Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  The image that emerged on Gauguin’s big canvas over the following days brought the weeks of intimate combat to a head. With an instinct for the jugular, Gauguin depicted Vincent at work on his favorite subject: sunflowers. The last of the great blooms had long since disappeared from the gardens of Arles, but in Vincent’s delusional world, Gauguin suggested, they never died. A vase of the ubiquitous flowers sits beside Vincent’s easel. He stares at it intently, his eyes squinting and fluttering in the peculiar way he had of focusing his field of vision. His face is dulled and mirthless. His lips are tight, and his jaw protrudes in what could be a pout or could be a trace of the monkeylike features that Gauguin gave him in the preparatory sketch.

  As in his version of The Night Café, Gauguin ruthlessly commandeered the icons of Vincent’s imagination: not just the revered sunflowers but their palette, too. The distinctive mix of yellows and oranges leaches from the enormous blossoms into Vincent’s coat and face and beard. The figure’s long reach, low brow, and simian features inflict on Vincent the very Daumier caricature he had urged on Gauguin. The thumb sticking up through the palette on his lap belittles his manhood. “Perhaps my portrait does not bear him much resemblance,” Gauguin coyly told Theo, “but it contains, I think, something of the intimate man.”

  Gauguin placed his helpless sitter under a huge painting done in his style: de tête. The invented landscape that looms over Vincent’s shoulder—so big it almost transports him to his beloved plein air—celebrates the limitless world of the imagination on which he has turned his back. Rather than seize that path, Gauguin’s Vincent fixes his eyes on the briefest of nature’s ephemera: flowers. Like Darwin’s monkey, he clings to the lowest rung of an inexorable climb to the fire and air of pure idée. To underscore this scornful message, Gauguin painted Vincent’s brush poised ambiguously between the flowers he depicts and the image he paints, imposing a Symbolist mystery on the sincere but witless act of transcribing nature.

  —

  PAUL GAUGUIN, Vincent van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, NOVEMBER 1888, OIL ON CANVAS, 28¾ × 35⅞ IN. (Illustration credit 35.5)

  IN MID-DECEMBER, Gauguin delivered the coup de grâce. “I am obliged to return to Paris,” he wrote Theo. “Vincent and I absolutely cannot live side-by-side any longer without friction because of the incompatibility of our temperaments and because he and I both need tranquility for our work. He’s a man of a remarkable intelligence whom I hold in great esteem and leave with regret, but, I repeat, it is necessary that I leave.”

  CHAPTER 36

  The Stranger

  GAUGUIN HAD WANTED TO LEAVE EVEN SOONER. IN MID-NOVEMBER, only a few weeks after arriving, he wrote Bernard: “I am like a fish out of water.” As the light shortened and the weather closed in, the days began to stretch out endlessly. When asked later how long he had stayed in the Yellow House, Gauguin could not say exactly, but admitted “the time seemed to me a century.” He had arrived thinking he might remain a year (whereas Vincent had imagined he would stay forever). Then he began to talk of departing in a few months; then simply “soon.” To another friend, he cast his circumstance in more dire terms, comparing it to a train “hurtling along at top speed.” “[I] can foresee the end of the line,” he wrote, “but I keep on coming up against the chances of going off the rails.”

  Initially, he kept the truth from Theo. “The good Vincent and the prickly Gauguin continue to make a happy couple,” he wrote cheerfully at the same time he despaired to Bernard. Still financially insecure and determined “not to launch my attack before I have all the necessary materials in my hands,” he hoped to endure by putting some distance between himself and his host. As often as he could, he left the house and disappeared into the night on his own, telling Vincent that he needed some “independence.”

  When bad weather condemned him to long spells in the living room that served as his studio, he buried his head in his work to avoid being trapped in the great debates that continuously raged in Vincent’s head. But even this did not bring the “peace and quiet” he sought. “When I am painting,” he complained, “[Vincent] is always finding me at fault with this, that or the other.” Gauguin apparently succeeded in exiling his host to work in the kitchen, which had been fitted out as a separate studio. But they still intersected every evening over supper and every night when they retreated to their bedrooms (Gauguin could only reach his by going through Vincent’s). Even then, the walls of his tiny nook were crowded with sleepless arguments.

  Inevitably, his thoughts fled the Yellow House long before he himself dared to. His enthusiasm wandered; his energy flagged. He left sketches undeveloped and paintings unfinished. He relied more and more on old drawings from Pont-Aven, or reprised previous paintings, or even borrowed from Vincent’s work, rather than engage with a place and a people he despised. He rarely mentioned Vincent in his letters—the only form of privacy left to him. Feeling put-upon and purchased, he brooded resentfully. Only weeks after arriving, he began imagining his escape. A brief encounter with the Zouave lieutenant Milliet, who left for Africa at the beginning of November, reignited his plan for a return to Martinique the following year. He determined to stay in Arles only until he could save enough to set sail, he wrote a friend, “[then] I shall go to Martinique and surely produce some fine work there.… I will even buy a house there and establish a studio where friends could find an easy life for next to nothing.”

  Vincent tried at first to see Gauguin’s plan for Martinique as an extension of his own great project for the South. “What Gauguin tells of the tropics seems marvelous to me,” he wrote soon after his guest arrived. “Surely the future of a great renaissance in painting lies there.” But with tensions mounting and Gauguin more disengaged every day (Vincent called him “homesick for the tropics”), any talk of departure threw Vincent into a panic of suspicion and anxiety that pushed their relations closer and closer to an open break. “Between the two of us,” Gauguin later recounted, “the one entirely a volcano and the other also boiling, but inside, some sort of struggle was bound to occur.”

  Even as Vincent’s behavior made Gauguin’s stay in Arles increasingly intolerable, Theo’s efforts in Paris made it increasingly unnecessary. In mid-November, when Gauguin’s canvases finally arrived from Pont-Aven, Theo exhibited them on the entresol and diligently promoted them to collectors and critics. Sales of both paintings and pottery mounted; admirers multiplied. A fresh wave of money and praise washed over the Yellow House. Gauguin began keeping lists of his buyers. He boasted to Bernard of his distinguished “flatterers,” especially Degas, and plotted to ensure that his disapproving family “got wind of my success.” Theo sent letters enclosing hundreds of francs, elaborate plans for framing, and requests for Gauguin to approve pending sales. Other letters arrived filled with sycophantic praise (“the richness and abundance of your production astound me … You are a giant”) and plans for exhibitions. He was invited to show his work with Les Vingt (The Twenty), an artists’ society in Brussels that, through its connection with the influential review L’Art Moderne, had become a leading venue for avant-garde art.

  Like Vincent, he declined an invitation to exhibit at the Revue Indépendante show in January, convinced that his enemies had laid a trap for him. Instead, he began planning his own independent show—“a serious exhibition in opposition to the petit point.” Swollen with new confidence, he wrote to his wife, “My business affairs are heading in the right direction [and] my reputation is becoming firmly established.” He sent friends a new photograph of himself showing off his “savage countenance,” as if to announce his triumphant—and imminent—return from the wilderness.

  Soon thereafter, the message reached Theo: “It is absolutely necessary that I leave.”

  VINCENT HAD SEEN the end coming. As early as mid-November, fear of it had begun to creep into his letters. “We are having wind and rain,” he reported, “and I am very glad not to be alone.” When Gauguin received the invitation to show with Les Vingt in Brussels, Vince
nt was seized by a paranoid suspicion that his housemate intended to move there. “Gauguin is already thinking of settling in Brussels,” he imagined, “so he can see his Danish wife again.” Perhaps to hide his anxieties from Theo, he wrote fewer and shorter letters, even as the nights grew longer and lonelier. He blamed the frictions in the Yellow House on weather and wind, or Gauguin’s obligations to his family, or the usual strains of creative life. The truth was simply unacceptable. As soon as Gauguin announced his decision to leave, Vincent launched a furious campaign to reverse it, pretending to Theo that the decision had not been made. “I think myself that Gauguin was a little out of sorts,” he explained. In a delusion of denial, he rented two additional rooms in the Yellow House.

  Like Theo’s refusal to come to Drenthe, or Rappard’s criticism of The Potato Eaters, Gauguin’s decision to leave Arles had to be undone—unsaid. Vincent would force him to “take it back.” He told Gauguin: “Before doing anything … think it over and reckon things up again.” Seeing doubt where there was none, he reopened all the arguments of the spring and summer—the “good reasons” why Gauguin’s destiny lay in Arles—pressing them with fresh vehemence and an edge of desperation.

  Despite the proof of his own eyes, he insisted that Gauguin had arrived there “in pain and seriously ill” and would fall sick again if he left the reparative embrace of the Yellow House. He warned that the success of Gauguin’s art, too, depended on the magical Midi. He heaped praise on recent works like The Grape Harvest and The Pigs, calling them “thirty times better” than Gauguin’s paintings from Pont-Aven. Turning against the plan for Martinique, he offered his own “calculations” to show that Gauguin needed far more money for his voyage than Gauguin himself had figured. Only if he stayed longer in the frugal South—with Theo looking after his pictures and Vincent looking after his health—could he amass the funds he truly needed. Surely he owed that duty of caution to his wife and children, Vincent pleaded.

  After exhausting all these arguments, he turned to the oldest argument of all: solidarity. He revealed to Gauguin his deepest secrets of failure—in family, in religion, in love—and drew from them a lesson that projected his own last hope for happiness onto his guest. “Gauguin is very powerful and strongly creative,” he wrote Theo, “but just because of that he must have peace. Will he find it anywhere if he does not find it here?”

  Inevitably, the pleadings found their way into paint. With tremendous care, he filled a large canvas with a scene that he and Gauguin had shared only a few weeks before: the ball at the Folies Arlésiennes. Vincent had always been drawn to crowds. From the fervent masses at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London to the rowdy sailors’ dances in Antwerp, the anonymity of large gatherings had made it possible for him to enjoy the human warmth that always eluded him in more intimate encounters. The annual winter ball at the Folies Arlésiennes, a huge theater that also hosted Christmas pageants and traveling zoos, outdid any celebration Vincent had seen in its naïve splendor and earnest high spirits. By the time he and Gauguin arrived on the night of December 1, the balconied theater was so packed that there was no room left for dancing. The festive chaos and infectious good cheer dispelled the claustrophobia of the Yellow House and the increasingly tense relations within it.

  Thus it was no surprise, two weeks later, when Vincent summoned up this raucous evening of wine, women, and camaraderie to dissuade Gauguin from leaving Arles. Working in Gauguin’s way, de tête, he captured the roiling sea of celebrants: women in Sunday hats and native bonnets, Zouave soldiers in their red regimental caps, both sexes bareheaded—an audacity of rustic esprit. Shoulder to shoulder, they surge across the ballroom floor and spill from the distant balconies under a galaxy of luminous Chinese paper lanterns.

  The vast mosaic of figures and faces bursts with decorative motifs and patterns, some borrowed directly from Gauguin’s Brittany work and from a Bernard painting that Gauguin had brought with him from Pont-Aven. The elaborate, geishalike hairdos of the Arlésiennes, seen from behind, fill the foreground with their sensuous curves of ribbons and curls. Beyond them, faces dissolve into featureless masks—rank after rank of Gauguin’s mysterious phantoms, like revelers at a masquerade. Only the face of Madame Roulin stands out as a real person. In homage to the maître, Vincent also abjured the bright color contrasts of his own work and filled the heavily outlined elements with Gauguin’s subtle crépon palette applied in judicious strokes. This was not the Folies ball they had witnessed; it was an idée of a ball.

  The outing to the Folies proved successful enough that Gauguin proposed a more extended day trip. The destination: Montpellier, a picturesque medieval city sixty miles southwest of Arles, not far from the Mediterranean coast. Gauguin chose the spot not for its rocky shoreline or its antique streets, but for its most famous treasure: the Musée Fabre. He had visited the museum years before, and he lured Vincent on the long train ride (a five-hour round-trip) with descriptions of the magnificent Delacroixs and Courbets that hung there as part of a collection given by Alfred Bruyas, a famous benefactor of the arts and friend to artists. In the lofty, skylighted Bruyas Gallery, the two painters passionately debated the paintings that crowded the walls. While Gauguin championed the muted tones of Delacroix, Vincent pleaded for his beloved portraiture—even defending the dozens of portraits of himself that Bruyas, a relentless narcissist, had commissioned from various artists.

  After the trip, a tense peace descended on the Yellow House. In response to discussions like the one in the Bruyas Gallery, Gauguin painted a portrait of an old man leaning on a cane—a nod of approval to Vincent’s Daumier-inspired country saint, Patience Escalier. Around the same time, he agreed to participate in another round of portraits of Madame Roulin, the postman’s wife, a model of motherhood that had begun to obsess Vincent’s imagination. The pair of portraits not only signaled an entente on the subject of portraiture, but also announced that the two artists had begun working together again in the front room. Gauguin even obliged Vincent’s request that they exchange self-portraits—the ultimate pledge of artistic brotherhood. Like the Rashomon views of Augustine Roulin, the reciprocal self-portraits matched perfectly in size, orientation, and palette. For the background, Vincent adopted Gauguin’s meticulous brushstrokes; Gauguin borrowed Vincent’s bonze green.

  Only days after returning from Montpellier, Gauguin withdrew his plan to leave Arles. “Please consider my journey to Paris as imaginary,” he wrote Theo mysteriously, “and in consequence the letter I wrote you as a bad dream.” Was Gauguin persuaded by Vincent’s pleas to stay? Was he moved by the passion for art that Vincent showed in Montpellier? Did he take pity on Vincent’s troubled past? Or did he simply fear that his housemate might come unhinged if he left?

  Undoubtedly, Theo had intervened in the meantime. Knowing his brother’s frantic needs and fragile spirits, he had surely begged in his careful way for Gauguin to reconsider and, if at all possible, remain. The combination of pity and pressure—whatever it was—proved persuasive even to the pirate Gauguin. “I owe a lot to Van Gogh and Vincent,” he wrote his friend Émile Schuffenecker. “In spite of some discord, I am unable to hold it against a man with such a good heart who is ill, suffering, and calls for me.” Indicating the threat he felt, he compared Vincent to Edgar Allan Poe, “who became an alcoholic as a result of his sorrows and neurotic state”; and he hinted at a darker cause: “I’ll explain in detail later.”

  But nothing had changed. Where Vincent saw entente and rededication, Gauguin saw appeasement and delay. What Vincent took as a change of heart, Gauguin meant only as a recalculation. If he could maintain good relations in Paris and avoid an explosion in Arles by staying, Gauguin reckoned, he could bear life with Vincent a little longer. “I am staying put,” he confided to Schuffenecker, “but my departure is always imminent.”

  To Theo, Vincent reported that all had returned to normal in the Yellow House. “This is how things stand,” he wrote cheerfully. “Gauguin was saying to me this morning when
I asked him how he felt ‘that he felt his old self coming back,’ which gave me enormous pleasure.” But, in fact, he knew the truth. Even as he boasted of a new rapprochement and claimed Gauguin as “an excellent friend,” he continued to fear the worst. “Up to the last days,” he later confessed, “I saw only one thing, that [Gauguin] was working with his heart divided between the desire to go to Paris to carry out his plans, and the life at Arles.” The uncertainty paralyzed him. Despite his claims of unceasing effort, his work ground to a halt. In a collapse of confidence reminiscent of The Hague, he asked Theo to return canvases from Paris and proposed not sending any more for at least a year. “It would certainly be better if I can refrain from sending them,” he wrote forlornly. “For there is no need to show them at the moment, I know that well enough.” Still, through all the premonitions of catastrophe, he protested his “absolute serenity” and confidence in the future.

  As in Drenthe and Antwerp, the contradiction between his averred life and his real life drove Vincent into a spiral of guilt and self-reproach in the weeks before Christmas, his most vulnerable season. Gauguin undoubtedly saw the first cracks of the coming breakdown in Montpellier when, standing before Delacroix’s portrait of Alfred Bruyas, Vincent launched into a bizarre discourse on the family resemblance between the bearded, redheaded Bruyas and himself. In twisted knots of association, he linked both Gauguin and Theo to Rembrandt portraits, creating a delusional brotherhood of look-alikes, and ended with a vision of himself as the brooding, demon-plagued poet Torquato Tasso, as Delacroix famously depicted him, imprisoned in an insane asylum.

  As much as he could, Vincent hid from Theo the gathering storm in his head. He talked vaguely about “difficulties [that] are rather within ourselves than outside.” He complained that his discussions with Gauguin left him “as exhausted as an electric battery after it has run down.” Only later did he admit to multiple “nervous crises” and attacks of “delirium” in the last weeks of December. But even at the time, Theo must have noticed how Vincent’s infrequent letters flitted distractedly from subject to subject, from image to image, as restless and disconnected as a ghost. He reported looking at paintings and seeing visions from the past. Delacroix’s portrait of Bruyas triggered a particularly vivid reverie, he told Theo: a phantomlike figure from a favorite poem by Alfred de Musset—“a wretch clad in black” that followed him silently wherever he went, watching as if from the other side of a mirror: