Van Gogh (95 page)

Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
, J
ANUARY-FEBRUARY
1886,
OIL ON CANVAS, 12⅞ × 9¼ IN
. (
Illustration credit 26.4
)

THE TWO BROTHERS
had been fighting over Vincent’s coming to Paris since 1880—even though neither one wanted it to happen. Theo had issued invitations on and off, invariably when Vincent’s art or spending careened out of control and consolidating their living expenses seemed the only hope of stretching his salary to support them both. But his invitations were always issued with a
sigh of resignation and an edge of reprimand, never in a spirit of genuine welcome. And for that very reason, Vincent had never accepted them. Instead, he invariably waited until Theo withheld money or support, then used the threat of coming to Paris to maneuver him into concessions.

Round and round they went—in the Borinage, in Brussels, in Drenthe, in Nuenen—daring and bluffing each other to stalemate each time, until Paris had assumed a significance far beyond its place as the mecca of artists everywhere. To Theo it had come to represent the frustration of his long effort to guide Vincent toward self-sufficiency; to Vincent, it meant the surrender not just of his independence, but of all his heated claims of artistic principle and ultimate success. To both, it had become an admission of failure.

The latest round had been fought as recently as January. In his delusional determination to save his portrait project, Vincent had urged his brother yet again to quit Goupil and open a gallery in Antwerp. When Theo responded by demanding that Vincent return to Holland instead, Vincent immediately threatened to descend on Paris—“without any hesitation.” And it would not be cheap, he warned. He would need to “work regularly from the model as much as possible”—and the models would not be free, as they were at the Academy. In addition, he would need “a rather good studio where one can receive people.”

Theo offered a compromise: if Vincent went to Nuenen for a few months to help their mother pack for a move to Breda, he could then come to Paris and perhaps work in a prominent studio. He dangled the name of Fernand Cormon, an atelier master long known to Vincent for his loose rules and nude models. But Vincent refused the bait. He angrily dismissed Theo’s objections to Antwerp, reaffirmed his satisfaction with his life there, and defiantly declared his intention to stay “for at least a year.” As for Paris, he said tauntingly, “we aren’t that far yet.”

But all that changed in early February. As in Drenthe, Vincent emerged from his breakdown a different man. After months of the dutiful drip-drip of weekly letters, he flooded his brother with seven long, pleading missives in just two weeks. Gone were the scolding defenses and strident demands for money. Instead, he filled page after page with dense, imploring arguments—not that he should stay in Antwerp, but that he should come to Paris. “If it could be arranged so that we lived in the same city,” he wrote in a complete reversal, “it would certainly be by far the best.”

He not only approved of Theo’s plan for the Cormon studio, he penned long paragraphs proclaiming it “critical” to his artistic project. His barbed demands for a separate studio were replaced by calls for caution and savings. A single room would be sufficient, he assured Theo. “Anything will do.” As for Antwerp, he apologized for not making more progress and humbly conceded “disappointment”
in his time there—another complete reversal. Although he never admitted to the debacle at the Academy (he led Theo to believe he was still registered), he retreated from the fiction of success he had spun and offered his brother a rare glimpse of his true world. “If I did not go [to Paris],” he confessed, “I am afraid I should get into a mess, and continue to go in the same circle and keep on making the same mistakes.”

Now, nothing mattered more than reuniting with Theo. “Union is strength,” he cried, resurrecting the call from Drenthe. He summoned the vision of the Rijswijk road (“It is such a splendid idea that, working and thinking together”), and tearfully cited other brother pairs who had “joined hands.” He pictured their life together in Paris in yearning images of domesticity, just as he had in Drenthe. “I do not think it would do you any harm to come home to a studio in the evening,” he wrote Theo. “I have wanted it to be this way between us for a long time already.” He promised his brother everything from better health to a better chance at happiness, if only he would agree.

Not even marriage—to Jo Bonger or anyone else—could daunt Vincent’s vision of perfect solidarity. “I wish we
both
might find a wife before long,” he imagined, “for it is high time.” As in Drenthe, he sealed his plea with vows of hard work, improved health, and good behavior, punctuated by outbursts of desperate longing. “After so many lost illusions we
must
feel sure that we can carry it through,” he wrote, “we
must
know our own minds perfectly, we
must
have a certain confidence after all.”

Theo surely foresaw, in Vincent’s fevered pleas themselves, the disaster that loomed. He had spent the last five years suffering his brother’s fanatic heart, his wild swings of weeping nostalgia and cautionless zeal, his alternating spirals of anger and self-abuse. Already old at twenty-eight, Theo could not have held out any hope for real change. Their bitter, unending contest would soon come to his city, his job, his friends, his home. All he could do was delay. He threw up excuses—his lease did not expire until June, there was no room in his apartment, it was too expensive to rent a second apartment—and pushed again for Vincent to go to Nuenen, at least until June.

“Brabant is a useless detour,” Vincent scoffed, in a worrisome reminder of his changeability.

When Theo suggested that Vincent could use his time in the country to paint landscapes, Vincent claimed the absolute necessity of drawing from plaster casts “without interruption”—an ominous reminder of his intransigence.

Finally, Theo did what he always resisted doing: he told Vincent no. He could
not
come to Paris immediately. He would have to wait until summer.

But Vincent could not wait. Only days after receiving Theo’s answer, he boarded the night train to Paris. He left his rent, his paint bills, and his dentist
unpaid. He told his brother nothing of his plan. The first Theo heard of it was a hand-delivered note he received at his office the next day.
“Mon cher Theo,”
it began.

Self-Portrait with Straw Hat
, 1887,
OIL ON PANEL, 14 × 10⅝ IN.
(
Illustration credit col3.1
)

V
INCENT WENT DIRECTLY FROM THE GARE DU NORD TO THE LOUVRE
. He had told Theo to meet him in the Salon Carré, the gilded wedding cake of a room that had given birth to the vast institution called the Salon. In this one room were displayed as many of the museum’s greatest masterpieces as would fit on the walls—Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
, Rembrandt’s
Holy Family
, Holbein’s
Erasmus
, Veronese’s giant
Marriage at Cana
, and scores more—all stacked and tightly fitted together like bits in a mosaic.

Only nine months earlier, the room had echoed with the wails and moans of mourners making their way to the Arc de Triomphe, where a huge black catafalque had been erected under Napoleon’s great arch. Victor Hugo was dead. Over two million people filled the streets that day, more than the entire population of the city. From the Louvre’s west-facing windows, a river of humanity stretched as far as the eye could see, flowing past the ruins of the Tuileries and pooling in the Place de la Concorde, site of the Revolution’s razor. As the funeral cortège passed through the vast square, the crowd swelled like a tide, climbing up every tree, fountain, lamppost, and kiosk to get a glimpse of the grand procession that climaxed in a simple pauper’s hearse—Hugo’s parting provocation.

The old socialist lion had achieved a new kind of divinity by debunking the old. Through the better part of a century of bourgeois consumerism and contentment, he had kept the torch of idealism—the flame of the Revolution—alight and aloft. He had battled backsliding governments and resurgent religion, outraging everyone from Louis Napoleon to Dorus and Anna van Gogh with his celebrations of godlessness and criminality. Indeed, he had proudly staked out his place as a noble outlaw at war with society, a prophet of doom to the prosperous and a Moses to the dispossessed, clinging to his vision of truth in a dark and doubting era.

By 1885, when Hugo was laid to rest in a deconsecrated Pantheon accompanied by a twenty-one-gun artillery salute, the world had changed. While his outcast-as-hero status lived on as a model to artists of all kinds, including Vincent van Gogh, his confidence in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit did not. The senseless slaughter of the Franco-Prussian War, the chaos of the Commune, the dislocation of technological changes, the buffeting of economic cycles, and the bafflement of scientific advances, all combined to make any ambitions to higher truth seem like mere bourgeois vanity. Who could maintain Hugo’s idealism in the face of Poincaré’s proof that time and space were not fixed (overturning Newton’s comfortable universe); Pasteur’s discovery of deadly unseen agents; or Flammarion’s mapping of unseen worlds in the night sky—to say nothing of capitalism’s incalculable barbarism?

Uncertainty bred fear. As the end of the century loomed, Hugo’s utopian optimism had turned to apocalyptic dread. His funeral itself struck many as a millennial marker: the huge black-draped Arc, a fitting metaphor on which to close a century that seemed doomed to end badly. The pervasive fatalism expressed itself in a desperate, demagogic politics. A military strongman, General Georges Boulanger, made promises of stability and security that were greeted with wild and menacing public acclaim. A newly empowered popular press alternately stirred the “patriotic” frenzy and pandered to readers’ fears with alarming reports of criminality and corruption. Anarchists’ bombs, both verbal and incendiary, provided the final proof that the end of civilization was near.

By 1885, most writers and poets had fled the high ground that Hugo had defended so stoutly—spooked, like everyone else, by the specter of meaninglessness. Some, like Zola, made a separate peace with the dark forces of modernism. Embracing the positivist promise of salvation through science, they marshaled the “facts” of everyday life into searing indictments of bourgeois complacency—the same enemy that Hugo had long battled with gripping fictions and soaring rhetoric. But a younger generation of writers found cold comfort in the naturalists’ limited world of observable phenomena. How could note-taking, even the brilliant note-taking of Zola, capture the roiling stew of human emotions or the mystery of existence? Wasn’t the ultimate reality not the observable one but the
felt
one; not the “real” world but the
perception
of the real world? If there was meaning to be found in life—and that “if” was crucial—then surely it could only be found in the tortured labyrinth of the psyche. Surely art’s truest mandate was to map that labyrinth: to express directly, unvarnished and un-tempered, the elemental reality of human consciousness.