Van Gogh (155 page)

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:

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

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 necessary 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.

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.