But first he had to paint the giant himself.
Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin, AUGUST 1888, INK ON PAPER, 12¼ × 9¼ IN. (Illustration credit 32.1)
Vincent couldn’t wait to share his astonishing discovery, this Tartarin among the mailbags of the Midi, with his comrades in Paris and Pont-Aven. Just as the Zouave and the Mousmé promised sexual exploits in the land of sun and passion, the postman Roulin would lure the world with the kind of lighthearted, larger-than-life character that could only be found in Daudet’s South. With an offer to pay for food and drink that the bibulous Roulin could hardly refuse, Vincent coaxed his reluctant model into the studio. Roulin sat stiffly, impatiently, while Vincent raced to finish in a single session. He used a big canvas, nearly two by three feet, for his tall-tale subject, and posed him sitting in a chair like a proud Dutch burgher, his arms spread beyond the chair arms as if resting on an imaginary throne. He looks down his pug nose disdainfully as Vincent hurries to capture every detail of his blustery self-regard, from the great gilded coat to the carefully trimmed, twin-pointed beard. Whether in carelessness or in caricature, Vincent painted him with huge hands and heavy-lidded eyes. He placed him against a sky-blue background, both to reinforce the cobalt of his uniform and to highlight the gold ornaments on his sleeve, the double row of brass buttons, and the label on his cap: POSTES. “God damn it!” he boasted to Bernard when he finished, “what a motif to paint in the manner of Daumier, eh!”
By late August, the prospect of hosting Gauguin, and perhaps Bernard, too, had made Vincent acutely aware of the distance, artistic as well as physical, that separated him from his comrades in Pont-Aven. To close that gap, he wrote voluminous letters filled with pledges of unity and common purpose. As if swearing a loyalty oath to the new Cloisonnist cause, he renounced any affiliation with Monet’s Impressionism (“I should not be surprised if the impressionists soon find fault with my way of working,” he wrote) or Seurat’s Neo-Impressionism (which he dismissed as “that school which would confine itself to optical experiment”).
Citing a host of inspirations, from the giants of the Golden Age to the pariah Monticelli, from Richard Wagner to Christopher Columbus, Vincent repeatedly cast himself, Gauguin, and Bernard as a triumvirate of explorers blazing a trail toward “the final doctrine”—an art that would do nothing less than “embrace the whole of the epoch.” Only as a team, he insisted again and again, could they reach this brave new art. “Paintings that achieve the serene summits of the Greek sculptors, the German musicians, and the writers of French novels are beyond the power of an isolated individual,” he cautioned the firebrand Bernard. “They can only be created by groups of men combining to execute an idea held in common.” When Theo suggested that his brother exhibit at the next show at the offices of the Revue Indépendante, despite Kahn’s poor review the previous year, Vincent worried only that his work might present an “obstacle” to his confréres in Pont-Aven. “The honor of all three of us is at stake,” he intoned. “None of us is working for himself alone.”
Only a few days after Theo relayed the Revue’s invitation, Vincent packed up his painting gear and headed to the Place du Forum. By the time he arrived, night had fallen. The spectacle of an artist clattering his easel into place on the dark, pebbled square may have looked like a joke to the locals who strolled by or sat under the awning of the Grand Café du Forum (it was reported with amusement in the local paper). But, in fact, Vincent was protecting the “honor” of his comrades. Only a year earlier, Anquetin, the Revue’s designated champion, had painted a similar nocturnal scene: a crowded sidewalk outside a butcher’s shop illuminated only by the gaslight within and two big gas lanterns hanging from its canopy. Other than the rank of patrons pressed near the orange glow of the windows, the image consisted almost entirely of purple-blue darkness, broken into fragments of hue as if viewed through a blue-glass prism. Anquetin’s night painting (to which he gave the Seurat-like documentary title Avenue de Clichy: Evening, Five O’clock) became an instant icon of the new Japanese style.
Placing himself at exactly the same oblique angle that Anquetin had chosen for his painting, Vincent used the café’s huge awning to create the same plunging perspective into the dark street and night sky beyond. He turned up the gaslight until it filled the covered patio with bright yellow and spilled across the Crau-stone pavement in ripples of complementary color. “I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day,” he wrote as he added wide swaths of orange (for the floors) and blue (for the doors) to his Anquetin tribute. He wrote endlessly of his Cloisonnist bona fides: his reliance on Japanese prints; his admiration for the speed and sureness of Japanese drawing; and, most of all, his devotion to Japanese color. “The Japanese artist ignores reflected colors,” he wrote Bernard, as if reciting a catechism, “and puts the flat tones side by side, with characteristic lines marking off the movements and the forms.”
Through letters and letter sketches from both Bernard and Gauguin, Vincent monitored the refinements to Anquetin’s Japonist ideas that the two artists forged during their summer together in Pont-Aven. Despite having not seen either’s work since the previous winter in Paris (when Gauguin, especially, was painting in a very different style), Vincent relentlessly pledged his allegiance to their unseen art and, based on Bernard’s enthusiastic reports, proclaimed the older artist a leader of the new movement. (Bernard called Gauguin “a very great master and a man absolutely superior in character and intellect.”)
Gauguin, after all, had painted negresses in Martinique who exactly matched Pierre Loti’s description of his Japanese child bride. And were not the Caribbean, Japan, and Provence all regions of the same magical South, Vincent argued, “where so much more of life is spent in the open air”? He called Gauguin “such a great artist” and prized the letters he received from Gauguin as “things of extraordinary importance.” To bring his art more and more into line with the path he imagined the Frenchman taking, Vincent embraced Gauguin’s Symbolist sympathies and promised to make his own images “more subtle—more like music.” He began referring to his works as “abstractions,” a word that bound music and art indistinguishably together.
He praised not only Wagner but another Symbolist favorite, the American poet Walt Whitman. He renounced naturalism (“I turn my back on nature”) and dedicated himself to the new gospel of clarity, simplicity, and intensity. He vowed “to paint in such a way that everybody, at least if they have eyes, would see it.” The sunflowers of late summer, with their determined “simplicity of technique” and “bright clear colors,” announced the new mission as Vincent heard it from Pont-Aven: “Gauguin and Bernard talk now of ‘painting like children.’ ”
To prove his new discipleship, Vincent painted a self-portrait. Not since Paris had he assayed himself in the mirror, and what he saw now looked nothing like the dapper entrepreneur or the avant-garde avatar that he had painted so often on the rue Lepic. Eschewing the small canvases and cardboard scraps to which so many Paris self-portraits had been relegated, he chose an imposing canvas almost two feet square. On it, he sketched out a gaunt head, turned slightly to one side to expose its nearly bald crown and highlight its bony cheek and brow. With soft hints of pink and yellow, he carefully modeled a sunken but untroubled face. His beard, more grown out than his hair, bristles in rust and gold, limning a jaw that is set but not clenched. The shortened whiskers reveal for the first time an upper lip, painted almost red, rising to two sharp peaks on either side of a deep philtrum. The head sits on a long neck, bare and featureless as the stem of an exotic flower, with only a large ornamental stud holding together his collarless shirt. A heavy rust-and-blue coat drapes his shoulders like a cloak. All around this austere figure shines a brilliant Veronese green, as bright as emerald but soft as menthol, radiating in halos of brushstrokes to the painting’s edge. The same ineffable color fills the whites of his eyes (rendered with ocher irises for contrast) as they gaze not directly into the mirror but past it—
past the viewer, into the distance, fixed on this brilliantly colored, better world.
In those same eyes, Vincent rededicated himself to the path forward. “I have made the eyes slightly slanting,” he informed Theo, “like the Japanese.” Indeed, not just the upward-slanting, almond-shaped eyes, but everything about the image—the shaved carapace, the long neck, the cloaklike coat, the ascetic gaze—evoked the descriptions and illustrations of Japanese monks that Vincent and his comrades all knew from Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème and other accounts. “[I] conceived it as the portrait of a bonze,” he told Gauguin, “a simple worshipper of the eternal Buddha.” This was the transformation that awaited them in Provence, Vincent’s image promised: from careworn painters beset by convention to priests of the sublime, living serenely in nature—“as if they themselves were flowers.” “One cannot study Japanese art without becoming much happier and more cheerful,” he assured them.
So eager was Vincent to share this beckoning, sunflower version of himself with his comrades in Pont-Aven that he wrote and urged them to make portraits of each other so that he could send them his “placid priest” in exchange. He imagined the trade as an initiation rite in the brotherhood of Midi bonzes. “Japanese artists often used to exchange works among themselves,” he explained. “The relationship between them was evidently, and quite naturally, brotherly … The more we can copy them in this respect the better for us.” And when he sent the painting to Gauguin in early October, he accompanied it with an oath, as solemn and summoning as his Japanese divine: “I should so much like to imbue you with a large share of my faith that we shall succeed in starting something that will endure.”
LIKE ALL HIS DESPERATE bids for belonging, Vincent’s campaign for membership in the brotherhood of “Japanese” artists carried the seeds of its own undoing. The same crosscurrents of devotion and antagonism, adhesion and aversion, that roiled his love for Theo and his friendship with Van Rappard quickly undermined his relations with Pont-Aven. No sooner had he accepted the new orthodoxy—even celebrated it—than he began to bridle against it. “I do not find it easy to think of changing my direction,” he had grumbled to Theo in June. “It is better never to budge.”
Throughout the summer, his letters to both Bernard and Gauguin squirmed between allegiance and resistance. Ringing declarations of “the final doctrine” and calls to unity and cooperation sat uneasily beside prickly defenses of independence and individuality. Vincent predicted that his comrades “will alter my manner of painting and I shall gain by it,” but then added ruefully, “all the same I am rather keen on my decorations.” Warm professions of fraternal solidarity were suffused with hints of competitive rancor and fits of resentment.
While Gauguin proved an erratic and unengaged correspondent, Bernard matched Vincent argument for argument, passion for passion, in a tug-of-war over the direction of the new movement. With Gauguin, who had a direct channel to Theo, Vincent struck an almost reverential tone (“I do not want to say depressing or dismal or malicious things to so great an artist,” he told Theo). But with Bernard, who shared his letters with Gauguin, Vincent could dominate the three-way conversation while preserving the appearance of deference to the older artist. When Bernard seconded Gauguin’s argument that the new art should find its imagery in the imagination—“ex tempore”—Vincent defiantly reaffirmed his determination to work from nature; chastised his young friend for “departing from the possible and the true”; and drew a sharp red line between “exaggeration” (what he did) and the Symbolists’ dreamy “inventions.”
He scolded Bernard’s self-dramatizing Symbolist poetry (questioning its “moral purpose”) and privately mocked his drawings done in the Symbolist style (“à la Redon”), calling them “very strange.” When Bernard defended Symbolism by charting its half-century rise from the scandals of Charles Baudelaire, an early champion of both Delacroix and Wagner, to the heights of the Parisian avant-garde, Vincent took up the gauntlet. In sweeping, vehement terms, he derided the Symbolists’ images as “follies,” “stupidities,” and “sterile metaphysical meditations.” He chastised them especially for turning their backs on the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age who “painted things just as they are.” “Hammer into your head that master Frans Hals,” he instructed Bernard; “hammer into your head the no less great and universal master … Rembrandt van Rijn, that broad-minded naturalistic man.” The argument escalated to accusations of cultural plagiarism as Vincent dismissed two centuries of French art as nothing more than “Dutch paste solidly stuffed into vulgar French noodles.”
Nothing about the Symbolist tutelage from Pont-Aven incensed Vincent more than the call for religious imagery. Bernard had first reopened these wounds in April by sending some religious poetry for Vincent’s review. Fired by the Symbolist debates in Paris, newly befriended by Albert Aurier, a young Symbolist poet, and reawakened to his own Catholicism by a love affair in Brittany that spring, Bernard arrived in Pont-Aven with a portfolio of mystic religious imagery in one hand and a Bible in the other. Gauguin received the new ideas openly, and soon both artists were busily planning works to plumb the Good Book’s deep well of mystery and meaning.
After such a warm reception, Bernard must have been shocked by the storm of protest that greeted his ideas in Arles. “How small-minded the old story really is!” Vincent fired back immediately. “My God! Does the world consist solely of Jews?” With inexplicable fury, he railed against “that deeply saddening Bible, which arouses our despair and indignation, which seriously offends us and thoroughly confuses us with its pettiness and infectious foolishness.” Only the figure of Christ survived Vincent’s wrath—he called it the “kernel” of consolation “inside a hard rind and bitter pulp.” But he belittled Bernard’s ambition to capture Christ’s image as “artistic neurosis” and ridiculed his chances of succeeding. “Only Delacroix and Rembrandt have painted the face of Christ in such a way that I can feel him,” he scoffed. “The rest rather make me laugh.”
The rant spilled across letter after letter, to Paris as well as Pont-Aven. “Oh, my dear boy,” he wrote Theo, “I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting.” He pounded Bernard with the crimes of Christianity, especially the “barbarity” of Catholic conversions in the New World, and mocked its modern-day hypocrisies. His months in Catholic Provence, with its medieval festivals and mystical devotions, had already roused childhood feelings of Protestant isolation and antipapist iconoclasm. (He described the Gothic church in Arles, St. Trophime, as “cruel and monstrous” and, worse, “Roman.”) In July, he undertook to reread the complete works of Balzac, as if to inoculate himself against the world of spirits and superstitions that surrounded him.
But the push from Pont-Aven was too strong, the obsession from the past too deep and unsettled, to resist for long. That same month, even as his letters filled up with bitter denunciations, Vincent tried his hand at the denounced imagery. He painted “a big study, an olive garden, with a figure of Christ in blue and orange, and an angel in yellow.” It was the image that had haunted him through a lifetime of failures and campaigns for forgiveness: Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Only now he saw it in the vivid color of the new art: “Red earth, hills green and blue, olive trees with violet and carmine trunks, green-gray and blue foliage, [and] a citron-yellow sky.” But the effort collapsed. In a fit of panic (he later called it “horror”) that foretold the catastrophes to come, he angrily took a knife and scraped the offending image off. He kept his failure secret from Bernard and Gauguin. To Theo, he blamed it on the lack of models. “I must not do figures of that importance without models,” he vowed. But surely he knew the block lay deeper.
The failed image triggered a fresh wave of resistance. He scolded his colleagues for resorting to the static, fabular world of the Bible, when the world of nature all around them—especially in Arles—offered so many subjects ripe with significance: sowers and sheaves, sunflowers and cypresses, suns and stars—all opportunities to “paint t
he infinite.” “It is actually one’s duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature,” he declared, taking aim at the Symbolists’ dry metaphysical exercises. “We are in need of gaiety and happiness, of hope and love.” And why confront the terrible, perfect countenance of Christ, he demanded, when sublimity could be found in faces and figures everywhere? “Do I make myself understood?” he wrote Bernard fiercely. “I am just trying to make you see this single great truth: one can paint all of humanity by the simple means of portraiture.”
In fact, the marginalization of Vincent’s favorite genre was already well under way. Impressionism’s glancing sight and playful light could never penetrate the inner life of a subject, only record the charming surface—while the new art, whether obsessed with science or essence, had little use for the random peculiarities of the human visage—as Vincent himself acknowledged.
To ensure a place for his beloved portraits (and models) in the art of the “next generation,” Vincent fervently argued on behalf of the mystery and sanctity—the symbolist essence—of portraiture. A great portrait was “a complete thing, a perfection,” he argued, “a moment of infinity.” When the “metaphysical magician” Rembrandt painted saints or angels or Christ himself, he painted real people, not abstractions or “fantasies.” For his own portraits, Vincent claimed the Symbolists’ ambition to “say something comforting as music is comforting,” and appropriated the religious mandate coming from Pont-Aven. “I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize,” he wrote. All summer long, as he prepared for the arrival of the Bel-Ami of the Midi (who “will do in portraiture what Claude Monet does in landscape”), Vincent shouted out his recusant conviction that portraits represented “the thing of the future”: “Ah! portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.”
Van Gogh Page 87