Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  But how could he capture the true essence of Provence without figures? Gauguin wrote alluringly about his studies of Breton peasant women working in the hemp fields and gathering seaweed. He boasted of his plan to paint fifty pictures that would “instill in these desolate figures a wild quality I perceive in them and also within me.” Without figures, how could Vincent aspire to the primitive truth, fraternal approval, and inevitable commercial success of images like these? And how could he paint figures without models? What could be more real—less abstract—than flesh and blood? The Millet peasants that lined his studio mocked the ambitions of the Impressionists, he said. “ ‘But look here,’ ” he imagined them taunting him, “ ‘when shall we see these country men and women of yours?’ ” “As for myself,” he replied abjectly. “I feel a disgrace and a failure.”

  Driven by thoughts like these, and bursting with new confidence, Vincent departed on a journey unthinkable only two months before: to Arles.

  Securing permission to go had not been easy. Peyron still blamed the last trip to Arles in July for “provoking” the crisis that summer. He had told Theo in October that Vincent would have to “pass many tests” before he could be trusted to travel so far again. But as the days without a relapse accumulated, it became harder and harder to resist Vincent’s pleas. In late October, Theo sent extra money for the journey. A few days later, Peyron gave his final approval. “[He] said that there is considerable improvement,” Vincent reported, “and that he has good hopes for me.” The trip that began two weeks later, in mid-November, seemed to confirm Peyron’s optimism. This time, everything went according to plan. Vincent saw Pastor Salles and collected the money he had been holding for Theo. He boldly bought “a stock of paints” for the great venture that lay ahead.

  But, most important, he saw Madame Ginoux.

  Ever since he missed seeing her in July, Vincent had been fantasizing about his reunion with the proprietress of the Café de la Gare, who had posed for him and Gauguin exactly one year earlier. Theo’s friend Isaäcson had seen Vincent’s portrait of her and complimented it. “I am glad to hear that someone else saw something in that woman’s figure,” Vincent had written in June, “though I think that the merit is in the model and not in my painting.” Since then, he had thought often about the statuesque Arlésienne with the raven ringlets and Mediterranean temperament. In October, he wrote Theo vaguely about “some people” in Arles “whom I felt, and again feel, the need for seeing”—the vagueness required to hide either a sudden spasm of desire or a long-simmering infatuation with a woman he barely knew.

  It had happened before, as Theo knew too well: a friendly female face exaggerated by loneliness and maternal longing into a fantasy of fondness, and even intimacy—a delusion that could only lead to overreach and heartbreak. Just two years earlier, in Paris, when Theo first abandoned the rue Lepic apartment to woo Jo Bonger, Vincent had wandered into these dangerous waters with Agostina Segatori, another sensuous, sloe-eyed café proprietress. That episode had ended in disaster. To avoid those memories, Vincent cloaked his ardor, as he had so many times before, in artistic imperative. “I despair of ever finding models,” he complained when he heard of Isaäcson’s compliment. “Ah, if now and then I had someone like [Madame Ginoux]…I’d do something very different yet.”

  On his trip in November, Vincent not only found his model, but apparently persuaded her to pose for him. She may have stood for his pencil, or merely allowed him to sketch her as she went about her chores. But when Vincent returned to the asylum two days later, he immediately sat down and memorialized his visit by painting another olive grove and inserting his Dulcinea at the foremost tree, arms upstretched, plucking the ancient fruit. He dared not share his triumph with Theo, but only hinted at it between the lines of his report: “It is a good thing to show yourself there from time to time,” he wrote about Arles, “they were very friendly, and even welcomed me.”

  In the days after his return, anything seemed possible. To Theo, Vincent couched his optimism in caution. “We will wait a little first to see if this journey will provoke another attack,” he wrote. “I almost dare to hope it won’t.” But the long streak of good health capped by the successful trip was already steeling his confidence and catapulting his thoughts into the future. He imagined leaving the asylum and returning to Arles where, he claimed, “at present no one has any antipathy toward me.” He talked of being “cured” and coming north in the spring when, he predicted, “we shall not even need the doctor at Auvers or the Pissarros.” His mind even drifted to the images he would make when he returned to Paris and could focus his newfound strength, his truth-telling brush, and his clear southern color on the gray city that gave birth to the new art.

  His ambitions raced forward and backward at the same time. He hatched plans for selling his paintings in England (“I know well enough what they look for there”) and boldly wrote Octave Maus at Les Vingt listing the six works he expected to hang in the upcoming Brussels show—more than twice the allotment per artist. He imagined a world in which art could be brought to the common people by a means less expensive than oil paints and less cumbersome than “grandiose exhibitions.” “Oh, we must invent a more expeditious method of painting,” he wrote, rallying Theo, as he did in The Hague, to a world in which “a picture will become as commonplace as a sermon” and even the humblest worker “could have in his home some pictures or reproductions.” He imagined producing lithographs of his own canvases in order to make them “more accessible to the public”—turning on its head his Millet project of translating prints into paintings, and reviving the distant mirage of popularity.

  With old ambitions and old ardors came old angers. Vincent returned from Arles and found two letters waiting for him, one from Gauguin and one from Bernard. Both contained alarming news. Gauguin’s boasted of recently completing a picture of Christ in the Garden. “I think you will like it,” he wrote; “it has vermilion hair.” Bernard’s reported a whole studio full of biblical images, including his own version of the scene at Gethsemane. Theo had visited his studio in Paris and sent Vincent a detailed description. It is “a kneeling figure surrounded by angels,” he wrote, “very difficult to understand, and the search for a style lends to the figures a ridiculous quality.” The report about Bernard, especially, infuriated Vincent. He replied immediately with a contemptuous echo of his brother’s criticism. “Our friend Bernard has probably never seen an olive tree,” he sneered. “Now he is avoiding getting the least idea of the possible, or of the reality of things, and that is not the way to synthesize—no.”

  A few days later, when Bernard sent photographs of the offending works, Vincent erupted in righteous indignation. “Those biblical paintings of yours are hopeless,” he lashed out: “bogus,” “spurious,” “appalling”—a “nightmare,” and, worse, “a cliché.” In a tone that wavered between brotherly condescension and apoplectic derision, between tu and vous, he demanded that Bernard abandon his “medieval tapestries” and “tremble” before the one true God: the God of “what is possible.” How dare he trade the “spiritual ecstasy” of the truth for the vagaries and falsities of imagined figures in dreamlike settings? “Can that really be what you mean to do?” he thundered. “No!” In terms as cataclysmic as his letter to Anthon van Rappard in defense of The Potato Eaters, Vincent called on Bernard to turn back from the “danger in those abstractions” and “immerse” himself once again in reality—as Vincent had done. “I ask you one last time,” he raged, “shouting at the top of my voice: please try to be yourself again!”

  This letter, like the earlier one, ended a friendship. The two artists never corresponded again. But far from regretting his outburst, Vincent immediately penned a similar scolding to Gauguin. He then wrote Theo boasting of his double blow against superstition and abstraction. “I have written to Bernard and Gauguin that our duty is thinking, not dreaming,” he proudly reported, “[and] I was astonished at their letting themselves go like that.” Artists must work
“without artistic preoccupations,” he insisted, planting himself firmly at his brother’s side in the partisan wars raging in Paris reviews and cafés. Together, they would defend the art of the past against the audacities and sophistries of the Symbolists and their ilk, who pretended to see what they could not see and know what they could not know. “They don’t just leave me cold,” he sputtered, “they give me a painful feeling of collapse instead of progress.”

  In his imagination, however—and on his easel—a more subtle, searching debate was playing out. Throughout the fall and winter, away from Theo’s sight and unmentioned in their correspondence, Vincent had been experimenting with the Symbolist license to invent. In letting his horizon lines wander, his mountaintops curl, his moons swell, and his clouds balloon, Vincent had been edging ever closer to the line between the real and the invented. In his quest for “the true and the essential,” exaggeration and simplification quickly slipped toward something altogether different.

  Painting a rocky gorge, he relegated the sky to a stalactite of green, the hillsides to dashes of orange, the looming mountains to broad strokes of violet and white. Looking down from an overhanging cliff, he saw no sky at all, just wavy stripes of furrowed ground, the green tops of a ragged grove interrupted here and there by an eruption of yellow—a plane tree in autumn. He painted the twisting olive groves so many times that they assumed an almost stenographic simplicity: black-and-green tangles of brushstrokes on hillsides reduced to cascades of multihued light and notations of violet-blue shadow. This is where the freedom to simplify led: to images of pure form, color, and texture—images to which later generations would refer using the word so much disparaged by Theo: abstraction.

  In his endless encouraging, Theo had unknowingly given his blessing to these excursions from reality. “It is permissible to do a piece of nature exactly as one sees it,” he wrote in early December. “The sympathy an artist feels for certain lines and for certain colors will cause his soul to be reflected in them.” What Vincent had done for color in Arles—freeing it from the demands of reality and infusing it with personal meaning—he did for form in Saint-Rémy. Even as he pledged and repledged his allegiance to reality with coloring-book Millet peasants and pleasant autumn “effects,” his contrary brush tested the limits of the freedom he decried, exploring how the real world could be portrayed in wild, unreal ways, and art could be uprooted from nature.

  In the clear air and cloistered serenity of the asylum of Saint Paul, Vincent might have ventured farther down the road to pure abstraction—the road down which the next century of art would vanish from view. But, as in Arles, the darkness turned him back.

  VINCENT NEVER SAID what triggered the renewed attacks that began in December 1889. But no season was more fraught with peril for him than Christmas—even before the dark events a year before in the Yellow House. Vincent himself had foreseen the danger. In September, just after recovering from the last series of attacks, he had predicted the next one with virtual certainty: “I shall continue to work without let-up, and then if I have another attack around Christmas, we’ll see, and when that’s over …” To plan for any other outcome, he said, “would be too foolhardy.”

  The demons can be heard offstage in his letters leading up to the dreaded holiday. The hardening weather and shortening days of winter forced him to spend more hours in the asylum, where idleness and despair stalked the halls. He spoke of being “bored to death” and sometimes overcome with “a great depression.” When the leaves fell in November, the bare countryside and the cold damp air reminded him more and more of “the North,” and the people from whom he was separated. “I think of you and Jo very often,” he wrote Theo, “feeling as though there were an enormous distance between here and Paris and it was years since I saw you.” The distance made him feel both alone and helpless. He complained of being “without an idea for the future,” and “feeling that I can do nothing about it.” At times he questioned whether his own confidence was mere “pretension” and wondered if “fate itself is set on thwarting us.”

  As the holiday approached, his thoughts flooded with images of home and homecoming. He showered his mother and sister Wil with gifts of paintings to fill the walls of their new home in Leiden, and, in a family ritual of sharing, sent them a painting of his own new home—the view from his studio window. He pushed the dreary, institutional dormitory to the edge of the picture in order to show more of the parklike asylum garden with blooming flowers and a verdant canopy against a radiant sunset. In the foreground, one enormous old tree shows the wound where a huge limb has been recently sawed off. He called it “a somber giant, with its hurt pride,” and explained how the image of “the great tree struck by lightning … gives an impression of anguish.”

  He also began another round of the Millet images that bound him to the past. One in particular, called Evening, tugged at the heartstrings of memory and remorse. It depicted a young peasant couple at the hearthside, bent over a baby in a cradle. Just as the asylum began to fill with the anticipation of Christmas and images of the Holy Family, Theo reported that Jo was “getting bigger” and “already feeling life” inside her. Vincent repainted Millet’s little scene of sublime domesticity on a huge canvas and imagined sending it to Paris as a Christmas present. At the same time, he wrote to his mother pleading in advance for a holiday reprieve for the pain and bother he had inflicted on his brother—and, by extension, his family—over so many Christmases past. “I certainly agree with you,” he wrote, “that it is much better for Theo now than before.”

  The guilt had never gone away. Vincent called it “the grief that gathers in our heart like water in a swamp.” If anything, the hints from Paris of future success only underscored the failures of the past. “The more my health comes back to normal,” he wrote in late October, “the more foolish it seems to me, and a thing against all reason, to be doing this painting which costs us so much and brings in nothing.” Theo didn’t help. By writing so rarely, so reluctantly, and usually about money; by focusing relentlessly on sales—whether good news or bad—he left Vincent convinced yet again that only success could reclaim his place in his brother’s and his family’s favor.

  The Garden of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, NOVEMBER 1889, OIL ON CANVAS, 28⅞ × 36⅛ IN. (Illustration credit 40.3)

  With every shipment of paint and canvas from Paris, every apologetic accounting of expenses, and every report of Theo’s deteriorating health (“[he] is still coughing—damn it—this does not please me at all”), Vincent slipped further into the swamp. “If I could one day prove that I have not impoverished the family,” he wrote at Christmastime, “that would comfort me.” Eventually, he could barely summon the courage to write at all. Speechless with guilt, he would start a letter again and again, he admitted, “without being able to finish it.”

  It didn’t take much to tip this toxic mix of fear, longing, and regret into a spiral of despair. A week before Saint Nicholas Day, a package arrived in the mail for Vincent. Theo had sent him a wool coat.

  It was a thoughtful, practical gift. Winter in the idyllic mountain valley of Saint-Rémy proved far harsher than in Arles. Vincent had complained of the cold, and Theo had asked, “Don’t you want something warm?” But the humble coat crystallized all the guilts and failures of the past. “How kind you are to me,” Vincent wrote in thanks immediately, “and how I wish I could do something good, so as to prove to you that I would like to be less ungrateful.”

  In the first two weeks of December, he filled out this reproachful self-portrait in strokes of abject apology and collapsing confidence, setting himself on a path that could end only one way. He reacted to Isaäcson’s praise with humility, even incomprehension (“There isn’t anything worth mentioning about my work now”), while his attitude toward the upcoming Les Vingt exhibition slipped into frantic self-effacement—almost a terror of recognition. “We must work as much and with as few pretensions as a peasant,” he admonished Theo, and himself. “Slow, long work is the only w
ay, and all ambition and keenness to make a good show of it, false.” Despite the freezing temperatures and the “unbearably harassing” winter wind, he redoubled his work effort, hurling himself into the hostile elements with such self-mortifying fervor that Theo felt obliged to pay extra for a fire in his studio to lure him in from the cold.

  Only days after dismissing the need for a doctor in Auvers, or anywhere else, and imagining his return to Paris in the spring, Vincent wrote asking to stay at least another year in the asylum. “There is no hurry,” he said, “for after all Paris only distracts.” He promised and promised better work in the future—much better than the “hard,” “harsh,” “ugly” things he was sending—and begged Theo to let him finish his “Impressions of Provence,” his portrait of the South, by “attacking the cypresses and mountains” again. On his hikes in the bitter weather, he had staked out many potential subjects for spring, and “good ideas are beginning to germinate,” he assured his brother. Staying was not only better for his art and absolutely necessary for his health, he argued, but also cheaper. “If I leave here, I think there would be hardly any advantage from the point of view of expense,” he pleaded, “and the success of my work is even more doubtful if I leave.”

  Or he could quit painting altogether. Even as he imagined an artistic redemption in the valley of the Alpilles and listed the paintings to be sent to Brussels, Vincent wondered if his life “would have been simpler if I had stayed quietly in North Brabant.” Once again, he briefly entertained a fantasy that “if I gave up painting and had to lead a hard life, say, as a soldier in the East, it would cure me.” As the fateful holiday approached, every path not taken haunted him. “I often think that if I had done as you did,” he wrote Theo in a spasm of regret, “if I had stayed with Goupils, if I had confined myself to selling pictures, I should have done better.”