lautrec, a lightning draftsman, made a sketch of Vincent sitting alone in a booth with a glass of absinthe. Later, he took the sketch home and turned it into a pastel portrait, which he presented to the brothers. With typical Lautrecian drollery, he portrayed Vincent not frontally but in profile, cold-shouldering the observer, staring straight out over the already mixed absinthe on the table in front of him—perhaps deep in thought, perhaps in a huff at a sly insult or insufficient attention; but in any case, lost in his own world. In January 1888, Theo bought a painting of Lautrec’s. After Vincent left Paris in February, he wrote Lautrec a letter. Lautrec never answered.

  HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, 1887, PASTEL ON CARDBOARD, 21⅜ × 17¾ IN. (Illustration credit 29.3)

  Sometime in October 1887, Vincent began to lay plans for an exhibition. It would be a manifestation not just of the “new school” of art, but also of Vincent’s central role in the brothers’ new enterprise. The proposal to Theo must have been both artistic and commercial: an exhibition would test the public’s interest, raise awareness of their venture among artists and critics, audition art for the entresol, and, not least, give Vincent an opportunity to show his own work—something Theo could never do at the Goupil gallery.

  Theo may have approved of the concept, but he surely disapproved of the venue Vincent chose. No one could have mistaken the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet for an art gallery. With its immense, unadorned hall and lofty ceiling, it looked more like “a Methodist chapel,” according to one visitor. And with its crowds of hungry, noisy working-class patrons, it sounded more like a train station. Nothing recommended it as a place to show art except that Vincent, who frequently ate there, knew the proprietor, Lucien Martin, and Martin needed something to put on his vast empty walls (“enough space to hang a thousand canvases,” one observer estimated). Vincent may have been urged to the unconventional site by Bernard, whose impatience for notoriety drove him inevitably to insurgent venues; but, like other vanguard artists and dealers, Vincent probably had no better choice.

  The show was a disaster. Indeed, it was hardly a show at all (Bernard later referred to it as merely “an attempt” at a show). No matter how vehemently he argued, Vincent could not bring the bitterly divided avant-garde art world together under the skylights of the Restaurant du Chalet. Bernard vetoed the inclusion of Neo-Impressionists like Signac and Seurat (frustrating Vincent’s effort to reconnect with Signac, who returned to Paris in November). Vincent himself refused to include the Symbolists, like Redon, that Bernard pushed on him. Pissarro, a stout partisan of Seurat, took umbrage at the exclusion of Signac (he referred to Neo-Impressionism as “our common struggle”) and refused to participate. His son Lucien followed suit. In the end, only Bernard and his Cormon comrades Lautrec and Anquetin agreed to contribute a few works—a testament to Theo’s backing and Goupil’s allure. Guillaumin may have contributed for the same reason. (Theo made his first purchase of a Guillaumin painting about the time the show opened, and featured his works on the entresol soon after it closed.)

  With so few artists participating, Vincent’s plan for a joint exhibition, a show of “unity and strength,” collapsed. To avoid an outright embarrassment—a comedy of inconsequence in Martin’s huge hall—Vincent filled up the show with his own work. He lugged cartload after cartload of paintings from the rue Lepic to the restaurant on the avenue de Clichy a half mile away, virtually emptying his studio. He enlisted Arnold Koning, a young Dutch artist who happened to be visiting the brothers from Holland, to help him hang the fifty to one hundred canvases, almost all of them Vincent’s.

  Despite the Herculean effort, the exhibition foundered after only a few weeks. As at Le Tambourin, and everywhere else, Vincent fell into a dispute. The proprietor Martin was so eager to fill his bare walls that he began hanging “patriotic shields” alongside Vincent’s precious paintings. The ensuing argument escalated until Martin summarily canceled the exhibition and ordered Vincent and his paintings out of the restaurant.

  During the brief interval between late November and early December when the strange array of unframed images hung on the walls of Martin’s cavernous eatery, hardly a soul noticed them. There was no catalogue, no announcement in the paper, no review. No “public” came. The restaurant’s regular patrons “paid more attention to the dish of the day” than to the new décor, one visitor recalled, although some seemed “a little disconcerted by the forbidding aspect of the paintings.” A few minor dealers dropped by, either earning or repaying favors. Some of the artists in the Van Gogh brothers’
circle (Pissarro, Guillaumin) came; others (Lautrec, Anquetin) apparently stayed away. Surprisingly, Georges Seurat showed up one day and spoke briefly to Vincent.

  Among the visitors was another artist whom Vincent had never met. He was a slight, suntanned man, just back from a long voyage to the Caribbean: Paul Gauguin.

  BETWEEN PROSELYTIZING for the painters of the Petit Boulevard, strategizing and promoting the brothers’ new enterprise, and preparing for the Restaurant du Chalet exhibition, Vincent had little time left for his own work. He later admitted doing only “a little painting” in the last months of 1887. It didn’t help that the police had banned him from working in the streets—a consequence, no doubt, of public displays like the one the Pissarros witnessed. The cosmopolites of Paris, no less than the peasants of Nuenen, found his strange habits and vehement displays disruptive.

  When he did go to the studio, it was inevitably to enlist his art in the brothers’ new shared mission.

  While Theo flattered and engaged artists with words, Vincent did the same with images. Driven by his vision of fraternal partnership, the mirage of collegiality, and his own protean imagination, Vincent opened a dialogue of imagery with each of the painters in the brothers’ circle. Like an anxious host, he darted from artist to artist, from innovation to innovation, leaving a zigzag trail of images that would defy later efforts to order or categorize them.

  For Pissarro, he already had stacks of pointillist works from his trips to Asnières to prove his engagement with Seurat’s science of color and light. He answered Lautrec’s pastel portrait of him with still lifes—one of a glass of absinthe—done in the same soft palette and feathery strokes. When Anquetin introduced him to the possibilities of monochrome canvases—works dominated by a single color—Vincent responded with a still life of apples all in yellow. When Guillaumin introduced violent colors and brutal contrasts into the argument over the future of Impressionism, Vincent fired back with canvases of blazing color and crashing complementaries. But when Signac returned to Paris in November, Vincent reached out to him with a very different conversation: still lifes of French novels, a motif he had undoubtedly seen in Signac’s earlier work, done in the gay tonalities and restless pointillist brush the two had shared in the spring—an image as carefully crafted to please its recipient as Vincent’s most polished letter.

  Émile Bernard introduced Vincent, in both words and images, to a radically new direction in art. Intent on being a leader, not a follower, Bernard advocated an imagery that would overturn Impressionism, not merely “renew” it. Beginning in 1887, he developed a stylized art of flat planes of color and bold outlines arranged to maximum ornamental effect, and compositions reduced to the simplest possible geometries—in short, an art that defied the canons of Impressionism in all its forms, indicting equally the feckless vagaries of Monet and the faux precision of Seurat. Both had failed in art’s greatest mission, he argued: to penetrate to the essence of life. Instead, they had rendered reality as insubstantial and meaningless—an evanescent stage effect, not real at all.

  These ideas belonged originally to Anquetin, a fearless innovator; the imagery, to the reclusive Paul Cézanne. But Bernard advertised them to Vincent in the bold new language of the Symbolists—the language of Huysmans’s À rebours. An image stripped of its temporal, scientific finery (Bernard called objective truth “an intruder in art”), reduced to color and design, possessed the same mysterious expressive power as pure sensation, he argued. Indeed, it was sensation. “What is the point of reproducing the thousand insignificant details that the eye perceives?” one critic summarized the rebellious new art. “One should grasp the essential characteristic and reproduce it—or, rather, produce it.” (In March 1888, the same critic coined a name for the new art: “Cloisonnism,” invoking the mosaic-like segmented color used on enameled metalware.)

  Like the Symbolists, Bernard claimed roots for his imagery in the iconography of the past, citing as precedents everything from medieval tapestries to Gothic stained-glass windows. In particular, he invoked the simplicity and directness of Japanese prints.

  These humble, ubiquitous images, imported by the bale for decades, had only recently been swept up into the debate about the future of art. While the exoticism and refinement of Japanese aesthetics had transfixed artists like Whistler and Manet as early as the 1860s, it wasn’t until the Exposition Universelle of 1878, with its dazzling Japanese pavilion, that “japonisme”—the mania for all things Japanese—began to grip the Paris art world. Stores specializing in Japanese arts opened on the city’s most fashionable shopping streets, selling everything from porcelains to samurai swords, but mostly reams of prints. Monet collected both prints and fans, and famously painted his wife in a striking red kimono. Le Chat Noir incorporated the imagery of Japanese prints into its shadow plays, and comprehensive guides, like Louis Gonse’s L’art japonais, unlocked the mysteries of their meaning. In 1886, only a few months after Vincent’s arrival in Paris, a popular magazine, Paris Illustré, featured a Japanese print on the cover of a special issue devoted entirely to the art and culture of the floating kingdom.

  Symbolists, especially, seized on the colorful, ubiquitous little prints as a model for the new art. Their prismatic color, exaggerated perspective, and stylized iconography represented the elemental expression of a “primitive” culture—that is, one uncorrupted by the bourgeois values and spiritual malaise of fin-de-siècle Europe. (In the same way, the cultures of medieval Europe, ancient Egypt, tribal Africa, and the Pacific islands were all deemed “primitive.”) Like the madmen and eccentrics that the Symbolists heroized, these unspoiled cultures, and their creations, had remained closer to the elusive world of essences—the wellspring of all great art.

  Vincent may have encountered Japanese art as early as childhood through a seafaring uncle who visited the island soon after it opened to the West and brought home its strange artifacts. Decades later, in The Hague and even in the wilderness of Nuenen, he had felt the rising tide of japonisme in the books he read, the prints he collected, and the Salon catalogues he consumed. It wasn’t until he arrived in Antwerp in late 1885, however, after reading Edmond de Goncourt’s celebration of Japanese art in Chérie, that he began to collect the cheap, colorful woodcuts that filled the shops of the maritime city.

  They were called crépons for the thin, wrinkled paper, like crêpe, on which they were printed. Vincent was drawn especially to images of geishas (as he was to all depictions of pleasuring women) and to busy city scenes: detailed panoramas of a distant world that appealed both to his long obsession with perspective and to his natural window-gazing, eavesdropping curiosity. Even then, he saw them mainly as affordable collectibles, decorations for an artist’s studio, and, in a pinch, a ready source of cash or exchange. His exhibition at Le Tambourin had been based on the belief—mistaken, it turned out—in the easy redeemability of his crépon collection.

  It wasn’t until late 1887, however, when Bernard introduced him to their symbolist secrets—their expressive code—that Vincent accepted the simple prints as lessons for his own art. Other artistic affinities drew him to this belated embrace. Already in Antwerp he had admired the luminous colors of stained-glass windows as well as the paintings of Henri de Braekeleer, with their patches of pure color and profound simplicity (“hardly anything, and yet a great deal”).

  But it took Bernard’s advocacy to lure Vincent off the trodden path of Impressionism. The younger artist sealed the older’s devotion with a claim—improbable but extravagantly flattering—that the Tambourin exhibition had influenced him and Anquetin in formulating their revolutionary imagery. Hungry for validation, especially from the young painter on whom he had set his brotherly eye, Vincent readily accepted Bernard’s blandishments and rewarded them with a storm of appreciation for crépons as passionate as the one he had shared with Anthon van Rappard for black-and-white prints.

  Informed by Gonse’s guide and inflamed by a succession of celebratory exhibitions in Paris in the wi
nter of 1887, Vincent descended on the premier retailer of Japanese art in the Western world, the emporium of Siegfried Bing. The store’s bronze doors, only a few blocks from Theo’s gallery, opened into a world of exotic artifacts and imagery, both Japanese and Chinese, in every medium and at every price: from authentic imperial pieces to reproductions crafted in Bing’s own workshops. A combination of Goupil-like ambition and a genuine zeal for Asian art had lofted Bing, a German native, to the zenith of the French decorative arts (a perch from which, a decade later, he would launch the Art Nouveau movement).

  With the fervor of a prospector, Vincent sifted through the “heaps” of images stored in Bing’s cellar and attic—“ten thousand crépons,” he exulted—poring over landscapes and figures; dozens of Mount Fujis and hundreds of geishas; pagodas and flowers and samurai fighters. “You’re dazzled, there’s so much of it,” he confessed. He returned again and again, haggling with the manager over prices, offering to swap previous purchases, or even to exchange one of his own paintings for a bundle of the precious tissues. He used his connection to Goupil to persuade the store to give him prints on credit—a license that swelled the “stock” of crépons on the rue Lepic to more than a thousand and ran up a perilous debt. He badgered Theo with elaborate plans for marketing the little prints and pleas to invest more in them. He battered other artists, especially Bernard and Anquetin, with exhortations to join him on his treasure hunts, or at least go and learn what wonders could be found in the dusty heaps.

  It wasn’t long before the fever swept into his studio. In a winter when little else was accomplished there, he spent hour upon hour tracing the exotic new images and transferring them to canvas. It was a madly elaborate process—almost an act of self-mortification for the voluble, impatient Vincent. He had to draw a grid on paper; then trace the little scenes—every blossom, every branch; then draw another, larger grid on the canvas, sometimes twice the size of the original; then transfer the tracing, square by square, line by line, onto the canvas grid.