Van Gogh (79 page)

Vincent had written, too; but since the brothers’ fierce argument that spring, his correspondence had dried to a grudging trickle. Once or twice a month, a curt letter arrived in Theo’s mailbox, suspiciously devoid of personal news and often missing the customary affectionate closing,
“met een handdruk”
(with a handshake). Even in this wary summer lull, however, the brothers continued to wage the battle over Vincent’s art that had begun in March. They argued about technique, with Vincent defending his drawings (and himself) from Theo’s charges of crudeness by invoking the “stately simplicity” of Golden Age masters like Ruisdael as well as recent favorites like Jozef Israëls and Charles de Groux. When Theo pointed out that Vincent had not yet submitted a watercolor to the Society of Draftsmen in The Hague (as he had promised to do after his trip to Drenthe), Vincent launched into a guilty fit of rebuttal. “I quite forgot it … I am not very keen on it … I have not one watercolor on hand…[It is] already
too late for this year … I am in no mood for it.” Instead, he announced yet more paintings and drawings of weavers directly defying Theo’s disapproval. But mostly, they argued about color.

Vincent had long felt insecure about using color. The debacle with Mauve, the expense of paint, the intractability of watercolor, and his huge psychic investment in black-and-white imagery had combined to delay any real progress in color for almost two years. “I have sometimes wondered why I was not more of a colorist,” he mused in August 1883. “My temperament decidedly seems to indicate it—but up till now it has developed very little.” Except for a few glorious experiments in the late summer of 1882, he had little to show for all his chronically unpaid bills for tubes of color.

Even when he tried, as in Drenthe, he could not leave the
grisaille
world of the Schenkweg studio behind. Just as he “painted” with charcoal and pencil—relentlessly hatching, shading, and smudging to imitate the vibrancy of color—he subdued his palette to a rainbow of grays, rarely using hue to do more than distinguish one object from another. He invented elaborate justifications for this reticence, arguing that he had to keep his colors in “a lower key”—“below the intensity of nature”—in order to preserve the “delicate gray harmonious color” of the whole. In his vast gallery, he found many champions (from the ubiquitous favorite Georges Michel to the elusive Max Liebermann); and, as always, he framed his muted images in a kaleidoscope of color-filled descriptions.

For all these reasons, Theo’s criticism of the Drenthe watercolors in March (“not any good”) had struck Vincent a wounding blow. When his brother visited Nuenen in May and repeated the criticism standing in the Kerkstraat studio, Vincent’s response was immediate and galvanic. “As to drab color,” he declared as soon as Theo left in a letter filled with underlining, “one must not judge the colors of a painting separately.… Colors can be very
luminous in a picture
that, when considered
separately
, are in fact of
a rather dark, grayish tone
.” It was the opening salvo in a debate that would propel his art on a defiant, yearlong descent into darkness.

Throughout the summer, in a series of unusually monothematic letters, Vincent channeled all his anger over past slights and all his fears about coming revelations into this single argument. He copied out pages of his recent reading from Charles Blanc’s
Les artistes de mon temps
(
The Artists of My Time
), summoning no less an authority than the titan Delacroix in his defense of “gray and dirty tones.” When Theo recommended the French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose luminous, pastel vision of Arcadia,
The Sacred Wood
, had captivated the 1884 Salon, Vincent shot back with the wisdom of Jozef Israëls (“start with a deep color scheme, thus making even relatively dark colors seem light”) and a storm of contrary models: from the chiaroscuro of Velázquez (whose “shadows and half-tones consist mostly of
colorless, cool grays”
) to the cloudy skies of the Barbizon.

Nothing could have been further from Vincent’s turgid, tenebrous views of life on the heath than Puvis’s idealized depictions of the
“doux pays”
(pleasant land), with their classical figures and chalky, serene color. No doubt sensing this, Vincent roundly rejected Theo’s advocacy of Puvis’s “silvery tones” and passionately defended his two favorite oil colors, “bistre and bitumen”—both browns—lodging the same complaints of neglect and pleas for patience on their behalf that he had made so often on his own:

When Theo tried to reopen consideration of the Impressionists, Vincent recoiled even more sharply. Claiming both ignorance (“I have seen absolutely
nothing
of them”) and indifference (“I am little curious about or desirous for other or newer things”), he dismissed Impressionism as nothing more than the elevation of charm over substance. “I do not disdain [it],” he said disdainfully, “but it does not add
very
much to the beauty of what is true.”

When Theo continued to press Impressionist arguments about avoiding black and capturing the effects of sunlight, Vincent’s opposition only hardened. He challenged the manliness of the Impressionists and invoked everything from the “unutterably beautiful” laws of color to the “infinitely deep” music of Beethoven in defense of his “dingy” art. Far from avoiding black, he announced yet another search, in paint this time, for an even blacker black—“stronger effects [and] deeper tones than pure black itself.” And he airily rejected as “impossible or ugly” any attempt to capture sunlight in paint. Only four years before setting his easel under the brilliant sun of Provence, he condemned all such “summer sun effects” and reaffirmed his devotion to shadows, silhouettes, and twilight.

AS IF IN TANDEM
, Vincent’s life followed his art into the darkness. The dramatic events of September swept aside the summer debate over color (it would return with a fury the following year) as Vincent once again provoked the world into near-universal condemnation. No one, not even his amorous brother, accepted Vincent’s elaborate Mouret justifications for leading Margot Begemann astray (“I would sooner perish of passion than die of boredom”). As word of the
kindhearted spinster’s fate at the hands of the pastor’s degenerate son leaked into the community, Vincent withdrew into surly isolation.

His letters to Theo sank into a slough of despondence (“I know well enough that the future will always remain very difficult for me”) punctuated by fierce eruptions of vitriol, often in long postscripts, as guilt condensed into anger. “I cannot swallow everything,” he wrote. “[It is] really too outrageous … Things can’t go on like this.” He cast Theo in the most damning role he could imagine—an enemy of the Revolution—and spun an elaborate conceit about two brothers fighting each other, perhaps killing each other, atop the barricades of the most heroic of all struggles. The stirring imagery briefly revived the dream of Drenthe (“try to know for yourself where you
really
belong”), but his thoughts always returned to the present—the “infinitely
meaningless
, discouraging, hopeless” present. His plans for the future, too, ricocheted between defiant threats to return to The Hague and despairing nostalgia for the black country.

Rappard’s visit the next month plunged Vincent into a different hell. He had always felt intensely competitive with his aristocratic friend, repeatedly insisting that “we are just about on the same level” and vowing to “keep up with him.” But two weeks of working together had exposed all that as delusion. In fact, a huge gap had opened between them. Rappard’s silver medal, his exhibitions, his social life, his suave friends and supportive family, all had conspired to shut Vincent out. The pain of that exclusion had suffused all the bickering over technique that filled their correspondence the previous spring. In October, the sight of his friend producing “beautiful” painted studies, one after another, all “damned well done,” sent Vincent into a paroxysm of competitiveness, part despair and part determination. “One comes to a dead end,” he declared, “and must renew oneself.” He wrote Theo letters filled with hyperventilating defenses of the past and breathless, almost babbling, impatience for the future: “I
must
strike while the iron is
hot…
not lose a moment … work must be done at
full
speed … I must show
very
shortly that I have again accomplished something.”

In a frenzy of ambition, he pledged himself anew to the conventional goals that had always eluded him. “I warrant you,” he wrote immediately after Rappard’s departure, “something will happen before long—either I shall exhibit or I shall sell.” With Rappard as his inspiration, he took his easel and paint box into the cold November countryside and painted a series of pleasant, conventional landscapes: a poplar lane in golden autumn hues, a country road, multiple views of the local mills.

To show his new resolve, he bought new clothes (“I am more particular about my clothes than before,” he assured Theo), and offered “facts and figures” to prove that he would soon start earning a 20 percent return on Theo’s money (“taking a sound view of business matters”). No doubt recognizing that he could never catch up to Rappard without Theo’s help, he sued for peace, or at least a
pause, in the brothers’ escalating feud. “We must make progress,” he wrote, reviving the fraternal “we” of fonder days. “We must get a move on.… Side with me—not in a neutral way, but in an energetic, positive way.… Dear brother and friend,
stir up the fire.”

As in Drenthe, Vincent filled the void between longing and dread with delusion. Without telling Theo, he wrote forceful letters to both Mauve and Tersteeg summoning their cooperation in his desperate new initiative. “Give me another opportunity to paint some studies in [your] studio,” he demanded of Mauve. In exchange for owning up to past errors, Vincent imagined, Tersteeg would “renew old relations,” and Mauve would give him “hints for correcting and improving my work.” He envisioned himself again as a successful young artist, like Anthon van Rappard, apprenticed to a solid, serious painter and reconnected to the art world of the formidable
gérant
. “I am just taking steps to promote the direct progress of my work,” he explained to Theo, who must have been both dumbfounded and appalled by his brother’s overtures. “I will harp on it till Mauve gives in.”

Even a quick, stinging rebuff from The Hague (“they have refused to have anything to do with me,” he reported) could not shake Vincent’s fantasy of vindication and advancement. “I am almost glad that Mauve and Tersteeg have refused me,” he wrote. “I feel within me the power to win them over
in the end.”
In fact, he had just begun work on a series of images that he
knew
would make them see the error of their ways, he told Theo. “I see a chance of giving them convincing proof.”

By early December, his studio was already filling up with the new imagery. From every wall, portrait heads peered out of the darkness. Whether on his easel or in his piles of sketches, visitors saw nothing but the solemn visages of Nuenen’s anonymous underclass—peasants and poldermen, weavers and their womenfolk—captured in endless variations of bistre and bitumen. This was Vincent’s grand new plan for commercial success, for winning over Mauve and Tersteeg, for ending his dependence on Theo, and for reclaiming his place beside Rappard. In fact, the series was inspired by his nobleman friend, who had spent much of his visit in October painting portrait heads—mostly women—that Vincent had enviously admired. “His visit has given me new ideas for my own work,” he wrote Theo immediately after Rappard left. “I can hardly put off starting work on them.”

Even the name that Vincent chose for these new images—“heads of the people”—betrayed his new commercial and competitive fever. Just as
The Graphic’s
famous series of illustrations had showcased the invisible “real people” of the working class, his series of peasant types would introduce the world to “the old Brabant race.” At the same time, he claimed for his new works the commercial cachet of portraits. (In his fervor, he cast aside the doubts about his ability to
render “likenesses” that had long paralyzed his attempts at portraiture.) Surely even Mauve and Tersteeg would see the sales potential of “heads with character,” he insisted. “Portraits are more and more in demand, and there are not so very many who can do them.”

Gripped by this chimera of success, Vincent launched yet another manic campaign of work. His initial plan was to paint thirty heads by the end of January 1885—ten a month—and then take them on the long-delayed sales trip to Antwerp. But within a few weeks, he had raised his goal to fifty heads—almost one a day—“as soon as possible, and one after the other.” Why? “Because right now I am hitting my stride,” he explained to Theo. “I cannot spare a day.” Convinced, as always, that Herculean labor could compensate for meager results, he hedged furiously against yet another failure. Models arrived almost every morning at the Kerkstraat studio: men and women, old and young, anyone he could pay or persuade to undergo the ordeal of his attention. He seemed to pick them for their “ugliness,” one of his students remarked: flat faces, low foreheads, thick lips, weak chins, dented or turned-up noses, protruding cheekbones, big ears. He posed them in the gray winter light of his studio: men in hats, visored work caps, or fashionable Zeeland bowlers; women in elaborate Brabant bonnets, morning caps, day caps, night caps, even bareheaded. As each one sat down, he pulled his chair up very close and peered through his perspective frame.

Then he painted. Racing the early dusk, he laid his brush directly on the blank one-and-a-half-by-one-foot canvases. There was no time for drawing or blocking in the shapes. He relied entirely on his squinting eye and any sketches he might have made the night before in the gaslight. True to his arguments with Theo, he brushed on the darkest colors first—the almost-black folds of jackets and smocks and shawls, the bitumen background, the bistre faces. He couldn’t wait for the paint to dry, so he added lighter colors wet-in-wet, eagerly soiling whites and ochers into grays and browns. With every errant stroke, he risked mud, as dabs of color disappeared quickly in the darkness that preceded them.