Van Gogh (107 page)

For Pissarro, he already had stacks of pointillist works from his trips to Asnières to prove his engagement with Seurat’s science of color and light. He answered Lautrec’s pastel portrait of him with still lifes—one of a glass of absinthe—done in the same soft palette and feathery strokes. When Anquetin introduced him to the possibilities of monochrome canvases—works dominated by a single color—Vincent responded with a still life of apples all in yellow. When Guillaumin introduced violent colors and brutal contrasts into the argument over the future of Impressionism, Vincent fired back with canvases of blazing color and crashing complementaries. But when Signac returned to Paris in November, Vincent reached out to him with a very different conversation: still lifes of French novels, a motif he had undoubtedly seen in Signac’s earlier work, done in the gay tonalities and restless pointillist brush the two had shared in the spring—an image as carefully crafted to please its recipient as Vincent’s most polished letter.

Émile Bernard introduced Vincent, in both words and images, to a radically new direction in art. Intent on being a leader, not a follower, Bernard advocated an imagery that would
overturn
Impressionism, not merely “renew” it. Beginning in 1887, he developed a stylized art of flat planes of color and bold outlines arranged to maximum ornamental effect, and compositions reduced to the simplest possible geometries—in short, an art that defied the canons of Impressionism in all its forms, indicting equally the feckless vagaries of Monet and the faux precision of Seurat. Both had failed in art’s greatest mission, he argued: to penetrate to the essence of life. Instead, they had rendered reality as insubstantial and meaningless—an evanescent stage effect, not
real
at all.

These ideas belonged originally to Anquetin, a fearless innovator; the imagery, to the reclusive Paul Cézanne. But Bernard advertised them to Vincent in the bold new language of the Symbolists—the language of Huysmans’s
À rebours
. An image stripped of its temporal, scientific finery (Bernard called objective truth “an intruder in art”), reduced to color and design, possessed the same mysterious expressive power as pure sensation, he argued. Indeed, it
was
sensation. “What is the point of reproducing the thousand insignificant details that the eye perceives?” one critic summarized the rebellious new art. “One should grasp the essential characteristic and reproduce it—or, rather,
produce
it.” (In
March 1888, the same critic coined a name for the new art: “Cloisonnism,” invoking the mosaic-like segmented color used on enameled metalware.)

Like the Symbolists, Bernard claimed roots for his imagery in the iconography of the past, citing as precedents everything from medieval tapestries to Gothic stained-glass windows. In particular, he invoked the simplicity and directness of Japanese prints.

These humble, ubiquitous images, imported by the bale for decades, had only recently been swept up into the debate about the future of art. While the exoticism and refinement of Japanese aesthetics had transfixed artists like Whistler and Manet as early as the 1860s, it wasn’t until the Exposition Universelle of 1878, with its dazzling Japanese pavilion, that
“japonisme”
—the mania for all things Japanese—began to grip the Paris art world. Stores specializing in Japanese arts opened on the city’s most fashionable shopping streets, selling everything from porcelains to samurai swords, but mostly reams of prints. Monet collected both prints and fans, and famously painted his wife in a striking red kimono. Le Chat Noir incorporated the imagery of Japanese prints into its shadow plays, and comprehensive guides, like Louis Gonse’s
L’art japonais
, unlocked the mysteries of their meaning. In 1886, only a few months after Vincent’s arrival in Paris, a popular magazine,
Paris Illustré
, featured a Japanese print on the cover of a special issue devoted entirely to the art and culture of the floating kingdom.

Symbolists, especially, seized on the colorful, ubiquitous little prints as a model for the new art. Their prismatic color, exaggerated perspective, and stylized iconography represented the elemental expression of a “primitive” culture—that is, one uncorrupted by the bourgeois values and spiritual malaise of fin-de-siècle Europe. (In the same way, the cultures of medieval Europe, ancient Egypt, tribal Africa, and the Pacific islands were all deemed “primitive.”) Like the madmen and eccentrics that the Symbolists heroized, these unspoiled cultures, and their creations, had remained closer to the elusive world of essences—the wellspring of all great art.

Vincent may have encountered Japanese art as early as childhood through a seafaring uncle who visited the island soon after it opened to the West and brought home its strange artifacts. Decades later, in The Hague and even in the wilderness of Nuenen, he had felt the rising tide of
japonisme
in the books he read, the prints he collected, and the Salon catalogues he consumed. It wasn’t until he arrived in Antwerp in late 1885, however, after reading Edmond de Goncourt’s celebration of Japanese art in
Chérie
, that he began to collect the cheap, colorful woodcuts that filled the shops of the maritime city.

They were called
crépons
for the thin, wrinkled paper, like crêpe, on which they were printed. Vincent was drawn especially to images of geishas (as he was to all depictions of pleasuring women) and to busy city scenes: detailed panoramas
of a distant world that appealed both to his long obsession with perspective and to his natural window-gazing, eavesdropping curiosity. Even then, he saw them mainly as affordable collectibles, decorations for an artist’s studio, and, in a pinch, a ready source of cash or exchange. His exhibition at Le Tambourin had been based on the belief—mistaken, it turned out—in the easy redeemability of his
crépon
collection.

It wasn’t until late 1887, however, when Bernard introduced him to their symbolist secrets—their expressive code—that Vincent accepted the simple prints as lessons for his own art. Other artistic affinities drew him to this belated embrace. Already in Antwerp he had admired the luminous colors of stained-glass windows as well as the paintings of Henri de Braekeleer, with their patches of pure color and profound simplicity (“hardly anything, and yet a great deal”).

But it took Bernard’s advocacy to lure Vincent off the trodden path of Impressionism. The younger artist sealed the older’s devotion with a claim—improbable but extravagantly flattering—that the Tambourin exhibition had influenced him and Anquetin in formulating their revolutionary imagery. Hungry for validation, especially from the young painter on whom he had set his brotherly eye, Vincent readily accepted Bernard’s blandishments and rewarded them with a storm of appreciation for
crépons
as passionate as the one he had shared with Anthon van Rappard for black-and-white prints.

Informed by Gonse’s guide and inflamed by a succession of celebratory exhibitions in Paris in the winter of 1887, Vincent descended on the premier retailer of Japanese art in the Western world, the emporium of Siegfried Bing. The store’s bronze doors, only a few blocks from Theo’s gallery, opened into a world of exotic artifacts and imagery, both Japanese and Chinese, in every medium and at every price: from authentic imperial pieces to reproductions crafted in Bing’s own workshops. A combination of Goupil-like ambition and a genuine zeal for Asian art had lofted Bing, a German native, to the zenith of the French decorative arts (a perch from which, a decade later, he would launch the Art Nouveau movement).

With the fervor of a prospector, Vincent sifted through the “heaps” of images stored in Bing’s cellar and attic—“ten thousand
crépons
,” he exulted—poring over landscapes and figures; dozens of Mount Fujis and hundreds of geishas; pagodas and flowers and samurai fighters. “You’re dazzled, there’s so much of it,” he confessed. He returned again and again, haggling with the manager over prices, offering to swap previous purchases, or even to exchange one of his own paintings for a bundle of the precious tissues. He used his connection to Goupil to persuade the store to give him prints on credit—a license that swelled the “stock” of
crépons
on the rue Lepic to more than a thousand and ran up a perilous
debt. He badgered Theo with elaborate plans for marketing the little prints and pleas to invest more in them. He battered other artists, especially Bernard and Anquetin, with exhortations to join him on his treasure hunts, or at least go and learn what wonders could be found in the dusty heaps.

It wasn’t long before the fever swept into his studio. In a winter when little else was accomplished there, he spent hour upon hour tracing the exotic new images and transferring them to canvas. It was a madly elaborate process—almost an act of self-mortification for the voluble, impatient Vincent. He had to draw a grid on paper; then trace the little scenes—every blossom, every branch; then draw another, larger grid on the canvas, sometimes twice the size of the original; then transfer the tracing, square by square, line by line, onto the canvas grid.

Once the transfer was complete, however, the ferocity of his zeal could express itself. Seizing Bernard’s notions of simplified forms and “plates” of color, he filled the penciled outlines with emerald greens, vivid oranges, and blazing yellows, creating black-bordered jigsaws of luminous color that doubled the originals in both size and intensity. A scene of pedestrians scurrying over a bridge on a gray rainy day was transformed into a bright yellow streak arching across a turquoise river, with a cobalt shore in the distance and a cerulean sky beyond. The gnarled limbs of a plum tree translated into a decorative calligraphy of dark veining set against a sunset reduced to a tricolor flag: green ground, yellow horizon, red sky.

Because his premade stretchers didn’t match the elongated proportions of the prints he used, the transfers left borders of canvas beyond the image. Into these slender voids, Vincent poured his newfound fervor for prismatic color and ornamental effect, as well as Blanc’s old gospel of complementaries. He painted frames within frames: red within orange, red within green within red again. Borrowing Japanese characters from other prints, he filled these frames with a decorative gibberish of signs, slashing green on orange or red on green, with unmixed paint directly from the tube.

These were rhetorical images: bold, demanding exhortations to the new art, not private meditations on favorite prints. The subjects he chose for this lavish aggrandizement—like the plum orchard and the rainy bridge from the series
One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
by Utagawa Hiroshige—were already-celebrated icons of
japonisme
, images as familiar to many Parisians as Millet’s
Sower
or Manet’s
Olympia
. He was advertising his allegiance to the new art in the only way he knew how: simultaneously shouting out the new ideas and celebrating his beloved
crépons
with an evangelical ardor; competing with Anquetin for the favor of his new
copain
Bernard; convincing his skeptical brother; and even, perhaps, currying a sale or exchange.

Tracing of the Cover of
Paris Illustré, J
ULY-DECEMBER
1887,
PENCIL AND INK ON TRACING PAPER, 15½ × 10⅜ IN.
, and
Courtesan: After Eisen
, O
CTOBER-NOVEMBER
1887,
OIL ON COTTON, 41⅜ ×
24
IN
. (
Illustration credit 29.4
)

In the last and largest of these polemics in color and form, Vincent looked beyond his collection of prints and chose as his subject the figure on the cover of
Paris Illustré
’s special
japonisme
issue: a sensuous courtesan beckoning all to enjoy the enchantments of her “primitive” island paradise. After transferring the figure to a larger canvas (almost four feet by two feet), he overlaid on this image of exotic allure a kaleidoscope of color. Ignoring the rich, subtle shadings of her dragon kimono, he robed her in jagged volutes of green and asterisks of red. He transformed the stiff folds of embroidered silk into a latticework of thick, crystalline color, much of it directly from the tube. He set the figure in a box of bright, gilded yellow and surrounded it with a broad border decorated with a different image entirely—a riverbank scene distilled to its barest essentials: green and yellow vertical stripes of bamboo, lavender and blue horizontal stripes of water, and, floating in between, pink balls of water lilies.

The so-called
japonaiserie
were not the only hortatory images that winter.
Vincent didn’t go to the studio often, but when he did, he went on fire. He returned to a portrait of Tanguy from earlier in the year and began a new version according to the new gospel, rendering the old paint dealer this time as a Buddha in a cobalt-blue coat, set against a studio wall chockablock with
crépons
, each one rendered in faithful, furious abstraction and incandescent color. He revisited another previous portrait, probably of Agostina Segatori, and repainted her in a dazzling Italian costume that, like the geisha’s kimono in
Courtesan: After Eisen
, gave free range to his fervor for simplicity, brilliant color, and decorative invention. He reduced everything—the design of her skirt, the folds in her blouse, the rejection on her face—to tesserae of pure pigment. In a thrill of ornamentation, he framed her on two sides with a border of tricolor stripes. He painted still lifes and self-portraits stripped down to no more than three or four colors and countable strokes of the brush.