Van Gogh (93 page)

But Theo had other ideas.

IN JANUARY 1886
, Theo told Vincent he had to leave Antwerp.

The brothers had been heading toward a showdown from the moment Vincent arrived. His insatiable demands for more models and more money had thrown them into yet another pitched battle almost immediately. His relentless sexual innuendoes and unblushing accounts of model hunting among the city’s brothels had set off alarm bells from the past. At every hint of concern or displeasure, of course, Vincent flew into rages of protest, accusing his brother of neglecting him, stifling his art, hampering his career, and sabotaging his efforts to “regain some credit.” In some of the most strident language he had used in years, he warned Theo against interfering with his newest obsession. “À
tout prix
[at all costs],” he wrote menacingly, “I want to be myself. I am feeling obstinate, too, and no longer care what people say about me or about my work.”

The dispute had come to a head right after New Year’s when Theo threatened to withdraw his support if Vincent did not abandon his absurd and appalling plan to pay prostitutes to pose. The plan not only made no business sense (by giving the portraits to the sitters, Vincent was essentially paying them twice), but also raised the ghost of Sien Hoornik and the possibility of yet another scandal. “We cannot do it,” Theo wrote in early January. “We have no money—there is nothing doing. I tell you ‘No.’ ” But Vincent was undeterred. Exploding in indignation, he called Theo an “impotent dullard and blockhead,” and in a moment of surreal defiance, forbade him from vetoing the plan.

Vincent’s health was the last straw. More than the furious accusations of meddling or the bitter Christmas denunciations, his vague reports of sickness and boasts of starvation sounded an ominous note. When he wrote that he would use any extra money not to buy food but to “immediately go on a hunt for models and continue until all the money was gone,” Theo had no choice but to intervene. No doubt foreseeing another self-destructive spiral of excess, he called for Vincent to leave the city for his health’s sake. “If you fell ill,” he wrote, “we should be worse off.” Convinced of the reparative powers of nature and unaware of the full scope of his brother’s expulsion from Nuenen, he insisted that Vincent return to the country.

The demand triggered a fierce storm of protest. Up until then, Vincent had maintained that his stay in Antwerp would be a short one—“a couple of months,” at most. Theo’s directive changed all that. “I do not think you can reasonably expect me to go back to the country,” he fired back immediately, “seeing
that the whole series of future years will depend so much on the relations I must establish [in Antwerp].” Frantic to preserve the life of portraits, models, and prostitutes that he still envisioned, he accused Theo of “slackening” and “losing courage,” and cast his staying in Antwerp as both a financial and an artistic imperative. “It would be by far the best thing for me to stay here
for a long time,”
he now insisted, “for the models are good.… Going back to the country now would end in stagnation.”

Desperate straits called for desperate measures. In mid-January, Vincent did something he had vowed he would never do again: he enrolled in art school. Not just any art school, but the ancient and prestigious Royal Academy of Art, Antwerp’s answer to Paris’s legendary École des Beaux-Arts. As recently as November 1885, only days before arriving in Antwerp, Vincent had dismissed the idea of Academic training: “They would not want me at the academy,” he said, “nor would I want to go there.” After his humiliation at the Brussels Academy in 1881 and years of bitter arguments with Rappard over Academic technique, his attacks on schools like Antwerp’s Royal Academy had only grown more heated. He vehemently condemned their students as
“plaster-of-Paris artists”
and ridiculed their teaching as “superfluous” to modern art. “No matter how academically correct a figure may be,” he wrote only six months before enrolling at the Antwerp Academy, “it lacks that essential modern aspect, the intimate character, the real action.”

But that gospel had been overwritten by a new one. The student of the heath had become the student of female flesh; the disciple of Millet, the disciple of Rubens. Vincent would do anything to protect his mission among the prostitutes of Antwerp. Besides, he might learn something about painting accurate, appealing “likenesses” that would make his search for models easier. To explain this sudden volte-face, he filled his letters to Theo with passionate, pleading, and sometimes conflicting arguments, all of them adding up to a single, simple plea: “Let me stay.”

Enrolling in the Academy would open up a world of “new friends and new relations,” he wrote, promising an end to years of artistic solitude. “It is a good thing to see many others paint … One must live in the artists’ world.” Rejoining that world would require him to dress better, he assured his brother, and would revive his “high spirits.” Living in the city would allow him to put both the melancholy of Christmas and the obsessions of the heath behind him, he argued, and living as a student would mean savings on rent (he would drop his demand for a larger studio), on painting materials, and, especially, on models. “I hope that I shall be allowed to paint from the model all day at the academy, which will make things easier for me, as the models are so awfully expensive that my purse cannot stand the strain.” With his “self-confidence and serenity”
restored, could success be far behind? “I could not take a shorter cut to make progress,” he assured Theo yet again. “This is the way.”

In his fever of persuasion, Vincent led his brother to believe that the Academy offered the ultimate prize, nude female models, and hinted that he might abandon his expensive, unhealthy, and unwise search among the brothels of Antwerp if only Theo relented. (In fact, only men posed nude at the Academy, as Vincent surely knew, and beginning students were not permitted to work from models at all.)

On January 18, 1
886
, Vincent began classes in the Academy’s distinctive building on the Mutsaertstraat—a Palladian façade affixed to a medieval friars’ church. He told Theo he had enrolled in two courses: an afternoon painting class with Charles (Karel) Verlat, the school’s director, and an evening drawing class, called
“antiek,”
in which students drew only from plaster casts of antique sculptures. Brushing past his long history of antagonism to schooling of any sort, he sent glowing reports of success and satisfaction (“I am very pleased that I came”). He portrayed himself as a changed man: no longer a belligerent, melancholic loner, but a dutiful student surrounded by artistic colleagues and even friends. He joined two drawing clubs: informal, student-organized groups that met late at night to draw from models, criticize each other’s work, and socialize. “It is an attempt to come into contact with people,” he assured Theo.

P
LASTER ROOM AT THE
A
NTWERP
A
CADEMY
(
Illustration credit 26.2
)

Banished, too, was the angry iconoclast who had alienated family and friends with his odd, tyrannical ideas about art. When instructors gave him “severe” advice, Vincent reported, or criticized his efforts, he took it not as a provocation, but as an opportunity. “I get a fresh look at my own work,” he wrote sunnily. “I can judge better where the weak points are, which enables me to correct them.” Not even the academy’s intense concentration on drawing from plaster casts (the very issue that had caused his final break with Mauve) could darken Vincent’s narrative of contentment. “On looking at them carefully again,” he wrote of the school’s vast gallery of plasters, “I am amazed at the ancients’ wonderful knowledge and the correctness of their sentiment.”

His point could not have been clearer, but he underlined it for his wary brother: “Maybe I shall feel at home here after all.” Less than two weeks after his first class, he wrote Theo a long, pleading letter:

No less an authority than director Verlat had advised him to stay in Antwerp for at least a year, Vincent claimed, drawing nothing but plaster casts and nudes. “I shall then go back to my other outdoor work or my portraits quite a different man,” he pledged. More than anything, he needed practice, and “that is a question of time,” he wrote. “It is to my advantage to stay here for some time.… I repeat, we are on the right track.”

In fact, catastrophe was already upon him.

CHARLES VERLAT INTERVIEWED
every student who was admitted to his painting class. His decisions were not easy to predict. He had a vigorous, inquiring mind and “a taste for the new and unknown,” according to one biographer, but also strong convictions and an irascible temperament. He saw himself both as a champion of Flemish culture and as a shepherd of young artists everywhere—he admitted legions of foreigners, especially Englishmen, to the Academy’s classes. Although schooled in Paris and steeped in the rigid academism inherited from previous centuries, he believed in nurturing talent of all kinds and understood the limits of artistic training. “Artists are born, not made,” he conceded. Although he admired Ingres, Flandrin, Gérome, and other stars of the French Academic firmament, he had befriended the rogue Courbet in his
youth, and even exhibited with him. His career had been marked by controversy and failure as well as success and eminence. He eschewed “fashion” in artistic movements but accepted the lesson of the new art: that artists should be allowed freedom to find their own creative styles. Polish mattered less, he said, than the ability to “breathe life into something and clearly render [its] character and feeling.”

With his portfolio full of crude drawings and roughly brushed portraits, all of them rendered with “character and feeling” but little polish, Vincent might have presented the director with a genuine dilemma. The previous fall, a vast overhaul of the Academy’s rules had thrown many of the old standards into disarray, opening up admission to a wider range of candidates. The Anglophile Verlat might have looked favorably on Vincent’s accomplished English; and the names Van Gogh, Goupil, Mauve, and Tersteeg would have stood out on any résumé. Even if Verlat had been disposed to take a chance on Vincent’s earnestness and pledges of hard work, however, he hardly ever permitted new applicants to enter his class directly. He routinely sent artists with far more training for at least a few weeks in
antiek
to prove their mastery of drawing, which he considered “more useful” to a painter “than knowing how to read and write.” It would have been truly extraordinary for a newcomer like Vincent to be admitted immediately into the master’s life painting class.

And, indeed, he wasn’t. Contrary to Vincent’s repeated claims to Theo, he never did gain admission to Verlat’s class. Whether he was rejected, or he never applied (the school term would end soon), Vincent had begun his Academy career with a desperate deception. He
was
allowed to register for the evening
antiek
drawing class, a decision in which Verlat may have had a hand, but he would not be allowed to paint at the Academy, nor could he work from a live model. Yet his letters continued to ply Theo with boasts of hard work in “painting class,” the joys of “seeing the nude again,” and the challenges of “getting along with” his demanding new instructor. “I have now been painting at the academy for a few days,” he wrote, “and I must say that I like it quite well.”

According to one eyewitness account, Verlat’s first encounter with the strange new Dutch student came quite suddenly and unexpectedly, sometime after that reassuring report. In what must have been a last-ditch effort to make good his story to Theo, Vincent appeared one day with his paints and palette in the Academy’s painting studio just after Verlat had posed two male models, naked to the waist, in the position of wrestlers. In a room crowded with sixty painters behind their easels and canvases, the teacher did not at first notice the interloper among them. But others did. “Van Gogh arrived one morning, dressed in a sort of blue smock,” recalled a fellow student, interviewed several decades later.

Whether at Verlat’s order or not, Vincent did enroll in a second drawing course immediately after the scene in the painting studio. It was yet another
antiek
class that confined him to the Academy’s collection of plaster casts. (The course he had initially enrolled in was also finishing the term, and Vincent had already clashed bitterly with its instructor, François Vinck.) The new class, which met in the afternoon rather than the evening, took up where Vinck’s left off. Only, for Vincent, the stakes had doubled. If he could not succeed there, he would have nothing to tell Theo but lies.