Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  But in the places that mattered to Vincent—Paris and Holland—all eyes were focused on a different Vincent van Gogh: Theo’s newborn son. The news arrived at Saint Paul almost at the same time as the first copy of Aurier’s article. The mail had piled up unread after the attack that followed Vincent’s trip to Arles in January. He awoke to find Jo’s heartbreaking midnight letter written before the birth, confiding her darkest fears to her distant brother-in-law. “If things should not turn out well,” she wrote, “if I should have to leave him—then you must tell him—for there is nobody on earth he loves so much—that he must never regret that he married me, for he has made me, oh, so happy.” Only a day later, Theo’s triumphant announcement arrived. “Jo has brought into the world a beautiful boy, who cries a good deal, but who looks healthy.” Together, the letters told a story of private anguish and tragedy averted—a roller coaster of emotion that dimmed the luster of Aurier’s praise.

  Long indisposed (and unaccustomed) to flattery, Vincent first responded to the article with blushing surprise and self-effacing denials. “I do not paint like that,” he wrote Theo immediately, as if to cut off any borning expectations. “My back is not broad enough to carry such an undertaking.” He recast Aurier’s comments as general exhortations to all artists, not praise of any single one. “The article is very right as far as indicating the gap to be filled,” he clarified. “The writer really wrote it more to guide, not only me, but the other impressionists as well.” He dismissed Aurier’s compliments, as he had dismissed Isaäcson’s (and, before that, Gauguin’s), as exaggerated and undeserved—or, at best, premature—and compared the article’s stirring rhetoric and utopian vision to a political campaign song: more rallying cry than sober criticism. “[Aurier] indicates a thing to be done rather than a thing already done,” he demurred. “We have not got there yet.”

  Beneath the reflex of humility, however, the article was already working its way into Vincent’s deepest thoughts about the future. (“When my surprise wore off a little,” he later admitted, “I felt at times very much cheered by it.”) Like green shoots from a tree long blighted by drought, old dreams sprang back to life. In Aurier’s deluge of praise, he saw not a personal triumph but an overdue vindication of the brothers’ shared enterprise on the entresol—an announcement to all the world, he said, “that at present the artists had given up squabbling and that an important movement was silently being launched in the little shop on the Boulevard Montmartre.” He immediately began plotting ways to translate Aurier’s overheated prose into sales and exchanges. The article “will do us a real service against the day when we, like everybody else, shall be obliged to try to recover what the pictures cost,” he wrote Theo. “Anything beyond that leaves me pretty cold.” He marked the rebirth of his mission in the Midi with an old icon of hope that now spoke in new layers of meaning: Millet’s The Sower.

  Vincent pressed his brother to send the Aurier article to the English dealer Alexander Reid, as well as to his uncle Cor in Amsterdam—even, perhaps, to his old nemesis H. G. Tersteeg—in order to “take advantage of it to dispose of something.” He reopened a correspondence with his former Cormon classmate, John Peter Russell, after almost two years of silence. “My purpose,” he wrote boldly, enclosing the article, “is to remind you of myself and my brother.” He lured the wealthy Australian to Theo’s gallery with the promise of a painting (implying, not specifying, an exchange) and tried to revive an old plan for Russell to put together a collection of the new art for his native country—a grand buying project that would require Theo’s savvy as well as Vincent’s art. And what better way to start than by buying one of the many Gauguins that filled the entresol’s storeroom, Vincent urged. “I assure you that I owe much to the things Gauguin told me on the subject of drawing,” he wrote, transferring Aurier’s imprimatur to his former housemate.

  Within days, the article emboldened Vincent to imagine a reunion at the Yellow House. Gauguin had recently written bewailing conditions in Brittany and even threatening to quit painting altogether. He talked vaguely of another sojourn to an exotic land (this time, the French colony of Vietnam), but languished in Le Pouldu increasingly impecunious and desperate. Earlier in January he had brushed aside Vincent’s preposterous offer to come stay with him on the coast. But a few days later, no doubt after reading Aurier’s article, he had surprised Vincent with a proposal that they set up a studio together in Antwerp, claiming “Impressionism will not be truly accepted in France until it has returned from abroad.”

  Delirious at the prospect of reconciliation and renewed friendship, but frightened by the cost of furnishing a new studio in Antwerp “as established Dutch painters do,” Vincent pressed his delusional plan for Gauguin to return to the South. “It seems a pity to me that he did not stay on here a little longer,” he wrote Theo in a reverie of “what if.” “Together we would have worked better than I have all by myself this year. And now we would have a little house of our own to live and work in, and could even put others up.”

  In pursuit of this vision of a resurrection in the Midi, Vincent sat down to write the one person who could make it come true: Albert Aurier. “Thank you very much for your article in the Mercure de France,” he began humbly. “It seems to me that you paint with words; in fact, I encounter my canvases anew in your article, but better than they are in reality, richer, more meaningful.” Vincent took no issue with Aurier’s dense arguments and left unchallenged the strange, insupportable claim that he was “almost always a Symbolist.”

  Instead, he argued that Aurier had missed the two most important parts of the story: first, his art’s unbreakable roots in the South; and second, his debt to Gauguin. Again and again, he invoked the dead Marseille master Monticelli, both for the intense “metallic, gem-like quality” of his color, and for his “isolé” credentials (“a melancholy, rather resigned, unhappy man … the outsider”). As for Gauguin—“that curious artist, that strange individual”—no one could rival the authenticity and “morality” of his art. They had “worked together for several months in Arles,” Vincent wrote, “before my illness forced me to go into an asylum.”

  Reframing Aurier’s article as “a study of the question of the future of ‘art in the tropics,’ ” he insisted that these two artists—Monticelli and Gauguin—should be the primary focus of any such study and that his role would never be more than secondary. He aspired only to be a facilitator, a disciple, a witness—that is, to reprise the role he played during those precious two months in Arles. If Aurier would only set aside “sectarian thinking,” he, too, would see the necessity of a return to that moment in time when the perfect artist, Gauguin, encouraged by the perfect companion, Vincent, worked together in the perfect place, Monticelli’s South. If Aurier had doubts, he could see for himself the fruits of this too-brief three-way collaboration under the southern sun by visiting Theo’s gallery on the entresol, where the gift of a new painting of cypresses—“so characteristic of the Provence landscape”—awaited him.

  When the letter was finished, Vincent made a copy for Gauguin and sent the original to Theo to convey to the critic. In a separate note to his brother, he added a wistful hope that Aurier’s article and his reply might convince Gauguin to “work together again here,” and a thrill of anticipation that, if it did, Vincent might become the artist that Aurier described. “[It] would encourage me [to] let myself go and venture even further,” he imagined, even to “drop reality and make a kind of music of tones with color.”

  If the Aurier article could revive the combination with Gauguin, perhaps it could heal more ancient wounds. From the beginning, when his first copy of the article arrived alongside the announcement of Theo’s new son, Vincent had blurred these two triumphs into one. “The good news you have sent me and this article have made me feel quite well personally today,” he wrote his brother. He proudly predicted that Aurier’s praise would bring both of them “some sort of reputation” and celebrated their joint achievement with a single, hear
ty congratulation: “Bravo—how pleased Mother is going to be.” He began to see the critic’s paean, like Theo’s son, as his long-delayed prodigal return. “I feel the desire to renew myself, and to apologize,” he wrote his sister Wil as copies of the article flew to every family member, as ubiquitously—and at the same time—as Theo’s announcement cards.

  Dreams of family redemption and maternal longings led inevitably to the manger scene in a Paris apartment. “Jo is nursing the baby, and has no lack of milk,” Theo reported in early February. “At times the little one lies with his eyes wide open and his fists pressed against his face. Then he has an air of perfect well-being.” Vincent drank in the reports of the baby’s first days, and he reached out to Jo with a letter in Dutch—an intimacy he had loftily withheld—signed with a reciprocal “Your brother, Vincent.” Theo indulged his brother’s longing heart with loving descriptions of the new arrival (“he has blue eyes … and big round cheeks”) and a touching insistence that the child take Vincent’s name, saying, “I devoutly hope that he will be able to be as persevering and as courageous as you.” Vincent saw in Theo’s new mission of fatherhood “a new sun rising inside him,” and laid plans to travel to Paris “when I am free again.”

  In the meantime, his heart lunged in a different direction: toward Arles. Since his aborted visit to see her in January, he had kept the image of his Arlésienne, Marie Ginoux, close by: not just in his imagination, but in the drawing that Gauguin had made of her more than a year earlier. The renewed correspondence with Le Pouldu and the prospect, however wishful, of Gauguin’s return to the South drew the big charcoal drawing out of whatever place Vincent had secreted it. If Aurier’s praise could lure the Bel-Ami back to the Midi, then surely it could persuade the reluctant Arlésienne to whatever consummation Vincent imagined. Among the first letters he sent announcing the article was one addressed to the Café de la Gare. “There have been articles on my pictures published simultaneously in Belgium and in Paris,” he wrote like a proud but diffident child. “They speak far better of them than I myself could have wished.” Other painters were now eager to come visit him, he said, and only recently “Mr. Paul” had written, and “it’s possible I shall see him soon.”

  As if rehearsing that double fantasy, he carefully traced Gauguin’s drawing of Marie Ginoux onto canvas. With every sinuous curve of her face, he drew closer to both of the elusive figures whose fates seemed intertwined with his: the disdainful bar matron Ginoux, who withheld her favor while passing out cubes of sugar, and the chameleon Gauguin, who issued rejections in the form of invitations. Vincent filled the sensuous forms with the tenderest shades of pink and green, laid on with the dry, careful brush of the maître himself—a reverie of the past and a preview of the reborn Studio of the South he envisioned. He had used this same blushing palette on the olive groves at Christmastime—the paintings he made for his mother and sister—colors so lovely, contrasts so delicate, no woman could resist them. As soon as he was done, he began another version, this one with more charged color and a more loaded brush: an urgency of affection and self-assertion that lingered with special care over the expression on her face, coaxing the hauteur of Gauguin’s drawing toward a benign smile.

  The same urgency transformed the books on the table in front of her. Instead of blank place-fillers, Vincent painted them as his own nostalgia-laden childhood favorites: Dickens’s Christmas Stories and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. With the same meticulous care as his entries in Annie Slade-Jones’s guestbook, he inscribed their covers and spines in paint. No sooner was the second version finished than a third began. Then a fourth, in a more maidenly palette—pink dress, citron shawl, and pale yellow wallpaper decorated with florets of impasto—as the new icon of womanhood oscillated in his imagination between urbane seductress and maternal comforter.

  Like the fecund Berceuse that multiplied in his eye with each new iteration, the sultry café proprietress slowly peopled his studio. Working night and day, he finished five versions, feverishly preparing for the double reunion he foresaw any day, regardless of the perils it posed, all made possible by Albert Aurier’s gift of praise.

  BUT IT WAS ALL A FRAUD.

  Almost from the moment he first read Aurier’s article, Vincent had felt caught in a lie. “I ought to be like that,” he said, “rather than the sad reality of what I feel myself to be.” As he paraded his new success to family and friends, the deception of it weighed on him more and more heavily. “Pride, like drink, is intoxicating,” he confessed. “When one is praised, and has drunk the praise up, it makes one sad.” His lifetime of “weaknesses, diseases, and wanderings” mocked Aurier’s fine words and seemed to invite a terrible reckoning. “As soon as I read the article in question,” he later recalled, “I feared at once that I should be punished for it.”

  Everywhere he looked, he saw failure and fakery: in the ranks of unsold canvases that lined his studio no less than in the endlessly repeated faux intimacies of his portraits of Madame Ginoux, whose elegant Degas-like lines didn’t belong to him any more than the sitter’s seductive gaze. He was already having “scruples of conscience” about his entire project of Millet “translations” when the Sower on his easel refused to “come off.” Suddenly, the grand ambition to bring these masterpieces to the masses began to look more and more like simple plagiarism. And now he was pouring his labors into another man’s image of his inamorata—a kind of plagiarism of the heart. And what about the elusive Madame herself? Was she not just a fiction of love—an intimacy as false as the illness he invented or exaggerated to justify his repeated trips to Arles to visit her? Bored with his relentless protestations of affection, apparently, she had banned him from visiting, and would no longer even accept his letters.

  Vincent’s fear of a reckoning welled up from deep in his childhood. In the Zundert parsonage, his mother had taught that fate would always have its revenge against excess or falsity. Vincent had learned the lesson well. “I fear that after all the sunshine I enjoy,” he wrote from London when he was twenty, “there could be rain very soon.” In February 1890, his letters filled up with the same dark forebodings of a price due for undeserved blessings. “You will foresee, as I do,” he wrote Theo after his first reading of the Aurier article, “that such praise must have its opposite, the other side of the coin.” The same dread led him to resist mightily Theo’s plan to name the new baby after him. Vincent already feared for the child’s family legacy—the seed of degeneracy that Vincent certainly carried and Theo probably shared. Why confuse and tempt the fates with another Vincent? He suggested naming the child Theo instead, “in memory of our father,” and followed with grave concern every report of the baby’s gloomy moods and “nervous disposition.”

  With each passing day, Vincent saw the reckoning approach. Theo mailed copies of the infamous article to family and friends, but conspicuously withheld comment or congratulations. (“It is necessary to get well known without obtruding oneself,” he remarked obliquely.) Instead, he called Vincent’s illness “the only cloud in the sky of our happiness,” and complained that “Jo and I suffer too because we know you are ill”—expressions of sympathy that only added new weight to the impossible burden of guilt Vincent already carried.

  The Aurier article—and the rumors that inevitably accompanied it—spawned a new terror: embarrassment. How would his family suffer as the details of his past “crime” and his commitment in Saint Paul began to be talked about openly? Would they be dragged through the “thorns and thistles” of public ridicule? Would his sister’s marriage prospects be dimmed? Would the new child suffer? “You must beware of putting your young family too much into artistic surroundings,” Vincent warned his brother. And all for what? In the month since the article appeared, no sales had materialized and not a soul had come to see him. An expected visit from a Marseille artist (arranged by Theo) was mysteriously canceled without a word, confirming Vincent’s worst fears about the price of “pretension.” Bernard maintained his stony silence,
while Gauguin, too poor for honesty, hid his fury that Aurier had passed over him.

  Sensing coldness on every side, Vincent retreated into his studio, returned to his furtive portraits of phantom love, and rejected Theo’s latest invitation to Paris—“there is no hurry,” he said—convinced that no one truly wanted him. “My pictures are after all almost a cry of anguish,” he wrote to Wil in an entreaty meant for his mother’s ears. “I feel that I have become a rather degenerate child.”

  In his pain, Vincent reached out to the only person who could make it better. He wrote a letter to his mother and began a new painting: “a blue sky with branches full of blossoms standing out against it.”

  Both his pen and his brush pleaded for forgiveness. He apologized again for Theo’s decision to name his son Vincent—a second death for the dead parson. “I should have greatly preferred him to call the boy after Father,” he wrote, “of whom I have been thinking so much these days.” In a desperate jumble of words, he tolled his sins: from a childhood of wandering too far on the heath to a lifetime of dependency, grief, and now illness. He confessed to violating “the bounds of pride and eccentricity” and being “soiled in the struggle for life.”

  His eye followed his thoughts back to Nuenen and his days of living “as the peasants do.” On a walk outside, he saw an almond tree—its pink-and-white flowers the first blooms of spring. One particular old branch caught his eye: a gnarled, knotted, half-dead limb that twisted its way toward the sky. From this wounded relic, a shower of blossoms exploded.