Van Gogh (106 page)

But all that changed in the summer of 1887. When Bernard returned from his summer trip to Brittany in July, the world of vanguard art had a new venue, Goupil’s
entresol;
and a new dealer, Theo van Gogh. With his unfailing instinct for advantage, Bernard soon made his way to the rue Lepic, where he immediately recognized the long-neglected Vincent as a promising route to Theo’s favor. Within weeks (before the end of the summer), he invited Vincent to visit him at his parents’ new home in Asnières, where a small wooden studio had been built for him on the grounds.

In this plank-sided clubhouse, the friendless thirty-four-year-old Vincent fell immediately under the spell of the suave nineteen-year-old Bernard. They exchanged enthusiasms and perhaps canvases. They may have painted together on the nearby banks of the Seine in the waning days of summer. For Vincent, the offer of friendship and the difference in ages triggered old, unalterable habits of heart. He treated Bernard with the same mix of solicitude and superciliousness, fraternal solidarity and tyrannical viscosity, that Theo and Rappard had endured in their turns. The coltish Bernard may have been pleased that the older artist took his ambition seriously. But Vincent surely entered the relationship blind to the implications of that ambition. Instead, he rushed headlong into yet another cordial or convenient alliance mistaken for a deep friendship and destined to flame out in a long, lopsided correspondence.

H
ENRI DE
T
OULOUSE-LAUTREC
,
Portrait of Émile Bernard
, 1886,
OIL ON CANVAS, 21⅜ × 17½ IN
. (
Illustration credit 29.2
)

Bernard brought with him into Vincent’s orbit his two colleagues from Cormon’s: Anquetin and Lautrec. Although both lived relatively close to the rue Lepic apartment, Vincent had seen neither of his former classmates except in
passing since leaving the atelier the previous summer. Theo, on the other hand, had begun corresponding with Lautrec by the spring of that year, drawn to the artist’s vibrant, Degas-like glimpses of “modern” life, just as he was drawn to Pissarro’s Monet-like glimpses of rural France. In reconnoitering for his coming push into vanguard art, Theo found reassurance in Lautrec’s proven salability, and, no doubt, in his family credentials—just as Lautrec found reassurance in Goupil’s gilt-edged reputation. With the announcement of the new initiative that summer, the status-conscious Lautrec eagerly followed his young friend Bernard into the circle around
les frères
Van Gogh.

Other artists were drawn to the borning flame of enterprise on the rue Lepic and the
entresol
, but only Bernard bid for Theo’s favor by directly courting his strange and difficult brother. The rest, like the students at the Antwerp Academy or Cormon’s studio, merely tolerated him, out of deference or fear of a bad report. When they congregated at a café or at someone’s studio (Guillaumin’s and Lautrec’s were favorites; never Vincent’s), they seldom included him in their conversations. “[Vincent] arrived carrying a heavy canvas under his arm,” recalled a participant in one such gathering, “and waited for us to pay some attention to it. No one took notice.” In direct encounters, they scoffed at his naïve enthusiasms and chaffed at his prickly self-righteousness, but feared his volatile temper. They rarely visited his studio and dreaded his visits to theirs, having heard stories of how “[he] would tear off his clothes and fall on his knees to make a point clearer, and nothing would calm him down,” according to the account of one such visit.

Camille and Lucien Pissarro, perhaps the most regular callers at the brothers’ apartment, once encountered Vincent on the rue Lepic coming back from a day of plein air painting. In a fit of eagerness to show his latest work, Vincent dropped his load of equipment in the middle of the busy sidewalk and lined the wet canvases up against the wall “to the great amazement of passersby,” Lucien recalled. On the basis of this and, no doubt, other such incidents, Camille concluded that Vincent was almost surely on the road to madness. Guillaumin came to the same conclusion when Vincent visited his studio and immediately started criticizing his paintings of men unloading sand. “Suddenly he went wild,” Guillaumin told an early chronicler, “shouting that the movements were all wrong, and he began jumping about the studio, wielding an imaginary spade, waving his arms, making what he considered to be the appropriate gestures.” The scene reminded Guillaumin of a painting by Delacroix:
Tasso in the Madhouse
. But civility to a madman was a small price to pay for a chance to show on the
entresol
.

Meanwhile, Vincent obliviously pursued his vision of an “entourage of artists” guided and supported by the brothers Van Gogh. He made introductions, wrote letters, arranged exchanges, and dispensed relentless advice on how fellow artists could advance their careers. He hinted that Theo was prepared to
provide regular monthly stipends to some artists (just as he had to Vincent)—the fantasy of every painter in the feast-or-famine world of living by the brush. He urged them to “set aside petty jealousies” and summoned them to “unity and strength,” just as he had so often summoned his brother. “Surely the common interest is worth the sacrifice of that selfishness of every man for himself,” he preached. Borrowing a coinage, probably from Lautrec, he tried to unite the fractious group under a new name: artists of the
“petit boulevard”
(side street), as opposed to successful Impressionists like Degas and Monet, who had already won their place in the galleries of the
“grand boulevard.”
It was the perfect caption from a man who lived by captions: rallying his fellows not to their divisive art, but to their shared aspirations.

Hovering over every call to solidarity and sacrifice, of course, was the promise of reward: “If you work hard,” he wrote Bernard, “I think you might end up by having a certain stock of pictures,
some of which we shall try to sell for you.”
It
was that promise that kept Lautrec circling despite his inevitable disdain for the coarse and earnest Dutchman, so different from his smooth and subtle brother. On one outing to a café, Lautrec, a lightning draftsman, made a sketch of Vincent sitting alone in a booth with a glass of absinthe. Later, he took the sketch home and turned it into a pastel portrait, which he presented to the brothers. With typical Lautrecian drollery, he portrayed Vincent not frontally but in profile, cold-shouldering the observer, staring straight out over the already mixed absinthe on the table in front of him—perhaps deep in thought, perhaps in a huff at a sly insult or insufficient attention; but in any case, lost in his own world. In January 1888, Theo bought a painting of Lautrec’s. After Vincent left Paris in February, he wrote Lautrec a letter. Lautrec never answered.

H
ENRI DE
T
OULOUSE-LAUTREC
,
Portrait of Vincent van Gogh
, 1887,
PASTEL ON CARDBOARD
,
21⅜ × 17¾ IN
. (
Illustration credit 29.3
)

Sometime in October 1887, Vincent began to lay plans for an exhibition. It would be a
manifestation
not just of the “new school” of art, but also of Vincent’s central role in the brothers’ new enterprise. The proposal to Theo must have been both artistic and commercial: an exhibition would test the public’s interest, raise awareness of their venture among artists and critics, audition art for the
entresol
, and, not least, give Vincent an opportunity to show his own work—something Theo could never do at the Goupil gallery.

Theo may have approved of the concept, but he surely disapproved of the venue Vincent chose. No one could have mistaken the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet for an art gallery. With its immense, unadorned hall and lofty ceiling, it looked more like “a Methodist chapel,” according to one visitor. And with its crowds of hungry, noisy working-class patrons, it sounded more like a train station. Nothing recommended it as a place to show art except that Vincent, who frequently ate there, knew the proprietor, Lucien Martin, and Martin needed
something
to put on his vast empty walls (“enough space to hang a thousand canvases,” one observer estimated). Vincent may have been urged to the unconventional site by Bernard, whose impatience for notoriety drove him inevitably to insurgent venues; but, like other vanguard artists and dealers, Vincent probably had no better choice.

The show was a disaster. Indeed, it was hardly a show at all (Bernard later referred to it as merely “an attempt” at a show). No matter how vehemently he argued, Vincent could not bring the bitterly divided avant-garde art world together under the skylights of the Restaurant du Chalet. Bernard vetoed the inclusion of Neo-Impressionists like Signac and Seurat (frustrating Vincent’s effort to reconnect with Signac, who returned to Paris in November). Vincent himself refused to include the Symbolists, like Redon, that Bernard pushed on him. Pissarro, a stout partisan of Seurat, took umbrage at the exclusion of Signac (he referred to Neo-Impressionism as “our common struggle”) and refused to participate. His son Lucien followed suit. In the end, only Bernard and his Cormon comrades Lautrec and Anquetin agreed to contribute a few works—a
testament to Theo’s backing and Goupil’s allure. Guillaumin may have contributed for the same reason. (Theo made his first purchase of a Guillaumin painting about the time the show opened, and featured his works on the
entresol
soon after it closed.)

With so few artists participating, Vincent’s plan for a joint exhibition, a show of “unity and strength,” collapsed. To avoid an outright embarrassment—a comedy of inconsequence in Martin’s huge hall—Vincent filled up the show with his own work. He lugged cartload after cartload of paintings from the rue Lepic to the restaurant on the avenue de Clichy a half mile away, virtually emptying his studio. He enlisted Arnold Koning, a young Dutch artist who happened to be visiting the brothers from Holland, to help him hang the fifty to one hundred canvases, almost all of them Vincent’s.

Despite the Herculean effort, the exhibition foundered after only a few weeks. As at Le Tambourin, and everywhere else, Vincent fell into a dispute. The proprietor Martin was so eager to fill his bare walls that he began hanging “patriotic shields” alongside Vincent’s precious paintings. The ensuing argument escalated until Martin summarily canceled the exhibition and ordered Vincent and his paintings out of the restaurant.

During the brief interval between late November and early December when the strange array of unframed images hung on the walls of Martin’s cavernous eatery, hardly a soul noticed them. There was no catalogue, no announcement in the paper, no review. No “public” came. The restaurant’s regular patrons “paid more attention to the dish of the day” than to the new décor, one visitor recalled, although some seemed “a little disconcerted by the forbidding aspect of the paintings.” A few minor dealers dropped by, either earning or repaying favors. Some of the artists in the Van Gogh brothers’ circle (Pissarro, Guillaumin) came; others (Lautrec, Anquetin) apparently stayed away. Surprisingly, Georges Seurat showed up one day and spoke briefly to Vincent.

Among the visitors was another artist whom Vincent had never met. He was a slight, suntanned man, just back from a long voyage to the Caribbean: Paul Gauguin.

BETWEEN PROSELYTIZING
for the painters of the Petit Boulevard, strategizing and promoting the brothers’ new enterprise, and preparing for the Restaurant du Chalet exhibition, Vincent had little time left for his own work. He later admitted doing only “a little painting” in the last months of 1887. It didn’t help that the police had banned him from working in the streets—a consequence, no doubt, of public displays like the one the Pissarros witnessed. The cosmopolites of Paris, no less than the peasants of Nuenen, found his strange habits and vehement displays disruptive.

When he did go to the studio, it was inevitably to enlist his art in the brothers’ new shared mission.

While Theo flattered and engaged artists with words, Vincent did the same with images. Driven by his vision of fraternal partnership, the mirage of collegiality, and his own protean imagination, Vincent opened a dialogue of imagery with each of the painters in the brothers’ circle. Like an anxious host, he darted from artist to artist, from innovation to innovation, leaving a zigzag trail of images that would defy later efforts to order or categorize them.