Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  At the beginning of August, soon after the success of Anquetin’s The Peasant triggered a rush to rustic imagery in both Pont-Aven and Arles, Vincent recruited an old gardener named Patience Escalier to model for him. He described Escalier as “a poor old peasant, whose features bear a very strong resemblance to Father, only coarser.” Vincent painted him hurriedly, placing his deeply creased, sun-brazed face against a cobalt background and dressing him in a bright turquoise blouse and yellow straw hat much like those Vincent himself wore on his painting trips into the countryside. To Theo and the comrades in Pont-Aven, he advertised Escalier as an icon out of Millet or Zola (“a man with a hoe, a former drover of the Camargue”), a primitive antidote to “highly civilized Parisian” ways, as well as a Daumier caricature, like the amiable giant Roulin. “I dare believe that Gauguin and you would understand,” he wrote Bernard. “You know what a peasant is, how strongly he reminds one of a wild beast, when you have found one of the true race.”

  Vincent quickly fell out with his model over payment terms, but the old man’s image lingered in his eye throughout the arguments with Bernard over religious imagery. When he finally lured Escalier back into the studio at the end of the month, he posed the grizzled gardener leaning on a cane, his hands folded in an attitude of prayer. From under his wide-brimmed straw hat, his old eyes stare serenely into the distance with a sad, long-suffering, heaven-fixed gaze. Beyond his sloping blue shoulders, the world is filled with “flashing orange” representing the “furnace” of harvests past, Vincent said, as well as the “luminous gold” of the sunset to come, and the sunrise beyond.

  Immediately after finishing his rustic saint, Vincent took up once again Bernard’s ultimate challenge to evoke the mystical sublime. The opportunity presented itself when Eugène Boch visited the Yellow House in late August. Vincent had met the thirty-three-year-old Belgian artist in June, when he became Dodge MacKnight’s studiomate in nearby Fontvieille. Vincent shared with the newcomer not only similar physiognomies (“a face like a razor blade, green eyes, and a touch of distinction”), but also similar bourgeois backgrounds with siblings involved in the art trade (Boch’s sister Anna was both a collector of avant-garde art and an artist herself).

  But Vincent lumped Boch together with the “slacker” MacKnight, and Boch shared MacKnight’s dislike of Vincent’s art and his distaste for Vincent’s “moody and quarrelsome” nature. The two barely saw each other until MacKnight left Arles at the end of August. In a single whirlwind week of camaraderie—a rehearsal for Gauguin’s imminent arrival—they took walks in the country, saw a bullfight in the arena, and talked late into the night about art. When Vincent learned that Boch intended to go to the coal region of his native Belgium and paint the miners of the Borinage, he swooned with solidarity, urging Boch to designate his new studio among the coal mines as a Yellow House of the North where he, Gauguin, and Boch could “change places” from time to time.

  To memorialize this brief manna of friendship, Vincent persuaded Boch to sit for a portrait. Despite their previous antagonism, Vincent had been laying elaborate plans for this portrait for some time. “I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend,” he had written Theo after an encounter with Boch in early August, “a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature.” Despite Boch’s dark hair, Vincent imagined painting him as “a blond man [with] orange tones, chromes and pale-yellow” highlights in his hair:

  Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I [will] paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I [will] get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky.

  When Boch finally sat for him, Vincent faithfully rendered his subject’s razor visage and dark hair (with blond highlights only in his mustache and beard). But he dressed him in a yellow-orange coat and stood him against a background of the deepest blue he could devise—just as he had imagined it. He crowned Boch’s head with a thin corona of citron yellow—exactly the color of the “nimbus” around the Savior’s head in Delacroix’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee—and flecked the dark void with stars shining yellow and orange from worlds beyond.

  It was exactly the scheme he had tried and destroyed in his Garden of Gethsemane: “a figure of Christ in blue and orange.”

  Images like these, Vincent argued, expressed their transcendent truths not in the biblical finery that Bernard urged, but in a new and different garb: color. Whether through “the mingling of opposites” or “the vibrations of kindred tones,” Vincent claimed he could address the deepest mysteries of life—the Symbolists’ grail—without resorting to the follies of religion. He could speak directly to the heart “through the language of color alone.” Thus, the sunset colors on Escalier’s face expressed “the eagerness of a soul,” while the light tone of Boch’s figure against the night sky expressed “the thought of a brow” and “hope upon a star.”

  The right color combinations, he insisted, could arouse the full range of human emotions: from the “anguish” of broken tones to the “absolute restfulness” of balanced ones; from the “passion” of red and green to the “gentle consolation” of lilac and yellow. In describing his colors, especially to Bernard, Vincent adopted the Symbolists’ vocabulary (repeatedly invoking “the eternal,” “the mysterious,” “infinity,” and “dreams”), but defiantly declared himself a “rational colorist” and boasted of the complicated calculations that guided his palette—Seurat-like terms anathema to the Symbolists’ manifesto of sensation. And he rejected outright Cloisonnism’s relegation of color to a mere element of design—a decorative deduction—rather than the “forceful expression” of “an ardent temperament.”

  That temperament expressed itself nowhere more forcefully, or defiantly, than in brushwork. In Pont-Aven, Vincent’s comrades had been developing a paint surface that barely betrayed a brush at all. Following Anquetin’s lead, they had pursued the Cloisonnist rhetoric about “plates” of color and the paradigm of stained glass to their logical conclusion. Where Cézanne had used brushy, thinly painted planes and brickworklike strokes to construct his faceted scenes, Gauguin and Bernard divided their images into areas of pure color and then filled each area with thinned paint applied in smooth, impassive strokes. Vincent surely knew of these innovations through his correspondence with both artists, and even occasionally tried them himself when the urge to solidarity overtook him.

  But inevitably his manic brush rebelled. His letter sketches to Pont-Aven continued to show only the coloring-book dogma of blocks of pure color, each with its label of “rouge” or “bleu.” But in his studio, unseen by his colleagues, his draftsman’s hand tirelessly filled those blocks with flights of brushwork in a pattern book of textures and complex topographies of enlever paint. Sometimes he followed the contours of his subjects with undulating trenches of color, faithfully tracing the spiky needles of a pine tree or the snaking branches of a vineyard. Other times, in the background or on the plates mandated by the new gospel, his brush would break into slathering riffs of strokes, turning a cloudless sky into a churning sea or a plowed field into a scumbled battleground. In one particularly intense eruption of impasto—Vincent himself called such episodes “violent”—he loaded his brush with paint and transformed a picturesque streamside mill into a castle of pigment, shattering every plane—walls, roof, sky, and stream—into defiantly visible paint strokes, each one a silent protest, a shake of his fist, against the orthodoxy issuing from Pont-Aven.

  By the end of September, with Gauguin’s arrival only weeks away, Vincent’s balks, debates, and rebuffs had combined into a full-throated rebellion against his fellow triumvirs of the new art. “How preposterous it is,” he wrote sister Wil seditiously, “to make oneself dependent on the opinion of others in what one does.” In opposition to the decorative, cerebral imagery advocated in Brittany, he had put forw
ard the elements of a very different art: an art of portraits, not parables; figures, not fantasies; peasants, not saints; an art of impact, not enigma; of paint, not glass. But most of all, an art of feeling—“heartbroken, and therefore heartbreaking.” Color, with its magic, musiclike power to arouse emotions, played a central role. “I use color … to express myself forcibly,” he wrote. “That’s it as far as theory goes.” If color was his music, the brush was his instrument. Strokes could be “interwoven with feeling,” Vincent maintained, to elicit a range of emotions: from the “pain” of impasto, to the exhilaration of stippling; from the serenity of smooth paint (“like porcelain”), to the sublimity of radiating strokes.

  He accepted Cloisonnism’s injunction to simplify, simplify, simplify—but not just for simplicity’s decorative sake. Simplification and exaggeration, like color and brushwork, had to serve some deeper emotional truth. In describing how he painted the square in front of the Yellow House—a patch of ill-tended public real estate—Vincent sheepishly admitted to “leaving out some trees” and “some shrubs that are not in character.… To get at that character,” he said, “the fundamental truth of it.”

  This was not “imagining,” he hastened to add, rejecting the Symbolist term as Bernard and Gauguin used it. He imagined nothing, he insisted; only looked and felt. He neither ignored nature, nor slavishly followed it; he “consumed” it. “I do not invent the picture,” he corrected Bernard; “on the contrary, I find it already there in nature; I just have to free it.” When Rembrandt painted angels, Vincent explained, “[he] did not invent anything … he knew them; he felt them there.” So, too, when Vincent looked at the trafficked square, he squinted his eyes and saw not the trompe l’oeil reality of overgrown pathways in un-Dutch neglect, but the riotously blooming oleander bushes—“loaded with fresh flowers, and quantities of faded blooms as well, their green continually renewing itself in fresh, strong shoots, apparently inexhaustibly”—an image of angelic consolation that bore no more relationship to reality, he argued, than reality bore to a colorless photograph.

  This was the only theory that Vincent’s refractory art could bear—the inevitable expression of a synthetic intelligence bound forever to a lunging heart. “When I am moved by something,” he said, “these are the only things that appear to have any deep meaning.” And painting those things “absorbs me so much,” he confessed, “that I let myself go, never thinking of a single rule.” Obsessively introspective and often alone, Vincent thought deeply about questions that preoccupied the writers, artists, and philosophers he read; but his personal theories on art, as on everything else, were neither coherent nor consistent. He never could command consistency from himself (not even within the same letter, much less between correspondents), nor could he keep his ideas isolated from the swirling currents of his emotions. Even within a single painting, his palette and brush often skidded from theory to theory, from model to model, in pursuit of the emotion that seized him—the only dogma that mattered. “What do these differences matter,” he wrote Bernard, declaring his independence by defending his deviations, “when the great thing after all is to express oneself strongly?”

  Vincent’s rebellious art opened the door to a century of “expressive” imagery and, as he foresaw, “even more personal and more original” visions. But, like all Vincent’s great zeals, this one redeemed the past by championing the future. “What I learned in Paris is leaving me,” he wrote Theo at the height of his summer insurrection in 1888. “I am returning to the ideas I had in the country before I knew the impressionists.” His dissenting argument for exaggerated, “suggestive” color skipped the Impressionists altogether and invoked Charles Blanc’s older gospel of simultaneous contrast; and, of course, its messiah, Delacroix. “My way of working … has been fertilized by Delacroix’s ideas rather than by theirs,” Vincent insisted. It was Delacroix, the hero of the Kerkstraat studio—not Monet or Seurat or Cézanne or Anquetin—who “spoke a symbolic language through color alone,” he said, and through that language, expressed “something passionate and eternal.” It was Delacroix, the artist-explorer of Africa, who had shown him the way South to the land of exaggerated color, and blazed the path to the Yellow House.

  He gave no credit to the Symbolists, either. Years before hearing Wagner’s music or Bernard’s instruction, he reminded Theo, he had studied the relationship between color and music by taking piano lessons in Nuenen. And from the moors of Brabant he had written about how the great Barbizon painter Jules Dupré expressed an “enormous variety of moods” using “symphonies of color.” He had sought his inspiration from within—through “instinct, inspiration, impulse, and conscience”—and rallied to Delacroix’s cry “Par coeur! Par coeur!” long before Huysmans’s À rebours roused avant-garde Paris.

  Since his return to Nuenen from the Rijksmuseum in October 1885, his brush had been guided by the miracle of enlever paint and the mandate to work “in one rush,” as Rembrandt did, to achieve an image of “noble sentiment, infinitely deep.” Liberated by the sight of Rembrandts and Halses that “did not have to be literally true,” Vincent had already claimed his right “to idealize, to be a poet,” and to let his colors “speak for themselves.” In the Kerkstraat studio and in the tumbledown hut of the De Groot clan, he had already put that right to the test. The portraits he slashed out there—with loaded brush, in the dim light, in a single sitting—had pointed the way. Three years before Anquetin’s The Peasant, Vincent had seized the example of Millet (in whose works “all reality is also at the same time symbolic,” he said) and found the perfect imagery to express his subjects’ stoic despair—and his own—in color and texture. By depicting his primitive family “as if painted in the soil that they sowed,” and doing so “with a will, with feeling, with passion, with love,” he had already achieved the “truer truth” that his comrades in Pont-Aven only now aspired to.

  In short, the world had come round to his lowly peasants. He called his portrait of Patience Escalier “an absolute continuation of certain studies of heads I did in Holland.” The old gardener’s radiant countenance marked the De Groots’ passage—and Vincent’s—out from the shadows of the heath and into the brilliant sun of the Midi. The years in Paris had merely brought to flower the seed of revolutionary art planted earlier in the dark loam of rhetoric that defended The Potato Eaters. His claims for the new art bristled with vindication of the old. If he had “kept the faith” of Nuenen, he told Theo, bitterly rebutting the judgments of the past, “I’d be a notable madman. Now I am just an insignificant one.”

  As in Nuenen, Vincent found an image that both expressed and inspired his resurgent contrarian vision. Like all of his self-justifications in paint, it sprang not from his imagination, but from his life. Every night that summer, when the Yellow House went dark, Vincent returned to the all-night Café de la Gare only a short block away. He ate a late supper in the bare barroom downstairs with its billiard table, hanging gas lamps, and looming clock. He occasionally shared a meal or an absinthe with Roulin at one of the marble-topped tables, but mostly sat by himself or drank standing up at the bar in back. Eventually, he climbed the narrow stairs to his small room and fell asleep over the never-sleeping scene below.

  As one of the few establishments in Arles open after midnight—other than the brothels—the café attracted a rogues’ gallery of drifters, hooligans, refugees, and homeless. Vincent called them “rôdeurs de nuit” (night prowlers)—those who “have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in,” he catalogued. Cranks talking politics, crazies babbling to themselves, whorehouse patrons dragging their whores, rejected suitors nursing their wounds—all ended up in the mercurochrome light of the Café de la Gare. “They flop down at a table and spend the whole night thus,” he told Bernard, describing his home-away-from-home as “a free-love hotel.”

  Vincent began his dissonant painting in a dissonant mood. He had fought his landlord, Joseph Ginoux, to a bargain: if Ginoux would forgive his tardiness in p
aying his rent, Vincent would paint a portrait of Ginoux’s “dreary” establishment. “To revenge myself for paying him so much money for nothing,” he reported to Theo, “I offered to paint the whole of his rotten joint.” More bemused than persuaded, Ginoux agreed to the proposition and Vincent began immediately. He waited until after the clock downstairs chimed midnight, then set his easel and a huge canvas in the front corner of the barroom, next to the door, to get the best view of the nightly procession.

  Most of his fellow patrons fled his brush, abandoning the scene, leaving coffee cups and drink glasses half full at their places and chairs pushed back in disarray. The few that remained, seated in the distant corners of the room, slumped and turned their faces away—accustomed, no doubt, to ignoring the unseemly goings-on in the café’s nocturnal demimonde, or to being ignored. Only the proprietor Ginoux stood his ground. Unashamed, immune to any abuse, inured to any scandal, he stationed himself proudly beside the billiard table in white coat and apron, looking straight at Vincent, taking the full heat of the gaslight glare.

  For three nights in a row, after sleeping through the day, Vincent returned to the perdition beneath his bed to capture in color and paint the feeling of isolation and marginalization he found there. Whatever colors Ginoux had chosen for the interior of his bar, Vincent saw only the pain of red and green. From the “blood-red” walls to the jade ceiling, from the malachite billiard table to its orange-red shadow, from the “soft tender Louis XV green” of the bar counter to the “delicate pink nosegay” of flowers that sat incongruously on it, every corner of the room was refracted through the lens of Vincent’s tartan vision of inner torment. Green scuffs the floorboards while red leaches up through the cracks; turquoise infiltrates the marble tabletops and the porcelain stove while a single red ball sits on the green felt playing field. Glasses glint in pink next to absinthe-green bottles labeled in red. A woman at the back wears a green skirt and pink shawl. A shy tramp slumps away, but shines in emerald.