Van Gogh

by Steven Naifeh

  It was an image of nature’s redemption that had comforted Vincent since his days on the heaths and in the hovels of Brabant. To capture it, he returned to the intense looking and soulful imagery of the Kerkstraat studio—the imagery of birds’ nests and battered shoes. Of all the drawings or paintings he had ever made, the only ones that his mother ever truly loved were the familiar scenes of nearby nature that he made for her during her convalescence in the Nuenen parsonage—especially the stand of sad, proud pollard birches. Now, with a brush instead of a pen, he focused his fanatic eye on another triumphant freak of nature.

  On a big canvas, he plunged straight in, not even bothering to paint a background color before limning the bulbous branch and its delicate tracery of new life: every starburst flower, every wandering shoot, every tender pink bud. The bounty of it spread across the entire picture, to every edge and beyond—a promise in paint that even the oldest, humblest, most crooked, barren, and diseased branch could still produce the most glorious flowering in the orchard.

  At the same time, he defended this vision of resurrection in words. To his mother, who had seen the Aurier article, he vehemently denied the accusations that it raised—nowhere more loudly than in Vincent’s own head—of pretension, fraud, and degeneration. He invoked a fervent litany of artists who had worked at the very limits of love, spirituality, and sanity: Giotto, who wept when he painted; Fra Angelico, who painted on his knees; Delacroix, who worked “full of grief” but “nearly smiling.” And surely none deserved the sainthood of sincerity more than the peasant-loving Millet, painter of the celebrated Angelus, who found divinity in “the quiet furrows of the fields.” “Oh Millet! Millet!” he cried. “How he painted humanity and that ‘quelque chose là-haut.’ ”

  How could his mother not embrace such exalted examples, such models of devotion and humility? Anna Carbentus had always criticized her son for not keeping “good company.” What better companions could he have than these copains imaginaires in the new art—“we impressionists”? What better rebuttal to Aurier’s charge of isolation and despair than these fellow disciples of the sublime, these tellers of truth and bringers of comfort no less than his preacher father?

  To show his renewed commitment to this higher calling, this belief in something “that is not in ourselves,” this shared faith in the ultimate forgiveness of the next world, he turned his eyes heavenward, placing his resurrected almond branch against a cloudless, clear blue sky: higher than the asylum walls, higher than the encircling hills, higher than any horizon—looking to the “other hemisphere of life” where art, religion, and family all reunited. Mixing and remixing an otherworldly blue, he painted around every tormented branch and brave blossom, filling every jagged void, every deformed crevice, with a rapture of brushstrokes in a color he called “bleu céleste”—heavenly blue.

  Dizzy with maternal longing, Vincent struck out for Arles the next day, before the paint on his plea had dried. He took with him a different image of aspiration and desire, a portrait of Madame Ginoux. He may have thought to win his reluctant model with the exciting news from Brussels: one of his works in the Vingt show had sold. Anna Boch, sister of Eugène, the Belgian artist who posed for him in Arles, had bought his painting of the grape harvest, The Red Vineyard, for four hundred francs. (“Compared with other prices,” he apologized to his mother, “this is little.”) Still, he left the asylum clutching the announcement from Theo, no doubt hoping to impress the worldly, penurious Ginoux.

  But something happened on the way. “My work was going well,” he recalled a month later, “and the next day, down like a brute.” Vincent never said what turned his dream of reconciliation into a nightmare. But only a month before, he had written Gauguin that his trips to Arles were always “disturbed by memories.” “My illness makes me very sensitive now,” he admitted to Theo. Despite continuing complaints of a “weak head” and “eccentric thoughts” after the last attack, he saw the trip as a test. “I shall try to make the trip to Arles again as a kind of trial,” he wrote Wil the day before leaving, “in order to see if I can stand the strain of traveling out of ordinary life without a return of the attacks.”

  He couldn’t. He was found the next morning wandering the streets of Arles, dazed and lost, unable to remember who he was, or where, or why. Both the painting he carried and the precious letter had disappeared. The authorities were contacted. Asylum personnel were dispatched to bring him back by carriage—a long and treacherous ride. The Ginouxs never said whether he had reached the Café de la Gare with his gift.

  The day after he returned, Dr. Peyron wrote Theo reassuringly: “It will only be for a few days and he will regain his sanity as before.”

  BUT THIS TIME was different. This time, the demons would not release him. Day after day, week after week, he sat in his room seized by paralyzing fear and hallucinatory fevers. Wave after wave of despair washed over him. He could not read or write. No one dared to come near him, much less trust him with a pen or pencil. Peyron banned him from the studio and forbid the use of paints. He held back the letters that arrived for Vincent, fearing they might contain fresh incitements. Now and then, the storms seemed to abate for brief interludes of dazed “stupefaction,” loneliness, and pitiless self-reproach—periods in which Vincent could expound coherently on the nightmare in which he was trapped. But then, just as suddenly, the darkness would close in on him again, Peyron reported, and “the patient once more becomes despondent and suspicious and replies no more to the questions put to him.”

  Almost a month passed before he emerged long enough to write one single letter, and that one took several tries to complete. “Don’t worry about me,” he wrote Theo on March 15. “My poor boy, just take things as they come, don’t be grieved over me, it will encourage and sustain me more than you think, to know that you are running your household well.” He ended the short letter with a wan hope that “peaceful days will come again” and a promise to “write again tomorrow or the next day” when his head cleared. But no letter followed; his head did not clear. Instead, he plunged back into the darkness.

  In another brief interlude, he managed to persuade his keepers to bring him a sketchpad, chalk, and pencil from his studio. With no models and a mind ravaged by memories, he filled sheet after sheet with drawings of figures—peasants digging and working the fields, parents with children, cozy cottages—deformed reveries of past and future, all drawn with the trembling hand of a frightened child, all as awkwardly posed and clumsily rendered as his earliest efforts in the black country. As if documenting the visions that afflicted him, he drew sowers and wanderers, empty shoes, parents with babies; endless versions of peasants eating around a table and empty chairs by the fireside.

  And then he plunged back into the darkness.

  Not even the surge of family attention that reached him in late March—on the occasion of his thirty-seventh birthday—could rescue him from the months of battering. If anything, the letters from the north only triggered dangerous new seizures of nostalgic longing. “Everything that reminds him of the past makes him sad and melancholy,” Theo reported to his mother. With or without Peyron’s permission, Vincent used his brief clearings of lucidity to paint a handful of images, all of which rehearsed the regressions that haunted his darker world. He painted scenes of his Brabant youth idealized into Andersen tales: filled with moss-covered cottages, quiet villages, and picturesque sunsets, all rendered in the “green soap” palette of The Potato Eaters. He called these nostalgic delusions “Reminiscences of the North,” and laid plans for a much larger series, including new versions of his “Peasants at Dinner” and the old church tower in Nuenen. “I can make something better of them now from memory,” he imagined. But his efforts to remake the past in paint only triggered new spasms of guilt, pushing him inexorably back into the abyss.

  Finally, at the end of April, on the eve of Theo’s birthday, he emerged from the darkness long enough to write another letter—only his second in two months. He meekly thanked
his waarde brother for “all the kindness you have shown me,” but offered only a cautious hope for his health (“I feel a bit better just now”) before opening the floodgates of despair. “What am I to say about these last two months? Things didn’t go well at all. I am sadder and more wretched than I can say, and I do not know at all where I have got to.”

  Two weeks later, he left the asylum for good.

  WHAT HAPPENED? WHAT had changed? What gave Vincent (and Theo) the confidence to abandon the relative safety of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole after two months of relentless, devastating attacks—the worst yet—and dashed hopes for a lasting recovery?

  Vincent awoke from his long nightmare as he always did: paranoid, angry, and determined to leave. “Really I have no luck,” he wailed in his birthday greeting to Theo. “I must try to get out of here.” He rehearsed old complaints about falling behind in his work (the blooming season in the orchards had already passed) and offered to go to an asylum in Avignon or Paris, reviving escape plans that had come and gone as often as his attacks. “I do not think I could be more shut up and more of a prisoner in the homes where they do not pretend to leave you free,” he wrote bitterly about his “voluntary” confinement in the cloister of Saint Paul. “What one has to endure here is hardly bearable.” He chastised Theo for allowing his previous deadlines for leaving to lapse, and propounded a preposterous theory—based on “observation of the other patients,” he claimed—that he was too young and too energetic to fall victim to another attack for at least another year.

  Within days, this delusion of invulnerability led him back to the plan, first proposed by Theo, of moving to the countryside outside Paris and living with a fellow artist, or on his own, near Paul Gachet, the doctor recommended by Pissarro. That plan had died once already, only to be revived in March when Theo reported meeting Gachet. “He gives the impression of being a man of understanding,” Theo had written. “When I told him how your crisis came about, he said to me that he didn’t believe it had anything to do with madness, and that if it was what he thought he could guarantee your recovery.” Theo’s letter, not read until the beginning of May, added a chimerical certainty of recovery to Vincent’s determination to leave. “I am almost certain that in the North I shall get well quickly,” he wrote, focusing the beam of obsession on the small town of Auvers, just north of Paris, where Gachet lived. “I dare to think that I shall find my balance in the North.” He wanted to leave in “a fortnight at most,” he announced impatiently, “although I’d be happier with a week.”

  But Theo had heard it all before. He had followed the ups and downs of Vincent’s crises and weathered the inevitable urgent calls for rescue that followed each attack. He had watched many times as even the fiercest optimism yielded to dread, and then to silence. To fend off Vincent’s demands to be released, he had counseled caution and proposed various “tests,” all of which Vincent had failed. Horrified by the prospect of another public incident like the one at the Yellow House, Theo gently insisted that his brother remain “under the supervision of a doctor”—another impediment to a rash departure. To keep Vincent at least near the asylum, he tried (unsuccessfully) to find a painter willing to take a studio in Saint-Rémy for the winter. He issued dutiful invitations to Paris, of course, but always with conditions that provided a cordon of delay. (A year earlier, he had required five months without an attack before deeming a recovery secure.)

  By the middle of March, after Peyron’s dire report and another long silence, Theo had resigned himself to the inevitable cycle of Vincent’s disease and urged his mother and sister to do the same. “Now that the crisis has lasted so long,” he wrote them, “it will be more difficult for him to pull through.” Vincent would never be “completely himself” again, he said, and to let him leave the asylum would be “irresponsible.”

  By early May, however, everything had changed.

  By May, Vincent’s predicament was no longer just a “sad situation”—a family embarrassment best left to doctors in a distant institution and the comfort of occasional letters filled with heartfelt but hollow encouragements. (“Cling to the hope that things will soon take a turn for the better,” Theo wrote in March.)

  By May, Vincent was a celebrity.

  The Aurier article had lit the fuse. The explosion came in March, when the annual Salon des Indépendants opened in the splendor of the Ville de Paris pavilion on the Champs-Elysées. With Vincent locked in silent suffering, Theo selected the ten paintings that hung alongside works by Seurat, Lautrec, Signac, Anquetin, Pissarro, Guillaumin, and others. The president of France officiated at the opening on March 19, and in the weeks that followed, all of Paris’s art world flooded through the pavilion doors. Many came specifically to see Aurier’s tormented genius. Few left disappointed. “Your pictures are very well placed and make a good effect,” Theo wrote, in a report that Vincent could not read until May. “A lot of people came to us and asked us to send you their compliments.”

  Vincent’s work was dubbed “le clou”—the star—of the show, throwing even the new offerings of Seurat into the shadows. Collectors accosted Theo and “discussed your pictures even without my drawing their attention to them,” Theo marveled. Artists returned again and again to see them; many made offers of exchanges. Painters stopped Theo on the street with congratulations for his brother: “Tell him that his pictures are highly remarkable,” one of them said. Another artist came to Theo’s apartment to express his “rapture” at Vincent’s imagery. “He said that if he had no style of his own,” Theo reported, “he would change his course and go seek what you are seeking.” Even Claude Monet, the monarch of Impressionism, pronounced Vincent’s pictures “the best of all in the exhibition.”

  Critics ratified the triumph. In Art et Critique, Georges Lecomte praised Vincent’s “fierce impasto,” “powerful effects,” and “vivid impression.” In Aurier’s magazine, Mercure de France, Julien Leclercq hailed Vincent’s “extraordinary power of expression” and advanced Symbolism’s claim to his art. “His is an impassioned temperament, through which nature appears as it does in dreams,” Leclerq wrote, “or rather, in nightmares.” He urged his readers to go and see for themselves these “fabulous” and “magnificent” new images: “ten paintings that bear witness to a rare genius.”

  But no review could have meant more to Vincent than the one sent by his former companion in the Yellow House (whose letter, like Theo’s reports, languished unread in Peyron’s office). “I send you my sincere compliments,” Gauguin wrote. “Of the many artists on display, you are the most remarkable.” He called Vincent “the only exhibitor who thinks,” and paid his work the ultimate tribute: “There is something in it as emotionally evocative as Delacroix.” Gauguin, too, asked for an exchange.

  It was one thing to seclude a troubled family member in the far-off mountain retreat at Saint-Rémy, away from the insults of daily life and public ridicule. It was quite another to imprison an artist that all of avant-garde Paris proclaimed a genius. As praise poured in and offers multiplied, as actual money appeared for the first time in Theo’s account book (in March, he deposited the check from Anna Boch for The Red Vineyard), the awkward questions mounted. What a pity it was—a crime, almost—that Vincent was not free to paint as he wanted. Why was he so often deprived of his studio and paints? Why was he treated like a misbehaving child, not the great artist that he was?

  Under the onslaught of questions and doubts, Theo quickly capitulated. Only weeks before, he had resigned himself to the tragic irony of Vincent’s fate. “It is such a pity that just now his work is becoming very successful,” he wrote his mother in mid-April. But on May 10, not even two weeks after the latest “recovery,” Theo sent Vincent the hundred and fifty francs he needed for the journey north. Ever the pragmatist, he saw the commercial opportunities in his brother’s sudden success, as well as the obstacles that his isolation posed to the full realization of that success. He shared Vincent’s frustration at the long confinements and interrupted productiv
ity. Business was slow (a broad economic downturn had dragged the entire art market into a slump), and the prospect of his brother finally supporting himself undoubtedly beckoned.

  But Theo was a romantic, too. And just at the moment when he had finally resigned himself to the cruel inevitability of Vincent’s exile, the triumph at the Indépendante show allowed him to step back from the brink of fatalism and imagine a happy ending at last to his brother’s long, sad journey. “I should like for you to feel better,” he wrote Vincent with the simplicity of hope, “and for your fits of sadness to disappear.”

  Over the first two weeks of May, Theo’s cautious fears fought a losing battle with his impetuous heart. He insisted that Vincent bear responsibility for his decision to leave Saint-Rémy (Vincent tried to characterize it as Theo’s plan), and admonished him not to have “too many illusions about life in the North.” He asked only that Vincent “act in conformity” with Peyron’s advice—a knot of circularity, since Peyron, who opposed the release as premature, would not give his blessing without Theo’s agreement. Over Vincent’s furious objections, Theo argued that the asylum should provide an escort on the train trip all the way to Paris, pointedly recalling the absolute disaster of Vincent’s unaccompanied excursion to Arles in February. On and on they went, in a duel of denial and delusion, indirection and defensiveness, thrashing toward a decision that neither wanted to claim.

  But Vincent wasted no time. Convinced that his window of “complete calm” was closing fast (already reduced from a year to “three or four months” as the battle over his departure dragged on), he plunged back into painting. He had always come out of his attacks with a manic burst of belated energy and a profligate outpouring of paint, as if to make up for all the canvases forgone in his delirium. Never had the reservoir been so full. “I have more ideas in my head than I could ever carry out,” he wrote. “The brush strokes come like clockwork.”