Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  His art only added to the mystery. From his grandmother’s friendship with Delacroix to his own flirtation with Symbolism, Gauguin’s art seemed always on the move, drawing from everywhere, promising everything, flinging itself from one latitude of the art world to another as freely as his ancestors (and Gauguin himself) traversed the tropics. As a stockbroker, he had bought the art and indulgence of the Impressionists. On his Sunday outings, he took up their brush and, under the tutelage of Pissarro, mastered their feathery style. By 1882, when his Bourse job vanished in the great stock crash that year, Gauguin felt sufficiently confident to turn his avocation for art into a full-time pursuit. To the horror of his status-conscious wife, who promptly left him and returned to Denmark, he took up the “vagabond life” of an artist and threw himself on the mercy of the art market. Unable to win critical attention or patronage (he admitted to offering himself “like a whore to the market and finding no takers”), Gauguin was soon forced to accept a sales job with a tarpaulin maker and rejoin his family in Copenhagen. After only six months, however, he abandoned them and returned to Paris, more determined than ever to make his mark in the art world. He took only his son Clovis, Mette’s favorite, with him—out of spite, some thought. In a tiny garret with little food and less heat, the six-year-old immediately fell sick with smallpox.

  Meanwhile, Gauguin’s art bounded from Impressionism to Symbolism. He drafted ambitious manifestos for a new kind of imagery—“spiritual, enigmatic, mysterious, and suggestive”—and took up a new champion, Cézanne. But before he could create an art to match this L’oeuvre-like mandate, the ground beneath him shifted again. In 1886, Seurat’s Grande Jatte swept all before it. Gauguin’s canvases were lost in the wake of the latest succès de scandale, his rhetoric drowned out by the deafening buzz over the “new” Impressionism. Almost immediately, he laid elaborate plans to ingratiate himself with the new hero Seurat, to whose banner many of Gauguin’s former comrades, especially Pissarro, had rallied. But an unexplained “contretemps” with the ill-tempered Seurat in June 1886 brought that initiative to an abrupt end. Before long, he and his longtime sponsor Pissarro were trading insults. Gauguin denounced the Neo-Impressionists as makers of “petit-point tapestries” and cursed “those damn dots.” Pissarro accused Gauguin of “bad manners” and dismissed his art as “a sailor’s art, picked up here and there.” “At bottom his character is anti-artistic,” Pissarro sized up his former friend, “he is a maker of odds and ends.” Degas called him “a pirate.”

  But Gauguin rebounded again. By the time Laval met him a few months later at the Gloanec Inn, he had found a new mentor, Félix Bracquemond; moved on to a new medium, ceramics; and assumed a new shape: a “savage from Peru.” Advertising his “Indian” heritage, he fashioned clay figures that combined pre-Columbian forms and Symbolist suggestion into sexually freighted images: menacing snakes and swans with phallic goosenecks. He signed them “PGo”—French slang for “prick.” He also refashioned himself as a brooding, volatile, alien “beast,” trapped in the parlors and studios of France. Banishing his past as a bourgeois Sunday painter, stockbroker, and Impressionist hanger-on, he grew his hair long and dressed in operatic costumery (extreme dishevelment one day, swaggering capes the next, often bedecked in ostentatious jewelry). Friends worried about his strange appearance and theatrical moods. Some thought that he had slipped into megalomania. He cultivated rumors (started by the altercation with Seurat) about his quick temper and feral belligerence, even as he continued to woo and charm. “You must remember that two natures dwell within me,” he explained ominously, “the Indian and the sensitive man. The sensitive being has disappeared and the Indian now goes straight ahead.”

  This was the Gauguin that Laval met and loved and devoted his life to: a man unconstrained by convention or good repute; a man of both enlightenment and mystery, cultivation and danger; a man, as Gauguin himself put it, “outside the limits that society imposes.” He could be affable and gregarious one minute, bullying and bellicose the next; now sardonic, now morose. In his limpid green eyes, some saw “gentleness and warmth”; others, “scoffing” disdain; others, “heavy-lidded sensuality.”

  In a profession defined by effeteness, in an era of irony and languor, Gauguin boxed and fenced and did not flinch from physical confrontation—a reputation that delighted his admirers and intimidated his adversaries. Although short even by the standards of the period (five feet four), he was strong and solidly built. To some, he radiated a “menacing power that seemed just barely held in check.” They called him “malin”—cunning. “Most people were rather afraid of him,” wrote an English painter in Pont-Aven in 1886, “and the most reckless took no liberties with his person.… He was treated as a person to be placated rather than aroused.” Those he could not intimidate, he seduced. By Gauguin’s telling, men as well as women could taste the honey of his charms, and Laval was by no means the only proof of such claims. Gauguin himself, despite his many tales of amorous conquest, seemed to live beyond sex. He demanded chastity of acolytes like Laval with the exhortation “pas de femmes” (no women) and exalted androgyny above all other forms of sexual allure. By such various and variable means, Gauguin won hearts like Laval’s. “All the artists fear me and love me,” he boasted from Pont-Aven. “None can hold out against my theories…[They] ask my advice, fear my critiques, and never challenge anything I do.”

  Paris, on the other hand, continued to resist him. By the time he returned there in the fall of 1886, the break with Pissarro and Seurat had widened into a chasm of mistrust and recrimination. No one would buy or sell or even show his work. Estrangement, obscurity, poverty, a long hospitalization, and a full turn from painting to pottery, combined to erase him from the avant-garde scene. By January 1887, Pissarro could write with some relief, “Gauguin is gone … completely disappeared.” One winter night, in his freezing apartment, warmed only by his kiln, his frustration, and the stubborn adulation of a few Pont-Aven acolytes like Laval, Gauguin presented his thrilling plan to thrust himself back into the public eye: he would “rebaptize” himself in the tropics. “I am going to Panama,” he announced, “to live like a savage.”

  The long and miserable sea voyage, racked by storms and “packed like sheep” in the third-class cabin, hinted at the horrors to come. But Laval saw only his mentor’s steadiness and seamanship on a crossing he had made many times before. In his two years as a merchant seaman, Gauguin had acquired not only steady legs, but also a talent for the shipboard ritual of storytelling. A gifted raconteur (he bragged of being “an astonishing liar”), Gauguin spun yarns more easily than truth. On their ocean journey, Laval may have heard for the first time some of Gauguin’s Candide-like tales: of earthquakes and shipwrecks, of royal ancestors and madmen chained to the roof of his childhood home; of sexual awakening at the age of six and whores in every port; of action in the Franco-Prussian War and near court-martial for insubordination; of cloak-and-dagger doings in a failed plot to overthrow the Spanish king. In one of his most astonishing stories, Gauguin crossed paths with another prolific fabulist, Julien Viaud—a fellow artistic soul of ambiguous sexuality lost in a midshipman’s uniform. A decade after their encounter, Viaud had become one of the era’s most popular writers, taking the name of a character he had invented for his fantasy account of a voyage to the Pacific: Pierre Loti.

  But no sailor’s tale, or even Loti, could have prepared Laval for Panama and what he found in Colón, at the base of the great dig. A huge shantytown stretched as far as the eye could see: twenty thousand people crowded onto a finger of marshland jutting into the sea. Torrential rains, regular floods, and poor drainage had turned the low-lying town, swollen to ten times its original size in just a few years, into a hellhole of mud and misery—a “malarious swamp,” Gauguin called it. Trash and sewage filled the streets, swirling into new patterns of rat-infested effluvia with each downpour or inundation. In the overcrowded, unpoliced town, “a sort of filthy, putrescent anarchy” reigned, according to one
account. Convulsions of violence—by the indigenous population against the newcomers and among the workers—cut swaths of ashes and ruin across the shanty rows. Death hovered in the air. Mosquitoes carrying malaria and yellow fever swarmed over the muddy peninsula, infecting half the population. At the canal itself, three out of four diggers—almost all of them blacks recruited from the West Indies—perished in wave after wave of unchecked contagion. At Colón’s only hospital, the death rate climbed even higher.

  Gauguin’s plans for work proved as illusory as his promise of paradise. His brother-in-law’s “trading firm” in Panama City, on the Pacific side of the isthmus, turned out to be just a general store, where Gauguin found neither work nor money nor sympathy. He and Laval were forced to return to Colón, where, according to a newspaper account, “the sad spectacle of educated men starving in the streets” was common. Through Laval’s contact, they found jobs as clerks at a construction company office, but only for two weeks. After that, Laval tried to raise money by painting portraits. Gauguin struck off into the countryside looking to buy land from the local Indians using what little money they had left. When that failed, he persuaded Laval to press on to Taboga, their original destination. Instead of an unspoiled Shangri-La, however, they found a tourist trap—a sham of costumed natives, Sunday trippers, and guided tours. The wily islanders demanded exorbitant prices for everything, especially their land. Frustrated, Gauguin immediately laid plans to travel to Martinique, a “genial and gay” French island in the eastern Caribbean where their ship had called briefly on the trip over. “We ought to have gone there,” Gauguin fulminated, “where living is cheap and easy and people affable.” Trailed by the adoring Laval, he left the fetid isthmus, convinced that an “enchanting life” awaited them at the end of the thousand-mile voyage to Martinique.

  They barely had time to find the little slave cabin, in the mountains overlooking the port of Saint-Pierre, before Laval was struck down by yellow fever. The disease pounced on its victims with savage suddenness, reducing healthy men to racking pain, trembling fevers, and convulsive nausea in a single day. The poison spread to every organ, impairing liver, kidneys, and lungs. Drenching sweats, dysentery, and bloody vomiting brought light-headedness, delusion, and delirium. Skin and eyes turned a bilious yellow. In his letters to family and friends, Gauguin made nothing of Laval’s agony (“all’s well that ends well,” he wrote). While Laval lay in his sweat-stained bed, Gauguin explored the mango groves and watched the dark porteuses carrying their loads on their heads through the mountain passes. He reported painting “some good pictures … with figures far superior to my Pont-Aven period.” Laval eventually recovered enough to join him on some of these painting excursions, at least around the perimeter of their little hut.

  In July, Gauguin, too, fell sick, but not seriously enough to merit a mention in his letters. That changed a month later when word arrived that a collector in Paris had expressed some interest in his pottery. Suddenly, a new El Dorado beckoned. “I must get out of here,” he wrote a friend, “otherwise I shall die like a dog.” In a fury of letters that testified against its own account of debilitating illness, Gauguin pled for money to return home. “I am just a skeleton,” he cried. “My head has become very weak, I have only a little strength in the intervals between delirium. Nervous crises almost every day and horrible shrieks, it is as if my chest were burning. I implore you … do all that is possible to send me 250 or 300 francs immediately.” In a bold lie, he claimed that his work in the trenches of the canal (“break[ing] the earth from half past five in the morning until six in the evening under the tropical sun”) had “poisoned” him. He described his “agonies in the stomach” and “atrocious pains.” “My head is swimming,” he wrote, “my face is covered with perspiration and I have shivers down my back.” Every night he “expected to die,” he said, and only a return to France would save him from death or a lifetime of “disease and fever.”

  Was Gauguin ever this sick? Or did he weave this vivid narrative from his friend’s sufferings to bolster his case for funding? Although the course of the disease was mercifully short, recovery (if there was one) often took months. In October, when Gauguin finally succeeded in begging the money for passage back to France, Laval was still too weak to travel. Gauguin, on the other hand, bounded home, leaving his friend to convalesce on his own, no doubt defending his departure in the same terms he had used only six months earlier when he abandoned his son Clovis in Paris: “I have just enough to pay my fare … my heart and mind are steeled against all suffering.”

  ALMOST EXACTLY ONE YEAR after returning from Martinique, Paul Gauguin knocked at the Yellow House door. He had not seen his wife or children once in the intervening year. Nor had the Paris art world fallen prostrate before the artist who now styled himself “a man of the tropics.” True, he had sold three Martinique paintings to the newcomer Theo van Gogh (whose entresol gallery, he discovered, had become “the center for the Impressionists” in his absence), but nothing had come of it. He had returned from his exotic adventure expecting a triumph—to “hit everybody in the eye” the way Seurat’s Grande Jatte had done. Instead, he found only Theo’s cautious optimism and his strange brother’s suffocating enthusiasm. “All I have brought back from the tropics arouses nothing but admiration,” he wrote acidly in November 1887. “Nevertheless, I do not arrive.”

  Rather than suffer obscurity in Paris, Gauguin had returned to the scene of his first and, so far, only succès—Pont-Aven—at almost the same moment in February 1888 when Vincent struck out for the South. There, he had worked tirelessly to bolster his new identity as an artist of savage temperament and primitive essence. He talked endlessly of his “decisive” Martinique experiences and instructed his reassembled acolytes: “If one wants to know who I am … one must look for me in the works I brought back from there.” He drew strained parallels between Brittany and Martinique, calling both “dark and primitive” places, whose natives bore the mark of “primitive times.” Borrowing from yet another Loti fantasy, Mon frère Yves, he dressed like a Brittany sea captain in sailor’s jersey and beret—a reminder to all of his exotic travels and of “the hidden savage” that Loti saw in every man who “inhabited the primitive world of the sea.”

  In this guise, Gauguin had revisited the triumph of two summers before. While currying Theo’s support with humble letters addressed “Cher Monsieur,” and repeatedly putting off Vincent’s pleading invitations to Arles with a charade of imminent departure, he circulated among the holiday crowd in Pont-Aven, reprising the role of chef d’école to a circle of young painters who, he hoped, would carry the flame of celebrity back to Paris. He even reclaimed the adulation of young Laval, who finally limped home from Martinique in July 1888, eight months after Gauguin left him there. With the help of Émile Bernard, a new addition to this charmed circle, Gauguin had developed an art to accompany his new incarnation—an art of primitive “crudity” and spiritual intensity. The bold forms and colors of Anquetin’s Cloisonnism and Bernard’s reborn mystical Catholicism both perfectly suited Gauguin’s self-portrait as savage. (The self-portrait that he sent Vincent had a “fierce, blood-glutted face,” he wrote, and “eyes like lava fires.”) Gauguin not only dominated the young challenger Bernard (though the two would soon clash over authorship of the new art), he underscored his primitive primacy by seducing Bernard’s seventeen-year-old sister Madeleine.

  Not surprisingly, he had stayed in Pont-Aven as long as possible. Only after all the others had left, including Bernard and Madeleine; only after his money had run out entirely; and then only after Theo bought some of his ceramics, offered to show his Pont-Aven pictures on the entresol, and paid a final fifty-franc inducement, did Gauguin reluctantly board a train and begin the long journey to Arles. While Vincent waited breathlessly for the consummation of brotherhood to come (alerted by a trunk sent in advance), Gauguin coolly appraised Theo’s—not Vincent’s—plan for the future: “However much Van Gogh may be in love with me, he would not
bring himself to feed me in the South for my beautiful eyes,” he wrote a friend on the eve of his departure. “He has surveyed the terrain like a cautious Dutchman and intends to push the matter to the utmost of his powers … This time I really have my foot on solid ground.”

  With his sights so firmly fixed on relations in Paris, and ambivalent to the last minute, Gauguin failed to inform Vincent what day or what time he would arrive in Arles. When his train pulled into the station shortly after five in the morning on October 23, 1888, it was still dark—too early to intrude on a man he barely knew. So he stepped into a nearby café that was open, the Café de la Gare, to wait for the sunrise. “It’s you,” the manager called out, startling him. “I recognize you.” In his excitement of anticipation, Vincent had shown Gauguin’s self-portrait to the café owner.

  A short time later, Vincent jolted awake at the sound of the long-awaited knock and rushed to the door.

  There was more to the mix-up than irresolution or oversight. As an expert fencer and boxer, Gauguin knew the value of keeping an opponent off balance. “Wait for the first forward movement,” he once advised an overmatched student at the fencing school where he taught. When he chose, he planned meticulously and acted decisively. When he sensed a weakness, he did not hesitate to attack. But the venture with Vincent was filled with unknowns, and Gauguin preferred not to put too much weight forward until he knew his opponent better.

  Where Vincent saw a brotherhood, Gauguin saw a contest. “I have a need for struggle,” he had announced before arriving, using a French term, la lutte, for the competition of wills that Gauguin saw in every exchange, whether with swords, fists, words, or images; “[I] slash away blow by blow.” To underscore this en garde, he sent Vincent a drawing of a painting he had made. It showed two Breton youths locked in a tense, wrestlers’ embrace. He described it as an image of primal combat “as seen through the eyes of a Peruvian savage.”