Van Gogh (100 page)

J
EAN-BAPTISTE
C
OROT
,
Agostina
, 1866,
OIL ON CANVAS, 51⅛ × 37¼ IN
. (
Illustration credit 27.4
)

When one particularly homely
pierreuse
agreed to pose for him, Vincent lavished his art on her overripe body and coarse face. He both drew and painted her as a grotesque odalisque, then celebrated her bestial features in a portrait done in the same earthy hues as his Nuenen peasants—a proud boast of her country-girl sexual prowess. He even sketched her in the same submissive position that Sien had assumed for
Sorrow
.

But no one, apparently, not even his
belle laide
Beatrice, would come to the rue Lepic as Sien had come to the Schenkweg. After leaving Cormon’s, Vincent was reduced to painting studies of the little nude statuettes the brothers collected, and, as in Nuenen, forlornly sifting through the contents of his studio for still-life subjects that refracted his frustrations and regrets. He found the perfect metaphor in a battered pair of walking shoes, which he painted in the moody tones and meditative strokes of the Kerkstraat birds’ nests, as if longing for the lost liberties of the heath.

The failure of his hunt for models drove Vincent even deeper into the
other
burning obsession he had brought with him to Paris: color. His unique witness to the gospels of Blanc and Chevreul, developed in the wilderness of Nuenen only to be swept aside in the commercial and sexual fevers of Antwerp, re-emerged in the summer of 1886 in a fresh burst of evangelical zeal. “Color drove him mad,” a classmate at Cormon’s recalled. Taking up the banner of “simultaneous contrast” where his rhetoric had left off the previous winter, Vincent startled his fellow atelier students by painting a nude model—the most prosaic of color subjects—against “an intense, unexpected blue” instead of the studio’s drab brown backdrop. The result, according to one witness, was an explosion of complementaries “with violent new tones, one inflaming the other.” And every vehement image came accompanied by a storm of vehement words. “He never stopped talking about his ideas about color,” recalled another Paris acquaintance.

But this time Vincent found himself preaching to a city already ablaze with arguments about color. What was it? How was it perceived? What did it express? Even as Paris celebrated the centenary of Michel Chevreul, the patriarch of color theory, with a torchlight parade (which Vincent undoubtedly attended), artists squabbled over his legacy. The divisionists, led by Seurat and championed by a powerful young critic, Félix Fénéon, wrestled the mantle of optical science away from Impressionism. They recruited scientists to validate their art and hailed the
Grande Jatte
, which débuted in April 1886, for its “exactitude of atmosphere.” Meanwhile, acolytes of Huysmans’s
À rebours
declared war on all forms of objectivity, including optics, and claimed for themselves the true grail of color: the power of suggestion. The arguments reached into every corner of the art world, even the Atelier Cormon. In the same year as Vincent’s brief attendance, according to one account, the studio erupted in a dispute over color so intense that the complacent master was forced to expel the troublemakers and temporarily close his school.

Through all the rancor and upheaval around him, Vincent remained true to the gospel of color that he learned on the heath. Through a spring and summer crowded with opportunities to see the images roiling the art world, his devotion never wavered. At the eighth and final Impressionists’ show in May, where he could finally study the works that had triggered the uproar a decade before (except for Monet and Renoir, who boycotted the show—a sign of the turbulent times), Vincent found only confirmation of the verdict he had argued to Theo for years. “When one sees them for the first time,” he later recalled his introduction to Impressionist images, “one is bitterly, bitterly disappointed, and thinks them slovenly, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, bad in color, everything that’s miserable.” After seeing them, he wrote Livens reassuringly, “Neither your color nor mine relates to their theories.” He explained the difference this way: “I have faith in color.”

At the same exhibition he also saw Seurat’s
Grande Jatte
, the symbolic meditations of Redon, and dozens of works by young artists unknown to him, including Paul Gauguin. But he commented favorably only on a suite of nude women, in pastel, by Degas. Through the Exhibition Internationale in June (where the works of Monet and Renoir
were
on display), and the equally huge Salon des Indépendants in August (in which almost 350 artists took part), and the exhibition of the Incoherents, Vincent commented favorably on only one work in his letter to Livens that fall: a Monet landscape.

What he missed in the shows, he could see every day in scores of galleries and dealers’ dens: from the storied salesroom of Durand-Ruel, Impressionism’s first champion, where a visitor could spend days viewing the nearly bankrupt dealer’s unsold stock, to the apartment of Arsène Portier, just downstairs, where Manets and Cézannes were available for close inspection. For more exotic fare, any night, he had only to visit one of the many cabarets like Le Chat Noir or Le Mirliton, where the walls were filled with the latest
fumiste
concoctions (including some by Lautrec), or just walk the streets where frame dealers and paint stores like Tanguy’s offered a babel of imagery in their windows.

Through the blizzard of sectarian reviews and fire-breathing rhetoric, through atelier debates and café chatter, Vincent clung to the view he had brought to Paris from the heath: complementary color was the one true gospel and Delacroix its truest prophet. “Delacroix was his god,” a fellow Cormon student recalled; “when he spoke of this painter, his lips would quiver with emotion.” In his studio, he kept a lacquered box containing balls of brightly colored yarn that he endlessly twined and untwined to test the interaction of colors—exactly the procedure described by Chevreul, who had developed his theories as director of dyes for the royal looms at Gobelins.

Instead of seeking out the
Grande Jatte
, Vincent returned again and again to the Louvre to view works like
The Bark of Dante
, Delacroix’s great vision of artistic determination, a painting mythologized in Charles Blanc’s writings. In the same galleries where he ignored so much, he sought out lesser-known images by the Romantic master. Dismissing those, like Anquetin, who considered Monet and the Impressionists the keepers of Delacroix’s palette, Vincent celebrated his own private pantheon of true heirs—painters like the Belgian Henri de Braekeleer and the long-dead Barbizon master Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña—and anointed a little-known Marseille painter, Adolphe Monticelli, as the truest disciple of all.

In the charged atmosphere, Vincent’s contrary certainty riled partisans on every side. “He was always quarreling,” wrote Theo’s friend Andries Bonger, whose comments on Vincent’s work were always met with the same fierce defense: “He persists in replying, ‘but I wanted to introduce this or that color contrast,’ ” Bonger complained, adding tartly, “as if I give a damn about what he
wanted
to do!” When he visited Tanguy’s to buy paints—a rare opportunity to engage fellow painters—Vincent would linger for hours arguing color theory with the other customers.

He clashed spectacularly with the shop’s owner, Julien Tanguy (known to everyone as Père Tanguy), over the Impressionists’ cheerful palette. Tanguy had not only mixed color for some of the giants of the revolution (including Monet and Renoir), he had appointed himself personal champion for one of their number in particular: Paul Cézanne. The dingy shop’s storage rooms were stocked to the rafters with the unpopular works of the hermetic Provençal master, who had left them there to rot or sell, he didn’t care which. Tanguy, a grizzled old socialist with a sentimental streak, defended both the Impressionists and Cézanne with the fierceness of a Communard, which only incited Vincent to greater storms of vehemence. A customer once saw Vincent emerging from Tanguy’s back room after an argument looking as if “he would erupt into flames.”

Deprived of models but determined to make his case for color, Vincent turned to a new subject: flowers. The choice was both rhetorical and commercial. Theo, too, admired the work of Monticelli, whose brashly colored, heavily encrusted little images of flowers and festive parties (
fêtes galantes
) had attracted a small but avid following in Paris and elsewhere. Theo not only dealt in Monticelli’s works, he kept several of them for his own collection—conferring on the Marseille artist both the stamp of salability and the lure of fraternal solidarity. When Monticelli died suddenly in June under strange circumstances (it was said he drank himself into insanity and suicide), Vincent’s fervor transformed him into a hero: a L’oeuvre-like martyr for color. He rushed to his studio and began a series of small, impacted still lifes showing flowers in scumbles of pungent reds and yellows. He painted orange lilies on a cobalt field, and ocher chrysanthemums, like suns, jumbled in a ginger jar of unfathomably deep green. Like Monticelli, he rendered even the brightest flowers in craggy impastos and draped them in Rembrandt’s darkest shadows. Every image served both as an homage to Monticelli (and Delacroix) and a rebuke—in rich hues, dramatic highlights, dark backgrounds, and prodigal paint—to all the so-called “modern” colorists.

Determined to prove that his contrary images could also be salable, Vincent took some of them to Agostina Segatori, hoping she might either buy them or at least show them at Le Tambourin. Segatori, who showcased other artists’ works and pitched her establishment as “more museum than café,” took pity on the ardent Dutchman and agreed to hang some of his paintings with the other “works of masters” on her walls. She also began accepting them as payment for meals, and may even have sent him flowers to suggest future subjects—giving Vincent all the proof of commercial viability he needed.

Fueled by the prospect of more “sales,” by the enthusiasm for Monticelli that he shared with Theo, and by his own devotion to Delacroix, Vincent launched
a furious campaign of persuasion in paint. As if illustrating Chevreul’s voluminous studies, he worked his way through the full range of complementary contrasts and tonal harmonies, using blossoms, vases, and backgrounds in ever-shifting combinations: red gladioli in a green bottle; orange coleus leaves against a blue field; purple asters and yellow salvia. From meditations in red with asters and phlox, to harmonies of green and blue with peonies and forget-me-nots, to red-green riots of contrast with carnations and roses, he argued his case with insistent thoroughness. To Livens, he boasted of his color “gymnastics.” Over the course of the summer, he exhausted the greenhouses of Paris: lilacs and zinnias, geraniums and hollyhocks, daisies and dahlias.

He worked with the lightning speed of the Nuenen peasant “heads”—faster than the flowers could wilt in the stifling city heat—turning out a score of images each month. Perhaps encouraged by Segatori’s continued support, he moved to bigger and bigger canvases, but he kept the saturated color, deep chiaroscuro, and sculptural brushstrokes of the unsung Monticelli rather than the all-over light and airy strokes—even dashes and dots—that marked the new art all around him.

Throughout the fall and into the winter, Vincent grew increasingly isolated and defiant. If anything, he built the barricades of mania even higher as the weather grew colder and the flowers fled south. He returned to the subjects of the spring: still lifes of boots, scenes of Montmartre, even the little plaster nudes in his studio. Only now he wrung them through the gospel of complementary color: painting some in vivid contrasts, some in tonal harmonies, some in both. He defied the Impressionists’ sunlight by painting his vignettes of city life under cloudy skies, and rejected their frivolous obsessions with yet more images of Nuenen diggers—only now dressed in blue and orange.

He turned again and again to the mirror, portraying himself always as the bourgeois Bel-Ami artist in satin-trimmed collar—only now with a bright orange beard and blue ascot, or wearing a deep green coat against a flaming-red field. He painted still lifes in vehement strokes and colors so “fierce,” according to a fellow Cormon student, that Tambourin patrons and Tanguy customers were “scared of them.”

In these and other works, Vincent shouted out his different vision with an uncompromising contrariness that could only have sprung from other sources, and could only be appeased by other means.

E
VERYWHERE THEY PITCHED THEIR TENT, CROWDS GASPED. DEFYING
both gravity and death high above the sawdust ring, they flung themselves toward each other, and then away again, in a spinning, whirling pas de deux of jeopardy and rescue. Release and catch. Release and catch. Their flying bodies seemed connected by hidden ties; their spines fused, even as they hurtled in opposite directions. Gianni, the older—urgent and questing—had pushed their act to the limits of possibility, forever straining at the bonds of endurance and nature. Nello, the younger—beautiful and soulful—flew like a bird to please his brother. Together they twirled and spiraled, twisted and tumbled in their midair ballet, now clutching each other, now casting each other off, leaping further and further into peril, in higher and higher swings, testing the invisible ligaments, tempting the logic of release and catch.