Van Gogh (99 page)

J
OHN
P
ETER
R
USSELL
,
Portrait of Vincent van Gogh
, 1886,
OIL ON CANVAS, 23⅝ × 17¾ IN
. (
Illustration credit 27.3
)

NOTHING SET VINCENT
apart from his fellow students more than his lack of facility. If he had wielded a pencil as wittily as Lautrec or a brush as winningly as Anquetin, his strange appearance might have been overlooked, his blunt manner forgiven. Led by Anquetin, who had drawn exquisitely since his schoolboy days in Normandy, and Lautrec, a precocious illustrator, Cormon’s acolytes put a high premium on drawing, just as their master did. Although tolerant of individuality in painting styles, Cormon, like Verlat in Antwerp, saw draftsmanship as above the to-and-fro of artistic fashion. “If one doesn’t measure,” he said, “one draws like a pig.” His students, no matter what daring new images they admired, all aspired to “draw like the old masters in the Louvre,” according to one of them.

Eschewing the cumbersome perspective frame that he had come to rely on—and that no doubt embarrassed him in a room filled with freehand draftsmen—Vincent focused with immense intensity on the old challenges of line and proportion. Although nude models were a regular feature of the atelier, he still found himself working mostly from the plaster casts that lined the studio walls.
Like Siberdt, Cormon emphasized contour over shading and hatching, and discouraged his students from improvising. “They were to copy strictly what they had in front of them,” one student recalled Cormon’s instructions, “without changing anything.”

Submitting yet again to the tyranny of reality, Vincent drew, erased, and redrew until a firm, accurate outline appeared, then delicately modeled with chalk and stump and more erasing in an effort to create the kind of precise, polished study that students like Lautrec could produce effortlessly. But his hand still would not, could not, obey. Even his most polished images, whether drawn from the plaster or the nude, emerged from his easel with broadened buttocks, misaligned limbs, enlarged feet, crooked faces, or quivering contours. “We considered his work too unskillful,” recalled a fellow Cormon student; “there were many who could surpass him from that point of view.” Another said, “His drawings had nothing remarkable about them.”

Painting, too, brought ridicule and rejection. Like the Academy students in Antwerp, Vincent’s Cormon classmates were astonished by the speed and appalled by the disorder of his working methods. He painted three studies to every one of theirs, completing multiple angles on the same pose in a single, relentless assault, not even pausing during the model’s rest period. “He worked in a chaotic fury,” one of his classmates recalled, “throwing all the colors on the canvas in feverish haste. He picked color up as if by the shovelful and the paint ran back along the brush and made his fingers sticky.… The violence of his study surprised the studio; the classical artists were horrified by it.”

When Vincent wasn’t looking, the other students mocked his flailing strokes. When Cormon stopped at his easel, they fell silent with anticipation and leaned in to hear how the placid master would react to the Dutchman’s latest provocation. But Cormon only criticized Vincent’s draftsmanship and advised him to work more carefully in the future. For a while, at least, Vincent tried to heed the advice. He came to the studio in the afternoons, when all the others had left, and practiced his drawing on the familiar plaster casts, struggling to capture their elusive contours until his eraser wore holes in his paper. Someone who chanced upon him alone in the big studio, locked in his furtive labors, thought he looked “like a prisoner in his cell.”

By summer, he was gone. He had promised to study at Cormon’s for three years; he stayed less than three months. He may have continued to make occasional trips to the studio on the boulevard de Clichy as late as the fall; but, if he did, he timed his visits carefully to avoid his former classmates. When pressed to describe his brief experience at Cormon’s, Vincent would say only, “I did not find it as useful as I had expected it to be.” After leaving Paris, he never wrote another word about it. So decisive was his failure at the prestigious atelier that the subject never came up in a letter Theo wrote to his mother in June summarizing
Vincent’s first few months in Paris. Instead, he spun a farrago of reassurance that Vincent had finally turned a corner, and that life with him was not the burden it had been in Nuenen. “He is much more cheerful than in the past and people like him here,” Theo reported brightly. “If we can keep it up I think his difficult times are over and he will be able to make it by himself.”

In reality, Vincent had found failure around every corner. Despite all his efforts that spring, he had not sold a single painting. None of the hundreds of magazines circulating in Paris would pay him for an illustration. Worse still, his attempts to win dealers to his cause had all foundered, despite his brother’s connections in the business. A Cormon classmate remembered how Vincent “used to rage from time to time that though connected with the picture trade no one would buy anything he did.”

Only Theo’s old colleague Arsène Portier, the same minor dealer who had abruptly withdrawn his support for
The Potato Eaters
the previous year, paid Vincent the respect of taking some works on consignment. But what else could he do? Living downstairs in the same building, Portier not only saw both brothers every day, but no doubt suffered a relentless haranguing—in person this time, not by letter. When pressed to
show
the paintings to buyers (he worked out of his apartment), Portier demurred, promising vaguely to mount an exhibition sometime in the future. The only place Vincent had found to actually display his work was a nearby paint supply store called Tanguy’s—described by a contemporary as “a small and shabby boutique”—where they hung unlighted amid the retail clutter with dozens of other customers’ canvases. Even when he tried to exchange his paintings with fellow artists (an old student tradition encouraged by Theo), he met with little success. Only those as obscure and marginalized as he was were tempted by his offers to swap. Better-known painters like Charles Angrand, a friend of Seurat’s, simply ignored his overtures.

Vincent might have made more exchanges if he had made more friends. But Theo’s assurance to his mother that “people like him here” was only a comforting fiction. The letters and journals of other artists in Paris at the time betray not a hint of Vincent’s presence, despite numerous opportunities for their paths to cross. He began the summer of 1886 as alone in Paris as he had been on the heath. Russell had left for the season, lending his apartment to two Englishmen who proved far less sympathetic hosts. A. S. Hartrick thought Vincent “more than a little mad”; and Henry Ryland reacted to his visits with horror. (“That terrible man has been here for two hours,” Ryland once complained to Hartrick. “I can’t stand it any more.”) Still, desperate to preserve some semblance of professional connection, Vincent continued to visit Russell’s studio until a row over Ryland’s watercolors (Vincent called them “anaemic and useless”) extinguished his welcome on the impasse Hélène forever.

By the fall, he was reduced to writing Horace Livens, the classmate in
Antwerp whom he barely knew, to report poignantly, “I work alone,” and to complain, “I am struggling for life and progress in art.” Only six months after arriving, he begged the distant Livens to join him in Paris, or, barring that, to help him escape. “In spring, or even sooner, I may be going to the South of France,” he wrote, anticipating by a year his flight to Provence. “And look here, if I knew you had longings for the same, we might combine.”

AFTER THE COLLAPSE
of his plan for Cormon, without friends or colleagues or direction, Vincent quickly retreated into the obsessions he had brought with him to Paris.

The portrait project that had preoccupied him in Antwerp resumed almost without interruption. Among his earliest paintings in Paris were two portraits of the same sitter: a raven-haired matron whose bourgeois dress and fancy bonnet betray the artist’s new bid for respectability. But once he started at Cormon’s, his mania returned to its deeper roots in sex. The atelier sessions provided a steady diet of nudes for Vincent’s voracious hand. Better yet, the studio attracted an almost unbroken stream of models in search of work. They paraded around the atelier for the inspection of all the students, who often voted on their favorites. Because auditions required disrobing, and students were free to poke and prod (to test musculature), such tryouts often dissolved into leering, snickering gauntlets of mutual arousal.

But Vincent wanted more. Long accustomed to the prerogatives of his own studio, he immediately set out to arrange private modeling sessions, only to encounter the same frustrations that had dogged all his previous campaigns. None of the professional models who lined up every day for the atelier’s auditions would accept an invitation to his studio. “[They] did not want to pose for him,” Theo recalled—either for portraits or for figure studies. And certainly not for nudes. Even the women Vincent knew personally, such as Russell’s mistress, Marianna, refused the strange Dutchman’s advances.

Soon enough, he was forced to take his hunt to more familiar regions.

Prostitutes swarmed the broad boulevards and café bars of Haussmann’s new city. The combination of wealth, license, and the opportunity for display made Paris the capital of sexual gratification—and venereal disease—on a randy continent in a libertine era. They went by many names—
pierreuse, lor-ette, grisette, gigolette, apéritive
—and serviced almost three-quarters of the city’s adult males. Virtually every artist in Cormon’s atelier not only kept a mistress but also made nightly forays into Paris’s libidinous underworld. Even Russell would leave the beautiful (and pregnant) Marianna to enjoy the end-of-empire decadence available on almost every street corner.

Surrounded by so much opportunity, Vincent could hardly contain himself.
Books like Zola’s
Nana
and the Goncourts’
La fille Élisa
(both chronicles of prostitution) had filled his head with visions of erotic freedom and sexual athleticism. Even Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, for all his amorous conquests, couldn’t resist the particular pleasures of Parisian whores. In later years, Vincent recalled fondly his model-hunting escapades not just in the city’s bustling brothels but also in the seedy walk-up back rooms where lonely women “screw 5 or 6 times a day.” He spoke knowingly about the relationships between prostitutes and their
“maquereaux”
(pimps), and described himself as merely a hungry consumer in search of the best cut of beef. “The whore is like meat in a butcher’s shop,” he wrote in 1888, “and I sink back into my brutish state.”

It was probably in his relentless search for models that Vincent first encountered Agostina Segatori. Although too old (about forty-five) to be active in the trade herself, Agostina knew where to find what Vincent was looking for. Since her teens on the streets of Naples, she had lived on the slippery border between modeling and prostitution. By 1860, her seductive look and voluptuous body had earned her passage to Paris, where she posed for a pantheon of the era’s greatest painters, including Gérôme, Corot, and Manet. All of Europe hungered for the easy sensuality of dark-haired Italian girls, often portrayed in fetching native costumes and carrying the symbol of their “gypsy” spirit: a tambourine. Like many former models, Agostina found a sponsor and, in 1885, capitalized on her fading celebrity by opening a café called simply Le Tambourin.

By the time Vincent met her in 1886, she had aged into a savvy, bosomy, bohemian
signora
, entouraged by a young lover, a thuggish manager, and two blond Great Danes. She presided over her café domain with languorous authority and “imposing charm,” according to one of her legion of admirers. Everything in the big establishment on the boulevard de Clichy, from the tambourine-shaped tables to the waitresses in Italian peasant dresses, played out the theme of exotic, erotic allure that had made her famous. But the allure was more than just stagecraft. Theme cafés like Le Tambourin typically did a booming side business in prostitution. In return for providing a safe environment and a steady stream of customers, owners took a cut of their servers’ after-work earnings. Like the procuress Vincent met in Antwerp, Agostina Segatori “knew a lot of women, and could always supply some.”

Even with Segatori’s help, Vincent’s excursions into Paris’s sordid underbelly produced only a few hasty, eavesdropping sketches. One shows a woman lying naked in bed, her arms behind her head, comfortably advertising her full availability. Another depicts a woman sitting on the edge of a bed languidly pulling up her stockings after sex. Another shows a woman squatting over a basin, cleaning herself. At one of the many erotic theatricals that filled the smoky basements of the boulevards, he captured in furtive pencil and chalk the peep-show scene of a couple copulating on stage, as shameless as a circus act.