Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  Exaggeration, of course, had long been a mandate of the new art, at least as Vincent first understood it from his correspondence with Bernard after leaving Paris. But Gauguin had brought a very different notion of modeling to the Yellow House: an insistence on precise line and idealized form that proved frustratingly elusive to Vincent’s unruly hand. Now, finally, in the clarity and serenity of his alpine retreat, Vincent could set aside his useless perspective frame, unclench his fist, and let his brush find the truest image. “In the open air,” he wrote, “one works as best one can, one fills one’s canvas regardless. Yet that is how one captures the true and the essential—the most difficult part.”

  He found support for his serene new art in a most unexpected place. After reading an article about a display at the Exposition Universelle, he determined that the ancient Egyptians—another “primitive” race, like the Japanese—must have known the secret of true art that he had discovered in the hills and vales of the Midi. Recalling the granite images he had seen in the Louvre, he imagined that Egyptian artists, “working by feeling and by instinct,” were able to express the “patience, wisdom, and serenity” of their potentates simply “by a few knowing curves and by the marvelous proportions.” Vincent found the same “harmony” of subject and art in the still lifes of Chardin and in the Golden Age glories of Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. But he wondered to Theo whether the Impressionists, or any of their noisy would-be successors, could make a similar claim.

  Meanwhile, in his own little world, he found that harmony everywhere. On his canvases, the valley’s rocky parapets came to life in cartoons of huge boulders piled in precarious walls and impossible overhangs. Close up, the ground ripples like a choppy sea. In the distance, it piles up in a dizzying multiplication of horizons. The clouds overhead hover not as atmosphere or light, but as objects in space, as solid as the mountains beneath, only bulbous and buoyant. The moon rises as a huge crescent, fantastically big and bright in its enclosed patch of sky. On the ground, olive trees loosen their crooked limbs and seem to shake to life, like characters in an Andersen fairy tale. With trembling foliage and twisted roots, they spring from the rolling ground as spritely curls of smoke.

  In this enchanted valley, everything has a life of its own. Even the stone wall that enclosed the field outside Vincent’s window seems to merge into the living landscape. Its angles soften; its hard edges melt. Instead of hewing to its straight course, it wanders across the undulating ground like a country lane or a hedgerow, as much a part of the countryside as the furrows and fields it encloses. Vincent was convinced that his old comrades Bernard and Gauguin would approve his new, “more spontaneous drawing.” “They do not ask the correct shape of a tree at all,” he insisted. But, in fact, nothing could have been further from either Gauguin’s ambitious striving after Degas’s or Bernard’s cerebrated ornamental-ism than Vincent’s tranquil, childlike world outside the world.

  That world would not have been possible without brushstroke. “What an odd thing the touch, the stroke of the brush, is,” he wrote in newfound wonderment. By altering the brushstroke “in keeping with the subject,” he discovered, “the result is without doubt more harmonious and pleasant to look at, and one can add whatever serenity and happiness one feels.” Freed from the “isms” that had chained it for so long, Vincent’s hand now returned to his Hague quest (kept alive since in drawings and letter sketches) to find the perfect fit of subject, line, texture, and mood. He cited the great engravers Félix Bracquemond and Jules Jacquemart, who had transformed works of art from one medium (oil) to another (copper plate) and in the process given them new perfection. He would do the same for nature, using the distinctive marks of his medium: brushstroke.

  To practice this “fit,” he found the ideal subjects right in plain sight, where he had looked past them a thousand times: cypress trees.

  They grew everywhere in the valley, some dating back to Roman times. They served as windbreaks and grave markers; they lined roads and marked boundaries; they stood in cohorts and in lonely sentinel. Once he saw them, their compact, “bottle-green” foliage and plain conical shape captivated him. He compared them in “beauty of line and proportion” to Egyptian obelisks. “The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts,” he wrote. “I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers, because it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them.”

  He saw them not just as simple cones (“a splash of black in a sunny landscape”), but as constellations of strokes. Like an astronomer looking through a telescope, the more closely he looked, the more he saw—and the more his brush recorded. From a distance, the dense branches all curved toward the pointed tip, twisting and flickering upward like flames. But as he approached closer and closer, each quivering branch became a little spiral of color and motion. Some curled upward, advancing the tree toward the sky; others flung themselves outward into space. Branch by branch, spiral upon spiral, he patiently piled them up, transforming ancient monuments of nature into towering monuments of paint.

  Cypresses, JUNE 1889, INK ON PAPER, 24⅝ × 18½ IN. (Illustration credit 39.4)

  By the end of the month, Vincent was working on a dozen canvases at once—almost all of them featuring cypress trees. Another dozen sat in the dormitory doorway, drying in the June heat. One of these was a nighttime study of a single tree silhouetted against a strange celestial display. “Enfin,” he wrote Theo, “I have a new study of a starry sky.”

  —

  VINCENT’S SEARCH TO express the serenity he felt led him inevitably to this familiar image. He was proud of the nightscape over the Rhône that he had painted in September the previous year (1888), on the eve of Gauguin’s arrival. Theo had liked it, too. Only a week after his brother complimented that painting in late May, Vincent proposed submitting it to the Revue Indépendante show in September—“in order not to exhibit anything too mad.” If not for the confinements of the Arles hospital—daylight-only releases, windowless isolation cells, bans on paints and brushes—he undoubtedly would have returned to the subject sooner.

  At Saint Paul, the constraints had hardly loosened. He still could not venture out after dark to paint, as he preferred, directly under the stars. Brushes and paints remained in his studio downstairs, to which he had access only during the day. To paint a starry night, he could only watch from behind the bars of his bedroom window as the asylum lights blinked off, the sky darkened, and the stars assembled. He may have made drawings—and tested other, deeper inventions—while staring at the small quadrant of the eastern sky that filled his little window. Over the course of the night, he saw a waning moon and the constellation Aries, lying low in the east, just above the hilltops, its four bright stellar points arrayed in a rough arc over the faint blush of the Milky Way. In the predawn hours, Venus, the morning star, appeared prominently on the horizon, bright and white—a perfect companion to an early wakening or a sleepless night. He stared and stared at the light they each shone, and the sparkling darkness around them.

  All this and more made its way onto Vincent’s canvas in the daylight hours. To ground his celestial vision, he added a sleeping village in the middle distance. Earlier in June, he had taken a day trip into the town of Saint-Rémy, about a mile downhill from the asylum gates. On this visit, or on one of his other forays into the hills overlooking the town, he had made a careful sketch of the popular mountain resort, with its dense warren of medieval streets girdled by broad modern boulevards: famous birthplace of Nostradamus, astrologer and prophet, and still a watering hole for passing luminaries like Frédéric Mistral and Edmond de Goncourt.

  For his painting, however, Vincent reduced the bustling town of six thousand to a sleepy village of no more than a few hundred souls—no bigger than Zundert or Helvoirt. The twelfth-century church of Saint Martin, which dominated the town with its fearsomely spiked stone bell tower, became a simple country chapel with a needlelike spire that barely pierced the horizon. Finally, he moved the town fro
m the valley floor north of the asylum and placed it to the east, directly between his bedroom window and the familiar serrated line of the Alpilles—a spot from which it, too, could witness the celestial spectacle about to begin.

  With all these elements—cypress tree, townscape, hills, horizon—secured in his imagination, Vincent’s brush launched into the sky. Unconstrained by sketches, unschooled by a subject in front of him, unbounded by perspective frame, unbiased by ardor, his eye was free to meditate on the light—the fathomless, ever-comforting light he always saw in the night sky. He saw that light refracted—curved, magnified, scattered—through all the prisms of his past: from Andersen’s tales to Verne’s journeys, from Symbolist poetry to astronomical discoveries. The hero of his youth, Dickens, had written of “a whole world with all its greatnesses and littlenesses” visible “in a twinkling star.” The hero of his age, Zola, described the sky of a summer night as “powdered with the glittering dust of almost invisible stars”:

  Starry Night, JUNE 1889, INK ON PAPER, 18½ × 24⅝ IN. (Illustration credit 39.5)

  Behind these thousands of stars, thousands more were appearing, and so it went on ceaselessly in the infinite depths of the sky. It was a continuous blossoming, a showering of sparks from fanned embers, innumerable worlds glowing with the calm fire of gems. The Milky Way was whitening already, flinging wide its tiny suns, so countless and so distant that they seem like a sash of light thrown over the roundness of the firmament.

  In his reading, in his thinking, in his seeing, Vincent had long looked past the “real” night sky—the tiny, static specks and sallow light of the night paintings he detested—in search of something truer to the vision of limitless possibility and inextinguishable light—the ultimate serenity—that he found in Zola’s blossoming, showering, glittering night.

  To record this vision, he summoned his new palette of violet and ocher, the unstudied curves of his mountaintops, the swirling spirals of his cypress branches, and the odd, wondering brushstroke with which he could “add whatever serenity and happiness” he felt. Guided only by “feeling and instinct,” like the ancient Egyptians, he painted a night sky unlike any the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes: a kaleidoscope of pulsating beacons, whirlpools of stars, radiant clouds, and a moon that shone as brightly as any sun—a fireworks of cosmic light and energy visible only in Vincent’s head.

  IN THE CENTURY after Starry Night was painted, scientists would discover that “latent” epileptic fits resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain. William James called them “nerve storms”—“explosions” of abnormal neural discharges that could be triggered by just a few “epileptic neurons” in a brain made up of billions of neurons. These cascading surges of errant sparks often originated in, or took their heaviest toll on, the most sensitive areas of the brain, especially the temporal lobe and the limbic system: the seats of perception, attention, comprehension, personality, expression, cognition, emotion, and memory. The “bombardment” of an epileptic shower could shake any of these foundations of consciousness and identity.

  The brain could weather these storms, researchers discovered, but it could never fully recover from them. Each attack lowered the threshold for the next attack and permanently altered the functions that had been shaken. The combination of fear (of another attack) and underlying neurological changes in the affected area of the brain created a pattern of behavior—a syndrome—associated with what came to be known as “temporal lobe epilepsy.”

  Seizures were usually followed by periods of extreme passivity—an apathetic haze in which victims showed little interest in the outside world, or in their own circumstances. Sexual appetite waned. To the untutored eye, and even to the victim, this passivity was often mistaken for serenity. Gradually, however, apathy yielded to its opposite: a state of heightened excitability. Obsessively alert to the outside world, the victim would be seized by intense feelings, deepened emotions (whether elation and euphoria or depression and paranoia), and towering enthusiasms. This state of heightened reality—easily exacerbated by alcohol—led in many cases to cosmic visions and religious raptures. As the mind grew increasingly excited, irritability, impulsiveness, and aggressiveness—the hallmarks of latent epilepsy—reappeared. Emotional disturbances led, inexorably, to violent ones—the “paroxystic violence” of a seizure—and the cycle would begin again.

  As for the ultimate cause—the origin of dysfunctional “epileptic” neurons in the brain—the answer remained a mystery. Some scientists, even as early as Vincent’s time, thought brain injuries, tumors, or birth defects might be responsible. Heredity continued to be suspected. Research did succeed in identifying the immediate causes of attacks—the triggers that could push a sufferer from passivity to euphoria, to paranoia, to agitation, to violent seizure, sometimes in the space of a year, sometimes within a month, sometimes within a day of the previous attack.

  Stress, alcohol, poor diet, vitamin deficiencies, emotional shocks, all could increase the brain’s susceptibility to electrical storms. The intense enthusiasms that filled the epileptic mind could also paralyze it with idées fixes—parasitic ideas that bored into a victim’s consciousness to the exclusion of all else, distorting perception and memory and alienating those around him to the point where friction and aggravation, the precursors of an attack, became inevitable. Any overstimulation of the affected areas of the brain—that is, disruptions of perception, cognition, or emotion—could open a pathway for bolts of neuronal “lightning.” Seizures could be triggered by visual stimuli as varied as sunlight dappling through leaves, fluttering of the eyelids, even images summoned up by passages in a book. Vivid dreams, unexpected events, rejection by loved ones, derogation by strangers, ambushes of memory, eruptions of “intense meaningfulness” (whether from religious thoughts or metaphysical musings)—any or all could provoke the troubled brain to another attack.

  Vincent’s euphoric image of a swirling, unhinged cosmos signaled that his defenses had been breached.

  EVEN LOCKED INSIDE his serene mountain retreat, Vincent could not escape the provocations that lurked everywhere—not least inside his own head. Letters arrived regularly from Paris and Holland, filled with his family’s equivocal embrace. Theo wrote sweetly of art and artists for which the brothers had always shared affection, and solicitously of Vincent’s hardships (“It can hardly be pleasant to be near so many lunatics”). But the pressures of married life both reduced the frequency of his letters and heightened his anxiety over the extra cost of the Saint Paul asylum.

  Meanwhile, he remained steadfastly lukewarm about Vincent’s works from Arles. “In the course of time they will become very beautiful,” he wrote evasively, “and they will undoubtedly be appreciated someday.” He dubbed paintings like La berceuse “very curious” and could find only words like “vigorous” and “glaring” to describe their brushwork and color. As Vincent’s strange, exaggerated landscapes began arriving from Saint-Rémy in June, Theo could not refrain from openly wondering why they “tortured the form” so, and seeing the answer in his brother’s mental affliction. “Your last pictures have given me much food for thought on the state of your mind at the time you did them,” he wrote. “How your brain must have labored, and how you have risked everything to the very limit, where vertigo is inevitable!”

  Jo wrote, too, sometimes happily chiming into Theo’s letters, sometimes venturing on her own into the darkness of Vincent’s vulnerability. “Dear Brother,” she began her first outreach in early May, “It is high time at last that your new little sister had a chat with you herself … now that we are really and truly brother and sister.” She could have no idea of the wounds she inflicted with her portrait of her new role as “Madame van Gogh” and the domestic bliss she shared with Theo. “It’s as if we had always been together,” she wrote. “He always comes home at twelve o’clock for lunch and at half-past seven for dinner.” Company, including family members, often joined them in the evenings, she reported. On Sundays—“so pleas
ant and cozy”—they spent the whole day together, just the two of them, sometimes visiting galleries, but sometimes staying home to “enjoy ourselves in our own way.” Her schoolgirl hints of conjugal intimacies (“In general we are very tired at night, and we go to bed early”) shook the foundations of Vincent’s brotherhood and his manhood, just as her report that “hardly a day ever passes without our speaking of you” set off tremors of anxiety and guilt.

  Vincent’s sister Wil also flooded her brother with unthinking concern. Of all his siblings, his youngest sister had followed most closely in his tortured path. With no history of suitors and no prospects of any, Wil, like Vincent, seemed destined for a life of loneliness and introspection. His stay at the Saint Paul asylum licensed her to inquire about their shared lot. “Why are so many other people who try to make their way in life making more progress than I?” she wondered. Was she, like Vincent, the victim of some “fatal malady” that prevented her from enjoying a “regular life”? Talk of failed love and elusive happiness led inevitably to thoughts of Theo and his new life as husband and father. To frame her queries, Wil sent Vincent a copy of Le sens de la vie (The Meaning of Life), Edouard Rod’s sentimental tale of a bourgeois lost soul who finds contentment and meaning in the arms of “a sweet and very devoted wife and his child” (as Vincent derisively summarized it). His mother wrote, too, celebrating Theo’s latest triumph with an obtuse exuberance bordering on cruelty.