Van Gogh (64 page)

But this time, he did not have to face the hostile crowds in the Geest or the scorn of the soup kitchen patrons. This time, he re-created the entire scene in his studio.

In an extravaganza of unaffordable expenditures, he remade the front room of the apartment into a replica of the soup kitchen he knew. He hired workmen to install multipart shutters in each of the studio’s three big north-facing windows, “so that the light falls exactly as in the place itself.” Using the canvas that had served as blinds, he made a partition across one end of the room and drew on it the small double opening through which the soup was served in the actual kitchen. He painted the entire room with the gray wainscoting of the original. “By paying attention to those things,” he explained to Theo, “one gets the local color so much more correctly.”

Vincent sent him lengthy descriptions of the mise-en-scène, complete with elaborate drawings that labeled each feature and explained its function. No detail was left unattended to; no expense forgone. He hired a crowd of models and bought
“real
clothes” for all of them—“picturesque” patched smocks and coarse linens like the ones in his illustrations. “Tomorrow,” he wrote in a fever of anticipation, “I’ll have the house full of people.”

The next day, Vincent sketched from dawn until dusk, moving his models from one position to another, opening and closing the shutters to get the highlights on the heads of the figures just right and “render the character most completely and strongly.” He was so delighted with the results that he immediately planned more alterations, more expenses, more models, and many, many more drawings. “I just go on drawing,” he said of his plans for the future, “that’s all.” He told Theo that he felt “at home and content” with the models together in his studio. The scene reminded him of a print in his collection depicting a corridor in the offices of
The Graphic
at Christmastime when all the models who had appeared in the magazine throughout the year came to offer their Yuletide greetings. It showed a procession of invalids, beggars, and blind men hanging onto each other’s coattails, all united by the redemptive spirit of Christmas.

Soup Distribution in a Public Soup Kitchen
, M
ARCH 1883, CHALK ON PAPER, 22¼ × 17½ IN.
(
Illustration credit 18.6
)

Now he could live in that print. He imagined not just a series of soup kitchen drawings, not just a series of group scenes, but a permanent Christmas on the Schenkweg—a “place where the models could meet every day, as in the old days of the
Graphic”:

I
N PARIS, THEO READ HIS BROTHER’S LETTER WITH A FRESH WAVE OF
dismay and alarm. The bizarre plan to transform the Schenkweg apartment into a private soup kitchen summarized all the excesses and misdirections of Vincent’s flawed and faltering career as an artist—a career that increasingly seemed destined to end, as all the others had, in failure.

Theo had tried dutifully to steer Vincent in the right direction—with little success. Indeed, as he looked back over the previous two years, it must have seemed that he had spent the entire time arguing with his brother about the direction of his art. Beginning in the fall of 1880, the two had sparred repeatedly over artistic issues great and small. Theo called Vincent’s early drawings, with their Puritan simplicity and recherché sentiment, old-fashioned—a direct assault on his brother’s exaggerated nostalgic enthusiasms. He complained that they were not only too big to attract buyers, but also “too dry” (a rebuke of Vincent’s preference for pencil), too dark, and too meager—charges that embraced Vincent’s whole beloved canon of black-and-white. He urged Vincent to find more cheerful subjects than the dreary workers and pitiful old men he favored. Buyers wanted “pleasant and attractive” images, he said, not “things of a more gloomy sentiment.”

He sent repeated exhortations for Vincent to do more landscapes—for which he seemed to have an innate talent—and lobbied relentlessly for more color and more elaboration. He said again and again that those endless solitary figures against blank backgrounds would never sell. If Theo knew one thing from his ten years in the art business, it was that people bought art because they
liked
it, because they found it pleasing and charming. They didn’t give a fig about Vincent’s fervent principles or tiresome rhetoric; they wanted “details,” they wanted “finish.”

Vincent had responded to all these suggestions with an unceasing stream of arguments. Over the winter, the stream had turned into a torrent as he struggled to justify his rising expenditures and unchanging art. At least twice a week, a fat letter appeared in Theo’s Goupil mailbox filled with Vincent’s hyperventilating justifications and promises of future progress. After long experience, Theo no doubt knew that any frank criticism might trigger an eruption of defensiveness that could last for weeks, even months. So, like his father before him, he avoided direct confrontations, veiling his persuasion in generalities about “vivid” palettes and the beauties of nature. He wrote lengthy descriptions of colorful scenes that would make wonderful paintings, and sang the praises of successful colorists and landscapists.

But Vincent matched his brother’s missives description for description, artist for artist, hint for hint, in a battle of indirection as rancorous as any open debate. He repeatedly solicited advice, often in the most affectionate terms, but almost always refused to follow it. He repledged his love for watercolor and landscape, but pushed any return to painting into the indefinite future. In an especially clever parry, he praised the vivid word paintings that Theo sent as proof of his brother’s true vocation and renewed his call for Theo to become a painter—essentially shifting the burden of unrealized potential back onto his brother.

He deflected accusations of “dryness” with complaints about Theo’s stingy stipend (“my life is too cramped and meager”) and protests that all beginners suffered the same problems. He responded to Theo’s call for more pleasing imagery by drawing one of his models pushing “a wheelbarrow full of manure.” When Theo encouraged more elaboration, Vincent answered with a paean to the “honesty, naïveté, and truth” of his unembellished images. Despite intense pressure to make smaller works (from Mauve and Tersteeg as well as Theo), he vehemently defended his continued use of the large, Bargue-sized sheets, dismissing the arguments against them as “preposterous” and vowing never to change. Finally, he rejected Theo’s right to make
any
comments about his drawings before he had seen them all together in the studio.

Much of Theo’s advice seemed designed to coach his obstreperous brother toward the new art of Impressionism. In his five years in Paris, Theo had seen the stock of artists like Manet, Degas, and Monet rise from the humiliating depths of the Hôtel Drouot auction in 1876. Their colorful, challenging images had not yet unseated commercial giants like Bouguereau and Gérôme, whose works still lined Goupil’s lush galleries, but the winds of fashion and capitalism were clearly at their backs. Only the year before, in 1882, the French state had withdrawn its official support from the Salon, leaving all artists at the mercy of the market. The Impressionists, who had by then mounted seven annual group shows, were already masters of the new rules of success. As a junior
gérant
in a bastion of the old order, Theo himself would not begin to deal in
the works of artists like Monet and Degas for several more years, but he had already come to see their commercial success as inevitable. “To me it seems quite natural,” he wrote his brother about the revolution in the air, “that the desired change will occur.” Recognizing that Vincent would never master the sharp rendering and deft modeling of his heroes like Millet and Breton, Theo must have seen in Impressionism’s brusque, unfinished images a perfect home for his brother’s impatient eye and unruly hand.

But Vincent resisted every effort to coax him from the grip of the past. In his opinion, the change brought by the Impressionists was neither natural nor desirable. He especially resented Theo’s suggestion that they would eclipse his eternal favorites Millet and Breton. He linked the Impressionists to the forces of decadence about which Herkomer had “sounded the alarm bell.” “The changes that the moderns have made in art are not always for the better,” he cautioned his brother, “neither in the works nor in the artists themselves.” He accused the Impressionists of “losing sight of the origin and the goal” of art. He associated their confectionary colors and unfocused forms with the “hurry and bustle” of modern life, with the ugly summer houses of Scheveningen, the disappearing moors of Brabant, and everything else that had “taken the joy out of life.” He rejected their loose
“à peu près”
(approximate) way of rendering reality, and dismissed their pretensions to scientific color as mere “cleverness.” Cleverness, he warned, would never save art; only earnestness could do that.

So strong was Vincent’s antagonism to Impressionism that not even Zola could appease it. Indeed, he recruited Zola’s decadent avant-garde painter, Claude Lantier, in his attacks on the new art. “One would like to see another kind of painter depicted by Zola than Lantier,” he wrote in November 1882, at the height of his argument with Theo. Vincent had heard that Zola based the figure of Lantier on the pioneer Impressionist Édouard Manet—“not the worst example of that school, which I think is called impressionist,” Vincent allowed, using the term for the first time. While conceding that Manet was clever, he railed against Zola’s modern ideas of art as “superficial,” “wrong,” “inaccurate and unjustified”; and he dismissed Manet and his ilk as “not part of the nucleus of the artistic corps.” Far from following in the path of past masters, the new style “utterly contradicted the style of these masters.” “Have you noticed,” Vincent pointed out in horror and disbelief, “that Zola doesn’t mention Millet at all?”

The brothers’ debate focused especially on one central tenet of Impressionism: that true black does not exist in nature. For an artist who had staked his whole precarious enterprise on black-and-white imagery, such a claim posed an existential challenge. While airily conceding the point in principle, Vincent insisted that Theo and the Impressionists had it exactly backward. While they claimed that all blacks were made up of color, Vincent argued that all colors
were, in fact, made up of black and white. “Scarcely any color is not gray,” he explained. “In nature one really sees nothing else but those tones or shades.” The highest duty of the colorist, he declared, was “to find the grays of nature on his palette.” To prove his point, he sent elaborate descriptions filled with shades and shadows: fields with “brown-gray soil”; horizons of “grayish streaks”; and vistas with “a somewhat yellowish yet gray sky.”

In the studio, as if to defy his brother’s cautious encouragements to Impressionism’s light and color, Vincent threw himself into an obsessive, winter-long campaign in search of the blackest black.

Theo had begun hearing about this contrarian quest as early as April 1882—at exactly the moment Vincent acknowledged his break with Mauve and forswore his enthusiasm for watercolor. Determined to prove his chosen medium, black-and-white, the equal of the rejected one, he cast about for ways to combine the saturated black of his beloved pen drawings with the vigorous modeling and varied tones of his pencil sketches. He loved the coal-dust black of charcoal, but in his frenzied working style he almost always smeared or overworked images before he could fix them. Then he tried making the pencil drawings look more like charcoal—blacker—by washing the shine off them with drenchings of fixative. “[I] just pour a large glass of milk, or water and milk, over it,” he described his unorthodox procedure. “It gives a peculiar saturated black, much more effective than is generally seen in a pencil drawing.” A visitor to the Schenkweg studio in 1882 was surprised to find Vincent “continuously sponging off his studies from buckets full of dirty water.”