Whereas the Salon had anointed single images, the new critics allied with private dealers to elevate artists, even whole movements, over individual works. One painting could not make a critic’s reputation, fund a magazine, or support a dealer’s family. Buyers had to be convinced that any painting by an approved artist, or within an approved style, was preferable to a work by any other artist or in any other style. The era of art franchises had begun. The model, of course, was Georges Seurat, whose distinctive Pointillist images had been championed by the critic Félix Fénéon not just as attractive decorations and masterpieces of craft, but as inevitable expressions of the zeitgeist. Fénéon’s relentless advocacy in the Revue Indépendante launched an army of Neo-Impressionist painters and collectors. Art was no longer enough. In a culture besotted by words and fashion, art needed advocates to persuade and mobilize; and artists needed movements to succeed. Critics provided both.
Gauguin and Bernard had watched Seurat’s startling rise and learned the lesson of the new era well. To be seen by the public, artists had to be shown by the galleries; to be shown by the galleries, they had to be talked about in the journals. Working in an uneasy alliance of self-interest (which would later collapse in a rancorous competition for credit), the two artists began jockeying for position in the scrum of avant-garde art. For his part, Bernard wooed potential sponsors among his friends who contributed to art reviews. During the long summer of 1888, while Vincent flooded both his comrades in far-off Brittany with ringing calls to the new art of Japan, Bernard circulated among the holiday crowds in Pont-Aven using Vincent’s ideas, and even some passages and drawings from his letters, to “sell” the new movement to influential critics like Gustave Geffroy. Another of his targets was the lanky twenty-three-year-old rising star Albert Aurier.
When the art world returned to Paris in the fall, Bernard’s campaign followed. As Gauguin prepared to leave for Arles, Bernard pressed his case on Aurier with trips to Tanguy’s paint store, Goupil’s entresol, and even Theo van Gogh’s apartment, in order to see works by Guillaumin, Gauguin, Vincent, and, of course, himself—all examples of this exciting new movement that lacked only an advocate.
Gauguin, meanwhile, plotted his own way to attract critical attention. From the depths of his entrapment in the Yellow House, he imagined mounting an insurgent attack on the avant-garde establishment, just as the Impressionists had done at the famous Salon des Refusés twenty-five years earlier. In a single coup de théâtre, he could showcase the still unnamed movement and steal a march on the “Neos” at the Revue Indépendante who had connived against him in preparing their January show. And what more appropriate place to stage his coup than at the upcoming Exposition Universelle that would open in Paris in May 1889? Like Bernard’s gallery tours, Gauguin’s manifestation would include enough of his fellow painters (“a little group of comrades,” he later described them) to impress critics like Aurier with the strength and viability of the new movement. “Vincent sometimes calls me the man from afar who will go far,” he rallied his comrade Bernard. “[But] we must work with each other and arrive holding hands together.”
Only a few days later, on Christmas Eve 1888, Gauguin had fled the Yellow House. It was hardly surprising that, upon his arrival in Paris, he immediately contacted Bernard; or that the first person to whom Bernard reported the terrifying story was Albert Aurier.
I am so sad that I need somebody who will listen to me and who can understand me. My best friend, my dear Vincent, is mad. Since I have found out, I am almost mad myself.
Bernard and Gauguin served up a Poe-like tale filled with Symbolist significance, religious overtones, and gothic frisson. Vincent believed “he was some kind of Christ, a God,” Bernard wrote, “a being from the other side.” His “powerful and admirable mind” and “extreme humanity” had been driven to madness by these strange visions. He had accused Gauguin of trying to “murder” him—an insane accusation that drove his stalwart friend away just as the horrible crime was revealed: “ ‘The entire population of Arles was in front of our house,’ ” Bernard wrote, transcribing Gauguin’s first-person account. “ ‘It was then that the gendarmes arrested me, for the house was full of blood.’ ” They thought Gauguin had killed him! Bernard’s account dramatically implied. But in fact, Vincent had slashed off his own ear and given the bloody prize to a prostitute.
The letter launched Gauguin’s campaign to portray himself as the innocent victim of Vincent’s murderous madness, not the guilty provocateur. It also reached out to the fashionably decadent critic. Only six months before, Aurier had contributed to a debate in Le Figaro over the new science of criminal anthropology. The paper cited works by prominent Symbolists (with provocative titles like Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts) defending murder as a natural instinct, not an abomination.
Aurier used the debate to comment on the most sensational story in the Paris papers at the time: the murder trial of Luis Carlos Prado, a handsome roué and confidence man accused of slitting the throat of a Paris prostitute. Like Gauguin, Prado had lived in Peru and worked in the stock market. The “Prado Affair” had brought to public view the Symbolists’ obsession with deviant behavior, especially criminal behavior, and Aurier’s review confirmed the stylish fascination with “sympathetic killers.” Gauguin had already traded on the new vogue with his self-portrait as Hugo’s Jean Valjean, the most famous criminal-hero in French literature. During Gauguin’s stay in the Yellow House, the trial had flamed again in the headlines as a bloodthirsty public counted down the days to Prado’s execution. (Gauguin, in fact, arrived back in Paris just in time to attend the public spectacle of his beheading.)
But the letter backfired. Indeed, Gauguin’s campaign to acquit himself worked at cross purposes with his outreach for favor. To the true believer Aurier, champion of outcasts and deviants, Vincent van Gogh, not Paul Gauguin, emerged from Bernard’s narrative as the truer artist. For Aurier, Vincent’s unthinking fury—whether directed at Gauguin (as Gauguin later claimed) or at himself—represented exactly the kind of extreme experience, the orgasmic surrender to sensation, that Huysmans exalted in À rebours. What could be more primitive, more essential, than the murderous urge that Cain felt against Abel? Indeed, wasn’t violence of any kind the ultimate rejection of bourgeois convention and thus the truest path to art?
Vincent’s continued confinement in the Arles hospital and then the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole only enhanced the image of tortured genius that Aurier, like Huysmans, prized above all else. Had not the great Italian criminologist Cesar Lombroso only recently revealed the link between epilepsy, insanity, criminality, and genius? According to Lombroso, many of history’s greatest artists—Molière, Petrarch, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, the Goncourt brothers—had suffered epileptic fits. What was “creative genius” if not an altered, aberrant state—an attack—of heightened feeling and perception? And was not this the same spiritual rapture that the great mystics and prophets felt when they saw visions and spoke God’s words? Lombroso named Saint Paul among his “epileptoid geniuses,” and saw in all of them the same “degenerative psychosis” as in born killers like Prado—a psychosis that he claimed he could document in the stigmata of their “savage” countenances.
Throughout 1889, while Gauguin and Bernard vied for the favor of the Catholic critic with increasingly hortatory images of Christ, Aurier’s interest stayed fixed on the lonely figure locked away in a Midi asylum. In April of that year, writing under the pseudonym Le Flâneur, he first reported the miracle happening under the southern sun. Not even Gauguin’s strange, improvisational show at the Exposition Universelle the following month could distract Aurier’s gaze for long. In his desperation for a prominent venue, Gauguin had rented a vast, déclassé brasserie, the Café Volpini, just opposite the entrance to the official art exhibition. His and Bernard’s paintings, over a dozen of each, competed with the pomegranate-red walls and a Russian all-woman band for the attention of fairgoers. Gauguin had invited Theo to show Vincent�
�s work. But Theo withdrew his brother from the venture before it opened, convinced that in the vast, ugly eatery the art would show poorly. Aurier came, but finding no images by the strange, raving Dutchman with a single name, he gave the show only brief attention.
Instead, he returned again to Tanguy’s, and to Theo’s, to see the work of an artist who had broken through the illusion of reality and penetrated to the core of the human experience. What better subject for the inaugural issue of his new journal, Mercure de France, that would greet the New Year and the new decade in January 1890? What better way to rivet the art world’s attention and secure his reputation than a profile of this pariah from the North, a pariah even among the pariahs of the avant-garde? With the public gorge still high over the severed head of Luis Prado, what better hero to carry the Symbolist banner of sensation in extremis into the new millennium than this mad Dutchman, this provincial trueheart who had slashed himself out of passion for life and art, this poète maudit of the Midi, this prophet and preacher, this seer and stranger?
By the time he put pen to paper at the end of the year, Aurier had worked himself into a fever of appreciation.
He opened with a blast of Baudelaire, invoking Symbolism’s deepest roots in the century, Les fleurs du mal:
Everything, even the color black,
Seemed furbished, bright, iridescent;
The liquid encased its glory
In the crystallized ray…
From these opening trumpets, Aurier’s article clamored with the thrill of discovery. He had found a genius—an “exciting and powerful,” “profound and complex” artist—an “intense and fantastic colorist, grinder of golds and of precious stones”—“vigorous, exalted, brutal, intense”—“master and conqueror”—“unbelievably dazzling.” The Symbolists exalted excess, and Aurier set out to show as well as tell. In a long, dense, delirious fusion of prose and poetry, he attempted to capture in words the sensation of seeing the images he described—the work of this newfound master. He piled up flights of description hundreds of words long, voluptuous cascades of imagery, strange extravagances of syntax and vocabulary, urgent imperatives and magisterial pronouncements, cries of recognition and exclamations of surprise and delight. In the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, he said, he had uncovered an art
at once entirely realistic and yet almost supernatural, of an excessive nature where everything—beings and things, shadows and lights, forms and colors—rears and rises up with a raging will to howl its own essential song in the most intense and fiercely high-pitched timbre.… It is matter and all of Nature frenetically contorted in paroxysms, raised to the heights of exacerbation; it is form, becoming nightmare; color, becoming flame, lava and precious stone; light turning into conflagration; life, into burning fever.… Oh! how far we are—are we not?—from the beautiful, great tradition of art.
In Vincent’s painting, Aurier saw “heavy, flaming, burning atmospheres … exhaled from fantastic furnaces,” “countries of resplendence, of glowing sun and blinding colors,” mountains that “arch their backs like mammoths,” twisted trees that waved their “gnarled menacing arms … the pride of their musculature, their blood-hot sap,” and “great dazzling walls made of crystal and sun.”
Where did these strange “flaming landscapes” come from? Aurier invoked the giant Zola, who still bestrode the avant-garde world, and claimed for Vincent the frayed mantle of Naturalism. No one could doubt Vincent’s “great love for nature and for truth,” he wrote. “He is very conscious of material reality, of its importance and its beauty.” But Vincent had gone further, Aurier proclaimed. He had revealed reality for the “enchantress” she was—an enchantress that kept most mortals under her spell using “a sort of marvelous language” that only artist-savants like Vincent could decipher. And he communicated that language to the world by the only means possible: symbols. “[Van Gogh] is, almost always, a Symbolist,” Aurier announced, claiming the new genius as one of his own, “a Symbolist who feels the continual need to clothe his ideas in precise, ponderable, tangible forms, in intensely sensual and material exteriors.”
To support this extraordinary claim, he portrayed Vincent’s paintings as dreamlike visions, his landscapes as “vain and beautiful chimeras,” his flowers as conjuries from “some alchemist’s diabolical crucible.” His cypresses “exposed their nightmarish, flame-like, black silhouettes,” and his orchards beckoned “like the idealizing dreams of virgins.” Never had there been a painter, Aurier exclaimed, whose art appealed so directly to the senses: from the “indefinable aroma” of his sincerity to the “flesh and matter” of his paint, from the “brilliant and radiant symphonies” of his color to the “intense sensuality” of his line. What else but Symbolist ambition could explain the exuberant excesses of these paintings, their “almost orgiastic extravagances”? “He is a fanatic,” Aurier concluded, “an enemy of bourgeois sobriety and minutiae, a sort of drunken giant.… What characterizes his work as a whole is its excess, its excess of strength, of nervousness, its violence of expression.”
With every reference to orgiastic extravagance and bourgeois outrage, Aurier invoked the spirit of Huysmans’s À rebours, the bible of his generation of artists and writers. For many, Huysmans’s decadent hero, Des Esseintes, pointed the way to the coming millennium. Now Aurier had found him in real life. “Finally, and above all,” he wrote, “[Van Gogh] is a hyper-aesthetic … who perceives with abnormal, perhaps even painful, intensities”—intensities “invisible to healthy eyes” and “removed from all banal paths.… His is a brain at its boiling point, irresistibly pouring down its lava into all of the ravines of art, a terrible and demented genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always at the brink of the pathological. ”
Hinting at the rumors that some had heard, he talked vaguely of “ineluctable atavistic laws” and invoked the criminology of Lombroso with references to Vincent’s “disquieting and disturbing display of a strange nature” and “brutally brilliant forehead.” Anyone could claim Symbolist ideas or imagery, Aurier wrote, throwing down a gauntlet to any artist who aspired to Vincent’s example. But only a privileged few could claim a true Symbolist temperament. And these few were chosen by nature, not affect; by instinct, not intellect. Only the few—the geniuses, the criminals, and the madmen—the savages among us—could see past the banal surface of bourgeois complacency to the “universal, mad and blinding coruscation of things.” This is where the “strange, intense and feverish” Vincent van Gogh towered above the rest. Aurier called him “this robust and true artist, a thoroughbred with the brutal hands of a giant, the nerves of a hysterical woman, the soul of a mystic.”
Indeed, Aurier claimed for Vincent the greatest prize of all—the crown of L’oeuvre. Ever since Zola’s masterpiece appeared in 1885, on the eve of Vincent’s arrival in Paris, its call for a new art for the new age had gone unanswered. The furious factional infighting since then had left every artist looking small just as the new century loomed large on the horizon. But the expectation of a galvanizing modern art had not died with the suicide of Zola’s fictional mad genius, Claude Lantier. Now, in this relentless, incandescent exhortation, a fiery young critic had anointed Vincent his successor.
Like Lantier, Van Gogh had worked too long in the noonday heat of truth—“insolent in confronting the sun head-on.” He had gone to the sunny South in pursuit of enlightenment, Aurier wrote, recasting Vincent’s exile as a Symbolist mission, “naively setting out to discover the direct translation of all these new sensations so original and so removed from the milieu of our pitiful art of today.” Like Lantier, Vincent was “a dreamer, a fanatical believer, a devourer of beautiful Utopias, living on ideas and dreams.” And, like Lantier, he had paid a heavy price for it. Indeed, only once before had anyone suffered so much for truth. Comparing Vincent to the subject that “haunted his brain,” Millet’s Sower, Aurier invoked on Vincent’s behalf the ultimate “idée fixe” of redemption that neither Vincent nor the century could escape: “the nec
essary advent of a man, a messiah, a sower of truth, who would regenerate the decrepitude of our art and perhaps of our imbecile and industrialist society.”
AS AURIER UNDOUBTEDLY expected, his article rocked the art world like an anarchist’s bomb. Almost immediately, it catapulted him into the firmament of critics, lifted his new journal to eminence, and put the name “Vincent” on every lip. Few had seen his art, and fewer still had paid it any attention. For many, the exhibition of Les Vingt, opening in Brussels only a few weeks after the article appeared, offered their first glimpse of Aurier’s new “genius.” To bait public interest still further, Aurier wrote a condensed version of his paean, titled simply “Vincent van Gogh,” for the January 19 issue of L’Art Moderne, the Belgian organ of Les Vingt, which appeared on the eve of the opening.
In the elegant galleries of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Vincent’s sunflowers, wheat field, orchard, and vineyard took their place for the first time beside works by Cézanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Signac, and Puvis de Chavannes. But the spotlight of Aurier’s article cast all the others into shadow. Traditionalist critics, who had still not forgiven Les Vingt for introducing Seurat’s dots to the world in 1887—and never hesitated to pronounce any deviation from Salon conventions “crazy”—were left speechless with incomprehension by Vincent’s wild imagery.
But avant-garde artists and critics rallied to the double charge. They praised Vincent’s “fierce impasto” and “powerful effects.” “What a great artist!” they cried. “Instinctive … a born painter.” Emotions ran so high that arguments broke out. At the official Vingt dinner, one member called Vincent “a charlatan,” which brought Toulouse-Lautrec leaping to his stubby feet shouting “Scandal! Slander!” and demanding a retraction. To defend the honor of the “great artist” Vincent, he challenged his detractor to a duel. After settling the quarrel (forcing the skeptic’s resignation), Octave Maus, Les Vingt’s founder, wrote Theo to report that Vincent’s work had sparked many “animated discussions” and won “strong artistic sympathies” in Brussels.
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