CHAPTER 35
La Lutte
THE FIRST BLOW FELL WHEN VINCENT OPENED THE YELLOW HOUSE door. Gauguin’s months of pleading letters and claims of paralyzing illness had led Vincent to expect a sick and debilitated man. He had seen that image in the self-portrait Gauguin sent ahead: “Gauguin looks ill and tormented!!” he exclaimed when it arrived. But the man who stood in his doorway looked a picture of health and vigor: muscles on his bones, blood in his cheeks, fire in his eyes. “Gauguin has arrived in good condition,” he wrote Theo, unmistakably startled. “He even seems to me better than I am.”
In the days that followed, Vincent marveled at his guest’s resilient stomach and hearty constitution—the two measures by which so many artists, Vincent included, often failed muster. With his ruddy complexion and robust health, Gauguin not only betrayed his self-portrait and belied months of complaints, he disarmed one of Vincent’s most vehement arguments on behalf of the Midi. Again and again, he had promised Theo that the Provençal sun would help Gauguin recover his health, rejuvenate his spirits, and return him to the gaiety and color of his Martinique paintings. But the hale bantam wrestler at his door had no need of rescue. “We are without the slightest doubt in the presence of a virgin creature with savage instincts,” Vincent reported in amazement.
The next blow fell only a few days later. Theo wrote that he had sold Gauguin’s painting of peasant girls dancing, Les bretonnes, for a handsome sum. In his subsequent letter, he enclosed a money order for Gauguin in the amount of five hundred francs—more than he had ever sent Vincent. “So for the moment,” he added cheerfully, “he will be quite well off.” Vincent dutifully dubbed the sale “a tremendous stroke of luck” for “all three of us.” But he couldn’t disguise the wound it inflicted. Any congratulations he offered Gauguin were drowned out in a cry of guilt to Theo. “I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell,” he wrote forlornly in a long mea culpa the same day news of the sale arrived.
I myself realize the necessity of producing even to the extent of being mentally crushed and physically drained by it, just because after all I have no other means of ever getting back what we have spent.… But my dear boy, my debt is so great that when I’ve paid it, which I think I’ll succeed in doing, the hardship of producing paintings will, however, have taken my entire life, and it will seem to me that I haven’t lived.… It is agonizing to me that there is no demand for [my pictures] now, because you suffer for it … I believe that the time will come when I too shall sell, but I am so far behind with you, and while I go on spending, I bring nothing in. Sometimes the thought of it saddens me.
Oblivious to his brother’s pain, Theo followed up on the sale of Les bretonnes with a quick show of Gauguin’s latest Breton work on the entresol. Only weeks after his arrival in Arles, Gauguin was receiving the glowing reports from Paris that Vincent had only dreamed about. “It will undoubtedly please you to learn that your pictures are having a great success,” Theo wrote him in mid-November. “Degas is so enthusiastic about your works that he is speaking about them to a lot of people … Two [more] canvases have now been definitely sold.” Theo used the opportunity to open negotiations with Gauguin about raising Goupil’s commission “once we begin to sell your work more or less regularly.” It was a conversation he had never had with Vincent. Within two months, Theo would sell five of Gauguin’s paintings, plus some pottery, and send him almost fifteen hundred francs, in addition to his monthly stipend.
Vincent reeled under his guest’s onslaught of success. Just as Gauguin’s hearty condition foiled Vincent’s argument that all true artists suffered for their art, Gauguin’s successes on the entresol undermined years of excuses for why his own art had failed to sell. Forced by events to justify his work “from the financial point of view,” Vincent could offer only a single, pathetic defense: “It is better that [the paint] should be on my canvas than in the tubes.”
Reversing years of pleadings, he urged his brother to abandon any effort to sell his paintings and advised him instead to “keep my pictures for yourself.” That way, he said, he could tell Gauguin and others that Theo treasured his works too much to sell them. “Besides,” he added, “if what I am doing should be good, then we shall lose no money; for it will mature quietly, like wine in the cellar.” He bolstered this wisp of hope with two familiar images. On his first trip into the countryside with Gauguin, he painted the scarified trunk of an old yew tree, an image that spoke in deep fraternal code of new life springing from the wreckage of the past. He immediately sent a sketch of the painting to Theo, rallying him to their shared mission of a “great renaissance” of Impressionism in the Midi—a mission that transcended any single artist.
On the same trip, he began yet another version of the Sower. More than any other image, Millet’s striding figure, making his rhythmic way through a vast field of turned earth in blues and yellows under a thin stripe of sea-blue sky, sounded the consoling notes of adversity overcome and persistence rewarded that Vincent most needed in this new trial by contrast.
Another blow fell when Gauguin picked the destination for their next painting excursion. Rejecting the barren fields and dusty barnyards of Vincent’s beloved Crau, Gauguin led them instead into the romantic heart of Arles: the Alyscamps. In Roman times, a necropolis lay to the south and east of the city walls—named, like the great avenue in Paris, after the Campi Elysii, the Elysian Fields. Christianity had added a gloss of sanctity to the old pagan burial ground. Chapels were built, saints gave blessings, legends of miraculous doings went out, Christ appeared in a vision. By medieval times, relatives eager to assure a place at the Last Judgment could float their dead down the Rhône to Arles, confident that Christian duty would safeguard them to a favored spot in the Alyscamps.
LES ALYSCAMPS, ARLES (Illustration credit 35.1)
Over the centuries, a ramshackle city of the dead grew up. Thousands of sarcophagi, arranged as randomly as death, spread across the alluvial plain, each one making claims on eternity, both in stone and in words. But neither antiquity nor sanctity stood in the way of industrial progress. By the time Vincent arrived, the railroad had blasted through the hallowed ground, churning up grave sites and discarding the marble detritus of death with furious disregard for the claims of pacem and aeternam. Belatedly, the city fathers collected some of the plundered discards and arranged them in a long alley connecting one of the cemetery’s antique gates to the Romanesque chapel of Saint Honorat. They lined this facsimile of history with benches and poplars, and solemnly dubbed it the “allée des tombeaux.”
The trees were still young and flaming with fall color when Gauguin led Vincent to the famous Alyscamps in late October 1888. He came partly as tourist (guidebooks devoted chapters to the “ancient” graveyard), but mostly as voyeur. For time had delivered one final insult to the displaced souls of the Alyscamps. In the allée’s cul-de-sac privacy and shady interstices, young lovers had found a perfect haven. Generations of Arlésiennes had turned the old site of reckoning into a parade-ground of vanities: a lovers’ lane limned in death. Here they could stroll in their exotic Sunday costumes for the gratification of tourists and the bid of bachelors, or even walk arm in arm with a beau, without causing scandal.
Because of their reputation for beauty (they were widely viewed as direct descendants of the “Roman virgins” that adorned the vases of antiquity), the Arlésiennes’ perambulations among the tombs had achieved a romantic fame that reached far beyond Provence. Through popular stories and images, the Alyscamps had become the most celebrated lovers’ lane in France, a collective Venusian fantasy of noble beauty, coquettish charm, and chaste love. When one local lovely threw her unwanted baby into a nearby canal, the fantasy showed its darker side: a busy nightlife of trysting among the sarcophagi and lovemaking among the shades.
Vincent had probably explored the Alyscamps sometime in his seven months in Arles, but he had never mentioned it, drawn it, or painted it. In general, he gave all the city’s ruins a wide berth, avo
iding both the tourists and the taunting immortality of the old stones. For feminine entertainments, he preferred the whorehouses of the rue des Récollets, near the Yellow House, where money was all that mattered. Egged on by Bernard, who sent both drawings and poems about brothels, Vincent took Gauguin on a tour of all his favorite spots, retracing his nightly rounds with the Zouave lieutenant Milliet (who left for Africa soon after Gauguin arrived), ostensibly for both recreation and “study.”
Gauguin tolerated these early excursions to the charmless, heavily regulated maisons de tolérance (which, according to one account, catered primarily to “the proletariat of ugliness and infirmity”), but he preferred the more elusive prey and challenging game of the Alyscamps—the contest of wit and glance that Vincent had long since abandoned as futile. (“My body is not attractive enough to women to get them to pose for me free for nothing,” he lamented.) In these fabled precincts, Gauguin, on the other hand, flourished. With his hypnotic sensuality and menacing physicality, he seduced the beautiful and aloof Arlésiennes with an audacity—and lack of conscience—that left Vincent breathless with envy.
Gauguin’s amorous successes dealt his host a special blow. They not only solidified Vincent’s place among the hapless rejects of the rue des Récollets, they exploded the myth of abstinent, monklike artists, resigned “to fuck only a little,” that he had devised to cover the shame of impotence. Here was an artist in whom the blessings of “blood and sex prevail[ed] over ambition” (or so Vincent thought); a man who did not need to preserve his sperm—indeed, spent it profligately—and still had plenty of “creative sap” left for his work. Already awestruck at Gauguin’s five children (and, according to rumor, twice as many bastards), Vincent marveled that Gauguin had “found the means of producing children and pictures at the same time.”
As if to press this crippling advantage, Gauguin immediately embarked on a reprise of his Martinique negresses—the touchstone of his artistic appeal and erotic authority for both Van Gogh brothers. On the Alyscamps, he painted three lovely Arlésiennes, in full local costume, posing indulgently on the bank of the canal that ran alongside the lane of graves. (Later, he turned to the Alyscamps’s dark side, with a menacing scene, half hidden behind a tree, of an older man accosting a young girl, to which he gave the leering title Your Turn Will Come, Pretty One.) Vincent, as usual, could find no one to pose for him and was forced to staff his Alyscamps paintings with figures based on old drawings and eavesdropping glances. He defended himself in the only way he could: with a brothel scene showing a man and two women playing cards (a ubiquitous form of fore-play in whorehouses) surrounded by groping couples and bored, dark-skinned beauties in candy-colored ball gowns.
Gauguin soon turned his predatory eye on a woman closer to home. Marie Ginoux, wife of the Café de la Gare’s owner Joseph Ginoux, had probably attracted Gauguin’s attention from the moment he arrived in Arles and waited at the café before calling on Vincent. A handsome, raven-haired woman of forty (exactly Gauguin’s age) with half-mast eyes and a “habitual smile,” according to one admirer, Marie had married a man more than a decade her senior, resigning herself to a childless marriage and round-the-clock service to the café’s family of regulars. Vincent, too, had been drawn to Marie’s Mediterranean warmth and faded beauty, so reminiscent of Agostina Segatori, the café proprietress he had tried to woo in Paris. Like Henry James, who wrote admiringly of one “splendid mature Arlésienne” whom he found “enthroned” behind the counter of a café (an “admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar”), Vincent saw in Marie’s oval face, low brow, straight “Greek” nose, and long, elaborately coiffed hair the picture of Arlesian womanhood sung by poets from Ovid to Daudet—“intensely feminine” yet “wonderfully rich and robust and full of a certain physical nobleness.”
Yet in the months Vincent had known this paragon, he had not painted her. For all his admiration of the legendary Arlésiennes, he had managed to coax only one old woman to sit for his brush. In August, he paid a young girl in advance to pose for him in local costume, but she never showed up. Either Marie Ginoux had refused his entreaties, or, fearing she would, he never asked. Paul Gauguin had no such fears. Less than a week after setting foot in Arles, he arranged for Marie to come to the Yellow House and pose. “Gauguin has already found his Arlésienne,” Vincent wrote, astounded. “I wish I had got that far.”
PAUL GAUGUIN, Madame Ginoux (Study for “Night Café”), 1888, CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 36⅛ × 28¾ IN. (Illustration credit 35.2)
She arrived in the full iconography of her kind: a long black dress with the distinctive white muslin fichu (shawl), her hair in a bun under a coquettish cap with a black ribbon dangling to her shoulder. She glided to a chair, laid down her parasol and gloves, then sat facing Gauguin and his sketchpad. When Vincent eagerly took up a position nearby, she put her hand up to her face, blocking his view and focusing her gaze on the beguiling newcomer, whom she called “Monsieur Paul.” While Gauguin sketched languorously in charcoal, glancing from his paper to engage his subject and capture her Mona Lisa smile, Vincent worked furiously in paint, slashing on a blue-black dress, scowling green face, and orange chair against a background of electric yellow in a race against the clock. Less than an hour later, Gauguin finished his drawing and Ginoux left. Fortunately, Vincent had finished his painting in time. To Theo, he gamely claimed a victory. “At last,” he wrote, “I have an Arlésienne.”
Over the next two weeks, a painting took form on Gauguin’s easel that added artistic insult to sexual one-upmanship. The visage of Madame Ginoux lingered in the shared studio as Gauguin slowly transferred his drawing to a large canvas. He gave her even softer features and a more beguiling, flirtatious smile. He transformed the wooden studio table on which she leaned into the milky marble of the Café de la Gare, and placed in front of her the tools of her trade: a serving of absinthe, a bottle of soda water, and two lumps of sugar.
Behind her, he painted an uncanny replica of the scene in Vincent’s The Night Café, seen from within—a low, patron’s perspective rather than Vincent’s high, all-seeing panorama. The green field of the billiard table fills the middle distance, stamping the floor with the same deep shade. Against the far wall—painted in the exact same fiery orange-red—a single oil lamp casts the same shadowless glare, and, under it, the same drunk slumps on a table, fast asleep. To fill out the crowd, Gauguin appropriated two of Vincent’s most cherished images, his portraits of Milliet and Roulin, and painted them into the scene as patrons: the Zouave at the table with the dozing drunk, the postman with a trio of glum prostitutes, holding forth under sickly streamers of cigarette smoke. Finally, he added a tiny cat under the billiard table, a symbol of female licentiousness that boasted of sexual conquest.
This ambiguous tribute to Vincent’s world—at once flattering and mocking—marked the first blow of an artistic siege: a battering of words and images and frustrated expectations that took Vincent completely by surprise. Despite months of beckoning advertisements like La mousmé and Le Zouave, Gauguin dismissed Vincent’s magical Midi as “petty and shabby.” He looked at the Crau and the Café de la Gare and saw not the bright hues and Zola life that Vincent saw, but only “scummy local color.” He called Arles “the filthiest spot in the South” and continued to hold out Pont-Aven as the true artist’s paradise. “He tells me about Brittany,” Vincent reported dolefully only days after his guest’s arrival, “[how] everything there is better, larger, more beautiful than here. It has a more solemn character, and especially purer in its tonality and more definite than the shriveled, scorched, trivial scenery of Provence.”
Vincent wanted to paint; Gauguin wanted to draw. Vincent wanted to rush into the countryside at the first opportunity; Gauguin demanded a “period of incubation”—a month at least—to wander about, sketching and “learning the essence” of the place. Vincent loved to paint en plein air; Gauguin preferred to work indoors. He saw their expeditions outside as fact-finding missions, opportunities to gather sketches—�
�documents,” he called them—that he could synthesize into tableaux in the calm and reflection of the studio. Vincent championed spontaneity and serendipity (“those who wait for the calm or work quietly will miss their chance,” he cautioned); Gauguin constructed his images slowly and methodically, trying out forms and blocking in colors. Vincent flung himself at the canvas headlong with a loaded brush and fierce intent; Gauguin built up his surfaces in tranquil sessions of careful brushstrokes. In their first few weeks in the Yellow House, Gauguin completed only three or four canvases; Vincent blazed through a dozen.
Vincent had imagined that Gauguin would share his Paradou fecundity once he felt the regenerative power of the Provençal sun. But Gauguin had just the opposite reaction. A man of the city, he found that bucolic life made him “lazy” in his personal habits and even more laconic in his approach to art, which he famously summed up: “One dreams, then paints calmly.” His deliberativeness struck Vincent a mortifying blow. Since arriving in Arles, he had vehemently defended his speed and productivity (and copious consumption of paint) against Theo’s repeated urgings to slow down and take more care with each painting. Every time Gauguin picked up a brush and began one of his slow transits across the canvas with short, scratching strokes, Vincent heard his brother’s nagging complaints. Vincent reveled in the fury of work, bragging to Theo: “Our days are taken up with work and ever more work; in the evening we are shattered and go to the café, followed by an early night. Such is our existence.” Gauguin wrote his wife scornfully: “Vincent is working himself to death.”
Gauguin’s elaborate programs and methodical brushwork also challenged Vincent’s understanding of Cloisonnist theory. “Aren’t we seeking intensity of thought rather than tranquility of touch?” he had written Bernard that summer. Vincent struggled to reduce his images to the fewest possible elements, arranged in bold mosaics of color—a campaign shared in dozens of color-labeled letter sketches; Gauguin endlessly adjusted line and tone, dissolving every surface into carefully modulated planes of interwoven, overlapping hues. Vincent answered the call to “crudity” and “ugliness” he heard in Anquetin’s ideas and Bernard’s rhetoric—the evidence of his audacity hung everywhere on the walls of the Yellow House; Gauguin sat at his easel in the front room and fashioned deft, delicate images filled with feathery strokes and discretions of color. Vincent enshrined the law of simultaneous contrast, the gospel of Blanc and Delacroix, at the heart of his art; Gauguin ridiculed the catechism of complementary colors as simplistic and monotonous. And as for the yellow that flooded the paintings in his bedroom—Gauguin could barely hide his exasperated contempt: “Shit, shit, everything is yellow: I don’t know what painting is any longer!”
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