Van Gogh (86 page)

In response to Theo’s criticism of the drawing in
The Potato Eaters
, Vincent made exactly the opposite argument. Instead of championing the rules, he furiously railed against them. Consistency was always an early casualty in Vincent’s persuasive terrors, but his defense of
The Potato Eaters
cracked open a rift of contradiction that had run through his artistic ambitions from the start. Deprived of natural facility, he had always clung to the faith that hard work and mastery of the rules, from Bargue to Blanc, would be rewarded with success. He defensively ridiculed the notions of “innate genius” and “inspiration,” while exalting his own meager tools: “drudgery,” “science,” and most of all, energy. But in the face of continuing frustration and failure, he had always left open another way of defining success. If an artist had sufficient
passion
, he argued whenever self-doubt overwhelmed him, nothing else mattered: not ability, not technique, not sales, not even the art itself. Criticizing the pictures in the 1885 Salon, Vincent wrote: “They give me neither food for the heart nor for the mind, because they have obviously been made without a certain passion.”

The Potato Eaters
had been borne on yet another wave of optimism about labor’s just rewards. Vincent had approached the painting like an Academy chef d’oeuvre, with months of arduous preparatory sketches. In the weeks leading up to its completion, he had reaffirmed his faith in the “fundamental truths of drawing … which the ancient Greeks already knew, and which will continue to apply till the end of the world.” He had fretted ceaselessly over correcting every detail of the painting “in order to make it exact.” He pointed out how his drawing had improved in the final version, and assured Theo repeatedly that the figures had been drawn “with care and according to certain rules.” Indeed, he insisted on their correctness and blamed Theo for seeing the subjects wrongly. “Don’t forget those people do not sit on chairs like those in Café Duval,” he admonished.

Only after Portier and Serret added their voices to Theo’s criticism (Serret had pointed out “certain faults in the structure of the figures”) did Vincent abandon
his claim to “lifelike” figures and fall back on his last line of defense: passion. In a furious about-face, he dismissed conventionally correct drawing and correct figures as
“superfluous
—even if drawn by Ingres himself”—and declared defiantly: “I
should be in despair if my figures were good.”
He praised the “almost
arbitrary”
proportions of caricature and scoured the vast gallery in his head for examples of “inaccuracies, aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality—lies, if you like” that marked the work of “true artists.” Art demanded more than correctness, he intoned. It demanded a truth “truer than the literal truth.” It demanded authenticity, honesty, intimacy, modernity—“in short, life.”

To Vincent, still in thrall to Sensier’s Millet, “life” meant only one thing. Whatever its technical shortcomings,
The Potato Eaters
expressed peasant life
as it really was:
peasant life, not “perfumed” with color or “polished” with correctness, but “smelling of bacon smoke and potato steam” and “reeking of manure”; peasant life as he, and Millet, had actually
lived
it—not as imagined by city-dwelling painters whose
“splendidly
done figures … cannot but remind one of the suburbs of Paris.” He schooled Theo with a passage from Sensier’s book about Millet’s masterwork,
The Sower:
“There is something great, and of the grand style in this figure, with its violent gesture, its proud raggedness, which seems to be painted with the very earth that the sower is planting.” In his fever of justification, Vincent grasped this poetic metaphor as a universal principle. “How perfect that saying of Millet’s about the peasants is,” he wrote.
“These peasants seem to be painted with the soil they sow.”

He repeated this mantra again and again, using it to exempt both his colors and his figures from all the “ordinary rules” imposed by “dupes of convention.”
His
paintings had the “dust of the cottages” on them, he bragged, as well as the flies of the field:

Throwing Theo’s sly hints back in his face, Vincent derided the notion that “bright painters”—Impressionists with their confectionary colors and floods of light—could ever express the “filthy, stinking” reality of peasant life; or that academically correct draftsmen could show “diggers that dig, peasants that are peasants, or peasant women that are peasant women.” Only the dark palette and coarse figures of
The Potato Eaters
could honestly express the “truer truth” of the peasants’ meager existence. And only a painter who lived and suffered among them could bear witness to that truth.
“Everything,”
he insisted, “depends on how much life and passion an artist is able to express.”

In every howling defense of his abused image, one can hear Vincent pleading an even more urgent cause. “What kind of man, what kind of visionary, or thinker, observer, what kind of human character stands
behind
canvases extolled for their technique?” he demanded to know. “Were [they] made with a
will
, with
feeling
, with
passion
, with
love”?
He reminded Theo of Zola’s injunction to
“cherchez l’homme”
(look for the man) in the work—to
“aimez l’artiste”
(love the artist) more than the painting.

As always, Vincent’s art followed where his arguments led. Throughout the summer of 1885, in an outpouring of work that matched the outpouring of words, he hectored his brother with images in support of
The Potato Eaters
. He seconded its dark colors with a series of even darker paintings: a landscape “under a starless night, dark and thick like ink”; a churchyard “in the evening”; and a peasant cottage like the De Groots’ “by night.” The thatch-roofed cottage, of a type already disappearing from the Brabant countryside, offered Vincent not only an appropriate subject for his nocturnal palette (with the last rays of sunset instead of lamplight), but also a chance to demonstrate his special feeling for the lives of its inhabitants. “Those ‘peasants’ nests’ remind me so much of the wren’s nest,” he wrote Theo, vowing to paint a whole series of similar images and to find “more beautiful hovels far away on the heath,” like a peasant boy searching for birds’ nests.

Head of a Woman
, M
ARCH
1885,
OIL ON CANVAS, 16⅞ × 13⅛ IN
. (
Illustration credit 24.5
)

At the same time, he painted more “heads,” some even darker than the dusty diners at the De Groot table; some even more caricatured and coarsely rendered. He sent Theo yet another portrait of Gordina, slashed out by heart in bold, unhesitant strokes, and claimed it as proof of his Millet gospel: “I haven’t yet made a head so much
‘peint avec de la terre’
[painted with soil],” he wrote, “and more will follow.” Soon afterward, another crate arrived in Paris, crammed with dark paintings and proudly labeled “V2.”

In response to the unanimous criticism of the figures in
The Potato Eaters
, Vincent launched a campaign of drawing that both answered the objections and defied them. He pledged allegiance to a new technique that would render his figures “fuller and broader” and promised to make fifty drawings, a hundred, or “even more, until I have exactly what I want, namely that everything is round and … makes one harmonious lifelike whole.” He sent Theo elaborate explanations of the new technique, filled with sonorous French phrases and the wisdom of eminences like Delacroix and Hébert.

But the drawings themselves hardly changed. Whether out of stubbornness, or a shortage of models as the July harvest approached, Vincent returned to the same poses he had been practicing since Etten: women bending over to glean corn or dig carrots, thrusting their bottoms in the air; men digging with spades, or raking, or reaping. He defiantly chose the large sheets and single subjects that Theo had been discouraging since Etten. His promises of roundness and wholeness added nothing except girth to the scores of familiar figures that piled up in the studio that summer. He claimed for all these bulging, unbudging images the same “character,” “life,” and “dust” that he claimed for his maligned potato eaters.

WHEN ANTHON VAN RAPPARD
sent a letter critical of the
Potato Eaters
lithograph in late May, Vincent unleashed a fury of rebuttal that brought their five-year friendship to a tumultuous end. Rappard had dared to specify, in pitiless detail, all the imperfections that Theo would only hint at:

The image had “terrified” him, Rappard wrote, and he castigated Vincent in the harshest terms for betraying the artistic ideals he had thought they shared: “While working in such a manner, how dare you invoke the names of Millet and Breton? Come on! In my opinion art is too sublime a thing to be treated so nonchalantly.”

Vincent immediately sent the letter back, adding only a curt, scribbled note. But within a week, his indignation exploded in wounded protest. For the next month, he spat out page after page of desperate argument, as if all the disputes of a lifetime hung in the balance. He ricocheted between angry counterattacks and self-pitying pleas on behalf of his art and himself. Repeated claims of indifference (“I leave you to your delusions”) were followed by long paragraphs of academic justification. Elaborate encouragements shared the page with half-mad accusations. He offered defenses from the most technical (“I used corrosives on the stone”) to the most sweeping (“We seek our subjects in the heart of the people”). He declared himself the truer disciple of Millet and predicted his friend’s ruin if they parted ways.

The more he argued, the angrier he grew, until his tirades regressed to the helpless frustration and hurt of a child’s tantrum. When Rappard suggested that Vincent needed someone to tell him “some home truths,” Vincent flailed back, “I
myself
am the one to tell myself some home truths.”

In Rappard’s disapproval, Vincent saw the same dark forces that had always thwarted and persecuted him. “I have had the very same kind of trouble for a great number of years with a great number of people,” he wrote, including “my parents and my whole family.” In his paranoia, Vincent suspected that Rappard’s betrayal had been part of an
actual
conspiracy against him—a conspiracy orchestrated, of course, by his old Goupil nemesis, H. G. Tersteeg. “What is the
real
reason you have broken with me?” he demanded. He speculated that Rappard had met secretly with Tersteeg on his recent visits to The Hague and agreed to trade his good opinion of
The Potato Eaters
for favors from the implacable
gérant
. Hadn’t Millet been betrayed in just the same way by those attempting to “suppress and refuse” him? Driven by his own escalating suspicions, Vincent had no choice but to demand a full retraction. “This is my last word,” he announced. “I want you to take back, frankly and without reservation, what you wrote.”

Concerned by Vincent’s unhinged letters, but antagonized by his “despotic” demands, Rappard retracted nothing. Instead, he apparently asked his friend Willem Wenckebach, who was summering again in nearby Heeze, to look in on his distraught friend in Nuenen. The dapper, urbane Wenckebach sought Vincent out among the birds’ nests, broken furniture, and dirty clothes of the Kerkstraat studio. Vincent responded to this gentlemanly outreach with the
same unkempt passions that filled his letters, careening between polite small talk and fits of violent rage. Kicking his easel to punctuate his arguments, he railed against the so-called “decent” bourgeoisie one minute and cursed the uncooperative peasants the next.

When Wenckebach reached to pick up a drawing from the floor, Vincent caught the glint of a gold cufflink. “He looked at me in a contemptuous manner,” Wenckebach recalled later, “and said furiously: ‘I can’t stand people who wear such luxuries!’ This unusual, unkind, and rude remark made me feel most uncomfortable.” On the subject of Rappard, Vincent was unyielding. He would “never admit the justice of [Rappard’s] reproaches,” he told his visitor. Therefore, nothing but a full retraction would suffice to “erase” his friend’s “unmanly” insults. When Wenckebach wondered why he would take such an uncompromising and ultimately self-destructive stand, Vincent answered simply: “It is not good to take the smooth path in one’s life! I never do!”