Van Gogh (122 page)

By the end of September, with Gauguin’s arrival only weeks away, Vincent’s balks, debates, and rebuffs had combined into a full-throated rebellion against his fellow triumvirs of the new art. “How preposterous it is,” he wrote sister Wil seditiously, “to make oneself dependent on the opinion of others in what one does.” In opposition to the decorative, cerebral imagery advocated in Brittany,
he had put forward the elements of a very different art: an art of portraits, not parables; figures, not fantasies; peasants, not saints; an art of impact, not enigma; of paint, not glass. But most of all, an art of feeling—“heartbroken, and therefore heartbreaking.” Color, with its magic, musiclike power to arouse emotions, played a central role. “I use color … to express myself forcibly,” he wrote. “That’s it as far as theory goes.” If color was his music, the brush was his instrument. Strokes could be “interwoven with feeling,” Vincent maintained, to elicit a range of emotions: from the
“pain”
of impasto, to the exhilaration of stippling; from the serenity of smooth paint (“like porcelain”), to the sublimity of radiating strokes.

He accepted Cloisonnism’s injunction to simplify, simplify, simplify—but not just for simplicity’s decorative sake. Simplification and exaggeration, like color and brushwork, had to serve some deeper emotional truth. In describing how he painted the square in front of the Yellow House—a patch of ill-tended public real estate—Vincent sheepishly admitted to “leaving out some trees” and “some shrubs that are not in character.… To get at that character,” he said,
“the fundamental truth of it.”

This was not “imagining,” he hastened to add, rejecting the Symbolist term as Bernard and Gauguin used it. He imagined nothing, he insisted; only
looked
and
felt
. He neither ignored nature, nor slavishly followed it; he “consumed” it. “I do not invent the picture,” he corrected Bernard; “on the contrary, I find it already there in nature; I just have to free it.” When Rembrandt painted angels, Vincent explained, “[he] did not invent anything … he knew them; he
felt
them there.” So, too, when Vincent looked at the trafficked square, he squinted his eyes and saw not the trompe l’oeil reality of overgrown pathways in un-Dutch neglect, but the riotously blooming oleander bushes—“loaded with fresh flowers, and quantities of faded blooms as well, their green continually renewing itself in fresh, strong shoots, apparently inexhaustibly”—an image of angelic consolation that bore no more relationship to reality, he argued, than reality bore to a colorless photograph.

This was the only theory that Vincent’s refractory art could bear—the inevitable expression of a synthetic intelligence bound forever to a lunging heart. “When I am moved by something,” he said, “these are the only things that appear to have any deep meaning.” And painting those things “absorbs me so much,” he confessed, “that I let myself go, never thinking of a single rule.” Obsessively introspective and often alone, Vincent thought deeply about questions that preoccupied the writers, artists, and philosophers he read; but his personal theories on art, as on everything else, were neither coherent nor consistent. He never could command consistency from himself (not even within the same letter, much less between correspondents), nor could he keep his ideas isolated from the swirling currents of his emotions. Even within a single painting, his
palette and brush often skidded from theory to theory, from model to model, in pursuit of the emotion that seized him—the only dogma that mattered. “What do these differences matter,” he wrote Bernard, declaring his independence by defending his deviations, “when the great thing after all is to express oneself strongly?”

Vincent’s rebellious art opened the door to a century of “expressive” imagery and, as he foresaw, “even more personal and more original” visions. But, like all Vincent’s great zeals, this one redeemed the past by championing the future. “What I learned in Paris is
leaving me
,” he wrote Theo at the height of his summer insurrection in 1888. “I am returning to the ideas I had in the country before I knew the impressionists.” His dissenting argument for exaggerated, “suggestive” color skipped the Impressionists altogether and invoked Charles Blanc’s older gospel of simultaneous contrast; and, of course, its messiah, Delacroix. “My way of working … has been fertilized by Delacroix’s ideas rather than by theirs,” Vincent insisted. It was Delacroix, the hero of the Kerkstraat studio—not Monet or Seurat or Cézanne or Anquetin—who “spoke a symbolic language through color alone,” he said, and through that language, expressed “something passionate and eternal.” It was Delacroix, the artist-explorer of Africa, who had shown him the way South to the land of exaggerated color, and blazed the path to the Yellow House.

He gave no credit to the Symbolists, either. Years before hearing Wagner’s music or Bernard’s instruction, he reminded Theo, he had studied the relationship between color and music by taking piano lessons in Nuenen. And from the moors of Brabant he had written about how the great Barbizon painter Jules Dupré expressed an “enormous variety of moods” using “symphonies of color.” He had sought his inspiration from within—through “instinct, inspiration, impulse, and conscience”—and rallied to Delacroix’s cry
“Par coeur! Par coeur!”
long before Huysmans’s
À rebours
roused avant-garde Paris.

Since his return to Nuenen from the Rijksmuseum in October 1885, his brush had been guided by the miracle of
enlever
paint and the mandate to work
“in one rush,”
as Rembrandt did, to achieve an image of “noble sentiment, infinitely deep.” Liberated by the sight of Rembrandts and Halses that “did not have to be
literally
true,” Vincent had already claimed his right “to idealize, to be a poet,” and to let his colors “speak for themselves.” In the Kerkstraat studio and in the tumbledown hut of the De Groot clan, he had already put that right to the test. The portraits he slashed out there—with loaded brush, in the dim light, in a single sitting—had pointed the way. Three years before Anquetin’s
The Peasant
, Vincent had seized the example of Millet (in whose works “all reality is also at the same time symbolic,” he said) and found the perfect imagery to express his subjects’ stoic despair—and his own—in color and texture. By depicting his primitive family “as if painted in the soil that they sowed,” and doing so “with
a
will
, with
feeling
, with
passion
, with
love
,” he had already achieved the “truer truth” that his comrades in Pont-Aven only now aspired to.

In short, the world had come round to his lowly peasants. He called his portrait of Patience Escalier “an absolute continuation of certain studies of heads I did in Holland.” The old gardener’s radiant countenance marked the De Groots’ passage—and Vincent’s—out from the shadows of the heath and into the brilliant sun of the Midi. The years in Paris had merely brought to flower the seed of revolutionary art planted earlier in the dark loam of rhetoric that defended
The Potato Eaters
. His claims for the new art bristled with vindication of the old. If he had “kept the faith” of Nuenen, he told Theo, bitterly rebutting the judgments of the past, “I’d be a notable madman. Now I am just an insignificant one.”

As in Nuenen, Vincent found an image that both expressed and inspired his resurgent contrarian vision. Like all of his self-justifications in paint, it sprang not from his imagination, but from his life. Every night that summer, when the Yellow House went dark, Vincent returned to the all-night Café de la Gare only a short block away. He ate a late supper in the bare barroom downstairs with its billiard table, hanging gas lamps, and looming clock. He occasionally shared a meal or an absinthe with Roulin at one of the marble-topped tables, but mostly sat by himself or drank standing up at the bar in back. Eventually, he climbed the narrow stairs to his small room and fell asleep over the never-sleeping scene below.

As one of the few establishments in Arles open after midnight—other than the brothels—the café attracted a rogues’ gallery of drifters, hooligans, refugees, and homeless. Vincent called them
“rôdeurs de nuit”
(night prowlers)—those who “have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in,” he catalogued. Cranks talking politics, crazies babbling to themselves, whorehouse patrons dragging their whores, rejected suitors nursing their wounds—all ended up in the mercurochrome light of the Café de la Gare. “They flop down at a table and spend the whole night thus,” he told Bernard, describing his home-away-from-home as “a free-love hotel.”

Vincent began his dissonant painting in a dissonant mood. He had fought his landlord, Joseph Ginoux, to a bargain: if Ginoux would forgive his tardiness in paying his rent, Vincent would paint a portrait of Ginoux’s “dreary” establishment. “To revenge myself for paying him so much money for nothing,” he reported to Theo, “I offered to paint the whole of his rotten joint.” More bemused than persuaded, Ginoux agreed to the proposition and Vincent began immediately. He waited until after the clock downstairs chimed midnight, then set his easel and a huge canvas in the front corner of the barroom, next to the door, to get the best view of the nightly procession.

Most of his fellow patrons fled his brush, abandoning the scene, leaving coffee cups and drink glasses half full at their places and chairs pushed back in disarray.
The few that remained, seated in the distant corners of the room, slumped and turned their faces away—accustomed, no doubt, to ignoring the unseemly goings-on in the café’s nocturnal demimonde, or to being ignored. Only the proprietor Ginoux stood his ground. Unashamed, immune to any abuse, inured to any scandal, he stationed himself proudly beside the billiard table in white coat and apron, looking straight at Vincent, taking the full heat of the gaslight glare.

For three nights in a row, after sleeping through the day, Vincent returned to the perdition beneath his bed to capture in color and paint the feeling of isolation and marginalization he found there. Whatever colors Ginoux had chosen for the interior of his bar, Vincent saw only the pain of red and green. From the “blood-red” walls to the jade ceiling, from the malachite billiard table to its orange-red shadow, from the “soft tender Louis XV green” of the bar counter to the “delicate pink nosegay” of flowers that sat incongruously on it, every corner of the room was refracted through the lens of Vincent’s tartan vision of inner torment. Green scuffs the floorboards while red leaches up through the cracks; turquoise infiltrates the marble tabletops and the porcelain stove while a single red ball sits on the green felt playing field. Glasses glint in pink next to absinthe-green bottles labeled in red. A woman at the back wears a green skirt and pink shawl. A shy tramp slumps away, but shines in emerald.

Over this battleground of “clashes and contrasts,” Vincent cast a merciless yellow glow. Four hanging lanterns, radiating strokes of yellow, orange, and green, beat down like four suns on the denizens of this unnatural world, exposing them like a searchlight, casting only the single shadow of the billiard table in the middle of the room.

As in Nuenen, Vincent claimed the highest purpose for his lowly subjects huddled around a table by lamplight. “The café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime,” he explained to Theo, invoking both a Zola novel and a Tolstoy play. In describing
The Night Cafe’s
exaggerations of color and form, he used the same defiant language he had used for his previous cry of dissent from the wilderness. “This picture is one of the ugliest I have done,” he wrote, as proudly unapologetic as the proprietor Ginoux. “It is the equivalent, though different, of the ‘Potato Eaters.’ ” (To prove his pride, he sent Theo a watercolor of the image the next day.)

In a perfunctory bow to Pont-Aven, he affirmed the painting’s “Japanese gaiety” and attributed to it the “good nature” of Daudet’s Tartarin. But he also claimed for his insistently secular subject a mystery and “deep meaning” equivalent to any of Bernard’s biblical fictions. “I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity,” he wrote, elevating his dingy café to the rank of Millet’s
Sower
.

But the real subject, as always, was Vincent himself; the real passions, his
own. Unlike Zola or Daudet, Vincent could not report or imagine other lives, feel other pain or other mirth. Whether painting shoes or nests, beached boats, roadside thistles, or families at table, all his windows looked inward. “I always feel I am a traveler,” he had written Theo in August when he first planned a painting of the Café de la Gare, “going somewhere and to some destination.” Driven by the same fear, rootlessness, and disenfranchisement as his fellow
rôdeurs de nuit
, he had taken temporary refuge in the strange, inverted daylight of Ginoux’s midnight café, just as he sought comfort in the midday darkness of the De Groots’ hovel. On behalf of all his fellow outcasts, Vincent wondered hopefully if “those things that we pretty well do without—like native land and family—are perhaps more attractive in the imaginations of people such as us than they are in reality.”

Unlike the others, however, Vincent had someplace to go. Every night, he could climb the stairs to his room, lie in bed, smoke his pipe, and dream of the visitor yet to come and the paintings yet to be painted.