Van Gogh (121 page)

He scolded Bernard’s self-dramatizing Symbolist poetry (questioning its
“moral purpose”) and privately mocked his drawings done in the Symbolist style (“à la Redon”), calling them “very strange.” When Bernard defended Symbolism by charting its half-century rise from the scandals of Charles Baudelaire, an early champion of both Delacroix and Wagner, to the heights of the Parisian avant-garde, Vincent took up the gauntlet. In sweeping, vehement terms, he derided the Symbolists’ images as “follies,” “stupidities,” and “sterile metaphysical meditations.” He chastised them especially for turning their backs on the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age who “painted things just as they are.” “Hammer into your head that master Frans Hals,” he instructed Bernard; “hammer into your head the no less great and universal master … Rembrandt van Rijn, that broad-minded naturalistic man.” The argument escalated to accusations of cultural plagiarism as Vincent dismissed two centuries of French art as nothing more than “Dutch paste solidly stuffed into vulgar French noodles.”

Nothing about the Symbolist tutelage from Pont-Aven incensed Vincent more than the call for religious imagery. Bernard had first reopened these wounds in April by sending some religious poetry for Vincent’s review. Fired by the Symbolist debates in Paris, newly befriended by Albert Aurier, a young Symbolist poet, and reawakened to his own Catholicism by a love affair in Brittany that spring, Bernard arrived in Pont-Aven with a portfolio of mystic religious imagery in one hand and a Bible in the other. Gauguin received the new ideas openly, and soon both artists were busily planning works to plumb the Good Book’s deep well of mystery and meaning.

After such a warm reception, Bernard must have been shocked by the storm of protest that greeted his ideas in Arles. “How small-minded the old story really is!” Vincent fired back immediately. “My God! Does the world consist solely of Jews?” With inexplicable fury, he railed against “that deeply saddening Bible, which arouses our despair and indignation, which seriously offends us and thoroughly confuses us with its pettiness and infectious foolishness.” Only the figure of Christ survived Vincent’s wrath—he called it the “kernel” of consolation “inside a hard rind and bitter pulp.” But he belittled Bernard’s ambition to capture Christ’s image as “artistic neurosis” and ridiculed his chances of succeeding. “Only Delacroix and Rembrandt have painted the face of Christ in such a way that I can feel him,” he scoffed. “The rest rather make me laugh.”

The rant spilled across letter after letter, to Paris as well as Pont-Aven. “Oh, my dear boy,” he wrote Theo, “I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting.” He pounded Bernard with the crimes of Christianity, especially the “barbarity” of Catholic conversions in the New World, and mocked its modern-day hypocrisies. His months in Catholic Provence, with its medieval festivals and mystical devotions, had already roused childhood feelings of Protestant isolation and antipapist iconoclasm. (He described the Gothic church in Arles, St. Trophime, as “cruel and monstrous” and, worse, “Roman.”) In July,
he undertook to reread the complete works of Balzac, as if to inoculate himself against the world of spirits and superstitions that surrounded him.

But the push from Pont-Aven was too strong, the obsession from the past too deep and unsettled, to resist for long. That same month, even as his letters filled up with bitter denunciations, Vincent tried his hand at the denounced imagery. He painted “a big study, an olive garden, with a figure of Christ in blue and orange, and an angel in yellow.” It was the image that had haunted him through a lifetime of failures and campaigns for forgiveness: Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Only now he saw it in the vivid color of the new art: “Red earth, hills green and blue, olive trees with violet and carmine trunks, green-gray and blue foliage, [and] a citron-yellow sky.” But the effort collapsed. In a fit of panic (he later called it “horror”) that foretold the catastrophes to come, he angrily took a knife and scraped the offending image off. He kept his failure secret from Bernard and Gauguin. To Theo, he blamed it on the lack of models. “I must not do figures of that importance without models,” he vowed. But surely he knew the block lay deeper.

The failed image triggered a fresh wave of resistance. He scolded his colleagues for resorting to the static, fabular world of the Bible, when the world of nature all around them—especially in Arles—offered so many subjects ripe with significance: sowers and sheaves, sunflowers and cypresses, suns and stars—all opportunities to “paint the infinite.” “It is actually one’s
duty
to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature,” he declared, taking aim at the Symbolists’ dry metaphysical exercises. “We are in need of gaiety and happiness, of hope and love.” And why confront the terrible, perfect countenance of Christ, he demanded, when sublimity could be found in faces and figures everywhere? “Do I make myself understood?” he wrote Bernard fiercely. “I am just trying to make you see this single great truth: one can paint all of humanity by the simple means of portraiture.”

In fact, the marginalization of Vincent’s favorite genre was already well under way. Impressionism’s glancing sight and playful light could never penetrate the inner life of a subject, only record the charming surface—while the new art, whether obsessed with science or essence, had little use for the random peculiarities of the human visage—as Vincent himself acknowledged.

To ensure a place for his beloved portraits (and models) in the art of the “next generation,” Vincent fervently argued on behalf of the mystery and sanctity—the symbolist essence—of portraiture. A great portrait was “a complete thing, a perfection,” he argued, “a moment of infinity.” When the “metaphysical magician” Rembrandt painted saints or angels or Christ himself, he painted real people, not abstractions or “fantasies.” For his own portraits, Vincent claimed the Symbolists’ ambition to “say something comforting as music is comforting,” and appropriated the religious mandate coming from Pont-Aven. “I want to
paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize,” he wrote. All summer long, as he prepared for the arrival of the Bel-Ami of the Midi (who “will do in portraiture what
Claude Monet does in landscape”
), Vincent shouted out his recusant conviction that portraits represented “the thing of the future”: “Ah! portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.”

At the beginning of August, soon after the success of Anquetin’s
The Peasant
triggered a rush to rustic imagery in both Pont-Aven and Arles, Vincent recruited an old gardener named Patience Escalier to model for him. He described Escalier as “a poor old peasant, whose features bear a very strong resemblance to Father, only coarser.” Vincent painted him hurriedly, placing his deeply creased, sun-brazed face against a cobalt background and dressing him in a bright turquoise blouse and yellow straw hat much like those Vincent himself wore on his painting trips into the countryside. To Theo and the comrades in Pont-Aven, he advertised Escalier as an icon out of Millet or Zola (“a man with a hoe, a former drover of the Camargue”), a primitive antidote to “highly civilized Parisian” ways, as well as a Daumier caricature, like the amiable giant Roulin. “I dare believe that Gauguin and you would understand,” he wrote Bernard. “You know what a peasant is, how strongly he reminds one of a wild beast, when you have found one of the true race.”

Vincent quickly fell out with his model over payment terms, but the old man’s image lingered in his eye throughout the arguments with Bernard over religious imagery. When he finally lured Escalier back into the studio at the end of the month, he posed the grizzled gardener leaning on a cane, his hands folded in an attitude of prayer. From under his wide-brimmed straw hat, his old eyes stare serenely into the distance with a sad, long-suffering, heaven-fixed gaze. Beyond his sloping blue shoulders, the world is filled with “flashing orange” representing the “furnace” of harvests past, Vincent said, as well as the “luminous gold” of the sunset to come, and the sunrise beyond.

Immediately after finishing his rustic saint, Vincent took up once again Bernard’s ultimate challenge to evoke the mystical sublime. The opportunity presented itself when Eugène Boch visited the Yellow House in late August. Vincent had met the thirty-three-year-old Belgian artist in June, when he became Dodge MacKnight’s studiomate in nearby Fontvieille. Vincent shared with the newcomer not only similar physiognomies (“a face like a razor blade, green eyes, and a touch of distinction”), but also similar bourgeois backgrounds with siblings involved in the art trade (Boch’s sister Anna was both a collector of avant-garde art and an artist herself).

But Vincent lumped Boch together with the “slacker” MacKnight, and Boch shared MacKnight’s dislike of Vincent’s art and his distaste for Vincent’s “moody and quarrelsome” nature. The two barely saw each other until MacKnight left
Arles at the end of August. In a single whirlwind week of camaraderie—a rehearsal for Gauguin’s imminent arrival—they took walks in the country, saw a bullfight in the arena, and talked late into the night about art. When Vincent learned that Boch intended to go to the coal region of his native Belgium and paint the miners of the Borinage, he swooned with solidarity, urging Boch to designate his new studio among the coal mines as a Yellow House of the North where he, Gauguin, and Boch could “change places” from time to time.

To memorialize this brief manna of friendship, Vincent persuaded Boch to sit for a portrait. Despite their previous antagonism, Vincent had been laying elaborate plans for this portrait for some time. “I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend,” he had written Theo after an encounter with Boch in early August, “a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature.” Despite Boch’s dark hair, Vincent imagined painting him as “a blond man [with] orange tones, chromes and pale-yellow” highlights in his hair:

When Boch finally sat for him, Vincent faithfully rendered his subject’s razor visage and dark hair (with blond highlights only in his mustache and beard). But he dressed him in a yellow-orange coat and stood him against a background of the deepest blue he could devise—just as he had imagined it. He crowned Boch’s head with a thin corona of citron yellow—exactly the color of the “nimbus” around the Savior’s head in Delacroix’s
Christ on the Sea of Galilee
—and flecked the dark void with stars shining yellow and orange from worlds beyond.

It was exactly the scheme he had tried and destroyed in his
Garden of Gethsemane:
“a figure of Christ in blue and orange.”

Images like these, Vincent argued, expressed their transcendent truths not in the biblical finery that Bernard urged, but in a new and different garb: color. Whether through “the mingling of opposites” or “the vibrations of kindred tones,” Vincent claimed he could address the deepest mysteries of life—the Symbolists’ grail—without resorting to the follies of religion. He could speak directly to the heart “through the language of color alone.” Thus, the sunset colors on Escalier’s face expressed “the eagerness of a soul,” while the light tone of Boch’s figure against the night sky expressed “the thought of a brow” and “hope upon a star.”

The right color combinations, he insisted, could arouse the full range of
human emotions: from the “anguish” of broken tones to the
“absolute restfulness”
of balanced ones; from the “passion” of red and green to the “gentle consolation” of lilac and yellow. In describing his colors, especially to Bernard, Vincent adopted the Symbolists’ vocabulary (repeatedly invoking “the eternal,” “the mysterious,” “infinity,” and “dreams”), but defiantly declared himself a “rational colorist” and boasted of the complicated calculations that guided his palette—Seurat-like terms anathema to the Symbolists’ manifesto of sensation. And he rejected outright Cloisonnism’s relegation of color to a mere element of design—a decorative deduction—rather than the “forceful expression” of “an ardent temperament.”

That temperament expressed itself nowhere more forcefully, or defiantly, than in brushwork. In Pont-Aven, Vincent’s comrades had been developing a paint surface that barely betrayed a brush at all. Following Anquetin’s lead, they had pursued the Cloisonnist rhetoric about “plates” of color and the paradigm of stained glass to their logical conclusion. Where Cézanne had used brushy, thinly painted planes and brickworklike strokes to construct his faceted scenes, Gauguin and Bernard divided their images into areas of pure color and then filled each area with thinned paint applied in smooth, impassive strokes. Vincent surely knew of these innovations through his correspondence with both artists, and even occasionally tried them himself when the urge to solidarity overtook him.

But inevitably his manic brush rebelled. His letter sketches to Pont-Aven continued to show only the coloring-book dogma of blocks of pure color, each with its label of
“rouge”
or
“bleu.”
But in his studio, unseen by his colleagues, his draftsman’s hand tirelessly filled those blocks with flights of brushwork in a pattern book of textures and complex topographies of
enlever
paint. Sometimes he followed the contours of his subjects with undulating trenches of color, faithfully tracing the spiky needles of a pine tree or the snaking branches of a vineyard. Other times, in the background or on the plates mandated by the new gospel, his brush would break into slathering riffs of strokes, turning a cloudless sky into a churning sea or a plowed field into a scumbled battleground. In one particularly intense eruption of impasto—Vincent himself called such episodes “violent”—he loaded his brush with paint and transformed a picturesque streamside mill into a castle of pigment, shattering every plane—walls, roof, sky, and stream—into defiantly visible paint strokes, each one a silent protest, a shake of his fist, against the orthodoxy issuing from Pont-Aven.