Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  In Nuenen, he had painted The Bible to vindicate his defiant life on the heath. In The Bedroom, he memorialized the limitless possibilities of his dreams in the Midi. The wood-plank floor opens like a book to show not his father’s bleak text, but the “joie de vivre” of Zola’s novel: a bed big enough for two, built of yellow-orange pine, as sturdy as a ship; and paired chairs with rush seats. On pegs above the headboard, his turquoise painter’s smock and straw hat. Over the bed, the portraits of the missing Boch and the departing Milliet—whose painted images, he said, made the house “seem more lived-in.” Yellow sunlight peeks through the closed shutters and casts a citron light on the pillowcases and sheets. The defiant streaks of color that he had used on the pages of The Bible spring from their prison of gray to fill the canvas with a tumult of contrasts: a blue washbasin on an orange toilet table; pink floorboards laced with green; yellow deal and lilac doors; a mint-green towel against a robin’s-egg wall; and, on the bed, a splash of scarlet coverlet. At the back of the telescoped room, beside the window, a small shaving mirror hangs on the wall, reflecting not an image, but a color—the same serene Veronese green that radiated from the bonze’s shaved head and gleamed in his eyes.

  But the higher Vincent flew, the harder he fell. In mid-September, after a long silence, Gauguin wrote another brief, cryptic note. One line stood out above all the others: “Every day I go deeper into debt, and the journey becomes more and more out of the question.”

  The letter sent Vincent into a tailspin of fury and hurt. He accused Gauguin of betraying the brothers’ generosity, and he urged Theo to issue an ultimatum—“Ask Gauguin bluntly…‘Are you coming or not?’ ” If he continued to waver or delay, Vincent fumed, Theo should cut him off—withdraw his offer of assistance at once. “We must behave like the mother of a family,” he scolded, displaying a sternness he never tolerated in his brother. “If one listened to him, one would go on hoping for something vague in the future … and go on living in a hell with no way out.”

  Seized by paranoia, he imagined that Gauguin had found a better “combination” with his friend Charles Laval, a young painter with family money who had accompanied Gauguin to Martinique the year before, and had recently joined him once again in Pont-Aven. “Laval’s arrival has temporarily opened a new resource to him,” Vincent concluded. “I think that he is hesitating between Laval and us.” When a letter arrived from Bernard suggesting that he would come to Arles for the winter, Vincent immediately suspected a plot to wring yet more money from his generous brother. “Gauguin is sending him as a substitute,” Vincent wrote, warning Theo not to tolerate such treachery. “No arrangement of any sort with [Bernard],” he snapped; “he is too fickle.”

  Vincent tried everything to keep his hopes for the Yellow House alive. He flooded Theo with long, manic letters whiplashing between cynicism (“I feel instinctively that Gauguin is a schemer”) and reassurance (“our friendship with him will endure,” “we are on the right road”). He summoned Theo to ever grander visions of a studio in the Midi even as he advised Gauguin on the finer points of evading creditors (he suggested either suing his landlord or leaving the back rent unpaid). He thrust himself into the details of the stalled negotiations in an effort to break the impasse. Placating Theo one minute, Gauguin the next, he alternated sides at the table: now pushing his brother to accede to Gauguin’s conditions (pay all his debts and travel expenses); now demanding new, impossibly onerous concessions from Gauguin (give Theo all his pictures and pay his own expenses). He vehemently pressed the commercial advantages of the combination even as he clung to the mandate of destiny. “All true colorists must come here,” he insisted; “Impressionism will last.” He bought more furniture for Gauguin’s bedroom. In the same letter, he assured Theo of his readiness to go forward alone if the deal broke down (“solitude does not worry me,” he said), and boldly proposed bringing both Gauguin and Laval to the Yellow House. “It is only fair since Laval is his pupil and they have already kept house together,” he reasoned. “We could find some way of putting them both up.”

  In late September, when Theo gently urged him to move on from his plan for Gauguin, and even move out of the Yellow House, Vincent’s confidence collapsed. He bravely parried his brother’s calls to concentrate more on selling and less on decorating, to quit his quaint dream of a utopia where artists didn’t have to pay their own way, and to abandon his grandiose plans for an institute of Impressionism in the hinterlands. He protested his ultimate commercial intent—“It is absolutely my duty to try to make money by my work”—and pledged himself yet again to “make progress.” He retreated from any immediate intention to provide a soup-kitchen refuge to other artists, while wanly defending “the right to wish for a state of things in which money would not be necessary in order to live.”

  But the prospect of another catastrophic failure pushed him closer and closer to breakdown. Without his dreams of the combination to hold it back, a wave of guilt and self-reproach swept over him. The old defenses of the Schenkweg studio sprang into place: the extravagant promises of future success, the claims of turning a new leaf, the bids for brotherly solidarity. As in The Hague, contrite confessions were followed by pleas for more money in a spiral of guilt and offense.

  Just when the burden of apology seemed too heavy to bear, news arrived from Paris that Theo had fallen ill again, as syphilis took its inevitable toll on his frail constitution. “Thinking and thinking these days how all these expenses of painting are weighing on you,” Vincent wrote in a panic of remorse; “you cannot imagine how disquieted I am … horribly and continually tormented by this uneasiness.” Answering old sins with old penance, he punished himself with unceasing labor, strict fasting, neglected ailments, and abusive drinking. He reimagined the extremes of Arlesian weather—the sulfurous sun and lashing mistral especially—as a kind of self-mortification. And when a letter arrived from Eugène Boch in the Borinage, Vincent immediately laid plans to return to the black country himself. “I love that dismal land so much,” he wrote Boch the same day, eagerly embracing the torments of the past. “It will always remain unforgettable to me.”

  His thoughts turned inevitably to death and, worse, madness. For the first time, he recognized himself in Claude Lantier, the hero of Zola’s L’oeuvre, a painter driven to suicide by crazed, self-annihilating ambition. He looked in the mirror and saw again the icon of artistic dementia, Émile Wauters’s portrait of the mad painter-monk Hugo van der Goes. “I am again pretty nearly reduced to the madness of [that] picture,” he confessed in October.

  More and more, though, Vincent’s darkest fears took the face and form of one man: Adolphe Monticelli.

  Vincent had appointed the Marseille artist as spiritual godfather to the brotherhood of colorists he envisioned springing up in the Midi. It was Monticelli, after all, who had first spun great art (as well as commercial gold) from the southern sun. It was Monticelli who denied “local color or even local truth” in order to achieve “something passionate and eternal.” The more Vincent’s dreams for the Yellow House slipped toward failure, the more fiercely he clung to the lifeline of Monticelli’s example. In flights of rhetoric increasingly unhinged, he claimed a virtual identity with the dead artist. He did not merely follow Monticelli, he said, he “resurrected” him. “I am continuing his work here,” Vincent declared, “as if I were his son or his brother.” He compared his sunflowers to Monticelli’s paintings of the South—“all in yellow, all in orange, all in sulfur.” He laid delusional plans for a joint exhibition to vindicate both himself and his predecessor in the eyes of a skeptical world, and elaborately imagined his triumphant “return” to Marseille. “It is my firm intention to go saunter in the Cannebière there,” he wrote in a reverie of reincarnation, “dressed exactly like him … with an enormous yellow hat, a black velvet jacket, white trousers, yellow gloves, a bamboo cane, and with a grand southern air.”

  But Monticelli had died in a stupor of madness and drink, slumped over a café table, accor
ding to the stories circulating in the art world. While Vincent acknowledged his hero’s troubled mind—“a little cracked,” he conceded, “or rather very much so”—he blamed it on the “harassment of poverty” and the hostility of a scorning public. “They call a painter mad if he sees with eyes other than theirs,” he scoffed. If this was madness, it was the madness that comes from being “blasted” too much by the sun, Vincent argued—a madness of inspiration and fecundity. It was the madness of the plants in Zola’s Paradou, or of the “raving mad” oleander bushes in the public garden outside his door, “flowering so riotously they may well catch locomotor ataxia.” If this was madness, it was his madness—an admission he celebrated in paint with a still life of a vase of blooming oleander sitting on a table next to a copy of La joie de vivre.

  But mad or not, the image of Monticelli’s ignominious end haunted him. “My mind dwells on the stories going around about his death,” he confessed. It was a mystery that both puzzled and frightened him. He tried to see his efforts in the Midi as redeeming his fallen hero. “We shall try to prove to the good people that Monticelli did not die slumped across the café tables of the Cannebière,” he vowed, “but that the little fellow is still alive.” But what if those efforts failed? What then? Who would redeem Monticelli’s glorious legacy of color and light if not Vincent? And who would redeem Vincent?

  With questions like these, his thoughts slipped back into the quicksand of religion. “When in a state of excitement,” he confessed, “my feelings lead me to the contemplation of eternity and eternal life.” He searched for answers in an article about Tolstoy’s views on the future of faith, but found no comfort in the Russian’s impossible call for a return to the simple belief of “common folk” and his bracing rejection of the afterlife. “He admits neither the resurrection of the body, nor even that of the soul,” Vincent reported bleakly, “but says, like the nihilists, that after death there is nothing else.” Unpersuaded by Tolstoy’s prediction of “an inner and hidden revolution” that would “have the same consoling effect … as the Christian religion used to,” Vincent lashed out at the failure of modern thinkers to answer the ultimate question, raising a cry that combined furious rebuke, anguished confession, and existential panic:

  I only wish that they would succeed in proving to us something that would tranquilize and comfort us so that we might stop feeling guilty and wretched, and could go on just as we are without losing ourselves in solitude and nothingness, and not have to stop at every step in a panic, or calculate nervously the harm we may unintentionally be doing to other people.

  In his desperation, Vincent turned again to the most consoling image he knew: Christ in the Garden. He imagined Monticelli “passing through a regular Gethsemane” and cast himself as the martyr’s resurrected spirit—“a living man arising immediately in the place of the dead man.” He summoned himself to “take up the same cause again, continuing the same work, living the same life, dying the same death.” In late September, he tried again to capture this vision of immortality in paint. “I have the thing in my head,” he wrote, “a starry night; the figure of Christ in blue, all the strongest blues, and the angel blended citron-yellow.” But again he failed. Crushed a second time by the weight of an image too heavily freighted with the past—“too beautiful to dare to paint”—Vincent again took a knife and “mercilessly destroyed” the canvas, offering up only the same timorous excuse: “the form had not been studied beforehand from the model.”

  But he immediately began another attempt. This time, he would leave out the fearful, unbearable figures of Christ and the angel, and paint only the starry night sky under which their sublime encounter played out.

  IT WAS AN IMAGE as deeply embedded in the iconography of Vincent’s imagination as sowers or sunflowers. “The lovely evening stars express the care and love of God for us all,” Anna van Gogh had written to her teenage son. To Anna, stars represented God’s promise “to make light out of darkness; and out of problems, good things.” Vincent’s father fondly recalled his late-night walks “under lovely starry skies,” while his sister Lies saw in the stars “all the people I hold dear very near … urging me: ‘Be brave.’ ” Andersen’s magical night skies had beguiled Vincent’s childhood, while Heine’s Romantic starlight had guided his adolescence. The beckoning star of Conscience had called him to Christianity, while Longfellow’s “tender star of love and dreams” had consoled his long exile. In Ramsgate, he looked into the starry night and saw both his family (“I thought of you all and of my own past years and of our home”) and his shame. In Amsterdam, on his evening walks along the riverbank, he “heard God’s voice under the stars,” and he painted in words an elaborate picture of the comfort he felt in the “blessed twilight,” when “the stars alone do speak.”

  In Paris, the city lights virtually extinguished the stars, but his imagination took flight on the “miraculous” fantasies of Jules Verne and the astronomical discoveries of Camille Flammarion, who mapped the night sky with new worlds and gave each speck of light its own new mystery, opening up a universe of infinite possibility. Or he could dream upon the starry nights he kept at his bedside in the books of Zola, Daudet, Loti, and especially Maupassant, author of Bel-Ami. “I love the night with a passion,” Maupassant wrote in the summer of 1887. “I love it as one loves one’s country or one’s mistress, with a deep, instinctive, invincible love.… And the stars! The stars up there, the unknown stars thrown randomly into the immensity where they outline those bizarre figures, which make one dream so much, which make one muse so deeply.”

  In Arles, Vincent rediscovered the stars. “At night, the town disappears and everything is black,” he reported with delight, “much blacker than in Paris.” He walked the city streets, the riverbanks, the country roads, the orchards, even the open fields, at night, drawn both by the opportunity to “muse deeply” and by the chance to go about unbothered. As much as the famous sun, the starry vault defined Vincent’s experience of the Midi. Soon after arriving, he began to imagine painting it. “I must have a starry night,” he wrote Theo in early April. “A starry sky is something I should like to try to do,” he wrote Bernard, “just as in the daytime I am going to try to paint a green meadow spangled with dandelions.” On his trip to the sea in May, a walk along the shore at night brought this ambition to a fever pitch. “It was beautiful,” he wrote Theo.

  The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires.

  On that dark shore, where both the inky water and the glittering sky invited reflection, Vincent’s ambition to combine with Gauguin—still more dream than plan—merged with his view of the night sky. Just as he saw the ghosts of his past in the dunes and houses of Saintes-Maries, he saw his future in the stars over the Mediterranean. “To look at the stars always makes me dream,” he wrote, “as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map.” He returned to Arles with the image burning in his imagination. “When shall I ever get round to doing the starry sky,” he wondered in mid-June, “that picture which is always in my mind?” Through all the trials of the summer, the up-and-down negotiations with Gauguin, the death of Uncle Cent, he saw in the nightly spectacle overhead not just a map to an impossibly distant world where life for painters might be easier, but the promise of a future almost within reach. “Hope is in the stars,” he wrote. “But let’s not forget that this earth is a planet too, and consequently a star.”

  In early September, he considered returning to the seashore to confirm and record the image in his head. “I absolutely want to paint a starry sky,” he told his sister Wil. With a vehemence that betrayed months of looking and planning, he explained to her how the night was “more richly colored than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens,” and instructed her in th
e rainbow of starlight: “If only you pay attention you will see that certain stars are citron-yellow, others have a pink glow, or a green blue and forget-me-not brilliance.” To fix this vision in the firmament of Symbolist imagery, he invoked the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose embracing summons to a future filled with love and sex and work and friendship “under the great starlit vault of heaven” perfectly matched the image Vincent saw when he stared and squinted into the night sky.

  He practiced this vision again and again throughout the summer and fall. He completed the portrait of Eugène Boch in early September by dabbing a constellation of multicolored “sparkling stars” onto the painting’s deep blue background. At the same time, he gave the portrait its new title, The Poet—a designation that connected Boch’s star-lighted visage with the new Petrarch of the Midi, Gauguin.

  But just painting the stars wasn’t enough; he longed to paint under the stars. “The problem of painting night scenes and effects on the spot and actually by night interests me enormously,” he wrote. To satisfy that yen, he dragged his equipment to the Place du Forum and painted his nocturnal view of the café terrace with its gaslit awning and its plunging streetscape “stretching away under a blue sky spangled with stars.” Unlike the seemingly random dots of the Boch portrait, the wedge of night sky in the Café Terrace on the Place du Forum reveals a universe of stars and planets arranged in solar systems of color. “Here you have a night picture without any black in it,” he boasted, “done with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green, and citron-yellow color.” He compared it to a description from Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, another touchstone of his dream for the Midi. He laid plans to paint a series of “starry night” paintings to rival the sunflowers of summer, including a plowed field under the night sky and, especially, the Yellow House, home to all his dreams. “Someday or other you shall have a picture of the little house itself,” he promised Theo, “with the window lit up, and a starry sky.”