Van Gogh (132 page)

L
UKE
F
ILDES
,
The Empty Chair
(
“Gad’s Hill, Ninth of June 1870”
), 1870,
ENGRAVING
(
Illustration credit 35.4
)

The Bel-Ami was slipping away.

HARDLY A DAY
had passed without conflict at 2, place Lamartine. From the moment of Gauguin’s arrival, the little blows of everyday life had never stopped driving a wedge deeper and deeper between host and guest. Gauguin not only rejected Arles and its people, he complained about the unseasonable cold, the ceaseless wind, and the miserable food. He was shocked at the cramped quarters and domestic disorder of the Yellow House, and he abhorred the “mess” of Vincent’s studio. (“His box of colors barely sufficed to contain all those squeezed tubes, which were never closed up,” he later recalled.) Displeased with some of the furniture in his carefully composed bedroom, Gauguin immediately bought a new chest of drawers and a long list of household goods. He threw out Vincent’s elaborate bedding and had his own sheets sent from Paris. He had pottery, cutlery, silver, and etchings sent, too—each item a reproach to the perfect “artist’s home” on which Vincent had lavished so much attention.

Everything about Gauguin frustrated Vincent’s expectations: his low forehead (according to phrenology, a sign of imbecility), the strange fencing masks and foils he had inexplicably brought with him, the pictures of his five
children. The same opposing currents that buffeted their art invaded every corner of their daily life together. Despite Vincent’s advance pledge “not to quarrel” with his guest, they clashed early over everything from household chores to restaurant choices. Gauguin took charge of the former (with assistance from Vincent’s ancient charwoman), while the latter was resolved only when Gauguin volunteered to cook. Vincent, a creature of café and bistro, tried to learn—just as he tried
de tête
painting—but with similar results. “Vincent wanted to make a soup,” Gauguin recalled, “but I don’t know how he mixed it—no doubt like the colors on his paintings—in any event, we couldn’t eat it.” Thereafter, Gauguin did all the cooking and Vincent did the shopping. Duties were divided, not shared.

They clashed over money, too. Gauguin, the ex-stockbroker, found the household finances in the same shamble of disorder as Vincent’s studio. He immediately established a regimen of bookkeeping as laborious as his brushwork. On a table in the front room, he set out two boxes with money inside: one was for food, the other for incidentals (liquor, prostitutes, tobacco) and “unforeseen expenses like rent.” On a piece of paper, “each would inscribe honestly what he took from the till.” Vincent, who could never abide a budget (Gauguin later referred to financial matters as “that great sensitivity of his”), rebelled against the arrangement by soliciting extra money from Theo.

Gauguin quickly sized up his adversary and set a strategy. “Your brother is indeed a little agitated,” he wrote Theo a few days after arriving, putting a gloss of understatement on the storms of passion and persuasion that must have burst from Vincent after being bottled up for so long. “I hope to calm him down gradually.” To accomplish that, rather than engage Vincent in his rants of enthusiasm (he had promised “day-long discussions”), Gauguin dodged and feinted. “He does not let himself get out of hand,” Vincent wrote, puzzled, in his initial report to Theo. Where Vincent poured out past injuries and plans for the future, Gauguin entertained with tales from his sailor days. Where Vincent heaped flattery on his guest (“your brother is most indulgent,” Gauguin wrote Theo blushingly), Gauguin reserved judgment. “I do not know yet what Gauguin thinks of my decorations in general,” Vincent complained after a week of awkward silence.

The ardent Dutchman found this intricate choreography of appeasement and evasion deeply vexing. Always alert to slights, and wary of Gauguin’s intentions after their drawn-out courtship, he imagined his guest as a stalking tiger “waiting for the right moment to make a leap forward.” But when Vincent tried to goad him into debate, Gauguin only replied with a mocking salute—“Yes, sir, Sarge”—quoting a popular song about a policeman’s muzzled contempt for his foolish boss.

Inevitably, this daily drubbing of caustic accommodation and veiled antagonism found its way onto canvas. Earlier that fall, Gauguin had drawn a caricature of Vincent sitting dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, looking up mesmerized at the sun, ignoring the peril at his feet. When Bernard sent the drawing to Vincent, he laughed it off, objecting, “I suffer from vertigo.” After that humiliation, it is doubtful that Vincent posed for the portrait of him that Gauguin painted in early December. Gauguin’s preparatory sketch looks candid: Vincent sits at his easel, caught midstroke, his eyes fixed on the canvas in front of him. His discomfort is palpable, and may account for the spareness and speed of Gauguin’s drawing—hardly the fond eye-embrace of Madame Ginoux.

The image that emerged on Gauguin’s big canvas over the following days brought the weeks of intimate combat to a head. With an instinct for the jugular, Gauguin depicted Vincent at work on his favorite subject: sunflowers. The last of the great blooms had long since disappeared from the gardens of Arles, but in Vincent’s delusional world, Gauguin suggested, they never died. A vase of the ubiquitous flowers sits beside Vincent’s easel. He stares at it intently, his eyes squinting and fluttering in the peculiar way he had of focusing his field of vision. His face is dulled and mirthless. His lips are tight, and his jaw protrudes in what could be a pout or could be a trace of the monkeylike features that Gauguin gave him in the preparatory sketch.

As in his version of
The Night Café
, Gauguin ruthlessly commandeered the icons of Vincent’s imagination: not just the revered sunflowers but their palette, too. The distinctive mix of yellows and oranges leaches from the enormous blossoms into Vincent’s coat and face and beard. The figure’s long reach, low brow, and simian features inflict on Vincent the very Daumier caricature he had urged on Gauguin. The thumb sticking up through the palette on his lap belittles his manhood. “Perhaps my portrait does not bear him much resemblance,” Gauguin coyly told Theo, “but it contains, I think, something of the intimate man.”

Gauguin placed his helpless sitter under a huge painting done in
his
style:
de tête
. The invented landscape that looms over Vincent’s shoulder—so big it almost transports him to his beloved plein air—celebrates the limitless world of the imagination on which he has turned his back. Rather than seize that path, Gauguin’s Vincent fixes his eyes on the briefest of nature’s ephemera: flowers. Like Darwin’s monkey, he clings to the lowest rung of an inexorable climb to the fire and air of pure
idée
. To underscore this scornful message, Gauguin painted Vincent’s brush poised ambiguously between the flowers he depicts and the image he paints, imposing a Symbolist mystery on the sincere but witless act of transcribing nature.

—

P
AUL
G
AUGUIN
,
Vincent van Gogh Painting Sunflowers
, N
OVEMBER
1888,
OIL ON CANVAS, 28¾ × 35⅞ IN
. (
Illustration credit 35.5
)

IN MID-DECEMBER
, Gauguin delivered the coup de grâce. “I am obliged to return to Paris,” he wrote Theo. “Vincent and I absolutely cannot live side-by-side any longer without friction because of the incompatibility of our temperaments and because he and I both need tranquility for our work. He’s a man of a remarkable intelligence whom I hold in great esteem and leave with regret, but, I repeat, it is necessary that I leave.”

G
AUGUIN HAD WANTED TO LEAVE EVEN SOONER. IN MID-NOVEMBER
, only a few weeks after arriving, he wrote Bernard: “I am like a fish out of water.” As the light shortened and the weather closed in, the days began to stretch out endlessly. When asked later how long he had stayed in the Yellow House, Gauguin could not say exactly, but admitted “the time seemed to me a century.” He had arrived thinking he might remain a year (whereas Vincent had imagined he would stay forever). Then he began to talk of departing in a few months; then simply “soon.” To another friend, he cast his circumstance in more dire terms, comparing it to a train “hurtling along at top speed.” “[I] can foresee the end of the line,” he wrote, “but I keep on coming up against the chances of going off the rails.”

Initially, he kept the truth from Theo. “The good Vincent and the prickly Gauguin continue to make a happy couple,” he wrote cheerfully at the same time he despaired to Bernard. Still financially insecure and determined “not to launch my attack before I have all the necessary materials in my hands,” he hoped to endure by putting some distance between himself and his host. As often as he could, he left the house and disappeared into the night on his own, telling Vincent that he needed some “independence.”

When bad weather condemned him to long spells in the living room that served as his studio, he buried his head in his work to avoid being trapped in the great debates that continuously raged in Vincent’s head. But even this did not bring the “peace and quiet” he sought. “When I am painting,” he complained, “[Vincent] is always finding me at fault with this, that or the other.” Gauguin apparently succeeded in exiling his host to work in the kitchen, which had been fitted out as a separate studio. But they still intersected every evening over supper and every night when they retreated to their bedrooms (Gauguin could only
reach his by going through Vincent’s). Even then, the walls of his tiny nook were crowded with sleepless arguments.

Inevitably, his thoughts fled the Yellow House long before he himself dared to. His enthusiasm wandered; his energy flagged. He left sketches undeveloped and paintings unfinished. He relied more and more on old drawings from Pont-Aven, or reprised previous paintings, or even borrowed from Vincent’s work, rather than engage with a place and a people he despised. He rarely mentioned Vincent in his letters—the only form of privacy left to him. Feeling put-upon and purchased, he brooded resentfully. Only weeks after arriving, he began imagining his escape. A brief encounter with the Zouave lieutenant Milliet, who left for Africa at the beginning of November, reignited his plan for a return to Martinique the following year. He determined to stay in Arles only until he could save enough to set sail, he wrote a friend, “[then] I shall go to Martinique and surely produce some fine work there.… I will even buy a house there and establish a studio where friends could find an easy life for next to nothing.”

Vincent tried at first to see Gauguin’s plan for Martinique as an extension of his own great project for the South. “What Gauguin tells of the tropics seems marvelous to me,” he wrote soon after his guest arrived. “Surely the future of a great renaissance in painting lies there.” But with tensions mounting and Gauguin more disengaged every day (Vincent called him “homesick for the tropics”), any talk of departure threw Vincent into a panic of suspicion and anxiety that pushed their relations closer and closer to an open break. “Between the two of us,” Gauguin later recounted, “the one entirely a volcano and the other also boiling, but inside, some sort of struggle was bound to occur.”