Van Gogh (105 page)

But they ventured further still. Having learned the
real
lesson of the previous decade—that there was money to be made, serious money, in marginal, even controversial art—they approved an initiative to seek out and support unproven artists. Goupil would risk its money and its reputation in a search for the
next
Impressionists, whoever they might be.

Finally, they chose the man to lead the search: Theo van Gogh.

History would later give Theo full credit for Goupil’s initiative in the new art. But, if anything, his standing in the firm had only been diminished by his attempt to break away the previous summer. The overhaul also reached far beyond his gallery on the boulevard Montmartre, and many of its aspects were managed entirely from Adolphe’s limestone palace on the rue Chaptal. Theo surely supported the plan; he may even have lobbied for it. For years, he had
been following and admiring the new trends (and pressing them on Vincent). He had even dabbled in their market a few times. And events had certainly proven him right.

But others at the firm, including his new bosses, shared his enthusiasm. In the end, the fateful decision to give Theo van Gogh the mandate to deal in the new art on behalf of Goupil may have hinged on an accident of architecture: only the Montmartre branch offered a discreetly separate display area—a small, ill-lit mezzanine, or
entresol
—where the controversial new images could be quarantined from the firm’s less adventurous clientèle.

In April, a month before Goupil’s massive sale, Theo launched his part of the companywide initiative with a coup that caught the attention of the entire vanguard art world. In a single stroke, he bought three paintings by Claude Monet and agreed to give over much of the
entresol
to show at least a dozen of the painter’s recent works—mostly views of the Brittany coast at Belle-Île. The deal represented not just a rich triumph for Monet (by the end of the year, Theo had bought fourteen of his canvases for almost twenty thousand francs, an astounding sum), but a milestone in the ascendance of Impressionism from avant-garde to investment-grade. Almost simultaneously, Theo paid an eye-opening four thousand francs for a large painting by Degas.

In accepting Theo’s offer, Monet abandoned Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who had built Monet’s success out of the ashes of the Drouot sale. It was a betrayal that both spotlighted the works on view on the
entresol
, and underscored the changing of the old order. Even more than the companywide fire sale of old stock, Theo’s Monet coup (and the money that followed) signaled to the art world that Goupil, the Salon fortress built on costume vignettes and martial scenes, pretty girls and picturesque peasants—Goupil, with its international network of stores, acres of printing presses, and armies of loyal collectors—had entered the market for “modern” art.

Inside the limestone walls of the boulevard Montmartre gallery, the momentous events of the spring and summer hardly altered Theo’s busy workday. He still spent most of his time on the main floor selling Goupil “evergreens” like Camille Corot and Charles Daubigny (both Barbizon landscapists) and managing relations with fashionable painters like Vittorio Corcos (another painter of women), whose works continued to pay the gallery’s bills. He still carefully appraised collector sentiment before committing company money or taking a painting on consignment, and dropped artists who didn’t sell, no matter how much he personally admired their work.

On the
entresol
, where the mandate of the spring brought a parade of new art and artists into Goupil’s sanctum, the same rules applied. He heavily favored artists, such as Raffaëlli and Monet, with established reputations and ready, if erratic, markets. Seemingly impervious to the ideological battles that filled artists’
cafés and partisan reviews, he assessed the work of lesser-known painters by the same commercial standards he had always used—the same standards that had long frustrated Vincent: Was it colorful? Was it done with “vigor”? Was the subject matter pleasant? Was it pleasing to the eye? In short: Would it sell?

Beyond the gallery walls, however, everything in Theo’s life changed. Goupil’s new initiative caused a sensation among the legions of unknown, upcoming painters struggling for recognition in Paris’s crowded art world. Most of them, young or old, came from middle-class backgrounds. However dissonant their theories or fractious their rhetoric, they, like Vincent, brought to their artistic pursuits the same middle-class aspirations to comfort and repute. Opportunities to show their works (except to fellow partisans) were rare; buyers, even rarer. Like Vincent, they filled the mailboxes of friends and family with bitter letters, howling the injustices of penury and neglect. Goupil’s commitment to open its doors, and its purse, offered not just the possibility of income, but, even more important, the promise of legitimacy—the chance to hang their work under the same roof as Delacroix and Millet. Toulouse-Lautrec’s aristocratic family, who otherwise frowned on the “low-life naturalism” of their son’s art, beamed with pride when they heard that his pictures would be exhibited “at the big art dealer, Goupil’s.”

For all these reasons, Theo enjoyed a power in the contemporary art world far out of proportion to the modest funds and timid initiatives he deployed starting in the fall of 1887. Artists of every stripe deluged him with pleas to show their works on the
entresol
. They offered to slash their prices, or even make gifts of paintings, in exchange for a treasured place in Goupil’s out-of-the-way mezzanine. They entreated him to visit their studios and attend the unpublicized shows they staged in whatever café, cabaret, or office lobby would have them. They plied him with personal gifts and favors as well: drinks, invitations, introductions—looking for any wedge of advantage.

Like any dealer, Theo had always reaped the benefits of inside information and artists’ gratitude. But as a junior Goupil
gérant
selling the expensive works of dead masters and prominent living artists, he had managed to collect only a few small gifts from illustrious clients like Corcos, and a scattering of sentimental favorites bought at bargain prices. All of that changed when he entered the fraught world of unproven art, where paintings often sold for the price of a good meal, if they sold at all. Theo apparently never transacted personal business on Goupil’s premises, but real separation was impossible, and the artists knew it. Nothing prevented him from using the
entresol
to build the reputations of painters he favored (and invested in), or from showing works to gauge public interest in particular artists before investing in them, or from just dropping a few flattering words into the large pool of collectors who relied on his discernment.

To help him find his way through this clamor of advocacy and chaos of imagery,
Theo turned to the one person whose eye and allegiance he trusted: his brother. Over the previous year, the chasm between their tastes in modern art had almost closed. From Monticelli’s palette the previous summer to the Impressionists’ light and subject matter that spring, one by one Vincent had abandoned the defensive barricades of
The Potato Eaters
and returned to the natural consonance of eyes trained on virtually identical imagery. The brothers had always shared a fondness for naturalism, especially in landscapes, as well as a suspicion of artifice (pictures “premeditated forcedly”) and a distaste for vulgarity.

They both saw the new art as a “regeneration” of the old, not a rejection—a gradual evolution, not the revolution plotted by some—and they relentlessly looked for continuities between the new images that attracted them and the old ones they had long revered. From their shared mentor H. G. Tersteeg, they had both learned to see the new art
“dans le ventre”
—in the gut—as well as in the eye; and never to confuse admiration with popularity. “Never denounce a movement in the arts,” Tersteeg warned, “[for] what you denounce today, in ten years may make you kneel.”

While Theo had never fully trusted his brother’s business sense—there is no evidence that he ever bought or sold a painting entirely on Vincent’s recommendation—there were practical as well as artistic arguments for bringing him into this new venture (and Vincent undoubtedly made them). With his already frantic schedule, Theo needed help keeping track of the bewildering array of art and artists who, unanchored by regular dealers, showed somewhere in the city almost every day. With his keen eye, vast knowledge, and vivid descriptive powers, Vincent could double Theo’s presence. Unproven, marginal artists would treat him not as an outsider, but as one of their own. He could preach to them in their shared language of aspiration, and reassure them that Theo, unlike other dealers, understood their craft as well as their predicament. He could solicit “exchanges” with his own work, using the implied promise of Theo’s attention to build the brothers’ personal collection.

Vincent marked his new place in Theo’s business world the same way he marked all the twists and tumbles of the brothers’ relationship in Paris: with self-portraits. In the fall of 1887, he painted himself in both of the roles Theo had assigned him: as the modern plein air painter in straw sun hat and smock, championing the art of the future; and as the ambitious dealer, decked out for business in gray felt homburg, stiff collar, silk cravat, and velvet-trimmed coat. Finally, it seemed, by a coincidence of heartbreak and entrepreneurship, they had found the joint enterprise that Vincent had dreamed of for so long, the perfect union of mind and heart that Theo had tried and failed to find elsewhere: “a rich life full of variation, full of intellectual stimulation, a circle of friends around us, working for a good cause.”

—

IN THE SUPERCHARGED
competitive atmosphere, such a circle formed quickly around
les frères
Van Gogh. Like everything else in the Paris art world, it was a shifting, ephemeral group—not a circle so much as a loose network, held together by the “good cause” of mutual self-interest: namely, the commercial promise of Theo’s foray into what he neutrally referred to as “the new school” of art.

Some artists, like Camille Pissarro, were drawn simply by the potential for income. A veteran of the very earliest Impressionist shows, Pissarro had watched enviously as fellow pioneers Manet, Degas, and now Monet flourished while his own fortunes languished. By the summer of 1887, desperate for money, distrustful of his longtime dealer Durand-Ruel, and harassed by a wife frantic to maintain her middle-class identity, Pissarro saw the young Goupil
gérant
as the only alternative to “complete disaster.” From the moment Theo made his first purchase in August, the garrulous, often cranky Pissarro became a regular visitor to the rue Lepic apartment. While his paintings sold sluggishly at first, he did manage, through Theo, to secure a job for his son Lucien at the Goupil printworks—a valuable perquisite that could not have gone unnoticed among the other contenders for Theo’s favor.

While Pissarro and his son (also an aspiring artist) depended on that favor for years, other artists came and went like comets through the new enterprise. In the fever of enthusiasm for “original” Impressionists that followed the deal with Monet, Theo bought three paintings by another aging, passed-over member of the movement’s founding generation, Alfred Sisley. Although a decade younger than Monet, Sisley had clung to Impressionist subjects and principles through all the “neo” temptations and Symbolist distractions of the decade. His cautious, colorful landscapes perfectly suited Theo’s cautious new initiative. (Vincent later called Sisley “the most tactful and sensitive of the impressionists.”) But when none of the three canvases he bought had sold by the end of 1887, Theo parted ways with the impoverished artist.

The work of Armand Guillaumin—a bolder, brighter version of Monet—had come to Theo’s attention that spring when he attended a “fringe” exhibition at the offices of the avant-garde periodical the
Revue Indépendante
—one of his earliest known forays into the demimonde of vanguard art. The polite dealer and the politic artist exchanged friendly letters at the time and may have mingled socially, but did no business. When Theo launched his new initiative in the fall, however, a work by Guillaumin was among his first purchases. The forty-six-year-old Guillaumin, like his friend Pissarro, circulated widely among other, better-known artists such as Monet, Degas, Renoir, Seurat, and Cézanne
(who kept a studio next to Guillaumin’s on the quai d’Anjou). He also enjoyed a steady income and good relations with a circle of loyal avant-garde dealers and collectors who supported his work. The combination made him a potentially valuable ally in the Van Gogh brothers’ venture, both as an artist and as a broker.

From gray eminences like Monet and Pissarro to yeoman disciples like Guillaumin, it was a guarded start. In an art world filled with young lions desperate for attention, Theo and Vincent never wandered far from the proven path of Impressionism.

Until they encountered the youngest lion of all: Émile Bernard.

From the moment he arrived at the Cormon atelier as a boy of sixteen, fresh from the vulgar provincialism of Lille and the incomprehension of his merchant father, Bernard fashioned himself the
wunderkind
of the Paris art world. Tall and slender, with fine, brooding features, an omnivorous intellect, and the fearlessness of youth, he pursued his vision of inevitable notoriety. At Cormon’s in 1884, he immediately cast himself as the
maître’s
gifted young protégé and ingratiated himself into a triumvirate with the studio’s undisputed leaders, Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec. When, in early 1886, Cormon soured on his arrogance and dismissed him, Bernard wrapped himself in the flag of artistic freedom (“a breath of revolt had blown through the theories of the place as soon as I entered the studio,” he later boasted) and declared himself a martyr for the new art.

Vincent and Bernard just missed each other at Cormon’s. But in the year that followed, they had many opportunities to meet. Both frequented Tanguy’s store. Both may have made return trips to Cormon’s studio in the fall of 1886, where their paths could have crossed. They both surely visited the nightclubs and cafés favored by artists, such as Le Chat Noir and Le Mirliton. Bernard is known to have patronized Agostina Segatori’s Le Tambourin and later claimed to have noticed some of Vincent’s paintings and prints among the clutter on the walls there. The two artists certainly had acquaintances in common—Lautrec, Anquetin, and Signac, for example. But none, apparently, bothered to make the necessary introductions or, if they did, to record the fact. This was hardly surprising. In Bernard’s vision of meteoric ascent, there was no place for the strange, peripheral Dutchman—or even for his junior, Salon-dealer brother.