Van Gogh (154 page)

Two days later, the storms struck again. Theo received the news the following week from the dilatory Peyron: “I am writing to you in the place of M. Vincent who is once more the victim of another attack.… He is unable to do any work at all and only replies incoherently to any question put to him.” Peyron’s bland report hid a much harsher reality. Vincent not only could not paint, he could not read or write. When anyone approached him, or even tried to talk to him, he would recoil violently “as if it hurts him,” a witness reported. All day long, day after day, he sat in his cold, barred room “with his head in his hands,” alternately ranting to himself about his “sad and melancholy past,” or lost in unreachable solitude.

IN PARIS, ON THE
same day Peyron sent his sad news, Johanna van Gogh–Bonger penned a letter to her distant brother-in-law. She sat at the dining room table in the apartment that Theo had decorated so conscientiously. It was midnight, but she was not alone. Theo, his mother, and his sister Wil had all joined her. A doctor slept in the apartment, too; the baby was due soon—perhaps as soon as that night. Theo, exhausted, was dozing in the chair beside her. On the table in front of her lay a copy of the Paris paper
Mercure de France
, which Theo had brought home from work. In it was an article about Vincent. Everyone at the table had read it and “talked about you for a long time,” Jo reported.

Indeed, everyone in Paris had read it and begun talking.

The title of the article, the first in a projected series, was “Les Isolés”—“The Isolated Ones.”

H
OLIDAY SHOPPERS PASSING BY THE PAINT STORE OF JULIEN “PÈRE”
Tanguy at Christmastime in 1889 saw something very strange in the window: two huge bouquets of sunflowers. Their distinctive aureoles of orange and yellow petals stood out starkly on the gray streets of Paris. But it wasn’t just their unseasonal subject that struck passersby. It was their size, their gesticulating forms, and, most of all, their ferocious color. One pasted the giant flowers against a brilliant, pearly turquoise; the other, against a yellow so bright it almost hurt the eyes. Some were startled by this vision of summer in the wintry gloom; some, bemused; many, dismayed. “It was horrible,” one passerby later recalled, “the rank glare of a sunflower.”

But others came looking for it. They had read Jozef Isaäcson’s article in
De Portefeuille
in September or registered the brief mention in
La Vogue
that same month; or they had seen the tantalizingly cryptic review by a pseudonymous columnist named “Le Flâneur” in the April
Le Moderniste Illustré
directing them to Tanguy’s shop, where they could find “pictures fantastically spirited, intense, full of sunshine.” Some heeded insider tips from among Theo’s wide circle of acquaintances about the mysterious painter identified by both Isaäcson and Le Flâneur only by his first name, Vincent. Some had heard the stories already circulating in the Paris art world about Gauguin’s bloody encounter a year ago with the strange Dutchman who had moved south and gone mad.

The images in Tanguy’s window seemed to prove all this and more.

One of those who came to Tanguy’s in search of the myth, as well as the art, was a young art critic named Albert Aurier. Like Vincent van Gogh (the subject of his first review in the
Mercure de France
), the twenty-four-year-old Aurier was riding the wave of history toward brief celebrity, early death, and
enduring fame. Unlike Vincent, he saw the wave coming. He arrived in Paris in 1883 as a law student and immediately succumbed to the high life and low morals of fin-de-siècle bohemia. A whirlwind of productivity in every area but his legal studies—poet, critic, novelist, playwright, painter—Aurier embraced each new “ism” as it emerged from the roiling, fermenting pot of intellectual fashion, and even invented one of his own: “
Sensationnisme
.” His first novel mimicked the ambition and Naturalism of Balzac. But Huysmans’s
À rebours
electrified him—as it did an entire generation of young poets, thinkers, and artists—in the service of Symbolism. By the time he turned twenty, he had joined the Decadents; declared Baudelaire’s
Les fleurs du mal
his “Bible”; the forbidden lovers Verlaine and Rimbaud, his heroes; and eccentricity (“a bizarre outlook”), the highest calling in art or life.

Aurier arrived in Paris as a
wunderkind
writer and critic. He published his first journal at age nineteen, wrote for
Le Chat Noir
by twenty, and caught Mallarmé’s eye at twenty-one. His meteoric rise coincided exactly with the ascendance of the critic as the single most powerful voice in the art world. Upon the withdrawal of state sponsorship from the Salon system in 1881, artists of every stripe were thrown into the crowded, competitive world of private dealers, galleries, and auction houses. As the influence of the Salon’s prizes waned, critics and reviews rushed into the vacuum of discernment, clamoring for the attention of bourgeois buyers bewildered by the dizzying array of choices now open to them.

Whereas the Salon had anointed single images, the new critics allied with private dealers to elevate artists, even whole movements, over individual works. One painting could not make a critic’s reputation, fund a magazine, or support a dealer’s family. Buyers had to be convinced that
any
painting by an approved artist, or within an approved style, was preferable to a work by any other artist or in any other style. The era of art franchises had begun. The model, of course, was Georges Seurat, whose distinctive Pointillist images had been championed by the critic Félix Fénéon not just as attractive decorations and masterpieces of craft, but as inevitable expressions of the zeitgeist. Fénéon’s relentless advocacy in the
Revue Indépendante
launched an army of Neo-Impressionist painters and collectors. Art was no longer enough. In a culture besotted by words and fashion, art needed advocates to persuade and mobilize; and artists needed movements to succeed. Critics provided both.

Gauguin and Bernard had watched Seurat’s startling rise and learned the lesson of the new era well. To be seen by the public, artists had to be shown by the galleries; to be shown by the galleries, they had to be talked about in the journals. Working in an uneasy alliance of self-interest (which would later collapse in a rancorous competition for credit), the two artists began jockeying for position in the scrum of avant-garde art. For his part, Bernard wooed potential sponsors among his friends who contributed to art reviews. During the long
summer of 1888, while Vincent flooded both his comrades in far-off Brittany with ringing calls to the new art of Japan, Bernard circulated among the holiday crowds in Pont-Aven using Vincent’s ideas, and even some passages and drawings from his letters, to “sell” the new movement to influential critics like Gustave Geffroy. Another of his targets was the lanky twenty-three-year-old rising star Albert Aurier.

When the art world returned to Paris in the fall, Bernard’s campaign followed. As Gauguin prepared to leave for Arles, Bernard pressed his case on Aurier with trips to Tanguy’s paint store, Goupil’s
entresol
, and even Theo van Gogh’s apartment, in order to see works by Guillaumin, Gauguin, Vincent, and, of course, himself—all examples of this exciting new movement that lacked only an advocate.

Gauguin, meanwhile, plotted his own way to attract critical attention. From the depths of his entrapment in the Yellow House, he imagined mounting an insurgent attack on the avant-garde establishment, just as the Impressionists had done at the famous Salon des Refusés twenty-five years earlier. In a single coup de théâtre, he could showcase the still unnamed movement and steal a march on the “Neos” at the
Revue Indépendante
who had connived against him in preparing their January show. And what more appropriate place to stage his coup than at the upcoming Exposition Universelle that would open in Paris in May 1889? Like Bernard’s gallery tours, Gauguin’s
manifestation
would include enough of his fellow painters (“a little group of comrades,” he later described them) to impress critics like Aurier with the strength and viability of the new movement. “Vincent sometimes calls me the man from afar who will go far,” he rallied his comrade Bernard. “[But] we must work with each other and arrive holding hands together.”

Only a few days later, on Christmas Eve 1888, Gauguin had fled the Yellow House. It was hardly surprising that, upon his arrival in Paris, he immediately contacted Bernard; or that the first person to whom Bernard reported the terrifying story was Albert Aurier.

Bernard and Gauguin served up a Poe-like tale filled with Symbolist significance, religious overtones, and gothic frisson. Vincent believed “he was some kind of Christ, a God,” Bernard wrote, “a being from the other side.” His “powerful and admirable mind” and “extreme humanity” had been driven to madness by these strange visions. He had accused Gauguin of trying to “murder” him—an insane accusation that drove his stalwart friend away just as the horrible crime
was revealed: “ ‘The entire population of Arles was in front of our house,’ ” Bernard wrote, transcribing Gauguin’s first-person account. “ ‘It was then that the gendarmes arrested me, for the house was full of blood.’ ”
They thought Gauguin had killed him!
Bernard’s account dramatically implied. But in fact, Vincent had slashed off his own ear and given the bloody prize to a prostitute.

The letter launched Gauguin’s campaign to portray himself as the innocent victim of Vincent’s murderous madness, not the guilty provocateur. It also reached out to the fashionably decadent critic. Only six months before, Aurier had contributed to a debate in
Le Figaro
over the new science of criminal anthropology. The paper cited works by prominent Symbolists (with provocative titles like
Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
) defending murder as a natural instinct, not an abomination.

Aurier used the debate to comment on the most sensational story in the Paris papers at the time: the murder trial of Luis Carlos Prado, a handsome roué and confidence man accused of slitting the throat of a Paris prostitute. Like Gauguin, Prado had lived in Peru and worked in the stock market. The “Prado Affair” had brought to public view the Symbolists’ obsession with deviant behavior, especially criminal behavior, and Aurier’s review confirmed the stylish fascination with “sympathetic killers.” Gauguin had already traded on the new vogue with his self-portrait as Hugo’s Jean Valjean, the most famous criminal-hero in French literature. During Gauguin’s stay in the Yellow House, the trial had flamed again in the headlines as a bloodthirsty public counted down the days to Prado’s execution. (Gauguin, in fact, arrived back in Paris just in time to attend the public spectacle of his beheading.)

But the letter backfired. Indeed, Gauguin’s campaign to acquit himself worked at cross purposes with his outreach for favor. To the true believer Aurier, champion of outcasts and deviants, Vincent van Gogh, not Paul Gauguin, emerged from Bernard’s narrative as the truer artist. For Aurier, Vincent’s unthinking fury—whether directed at Gauguin (as Gauguin later claimed) or at himself—represented exactly the kind of extreme experience, the orgasmic surrender to sensation, that Huysmans exalted in
À rebours
. What could be more primitive, more
essential
, than the murderous urge that Cain felt against Abel? Indeed, wasn’t violence of any kind the ultimate rejection of bourgeois convention and thus the truest path to art?

Vincent’s continued confinement in the Arles hospital and then the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole only enhanced the image of tortured genius that Aurier, like Huysmans, prized above all else. Had not the great Italian criminologist Cesar Lombroso only recently revealed the link between epilepsy, insanity, criminality, and genius? According to Lombroso, many of history’s greatest artists—Molière, Petrarch, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, the Goncourt brothers—had suffered epileptic fits. What was “creative genius” if not an altered, aberrant
state—an attack—of heightened feeling and perception? And was not this the same spiritual rapture that the great mystics and prophets felt when they saw visions and spoke God’s words? Lombroso named Saint Paul among his “epileptoid geniuses,” and saw in all of them the same “degenerative psychosis” as in born killers like Prado—a psychosis that he claimed he could document in the stigmata of their “savage” countenances.

Throughout 1889, while Gauguin and Bernard vied for the favor of the Catholic critic with increasingly hortatory images of Christ, Aurier’s interest stayed fixed on the lonely figure locked away in a Midi asylum. In April of that year, writing under the pseudonym Le Flâneur, he first reported the miracle happening under the southern sun. Not even Gauguin’s strange, improvisational show at the Exposition Universelle the following month could distract Aurier’s gaze for long. In his desperation for a prominent venue, Gauguin had rented a vast, déclassé brasserie, the Café Volpini, just opposite the entrance to the official art exhibition. His and Bernard’s paintings, over a dozen of each, competed with the pomegranate-red walls and a Russian all-woman band for the attention of fairgoers. Gauguin had invited Theo to show Vincent’s work. But Theo withdrew his brother from the venture before it opened, convinced that in the vast, ugly eatery the art would show poorly. Aurier came, but finding no images by the strange, raving Dutchman with a single name, he gave the show only brief attention.