Van Gogh (96 page)

But how to fulfill that mandate? How could one express in words a reality that was both unobservable and individual? Everyone agreed on the question, but no one agreed on the answer—thus proving the dilemma. Some, like Mallarmé, continued to believe that traditional words and forms, the stuff of Hugo,
could meet the challenge of exploring this new dreamlike inner world. Others insisted that the new reality demanded a new language. The old precision of words was a chimera, they claimed. Words were, in fact, more like scents, or tones, or colors. Using them to inform or describe, as Zola did, was a fool’s errand. Their real purpose could only be to stimulate the senses, engage the heart, or stir the soul. Sensation, emotion, inspiration. These were the elusive “essences” of life—art’s only deserving subject.

In 1884, J. K. Huysmans, a former Zola acolyte (and nephew of Vincent’s high school art teacher), published a manifesto of the new ideas: a thinly veiled autobiographical tale of a reclusive aesthete engorging his senses on every strange and forbidden indulgence. In the year before Vincent arrived,
À rebours
(
Against the Grain
) rocked the literary world of Paris. To some writers, however, like the poet Paul Verlaine,
any
words, even autobiographical words, seemed pitifully insufficient. An estranged son of the bourgeoisie, Verlaine wandered from dissolution to scandal to self-destruction in a tortured living out of his inner life. At the moment of Vincent’s arrival, not far from the Louvre, Verlaine lay sickly, drunk, and dissipated in a prostitute’s flat in the Latin Quarter. But in the new, inverted world of Parisian letters, he was acclaimed a hero.

Critics coined a new term for these avatars of excess, whether real or fictionalized: “Decadents.” The writers themselves couldn’t agree on a better name. In 1886, someone proposed “Symbolists”—the label history would ultimately attach to them—but that was rejected as too literate, too literal. What bound them together was not a word—feckless, faithless words—but a common contempt for convention, a love of scandal, and a shared belief that only the eccentric outcast—whether aesthete, criminal, or madman—pursuing his own inner path, could express the deepest mysteries of life.

Artists, too, had peered into the abyss and come away with divided minds. The nostalgic naïveté of Barbizon pastorals and Millet peasants had long since lost its allure to young painters impatient for the future. In the decade since Vincent left Paris in disgrace after his fall from Goupil, the Impressionists’ long struggle for legitimacy (and sales) had moved from insurgency to vindication to eclipse. Their relentless descriptions of sunlight and bourgeois ephemera seemed more and more a confectioner’s art—pretty, optimistic, and meaningless—to artists and critics hungering for expressions of the fin-de-siècle darkness.

Driven by the fractious literary world, with its chaos of competing ideologies each supported by its own partisan critics and mouthpiece reviews, progressive artists splintered into shifting, bickering factions.

Some attacked the Impressionists for not going far enough in embracing the scientism of the future. Led by Georges Seurat, the son of a customs official and a disenchanted Beaux-Arts student, they argued that color could be divided up into its constituent elements and then reassembled by the observer’s eye as it
reacted to a work of art. Drawing on positivist philosophers as well as the scientific color theories of Blanc and Chevreul, they rejected the old way of mixing colors on the palette and claimed that a more vivid effect could be achieved by dividing each stroke into smaller “points” of purer color and applying each one separately.

Seurat had spent most of 1885 eagerly preparing a great “manifestation” to prove this theory of divided color. He went again and again to make preparatory drawings at an island in the Seine called La Grande Jatte, a favorite Parisian spot for recreation and promenading. He advertised these preparations to his followers as an elaborate scientific project, involving precise measurements of color and light, and he gave the huge painting that took shape slowly, point by point, in his studio, a suitably descriptive title:
Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte
(
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
). Seurat dubbed his new method “chromoluminarism,” but even his own followers preferred simpler names like “divisionism” or “pointillism.”

Another group attacked Impressionism for the opposite reason: because it relied
too much
on science. No rules, no matter how scientifically formulated or applied, could express the elusive meanings and deep mysteries of life—art’s ultimate subject. Their leaders were not young: Odilon Redon was a forty-five-year-old provincial aristocrat when Huysmans’s
À rebours
brought the art world’s attention to his eccentric charcoal
Noirs
—disturbing, hallucinatory images that eschewed color altogether in their pursuit of mystery and meaning. Gustave Moreau had turned sixty by the time young disillusioned artists—again alerted by
À rebours
—began seeing in his mysterious renderings of Greek myths, Bible tales, and children’s fables an escape from the literalness of modernism.

Encouraged by these and other examples, and urged on by Symbolist writers and critics, artists began rummaging in the attic of the culture’s collective unconscious for the “reality” in otherworldly images, and for pictorial devices that conveyed the essential otherworldliness of real life. They wrapped their subjects in gauzy, dreamlike atmosphere or bathed them in theatrical light in order to transform the everyday into the monumental; the natural into the supernatural; the specific into the mythic. By refocusing Impressionism’s view of reality from surfaces to essences, these artists (whom history would also label Symbolists) hoped to reenchant both art and life—to fill the hole left by religion and unfilled by science.

Still another group of artists, especially younger ones, had given up on both science and enchantment. Instead of compromising with or transcending the absurdity of modern life, they embraced it. Children of the postwar malaise, artists in their twenties, especially, found the entire artistic enterprise unconvincing and irrelevant. They entertained each other with ferocious mockery of the Academic system and irreverent skepticism of all art’s claims to higher truth.
Their anarchic cynicism expressed itself less in art than in actions. They formed mock-solemn societies that ridiculed not just the usual bourgeois enemy but any attempt to enlighten or reform it. They lampooned the Impressionists with an exhibition of “drawings made by people who don’t know how to draw” and derisively dubbed themselves “the Incoherents.”

Their art relied heavily on words, especially wordplay, as if they no longer trusted images alone. What little work they produced mixed parody, provocation, adolescent humor, profanity, and polemics into images as randomly explosive as anarchists’ bombs: drawings made with the artist’s foot; paintings of nudes described as
“léchée”
(licked); all-white and all-black paintings with winking titles (
Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night
)
;
constructions that combined traditional images with actual objects affixed to them (a worn shoe stuck to the portrait of a postman). One artist repainted the
Mona Lisa
with a pipe in her mouth and wreathed in smoke (anticipating by several generations Marcel Duchamp’s similar defacement after the next great war).

They found many ways to vandalize the old pretensions of “high” art. They incorporated into their work the tawdry subjects, garish colors, and unrefined sensibilities of commercial advertising (in which some of them were employed). They borrowed imagery from “low” aesthetic genres like fashion magazines, street posters, calendars, and cartoons, as well as the cheap but colorful prints sold by the thousands to working people and plastered everywhere in cafés, wine shops, and public urinals. Artists like the Incoherents proudly acknowledged the meaninglessness of their endeavors (“the subject is nothing,” Paul Signac explained) and gave their subversive approach to art—and life—a name that perfectly reflected both its origins in café badinage and its blithe insubstantiality. They called it
fumisme
—roughly, blowing smoke.

In a culture defined by consumerism and self-contempt, the
fumistes’
nihilist aesthetic quickly became all the rage. Artists’ clubs that began as little more than café conclaves mutated into popular entertainments (
cabarets artistiques
) where impresarios like Rodolphe Salis and Aristide Bruant marketed the outré bohemianism of avant-garde art to the
haut monde
of Paris society and gaping tourists. They took names like Café des Assassins, Cabaret des Truands (criminals), and Cabaret de l’Enfer (hell). At the most famous of them, Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat, an obscene pun on a slang term for the female genitalia), the fashionable clientèle sat in cramped rooms decorated in “atelier clutter” attended by waiters dressed in the green-and-gold livery of the French Academy. The proprietor, Salis, insulted his guests with Republican
égalité
, favoring even the most genteel with a frisson of the artistic life by “treating them like pimps and whores,” according to one account.

The artists themselves eagerly played their part in this self-annihilating parody. It was the era of publicity and self-promotion; an era when even a tarty
actress could rise to unheard-of celebrity as “the divine” Sarah Bernhardt (a Chat Noir patron); an era when any artist with a scandalous story or an outrageous image, and a critic or publicist to flak it, could aspire to a level of conspicuity unimagined by Salon favorites of the past. With so much to gain, and the future of art—and everything else—so much in doubt, the new generation of artist-entertainers barely noticed or cared that they had succumbed to the same bourgeois ethos they so mercilessly pilloried every night at Le Chat Noir. Of only one thing were they certain: if art was to have a future—and that “if” was crucial—it would have to travel by a new road, as they had blown up all the old ones.

This was the art world that awaited Vincent van Gogh in Paris. Only a few years after the Impressionists drove the first wedge into it, the great monolith of the Salon—with its hegemony over public taste and intellectual discourse—had shattered into a kaleidoscope of noisy, competing partisans, fueled by ideas noble and mean, existential and commercial, evangelical and self-serving: a world sustained on the oxygen of café arguments, clamorous reviews, and the certainty that history would lavishly reward the art and ideas that triumphed, and ruthlessly discard the rest.

The disintegration of the artistic avant-garde horrified and disgusted Émile Zola. He saw in it the frustration of his great naturalism project. In
L’oeuvre
(
The Masterpiece
), which Vincent began reading in serialized form on the eve of his arrival in Paris, Zola chastised all artists, even the Impressionists he had once championed, for their failure to find a single, emblematic art for the new era. Using the fictional story of Claude Lantier, a near-mad painter obsessed with the creation of a perfect work, Zola rejected both the Symbolists’ surrender to the supernatural and Seurat’s impersonal science. To create a
true
modern masterpiece, he argued, an artist would have to give more of himself (“What was Art, after all, if not simply giving out what you have inside you?”)—even if, as in Lantier’s case, that meant insanity and certain death. He challenged artists of every stripe to meet his challenge. The entire century had been and would remain “a failure,” he thundered, until the mandate of modern art had been fulfilled—until someone, somewhere, found inside himself an art at once literal and poetic, real and symbolic, personal and enchanted.

VINCENT ARRIVED IN
Paris with only one mandate: to please Theo. He had come unannounced, unexpected, and unwelcome. For years he had pictured the brothers’ reunion as a perfect and inevitable fulfillment—increasingly, the only one possible. Now that it was upon him, he was terrified of disappointment. “What I am not sure of is whether we shall get on personally,” he confessed to
Theo only weeks before his departure from Antwerp. “If we were together soon, I might disappoint you in many things.”

To avoid that fate, Vincent immediately rededicated himself to the goal that he had so often abandoned: bourgeois respectability. He sought out a barber to give his beard the smartest new trim and a tailor to fit him for a new suit to match his dapper brother. He finished the arduous task of fixing his teeth, and had a modern Paris dentist fit him out with the latest in wooden dentures. Casting aside the last self-abnegation of the heath, he indulged in a regular Parisian diet of restaurant fare. In these and other ways, he did his best to blend in with the fashionable crowds that bustled outside Theo’s little apartment on the rue Laval. Situated just off the grand boulevard de Clichy in a busy theatrical district, the street was well known to all of Paris society. Only a few doors away, Le Chat Noir filled the neighborhood with stylish revelers until well past midnight.

But Vincent’s renewed ambition also brought renewed demands. Theo’s cramped flat not only posed a threat to the brothers’ comity, it also proved completely unsuitable to Vincent’s vision of “a rather good studio where one can receive people if need be.” He may have been forced to stop painting altogether for lack of space. Before arriving in Paris, eager to join his brother, Vincent had temporarily dropped his demand for a studio. He even offered to live by himself in a garret for the first few months and wait a year before securing a separate workspace. But Paris’s lures and Theo’s cosmopolitan lifestyle soon rekindled old longings. He probably began militating for a bigger apartment as soon as he arrived, and without doubt he took the lead in finding one—a process that he had rehearsed often in his fantasies. “If one wants to start a studio,” he wrote from Antwerp, “one must consider well where to rent it, where one has the greatest chance of getting visitors, and making friends, and getting known.”