Van Gogh (130 page)

And so it went, through Vincent’s entire pantheon: every sortie of enthusiasm blocked by a parry of contradiction or disdain. Vincent admired the great Barbizon painters Daubigny, Dupré, and Rousseau; Gauguin “could not tolerate” them, and proposed as better models the great illusionists Ingres and Raphael—artists that Vincent “hated,” according to Gauguin. Vincent praised the painters of
real
people, like Breton and Lhermitte and, of course, Millet; Gauguin countered with the “primitive” perfection of Giotto and Michelangelo and cared not a jot for Vincent’s sainted painter of peasants. As for the moderns, Gauguin made a spirited case for his new sponsor, the master of contour, Degas—a choice that left Vincent “despairing.” Even when they agreed, they disagreed. Vincent venerated Rembrandt for his moody tonalities and deep meaning; Gauguin, for his exquisite forms. To Vincent, Delacroix ranked as a “universal genius” for his expressive color, bravura brushwork, and godlike vision (“he paints humanity”); Gauguin admired his consummate draftsmanship. “Generally speaking,” Gauguin reported drily to Bernard, “Vincent and I hardly see eye to eye, especially in regard to painting.”

Behind Gauguin’s attacks on Vincent’s idols loomed another, far greater threat. Gauguin’s mocking
Night Café
challenged Vincent’s entire way of working. In creating
his
image, Gauguin never set his easel in the Café de la Gare; never painted in its harsh glare; never endured the skeptical shrugs or suspicious stares that Vincent did; never experienced the loneliness that bound the patrons together in the shared solitude of mercurochrome light. Through imagination alone, Gauguin had entered the world of Vincent’s painting and constructed an imaginary scene glimpsed from an impossible angle—a scene as unreal as an angelic visitation. By doing so, he had raised again the argument that true art sprang not from the eye, but from the head—
“de tête.”

Mixing symbolist rhetoric and Zola’s mandate to create a perfect “modern” art, Gauguin insisted that only images removed from reality—transformed through imagination, reflection, and memory—could capture the elusive essence of experience, the human quotient, that represented art’s truest subject. “My artistic center is in my brain and not elsewhere,” he would later insist. In his
Night Café
, as in his self-portrait sent in advance, Gauguin warned Vincent against the “childish trivialities” of technique, like brushstroke and impasto. Even paint itself represented a compromise with the Truth. As he had instructed all his disciples in Pont-Aven, an artist should pursue painting of pure thought (
“sans exécution”
), liberated from the interference of reality by a process of “abstraction” in which the artist synthesizes messy experience into pure
“idée.”

Vincent had already heard these lessons from one of those Pont-Aven disciples,
Émile Bernard. During the summer, they had fought an epistolary battle over the mandate from
le maître
to forswear the accidents of technique and pursue the inner truth of imagination. Vincent had adopted Gauguin’s vocabulary of musical “abstraction” and had even ventured a few
de tête
images—in particular, his two versions of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. But when both of those pictures failed so miserably, he recoiled from the new teaching. “I never work from memory,” he wrote in early October. “My attention is so fixed on what is possible and really exists that I hardly have the desire or the courage to strive for the ideal.” In his use of color, he was already following Gauguin’s gospel of the unreal, he protested, “arranging the colors, exaggerating and simplifying.” But “in the matter of form,” he told Bernard, he would continue “doing what I am doing, surrendering myself to nature.”

Why did Vincent draw this line in the sand? Why did he resist the mandate of
de tête
painting “in the matter of form” but not color? Despite his new sense of shared mission with Gauguin and Bernard, Vincent’s imagination clung fiercely to the artistic ideals of old heroes like Millet and Monticelli and the studio practices he had learned from them. Like them, he was born into a world filled with religious metaphor and Victorian sentiment—lenses that revealed new layers of meaning in reality but never abandoned it. Romantic nature had enthralled his adolescence, and Naturalist observation had shaped his maturity. Like his brother, he had emerged into adulthood as a man of “logic and earthly things”—an artistic ward of the Frenchman banned from the Zundert parsonage, Émile Zola. When asked if Vincent resembled the idée-obsessed painter Claude Lantier depicted disparagingly in Zola’s
L’oeuvre
, Theo responded: “That painter was looking for the unattainable, while Vincent loves the things that exist far too much to fall for that.”

To accept Gauguin’s world of pure imagination, Vincent would not only have to give up his beloved rituals of plein air painting, he would have to uproot an entire lifetime of engagement with reality (what he called the “hand-to-hand struggle with nature”). He would have to trade the world of models and portraits for a world peopled by chimeras and phantoms; to exchange the endless fascinations of the outer world—from birds’ nests to starry nights—for the nameless terrors of memory and reflection.

In fact, Vincent’s imagery, with its defiantly idiosyncratic craft and deeply personal symbolism, already answered Gauguin’s call for an art of “individual intention and feeling”—answered it more forcefully and convincingly even than Gauguin’s wrought-over constructions with their heavy-handed mysteries. Indeed, from the earliest days of his career, Vincent had used the language of
de tête
painting to define his art and defend his artistic prerogatives. A decade before, in one of his first adult works, he had drawn a scene from the Bible “as I imagined the place.” In his furious arguments on behalf of
The Potato Eaters
, he
had championed the artist’s right to transform reality into images “truer than the literal truth”—Gauguin’s
idée
—and passionately seconded Delacroix’s call for art created
“par coeur”
(by heart).

But Gauguin’s ideas posed a threat to the delicate compromise buried at the core of Vincent’s artistic project. Unlike his guest, Vincent could not draw freehand. He depended on models, studio “tricks” like the perspective frame, and endless attempts to achieve anything like verisimilitude. Even then, the sure lines and graceful contours of Degas (or Gauguin) eluded him. He could use the new art’s mandate to “exaggerate and simplify” as an excuse for his weak draftsmanship, just as he had used Delacroix’s
par coeur
call to justify his errant lines, impetuous brush, and perpetual inability to render “likenesses.” But without the opposition of reality, without the cover of defiant deviation, his weaknesses would be laid bare. There was no perspective frame for the imagination.

In his optimistic moments, Vincent imagined that time would close this gap, allowing him eventually to create the pure “inventions” that Gauguin demanded. “I don’t mean I won’t do it after another ten years of painting studies,” he wrote. But until that day, Gauguin’s license to “make up” images—to forswear nature’s impediments and “just paint”—struck Vincent a paralyzing blow. “When Gauguin was in Arles,” he recalled to Theo a year later, “I considered abstraction an attractive method. But that was delusion, dear friend, and one soon comes up against a brick wall.”

It was easy enough for Vincent to fend off Gauguin’s ideas in letters to Bernard (“I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true,” he had told Bernard as recently as October). But the presence of the master himself—working in the Yellow House with him, painting at the easel next to him, sitting at the café table across from him—changed everything. Against Gauguin’s commanding certainty, his mastery of fashionable discourse, his superior French, and, especially, his persuasive art, Vincent’s defenses failed him. (He later described Gauguin as “a genius” when explaining his theories.) Gauguin also held the high ground of caring less. He already had a confident foothold on the
entresol
. Theo owed him almost a thousand francs. For him, the consequences of failure in Arles hardly registered. For Vincent, they were unthinkable.

After an opening salvo of self-assertive imagery—the sower and the yew tree—Vincent quickly succumbed to Gauguin’s overwhelming advantage. Within a week, his guest’s ideas found their way into Vincent’s brush. Working on Gauguin’s coarse jute, he tamed his impasto, muted his color, and reached for the safe, shared models of Japanese prints and Puvis de Chavannes’s idealized settings. In one of his Alyscamps paintings, orange leaves drift down from the trees in Gauguin’s dry, judicious hatches.

The official surrender came on the first Sunday of November, on a walk to
Montmajour. Passing the empty vineyards at the bottom of the mount, Vincent described to Gauguin the scene he had witnessed a month before when the grapes were harvested: the workers, mostly women, swarming over the fat, purpling vines, sweating in the still-intense southern sun. Moved by this vivid description, Gauguin challenged his host to paint the scene
from memory
. Gauguin offered to paint the same scene himself, based on nothing more than Vincent’s telling—that is, from imagination. For Vincent, the intimacy of their wandering walk—so much like Petrarch and Boccaccio—and the “splendor” of the sunset over the vineyards proved an irresistible inducement. He accepted the challenge. “Gauguin gives me the courage to imagine things,” he wrote.

Over the next week, confined to the studio by a spell of rain, both artists constructed their competing visions. Vincent relied on years of sketching field-work and on his trove of drawings to populate the empty vineyard with toiling women bending over the low-lying vines like the potato diggers of The Hague. He dressed them in purples and blues to contrast with the burning yellow sky under which they labor. Near the horizon, he put a signature Midi sun.

Gauguin responded with a completely different image. Eschewing Vincent’s deep space and southern light, Gauguin zoomed in on a single worker—a mysterious, doleful figure with a masklike face and a dome of orange hair. As formidable as any Martinique negress, she sits exhausted on the ground with her chin propped on her fists, resting between bouts of work. Her large scale and deftly drafted pose contrast starkly with Vincent’s awkward little figures crawling anonymously over the landscape. Her bare forearms and brooding pose radiate sexual energy, creating a portrait of the peasant’s bestial essence entirely missing from Vincent’s faceless crowd of pickers.

Gauguin’s laborer wears the native costume of Brittany, not Provence—as much a rebuke as his rejection of complementaries in favor of “uniform tonalities.” Unlike Vincent’s workaday scene with its clustered figures, neat narrative, and postcard sunset, Gauguin’s vision of the grape harvest abbreviates the task (two women are shown at work in the background), crops the foreground tightly, and poses more questions than it answers—Who is this woman? Why is she so desolate?—transforming Vincent’s colorful vignette of country labor into a Symbolist meditation on the inaccessibility of inner life. Calling Gauguin’s painting “very fine, very unusual” and “as beautiful as the Negresses,” Vincent conceded defeat. “Things from the imagination certainly take on a more mysterious character,” he acknowledged.

After his victory in the vineyard, Gauguin immediately turned to another image that bested Vincent in draftsmanship, eroticism, and mystery. Drawing on some tantalizing sketches he had made in Brittany before leaving, and on his love of Degas’s bathers, Gauguin painted a peasant woman stripped to the
waist, seen from behind. “Gauguin is working on a very original nude woman in the hay with some pigs,” Vincent reported in mid-November. “It promises to be very fine, and of great distinction.”

The woman slumps exhausted over a stack of hay, baring her muscular back, the nape of her neck, and wisps of blond hair loosed from under her bonnet. With one half-tanned arm flung over the hay to grasp a hook, and the other providing a cushion for her bowed head, she could be resting or praying—or preparing for some sexual act—while the pigs she tends grunt and grub around her with the indifference of fellow beasts. Gauguin called the grouping simply
Les cochons—The Pigs
—and sent the painting to Theo with a salacious note: “[It is], to my mind, rather virile … Is it the southern sun that causes us to be in rut?”

The image routed Vincent’s last defenses. “I am going to set myself to work from memory often,” he wrote. “The canvases from memory are always less awkward, and have a more artistic look than studies from nature.” He chose as his impossible image a scene he had witnessed months before: a bullfight in the great Roman arena at the center of Arles. He had loved the spectacle of it—the “colorful multitudes piled up one above the other,” the “fine sight [of] sunshine and crowd.” He had even considered making the arena the subject of his next series of paintings after the orchards of spring—to explore “the effect of sun and shade and the shadow cast by the enormous ring.” Gauguin had seconded the idea in a letter that summer, listing the bullfight as the Provençal subject he most wanted to “interpret.” But by the time he arrived in October, the season for blood sport had ended. So with only his memories to guide him, Vincent sat in the studio and unleashed his brush on a big piece of Gauguin’s heavy jute.

Everywhere, his hand betrayed him. The far spectators turned into hash marks; those in the middle distance, into stick figures; those closer up, into awkward cartoons. He filled the foreground with people drawn loosely from his studies—Roulin, Ginoux, a couple from the Alyscamps—arranged in disjointed poses and jumbled perspective: some of their faces barely sketched, some rendered with odd care, some blank, some blotted out in frustration. The coarse jute smothered his boldest impasto and made permanent every errant risk of his brush. He never mentioned the painting to Theo.

Instead, he tried again. This time, he tapped the wellspring of all his truest art: the past. In mid-November, three letters arrived from Holland that sent him into a rapture of nostalgia. One came from Jet Mauve, his cousin and the widow of his former mentor. She thanked him for the
“mémoire”
painting he had sent through Theo, and “spoke of old times” in a way that opened his heart. Another came from his youngest sister, twenty-six-year-old Wil, who had long assumed the duty of caring for their aging mother. Her announcement that she had begun reading Zola’s scandalous
Au Bonheur des Dames
struck him as a sign of
passing time. The third letter came (via Theo) from Anna van Gogh herself, who had not written him directly since Dorus’s death. Her mood was melancholic.