Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Arriving almost simultaneously, the three missives triggered a wave of remembrance that found its way onto canvas. Vincent’s mind traveled back to the last place where he had lived in peace under the same roof with his parents and siblings: Etten. Following Gauguin’s program of asymmetric composition and tight cropping, he imagined a scene in the parsonage garden from which he had been expelled in 1881. In the sinuous contours that Gauguin had taught him, he filled the left foreground with two large female figures shown only from the waist up and only steps away from exiting the canvas. “Let us suppose that the two ladies out for a walk are you and our mother,” he described the image to Wil.

  To give his figures the air of mystery that Gauguin demanded, he shrouded one in a dark hood, like a mourner at a funeral, and the other in a high-bundled shawl. Using the photograph Wil had sent him, he gave the mourning figure his mother’s features; the other he depicted with the naïve intensity of his Zola-reading sister, but with the eyes and nose of Madame Ginoux. Behind them, the winding path of the public garden snakes up toward the unseen horizon, interrupted only by the figure of a peasant woman, an unwanted ghost from Nuenen, thrusting her rump in the air in a way he had drawn a hundred times. In the background he saw both the twisting, flaming cypresses of the Midi gardens and the multicolored flowers that had filled all his mother’s gardens.

  The memories were his own, but the image belonged to Gauguin. From the muted tonalities to the labored brushwork, from the sensuous curves to the stylized composition, from the mysterious figures to the shadowless landscape, Vincent had yielded to the maître’s persuasion. He built up the image with the same layering of dry paint in short strokes that Gauguin used—an astonishing act of discipline for Vincent’s impetuous brush.

  But the absence of a model and the halting approach invited back all the demons of drawing—especially drawing the human figure—that had defeated him so often in the past: lifeless faces and grotesque hands; conflicting perspectives and skewed proportions. In his letter to Wil, which included a sketch of the painting, he defended his unnatural new work (“bizarre,” he called it) with an appeal to Gauguin’s mandate of the imagination. Rather than pursue “vulgar and fatuous resemblance,” he had presented the scene “as seen in a dream,” he insisted. “I know this is hardly what one might call a likeness,” he apologized, “but for me it renders the poetic character and the style of the garden as I feel it.”

  At the same time, Vincent instructed Theo to refuse an invitation from the Revue Indépendante to exhibit his paintings in the magazine’s next show, in the spring of the following year (1889). Gauguin had discovered a plot against him by the “petits points” crowd to use the Revue exhibition as a platform to attack him and Bernard as “worse than devils who must be avoided like the plague.” Rather than participate in this ambush, Vincent cast aside years of ambition and embraced the avant-garde factionalism he had so often decried. He called the Revue’s editor, Édouard Dujardin, “a scoundrel” and ridiculed his exhibition as “a black hole.” “Please tell them curtly it’s no go,” he instructed Theo. “I am so disgusted at the idea.” It was a small price to pay for his new brotherhood. “My friend Paul Gauguin, an impressionist painter, is now living with me,” he boasted to Wil, “and we are very happy together.”

  BUT THE NEW BROTHERHOOD of art and ideas, like the old one of blood and family, was pulled by contrary currents. In a few short weeks, unable to achieve the mastery of form and line that Gauguin’s art demanded, Vincent swung from submission to defiance. The compliant paint of the Etten garden barely had time to dry before he returned to the canvas and attacked it with his contradictory brush. He peppered the shrouded figure of his mother with jabs of red and black and the stooping peasant with a hail of blue, orange, and white dots. At a time when Gauguin was locked in combat with the Pointillists in Paris, Vincent’s revisions announced an insurgency under the same roof.

  Vincent had never completely capitulated to his mentor’s unnatural methods. Even in the midst of his enthrallment to Gauguin’s Puvis surfaces and Degas contours, he had continued to celebrate his own Daumier caricatures and Monticelli incrustations. Even as he obeyed Gauguin’s instruction to wash the shine off his glistening impasto, he would return to his canvases afterward and touch them up to restore the brilliant, jewel-like color that he never stopped prizing. Even as he acknowledged Gauguin’s criticism that he painted too quickly and contritely agreed to “make some alterations,” he boasted to Theo of “doing some things even more hurriedly.”

  By the end of November, the great sea change in his own art that Vincent had predicted Gauguin would bring had been reduced to this grudging concession: “In spite of himself and in spite of me, Gauguin has more or less proved to me that it is time I was varying my work a little.”

  Vincent marked the pendulum’s swing with a bold reassertion of self: a Sower. He tried it first on a small canvas, not Gauguin’s jute, with Millet’s striding figure placed forthrightly in the center of the picture, not off to the side or oddly cropped. He is dressed in the uniform of Cloisonnism, as Vincent understood it: fragments of pure color; and he treads a field as blue and glassy as a calm sea. The tokens of reality—a plowing horse, a farmhouse, the distant Arles skyline (including factories belching smoke)—frame the crystal figure in Zola’s nature. A topography of impasto grounds it in paint. In another attempt only a few days later, Vincent “varied” the image by enlarging the familiar figure and moving it to one side, but rooted it even more deeply in the landscape of his own art. In the middle of the canvas he placed a huge pollarded tree with fresh blossoms springing from old wounds, silhouetted against a pink-and-green Corot sky. Over the sower’s head, an immense yellow sun sets into a stippled violet horizon—a shake of the fist in form, color, and stroke. “I allowed myself to be led astray,” Vincent later described his Gauguin experiments, “and [then] I had my fill of that.”

  Next, he pressed the insurrection with portraits. He had imagined that Gauguin would lure a stream of models to the Yellow House and had fitted out the studio to accommodate a dozen models at a time. Vincent pictured the two painters coming home from a day in the fields “bringing along neighbors and friends, and, while chatting away, [painting] portraits of people in the light of a gas lamp.” But after the brief session with Madame Ginoux, Gauguin had largely ignored Vincent’s pleas on behalf of the “painting of the future.” For almost a month, Vincent stood by, fulminating at the opportunities for models lost on account of Gauguin’s devotion to the art of airy nothings. “If at the age of forty,” he wrote, citing Gauguin’s age and squandered advantages, “I do a painting of figures or portraits the way I feel it, I think that will be worth more than any present success.”

  At the end of November, Vincent struck out against the boycott of his favorite imagery. “I have made portraits of a whole family,” he announced to Theo triumphantly. “You know how I feel about this, how I feel in my element … At least I shall have done something to my liking and something individual.” After a long absence, the postman Roulin had reappeared in Vincent’s life, and he brought his family with him: his sons Armand, seventeen, and Camille, eleven, and his wife, Augustine. Money probably played a role in their rapprochement. Vincent was so eager to paint portraits that he agreed to pay for every sitter provided by the postman, who supported his family on a mere hundred and thirty francs a month, half of what Theo sent. Even the infant Marcelle joined the line of Roulins that filed into the Yellow House.

  Vincent tore through six portraits at the rate of one a day. After weeks of Gauguin’s demands for invention and inward looking, he reveled in the sheer tactility of faces and postures and clothing. Rather than explore the dark recesses of his own mind, he gleefully recorded every nuance of his sitters’ moods: Armand’s glum resignation, Camille’s fidgety distraction, Marcelle’s squirming indifference in her mother’s arms. He rushed from portrait to portrait (two of Armand, three of Camille), glorying in the reconnection with reali
ty. He labored lovingly over facial features with some of the most faithful likenesses he had produced in a decade of trying. “I am completely swamped with studies, studies, studies,” he wrote in an ecstasy of observation; “it makes such a mess that it breaks my heart.”

  The Baby Marcelle Roulin, DECEMBER 1888, OIL ON CANVAS, 13⅞ x 9¼ IN. (Illustration credit 35.3)

  His next subject argued even more vehemently for the mess and marvel of real life. What could be further from Gauguin’s phantoms and illusions than the wooden slats, stout legs, rush seat, and blunt feet of a sturdy pine chair? Vincent had bought a dozen of them in preparation for the acolytes he expected would follow Gauguin to his door. Now he picked one out of the crowd, set it in front of a big canvas, and just looked. Like birds’ nests, tree trunks, and canal bridges, the simple, armless chair engaged Vincent’s imagination in a way no idée could.

  He rediscovered the fierce colors of The Bedroom in the red floor, blue door, pale blue walls, and brilliant yellow of the chair itself. Rejecting Gauguin’s evasive curves and elusive space, he planted the square-jointed chair firmly on its four legs in careful perspective and declared forthrightly its place in this world by focusing his brush on knots in the wood and hinges on the door. He battled Gauguin’s coarse jute to a triumph of impasto, crisscrossing every floor tile with its own signature fabric of paint. Working with defiant speed, he laid in great swaths of color and outlined each bone of the monumental chair, reclaiming the Midi for reality. This was the vision of the future of art that he had championed in paintings like The Yellow House: the Japanese gospel of simplicity and intensity to which he had sworn a sacred oath before his guest’s arrival.

  He had found his voice again.

  Bursting with protest, he immediately grabbed a second big sheet of jute and began another image: Gauguin’s chair. In the internal debates that always accompanied his ardors, Vincent often took up the arguments of his opponents, recasting them to suit his counterattacks and ensure his victory. He did the same with paint. In Nuenen, he had depicted his father’s Bible in the heavy, lifeless grays of the rayon noir so he could assail it with a copy of Zola’s La joie de vivre in a flash of sunny yellow. Now he picked another fight with another oppressive foe. This time, he used chairs, not books, as surrogates; and he staged their battle on separate canvases.

  He had bought the chair specifically for Gauguin’s bedroom. Its saber legs, curving arms, and voluted top-rail perfectly fit his ambition to create a “prettier” room for his refined guest. It also contrasted with the coarse, cheap pine of his own room, which he described in complementary terms of “solidity, durability and quiet.” The same clash of opposites played out on the two canvases: humble naïveté versus showy elegance; Millet’s sturdy forms versus Degas’s languorous lines; Midi sun versus café gaslight; yellow-blue consolation versus red-green purgation.

  Unable or afraid to recruit Gauguin to pose for him, Vincent piled all his pent-up grievances on the gaudy chair. He slashed its outline onto the resistant jute with such force that the foremost leg ran off the canvas. He filled its sensuous contours with the arguments of color that Gauguin rejected: orange and blue for the walnut chair, red for the floor, and a deep, acidic green for the wall. He imposed on it—in a way he could never impose on its absent sitter—not just the law of simultaneous contrast, but the crustaceous impasto of Monticelli, the cartoon simplicity of Daumier, and a quaint, nostalgic program of “day effect” and “night effect”—just the kind of straightforward picture making that the sophisticated Gauguin disdained. Finally, he placed on the seat of the chair a burning candle and a pair of books—a scolding of pink and yellow novels, icons of French Naturalism—as a rebuttal to Gauguin’s Symbolist excesses and a call to eventual enlightenment, or inevitable reckoning.

  While the bright peasant chair resurrected the dream of Daudet’s magical South, Gauguin’s abandoned throne summoned older and darker memories. Its empty embrace could not fail to evoke Luke Fildes’s famous image of Charles Dickens’s desk after his death, with its stilled pen, blank paper, and a vacant chair pushed back by the departing master. Years before, Vincent had cited the Fildes image to bewail the loss of courage and direction among modern artists. In 1878, after his father came to Amsterdam and put an end to his studies for the ministry, Vincent returned from the train station to his room and wept at the sight of his father’s empty chair. A decade later, the same image of failure and abandonment resurfaced in the Yellow House. The true subject of Gauguin’s Chair, Vincent later admitted, wasn’t a chair at all. “I tried to paint ‘his empty place,’ ” he wrote, “the absent person.”

  LUKE FILDES, The Empty Chair (“Gad’s Hill, Ninth of June 1870”), 1870, ENGRAVING (Illustration credit 35.4)

  The Bel-Ami was slipping away.

  HARDLY A DAY had passed without conflict at 2, place Lamartine. From the moment of Gauguin’s arrival, the little blows of everyday life had never stopped driving a wedge deeper and deeper between host and guest. Gauguin not only rejected Arles and its people, he complained about the unseasonable cold, the ceaseless wind, and the miserable food. He was shocked at the cramped quarters and domestic disorder of the Yellow House, and he abhorred the “mess” of Vincent’s studio. (“His box of colors barely sufficed to contain all those squeezed tubes, which were never closed up,” he later recalled.) Displeased with some of the furniture in his carefully composed bedroom, Gauguin immediately bought a new chest of drawers and a long list of household goods. He threw out Vincent’s elaborate bedding and had his own sheets sent from Paris. He had pottery, cutlery, silver, and etchings sent, too—each item a reproach to the perfect “artist’s home” on which Vincent had lavished so much attention.

  Everything about Gauguin frustrated Vincent’s expectations: his low forehead (according to phrenology, a sign of imbecility), the strange fencing masks and foils he had inexplicably brought with him, the pictures of his five children. The same opposing currents that buffeted their art invaded every corner of their daily life together. Despite Vincent’s advance pledge “not to quarrel” with his guest, they clashed early over everything from household chores to restaurant choices. Gauguin took charge of the former (with assistance from Vincent’s ancient charwoman), while the latter was resolved only when Gauguin volunteered to cook. Vincent, a creature of café and bistro, tried to learn—just as he tried de tête painting—but with similar results. “Vincent wanted to make a soup,” Gauguin recalled, “but I don’t know how he mixed it—no doubt like the colors on his paintings—in any event, we couldn’t eat it.” Thereafter, Gauguin did all the cooking and Vincent did the shopping. Duties were divided, not shared.

  They clashed over money, too. Gauguin, the ex-stockbroker, found the household finances in the same shamble of disorder as Vincent’s studio. He immediately established a regimen of bookkeeping as laborious as his brushwork. On a table in the front room, he set out two boxes with money inside: one was for food, the other for incidentals (liquor, prostitutes, tobacco) and “unforeseen expenses like rent.” On a piece of paper, “each would inscribe honestly what he took from the till.” Vincent, who could never abide a budget (Gauguin later referred to financial matters as “that great sensitivity of his”), rebelled against the arrangement by soliciting extra money from Theo.

  Gauguin quickly sized up his adversary and set a strategy. “Your brother is indeed a little agitated,” he wrote Theo a few days after arriving, putting a gloss of understatement on the storms of passion and persuasion that must have burst from Vincent after being bottled up for so long. “I hope to calm him down gradually.” To accomplish that, rather than engage Vincent in his rants of enthusiasm (he had promised “day-long discussions”), Gauguin dodged and feinted. “He does not let himself get out of hand,” Vincent wrote, puzzled, in his initial report to Theo. Where Vincent poured out past injuries and plans for the future, Gauguin entertained with tales from his sailor days. Where Vincent heaped flattery on his guest (“your brother is most indulg
ent,” Gauguin wrote Theo blushingly), Gauguin reserved judgment. “I do not know yet what Gauguin thinks of my decorations in general,” Vincent complained after a week of awkward silence.

  The ardent Dutchman found this intricate choreography of appeasement and evasion deeply vexing. Always alert to slights, and wary of Gauguin’s intentions after their drawn-out courtship, he imagined his guest as a stalking tiger “waiting for the right moment to make a leap forward.” But when Vincent tried to goad him into debate, Gauguin only replied with a mocking salute—“Yes, sir, Sarge”—quoting a popular song about a policeman’s muzzled contempt for his foolish boss.

  Inevitably, this daily drubbing of caustic accommodation and veiled antagonism found its way onto canvas. Earlier that fall, Gauguin had drawn a caricature of Vincent sitting dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, looking up mesmerized at the sun, ignoring the peril at his feet. When Bernard sent the drawing to Vincent, he laughed it off, objecting, “I suffer from vertigo.” After that humiliation, it is doubtful that Vincent posed for the portrait of him that Gauguin painted in early December. Gauguin’s preparatory sketch looks candid: Vincent sits at his easel, caught midstroke, his eyes fixed on the canvas in front of him. His discomfort is palpable, and may account for the spareness and speed of Gauguin’s drawing—hardly the fond eye-embrace of Madame Ginoux.