Van Gogh (120 page)

Almost six and a half feet tall, with a thick salt-and-chestnut beard—“a whole forest”—groomed to two points, a brow like an escarpment, and a perpetual drunken glow, the forty-seven-year-old Roulin could have stepped out of a Daudet novel. He drank, sang, and orated with gusto until the bars emptied, except for Vincent. He boasted his republican politics with the booming voice and bureaucratic flourish appropriate to his office, and paraded about at all hours in his heavy postal livery—a deep blue double-breasted coat with brass buttons, scrolling gold embroidery at the sleeves, and a stiff cap with
POSTES
emblazoned over the bill.

Vincent compared his face to Dostoyevsky’s (“the look of a Russian”), his oratory
to Garibaldi’s (“he argues with such sweep”), and his drinking to Monticelli’s (“a drinker all his life”). But it wasn’t just alcohol—absinthe especially—that sealed their improbable bond. “[Roulin’s] wife was delivered of a child today,” Vincent announced at the end of July, “and he is consequently feeling as proud as a peacock, and is all aglow with satisfaction.” Vincent loved babies and, in the past, had often used them to gain access into adopted families. And so it was with the newborn Marcelle and the family of Joseph Roulin—wife Augustine and teenage sons Armand and Camille—who lived in a dark government building wedged between two railroad bridges only a block from the Yellow House. Vincent attended Marcelle’s christening and immediately laid plans to paint a portrait of the chubby infant. “A child in the cradle,” he wrote in wonderment, “has the infinite in its eyes.”

But first he had to paint the giant himself.

Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin
, A
UGUST
1888,
INK ON PAPER, 12¼ × 9¼ IN
. (
Illustration credit 32.1
)

Vincent couldn’t wait to share his astonishing discovery, this Tartarin among the mailbags of the Midi, with his comrades in Paris and Pont-Aven. Just as the
Zouave
and the
Mousmé
promised sexual exploits in the land of sun and passion, the postman Roulin would lure the world with the kind of lighthearted, larger-than-life character that could only be found in Daudet’s South. With an offer to pay for food and drink that the bibulous Roulin could hardly refuse, Vincent coaxed his reluctant model into the studio. Roulin sat stiffly, impatiently, while Vincent raced to finish in a single session. He used a big canvas, nearly two by three feet, for his tall-tale subject, and posed him sitting in a chair like a proud Dutch burgher, his arms spread beyond the chair arms as if resting on an imaginary throne. He looks down his pug nose disdainfully as Vincent hurries to capture every detail of his blustery self-regard, from the great gilded coat to the carefully trimmed, twin-pointed beard. Whether in carelessness or in caricature, Vincent painted him with huge hands and heavy-lidded eyes. He placed him against a sky-blue background, both to reinforce the cobalt of his uniform and to highlight the gold ornaments on his sleeve, the double row of brass buttons, and the label on his cap:
POSTES
. “God damn it!” he boasted to Bernard when he finished, “what a motif to paint in the manner of Daumier, eh!”

By late August, the prospect of hosting Gauguin, and perhaps Bernard, too, had made Vincent acutely aware of the distance, artistic as well as physical, that separated him from his comrades in Pont-Aven. To close that gap, he wrote voluminous letters filled with pledges of unity and common purpose. As if swearing a loyalty oath to the new Cloisonnist cause, he renounced any affiliation with Monet’s Impressionism (“I should not be surprised if the impressionists soon find fault with my way of working,” he wrote) or Seurat’s Neo-Impressionism (which he dismissed as “that school which would confine itself to optical experiment”).

Citing a host of inspirations, from the giants of the Golden Age to the pariah Monticelli, from Richard Wagner to Christopher Columbus, Vincent repeatedly cast himself, Gauguin, and Bernard as a triumvirate of explorers blazing a trail toward “the final doctrine”—an art that would do nothing less than “embrace the whole of the epoch.” Only as a team, he insisted again and again, could they reach this brave new art. “Paintings that achieve the serene summits of the Greek sculptors, the German musicians, and the writers of French novels are beyond the power of an isolated individual,” he cautioned the firebrand Bernard. “They can only be created by groups of men combining to execute an idea held in common.” When Theo suggested that his brother exhibit at the next show at the offices of the
Revue Indépendante
, despite Kahn’s poor review the previous year, Vincent worried only that his work might present an “obstacle” to his confréres in Pont-Aven. “The honor of all three of us is at stake,” he intoned. “None of us is working for himself alone.”

Only a few days after Theo relayed the
Revue
’s invitation, Vincent packed up his painting gear and headed to the Place du Forum. By the time he arrived, night had fallen. The spectacle of an artist clattering his easel into place on the dark, pebbled square may have looked like a joke to the locals who strolled by or sat under the awning of the Grand Café du Forum (it was reported with amusement in the local paper). But, in fact, Vincent was protecting the “honor” of his comrades. Only a year earlier, Anquetin, the
Revue’s
designated champion, had painted a similar nocturnal scene: a crowded sidewalk outside a butcher’s shop illuminated only by the gaslight within and two big gas lanterns hanging from its canopy. Other than the rank of patrons pressed near the orange glow of the windows, the image consisted almost entirely of purple-blue darkness, broken into fragments of hue as if viewed through a blue-glass prism. Anquetin’s night painting (to which he gave the Seurat-like documentary title
Avenue de Clichy: Evening, Five O’clock
) became an instant icon of the new Japanese style.

Placing himself at exactly the same oblique angle that Anquetin had chosen for his painting, Vincent used the café’s huge awning to create the same plunging perspective into the dark street and night sky beyond. He turned up the gaslight until it filled the covered patio with bright yellow and spilled across the Crau-stone pavement in ripples of complementary color. “I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day,” he wrote as he added wide swaths of orange (for the floors) and blue (for the doors) to his Anquetin tribute. He wrote endlessly of his Cloisonnist bona fides: his reliance on Japanese prints; his admiration for the speed and sureness of Japanese drawing; and, most of all, his devotion to Japanese color. “The Japanese artist ignores reflected colors,” he wrote Bernard, as if reciting a catechism, “and puts the flat tones side by side, with characteristic lines marking off the movements and the forms.”

Through letters and letter sketches from both Bernard and Gauguin, Vincent monitored the refinements to Anquetin’s Japonist ideas that the two artists forged during their summer together in Pont-Aven. Despite having not seen either’s work since the previous winter in Paris (when Gauguin, especially, was painting in a very different style), Vincent relentlessly pledged his allegiance to their unseen art and, based on Bernard’s enthusiastic reports, proclaimed the older artist a leader of the new movement. (Bernard called Gauguin “a very great master and a man absolutely superior in character and intellect.”)

Gauguin, after all, had painted negresses in Martinique who exactly matched Pierre Loti’s description of his Japanese child bride. And were not the Caribbean, Japan, and Provence all regions of the same magical South, Vincent argued, “where so much more of life is spent in the open air”? He called Gauguin “such a great artist” and prized the letters he received from Gauguin as “things of extraordinary importance.” To bring his art more and more into line with the path he imagined the Frenchman taking, Vincent embraced Gauguin’s Symbolist
sympathies and promised to make his own images “more subtle—more like music.” He began referring to his works as “abstractions,” a word that bound music and art indistinguishably together.

He praised not only Wagner but another Symbolist favorite, the American poet Walt Whitman. He renounced naturalism (“I turn my back on nature”) and dedicated himself to the new gospel of clarity, simplicity, and intensity. He vowed “to paint in such a way that everybody, at least if they have eyes, would see it.” The sunflowers of late summer, with their determined “simplicity of technique” and “bright clear colors,” announced the new mission as Vincent heard it from Pont-Aven: “Gauguin and Bernard talk now of ‘painting like children.’ ”

To prove his new discipleship, Vincent painted a self-portrait. Not since Paris had he assayed himself in the mirror, and what he saw now looked nothing like the dapper entrepreneur or the avant-garde avatar that he had painted so often on the rue Lepic. Eschewing the small canvases and cardboard scraps to which so many Paris self-portraits had been relegated, he chose an imposing canvas almost two feet square. On it, he sketched out a gaunt head, turned slightly to one side to expose its nearly bald crown and highlight its bony cheek and brow. With soft hints of pink and yellow, he carefully modeled a sunken but untroubled face. His beard, more grown out than his hair, bristles in rust and gold, limning a jaw that is set but not clenched. The shortened whiskers reveal for the first time an upper lip, painted almost red, rising to two sharp peaks on either side of a deep philtrum. The head sits on a long neck, bare and featureless as the stem of an exotic flower, with only a large ornamental stud holding together his collarless shirt. A heavy rust-and-blue coat drapes his shoulders like a cloak. All around this austere figure shines a brilliant Veronese green, as bright as emerald but soft as menthol, radiating in halos of brushstrokes to the painting’s edge. The same ineffable color fills the whites of his eyes (rendered with ocher irises for contrast) as they gaze not directly into the mirror but past it—past the viewer, into the distance, fixed on this brilliantly colored, better world.

In those same eyes, Vincent rededicated himself to the path forward. “I have made the eyes
slightly
slanting,” he informed Theo, “like the Japanese.” Indeed, not just the upward-slanting, almond-shaped eyes, but everything about the image—the shaved carapace, the long neck, the cloaklike coat, the ascetic gaze—evoked the descriptions and illustrations of Japanese monks that Vincent and his comrades all knew from Loti’s
Madame Chrysanthème
and other accounts. “[I] conceived it as the portrait of a
bonze,”
he told Gauguin, “a simple worshipper of the eternal Buddha.” This was the transformation that awaited them in Provence, Vincent’s image promised: from careworn painters beset by convention to priests of the sublime, living serenely in nature—“as if they themselves were flowers.” “One cannot study Japanese art without becoming much happier and more cheerful,” he assured them.

So eager was Vincent to share this beckoning, sunflower version of himself with his comrades in Pont-Aven that he wrote and urged them to make portraits of each other so that he could send them his “placid priest” in exchange. He imagined the trade as an initiation rite in the brotherhood of Midi
bonzes
. “Japanese artists often used to exchange works among themselves,” he explained. “The relationship between them was evidently, and quite naturally, brotherly … The more we can copy them in this respect the better for us.” And when he sent the painting to Gauguin in early October, he accompanied it with an oath, as solemn and summoning as his Japanese divine: “I should so much like to imbue you with a large share of my faith that we shall succeed in starting something that will endure.”

LIKE ALL HIS DESPERATE
bids for belonging, Vincent’s campaign for membership in the brotherhood of “Japanese” artists carried the seeds of its own undoing. The same crosscurrents of devotion and antagonism, adhesion and aversion, that roiled his love for Theo and his friendship with Van Rappard quickly undermined his relations with Pont-Aven. No sooner had he accepted the new orthodoxy—even celebrated it—than he began to bridle against it. “I do not find it easy to think of changing my direction,” he had grumbled to Theo in June. “It is better never to budge.”

Throughout the summer, his letters to both Bernard and Gauguin squirmed between allegiance and resistance. Ringing declarations of “the final doctrine” and calls to unity and cooperation sat uneasily beside prickly defenses of independence and individuality. Vincent predicted that his comrades “will alter my manner of painting and I shall gain by it,” but then added ruefully, “all the same I am rather keen on my decorations.” Warm professions of fraternal solidarity were suffused with hints of competitive rancor and fits of resentment.

While Gauguin proved an erratic and unengaged correspondent, Bernard matched Vincent argument for argument, passion for passion, in a tug-of-war over the direction of the new movement. With Gauguin, who had a direct channel to Theo, Vincent struck an almost reverential tone (“I do not want to say depressing or dismal or malicious things to so great an artist,” he told Theo). But with Bernard, who shared his letters with Gauguin, Vincent could dominate the three-way conversation while preserving the appearance of deference to the older artist. When Bernard seconded Gauguin’s argument that the new art should find its imagery in the imagination—
“ex tempore”
—Vincent defiantly reaffirmed his determination to work from nature; chastised his young friend for “departing from the possible and the true”; and drew a sharp red line between “exaggeration” (what he did) and the Symbolists’ dreamy “inventions.”