Van Gogh (129 page)

Gauguin’s amorous successes dealt his host a special blow. They not only solidified Vincent’s place among the hapless rejects of the rue des Récollets, they exploded the myth of abstinent, monklike artists, resigned “to fuck only a
little,”
that he had devised to cover the shame of impotence. Here was an artist in whom the blessings of “blood and sex prevail[ed] over ambition” (or so Vincent thought); a man who did not need to preserve his sperm—indeed, spent it profligately—and still had plenty of “creative sap” left for his work. Already awestruck at Gauguin’s five children (and, according to rumor, twice as many bastards), Vincent marveled that Gauguin had “found the means of producing children and pictures at the same time.”

As if to press this crippling advantage, Gauguin immediately embarked on a reprise of his Martinique negresses—the touchstone of his artistic appeal and erotic authority for both Van Gogh brothers. On the Alyscamps, he painted three lovely Arlésiennes, in full local costume, posing indulgently on the bank of the canal that ran alongside the lane of graves. (Later, he turned to the Alyscamps’s dark side, with a menacing scene, half hidden behind a tree, of an older man accosting a young girl, to which he gave the leering title
Your Turn Will Come, Pretty One
.) Vincent, as usual, could find no one to pose for him and was forced to staff his Alyscamps paintings with figures based on old drawings and eavesdropping glances. He defended himself in the only way he could: with a brothel scene showing a man and two women playing cards (a ubiquitous form of fore-play in whorehouses) surrounded by groping couples and bored, dark-skinned beauties in candy-colored ball gowns.

Gauguin soon turned his predatory eye on a woman closer to home. Marie Ginoux, wife of the Café de la Gare’s owner Joseph Ginoux, had probably attracted Gauguin’s attention from the moment he arrived in Arles and waited at the café before calling on Vincent. A handsome, raven-haired woman of forty (exactly Gauguin’s age) with half-mast eyes and a “habitual smile,” according to one admirer, Marie had married a man more than a decade her senior, resigning herself to a childless marriage and round-the-clock service to the café’s family of regulars. Vincent, too, had been drawn to Marie’s Mediterranean warmth and faded beauty, so reminiscent of Agostina Segatori, the café proprietress he had tried to woo in Paris. Like Henry James, who wrote admiringly of one “splendid mature Arlésienne” whom he found “enthroned” behind the counter of a café (an “admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar”), Vincent saw in Marie’s oval face,
low brow, straight “Greek” nose, and long, elaborately coiffed hair the picture of Arlesian womanhood sung by poets from Ovid to Daudet—“intensely feminine” yet “wonderfully rich and robust and full of a certain physical nobleness.”

Yet in the months Vincent had known this paragon, he had not painted her. For all his admiration of the legendary Arlésiennes, he had managed to coax only one old woman to sit for his brush. In August, he paid a young girl in advance to pose for him in local costume, but she never showed up. Either Marie Ginoux had refused his entreaties, or, fearing she would, he never asked. Paul Gauguin had no such fears. Less than a week after setting foot in Arles, he arranged for Marie to come to the Yellow House and pose. “Gauguin has already found his Arlésienne,” Vincent wrote, astounded. “I wish I had got that far.”

P
AUL
G
AUGUIN
,
Madame Ginoux
(
Study for “Night Café”
), 1888,
CHARCOAL ON PAPER, 36⅛ × 28¾ IN
. (
Illustration credit 35.2
)

She arrived in the full iconography of her kind: a long black dress with the distinctive white muslin
fichu
(shawl), her hair in a bun under a coquettish cap with a black ribbon dangling to her shoulder. She glided to a chair, laid down her parasol and gloves, then sat facing Gauguin and his sketchpad. When Vincent eagerly took up a position nearby, she put her hand up to her face, blocking his view and focusing her gaze on the beguiling newcomer, whom she called “Monsieur Paul.” While Gauguin sketched languorously in charcoal, glancing from
his paper to engage his subject and capture her Mona Lisa smile, Vincent worked furiously in paint, slashing on a blue-black dress, scowling green face, and orange chair against a background of electric yellow in a race against the clock. Less than an hour later, Gauguin finished his drawing and Ginoux left. Fortunately, Vincent had finished his painting in time. To Theo, he gamely claimed a victory. “At last,” he wrote, “I have an Arlésienne.”

Over the next two weeks, a painting took form on Gauguin’s easel that added artistic insult to sexual one-upmanship. The visage of Madame Ginoux lingered in the shared studio as Gauguin slowly transferred his drawing to a large canvas. He gave her even softer features and a more beguiling, flirtatious smile. He transformed the wooden studio table on which she leaned into the milky marble of the Café de la Gare, and placed in front of her the tools of her trade: a serving of absinthe, a bottle of soda water, and two lumps of sugar.

Behind her, he painted an uncanny replica of the scene in Vincent’s
The Night Café
, seen from within—a low, patron’s perspective rather than Vincent’s high, all-seeing panorama. The green field of the billiard table fills the middle distance, stamping the floor with the same deep shade. Against the far wall—painted in the exact same fiery orange-red—a single oil lamp casts the same shadowless glare, and, under it, the same drunk slumps on a table, fast asleep. To fill out the crowd, Gauguin appropriated two of Vincent’s most cherished images, his portraits of Milliet and Roulin, and painted them into the scene as patrons: the Zouave at the table with the dozing drunk, the postman with a trio of glum prostitutes, holding forth under sickly streamers of cigarette smoke. Finally, he added a tiny cat under the billiard table, a symbol of female licentiousness that boasted of sexual conquest.

This ambiguous tribute to Vincent’s world—at once flattering and mocking—marked the first blow of an artistic siege: a battering of words and images and frustrated expectations that took Vincent completely by surprise. Despite months of beckoning advertisements like
La mousmé
and
Le Zouave
, Gauguin dismissed Vincent’s magical Midi as “petty and shabby.” He looked at the Crau and the Café de la Gare and saw not the bright hues and Zola life that Vincent saw, but only “scummy local color.” He called Arles “the filthiest spot in the South” and continued to hold out Pont-Aven as the true artist’s paradise. “He tells me about Brittany,” Vincent reported dolefully only days after his guest’s arrival, “[how] everything there is better, larger, more beautiful than here. It has a more solemn character, and especially purer in its tonality and more definite than the shriveled, scorched, trivial scenery of Provence.”

Vincent wanted to paint; Gauguin wanted to draw. Vincent wanted to rush into the countryside at the first opportunity; Gauguin demanded a “period of incubation”—a month at least—to wander about, sketching and “learning the essence” of the place. Vincent loved to paint
en plein air;
Gauguin preferred to
work indoors. He saw their expeditions outside as fact-finding missions, opportunities to gather sketches—“documents,” he called them—that he could synthesize into
tableaux
in the calm and reflection of the studio. Vincent championed spontaneity and serendipity (“those who wait for the calm or work quietly will miss their chance,” he cautioned); Gauguin constructed his images slowly and methodically, trying out forms and blocking in colors. Vincent flung himself at the canvas headlong with a loaded brush and fierce intent; Gauguin built up his surfaces in tranquil sessions of careful brushstrokes. In their first few weeks in the Yellow House, Gauguin completed only three or four canvases; Vincent blazed through a dozen.

Vincent had imagined that Gauguin would share his
Paradou
fecundity once he felt the regenerative power of the Provençal sun. But Gauguin had just the opposite reaction. A man of the city, he found that bucolic life made him “lazy” in his personal habits and even more laconic in his approach to art, which he famously summed up: “One dreams, then paints calmly.” His deliberativeness struck Vincent a mortifying blow. Since arriving in Arles, he had vehemently defended his speed and productivity (and copious consumption of paint) against Theo’s repeated urgings to slow down and take more care with each painting. Every time Gauguin picked up a brush and began one of his slow transits across the canvas with short, scratching strokes, Vincent heard his brother’s nagging complaints. Vincent reveled in the fury of work, bragging to Theo: “Our days are taken up with work and ever more work; in the evening we are shattered and go to the café, followed by an early night. Such is our existence.” Gauguin wrote his wife scornfully: “Vincent is working himself to death.”

Gauguin’s elaborate programs and methodical brushwork also challenged Vincent’s understanding of Cloisonnist theory. “Aren’t we seeking intensity of thought rather than tranquility of touch?” he had written Bernard that summer. Vincent struggled to reduce his images to the fewest possible elements, arranged in bold mosaics of color—a campaign shared in dozens of color-labeled letter sketches; Gauguin endlessly adjusted line and tone, dissolving every surface into carefully modulated planes of interwoven, overlapping hues. Vincent answered the call to “crudity” and “ugliness” he heard in Anquetin’s ideas and Bernard’s rhetoric—the evidence of his audacity hung everywhere on the walls of the Yellow House; Gauguin sat at his easel in the front room and fashioned deft, delicate images filled with feathery strokes and discretions of color. Vincent enshrined the law of simultaneous contrast, the gospel of Blanc and Delacroix, at the heart of his art; Gauguin ridiculed the catechism of complementary colors as simplistic and monotonous. And as for the yellow that flooded the paintings in his bedroom—Gauguin could barely hide his exasperated contempt: “Shit, shit, everything is yellow: I don’t know what painting is any longer!”

Vincent wanted them to grind their own colors; Gauguin hated Vincent’s
paints and arranged to have his sent from Paris. Vincent typically finished his painting with varnish (egg white or resin); Gauguin preferred the unvarnished matte surface of the Impressionists. Vincent painted on commercially prepared canvases; Gauguin wanted a rougher surface and bought a bolt of jute, with the coarseness of burlap, which he cut, stretched, and primed himself. Vincent lavished paint on his images, dispensing it with a broad brush heavily loaded and quickly replenished, plowing it into deep contours and
enlever
peaks; Gauguin arranged the pigments on his palette in stiff dollops of color that he doled out stingily in an unchanging register of short, parallel hatches. Vincent reworked his strokes, reshaping his impasto again and again before the paint began to set, and sometimes after, in a tempest of inspiration; Gauguin, who rarely repainted, deplored the disorder and indecision of Vincent’s method—a “mess” he called it. “He likes the accidents of thickly applied paint,” Gauguin alerted Bernard. “I detest the worked-over surface.”

Vincent championed Monticelli, another passionate sculptor of paint. When Vincent talked of Monticelli, Gauguin reported, “he wept.” But Gauguin despised the Marseille eccentric and his sloppy paintings, too. He praised instead a different maestro of the southern light, Paul Cézanne. Ever since his previous incarnation as stockbroker and collector, Gauguin had admired Cézanne’s serene, cerebral depictions of the countryside around Aix-en-Provence, not far from Arles. For him, Cézanne’s dry palette and measured brush perfectly captured the Midi’s distinctive play of color, dust, and glare. The previous summer, in his bid for Gauguin’s favor, Vincent had claimed a special kinship with his fellow painter of the South (“Look! I’ve got the very tones of old Cézanne!”), but even then he couldn’t help but criticize Cézanne’s lack of energy or ardor—the defining qualities he celebrated in the martyred Monticelli, and in himself.

Vincent proposed another hero for the Yellow House: Honoré Daumier, the “great genius” of caricature who translated into images the sublime ridiculousness of Daudet’s Tartarin and Voltaire’s Candide. On the eve of Gauguin’s arrival, Vincent had declared the Midi “superb, sublime country…[like] a Daumier come to life.” Testaments to his conviction hung on every wall: from Daumier prints, to landscapes peopled with cartoon figures, to writ-large portraits of the postman Roulin and the peasant Escalier. But Gauguin saw only meanness and squalor in the people of Arles. “It’s strange that Vincent feels the influence of Daumier here,” he wrote Bernard in November, just as he put the finishing touches on his lampoon of Vincent’s Daumier delusions in
The Night Café
.

Again, he countered with a different artist: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the creator of myth-like scenes filled with affectless figures in friezelike poses, painted with classical calculation in a cool, untraceable brush—the defining qualities Gauguin celebrated in his own work. In the streets he saw the future of art not in the caricatures of Daumier but in the goddesses of Puvis: “Women
here have a Greek beauty,” he wrote Bernard, admiring the elaborate coifs and costumes of the Arlésiennes. “The girl passing along the street is as virginal in appearance as Juno … So there is a fountain of beauty here,
modern style
. ”