Van Gogh (90 page)

The Old Church Tower at Nuenen
, J
UNE-JULY
1885,
OIL ON CANVAS, 25⅝ × 34⅝ IN.
(
Illustration credit 25.2
)

Looking around his studio in November for a subject to replace the faithless peasants, Vincent found an object that invited him to probe the unhealed wound only touched in
The Old Church Tower at Nuenen
. A huge Bible sat amid the discarded clothes and dried-up specimens. It had belonged to his father. Because the church kept the pulpit Bible and his widow kept the family Bible, this magnificent tome, with its copper-reinforced corners and double brass clasps, was the only Bible passed down when Dorus van Gogh died. And it passed not to Vincent, but to Theo. It came to be in Vincent’s studio only because his mother, in an act of wanton insensitivity, had asked him to mail it to his brother in Paris. Clearing an open place in the clutter, Vincent spread a cloth over a table, set the Bible on it, and unhooked the clasps. The huge book fell open in the middle, to Chapter 53 of Isaiah. He pulled his easel up close, so that the open book almost filled his perspective frame. He propped up the spine to show more of the linen pages with their dense double columns of text. At some point, he decided to enliven the composition with another object. Sifting through his piles of books, he selected one of the bright yellow paperback Charpentier editions of the French novels he loved, and placed it on the edge of the table, at the foot of the giant Bible.

Then he began to paint.

Vincent’s fanatic brush found significance everywhere. He designated the yellow novel as Zola’s
La joie de vivre
and with provocative care lettered in its title, author, and place of publication—Paris. In a few strokes, he captured its dog-eared cover and well-worn pages—a challenge to his father’s flawless, formal Bible. The yellow defiance of Zola elicited a violet response. Vincent mixed and mixed the two complementaries on his palette in search of a gray to express the narrow-mindedness of Dorus’s gospel. When he finally achieved the color he was looking for—a deep, pearly lavender gray, equal parts Veronese’s wedding banquet, Hals’s bourgeois militiaman, and the dead flesh of Rembrandt’s corpses—he “detonated” it on the canvas in a hail of vandalizing brushstrokes in place of the neat blocks of text.

Still Life with Bible
, O
CTOBER
1885,
OIL ON CANVAS, 25⅝ × 30¾ IN.
(
Illustration credit 25.3
)

But the text answered back. The words of Isaiah in front of him were well known to Vincent: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” The painfully resonant scripture, combined with the defiant juxtaposition of gospels, opened up the entire landscape of the previous two years, and Vincent’s brush recorded it with a candor that he hardly ever allowed himself in words: the fights with his father, sex with the peasant girls like Gordina, the Mouret-like pursuit of Margot Begemann in the shadow of the parsonage, his persecution by the priests, the betrayal of the peasants. Onto the pages of fathomless gray, he introduced accents of blue and orange—another contest of opposites summoned up from somewhere other than the table in front of him. He executed the identical clasps in opposite ways: one, lying to the
side in a tremulous ripple, the other standing bolt upright in a single menacing stroke. As he finished the book and the draped table, the clash of complementaries played itself out in an argument of broken tones applied with an increasingly broad and confrontational brush. To complete this chronicle of rejection, grief, self-reproach, and defiance, Vincent added at the last minute a new object—an extinguished candle—the final snuffing out of the
rayon noir
, and a confession that he could never make any other way.

He immediately reported the new painting to his brother, accompanied by a proud boast: “I painted it in one rush, during a single day.”

Through this seamless, spontaneous interweaving of personal preoccupations and artistic calculations, private demons and creative passions, Vincent had achieved an entirely new kind of art. And he knew it. His letters churn with the false bravado of uncertainty—of a man who finds himself suddenly either on the edge of a new world or at the end of a long limb. He could not invoke Zola often enough to make the doubts go away. “Zola creates, but does not hold up a mirror to things, he creates wonderfully, but creates, poetizes, that is why it is so beautiful.” He wreathed his new liberties in the science of Blanc, as well as in medieval notions of immanence. His goal, he said, was to find
“ce qui ne passe pas dans ce qui passe”
(that which endures in that which fades). “To think of one thing and to let the surroundings belong to it and proceed from it,” he argued, “surely that is real painting.” Even as he advertised the modernity of his new, personal “symbolism,” he imagined it as a rebirth of the Romanticism on which he was weaned. “Romance and romanticism are of our time,” he insisted, “and painters must have imagination and sentiment—which lead to poetry.”

Indeed, Vincent was the most reluctant of pioneers—more shunned than shunning; ostracized from the art he loved by the shortcomings of his hand just as he was ostracized from his families, both real and adopted, for the nonconformity of his behavior. He spoke of the new poetry in his brush in mixed tones of anticipation and resignation. “As I have been working absolutely alone for years,” he wrote in November, “I shall always see with my own eyes, and render things originally.” He wanly consoled himself that Millet, too, was a “symbolist” in this new way, but he knew that he had left the safety and reassurance of all his former favorites behind. He defended his years of drudgery in the mines of verisimilitude with unrepentant nostalgia, even as he acknowledged his ultimate failure there. “One can never study and toil too much from nature,” he wrote after completing
The Bible
. “For years and years I myself have been so engaged, almost fruitlessly and with all kinds of sad results, [but] I should not like to have missed that error.” In a poignant farewell to Realism, he conceded almost wistfully that “the greatest, most powerful imaginations have made things directly from nature that strike one dumb.”

One of the few authorities from his past that Vincent did not invoke to comfort his leap into the unknown was also the most eloquent. In an 1872 essay on poetry that both Vincent and Zola read, the philosopher Hippolyte Taine had described with astonishing prescience the imagery at the end of Vincent’s tortuous journey:

AT THE END
of November, only a week before Saint Nicholas Day, Vincent left Nuenen. It was, by all accounts, a bitter, acrimonious, and unwilling departure. Defying all his reassurances to Theo, the scandal over Gordina’s baby did not die down. The townspeople never stopped believing he was the father. If anything, the clamor for his departure only grew louder, as Vincent battled his accusers with bellicose taunts and new provocations. (After one of his trips to the city, he brought back a supply of condoms and distributed them among the “country lads.”) To the end, he blamed his troubles solely on clerical intrigue and public hysteria. “I am greatly handicapped by the neighbors,” he complained; “people are still afraid of the priest.”

Nor could he find succor at the parsonage. The new scandal had pushed his mother from a chill of animosity into a freeze of hostility. Despite often lingering nearby to draw or paint, he was never invited inside to share a hot meal, even as the winter drew on and the holidays approached. Vincent exacted his bizarre revenge with a premonition that his mother would soon follow her husband to the grave. With all the vehemence of a curse, he predicted that “death will come
unexpectedly and softly, just as it came to Father,” and warned Theo insistently, “there are many cases of a wife’s not outliving her husband by long.”

The crisis came to a head when Vincent’s landlord, the sexton Schafrat, refused to renew his lease on the Kerkstraat studio. “In this studio, just next door to the priest and the sexton, the trouble would never end,” Vincent wrote, “that is clear, so I am going to change this.” At first, he planned just to rent another room nearby and wait for the controversy to blow over—a fantasy that lasted only a few days. He thought of returning to Drenthe—a sure sign that the pressure to leave Nuenen had become unbearable. Finally, he proposed to take the sales trip to Antwerp that he had so often postponed, and perhaps stay and work there for a while. But only for a few months. “I know the country and the people here too well and love them too much,” he said, “to be positively leaving them for good.”

He filled his letters with plans to make connections and promises to learn from pictures again, as he had in Amsterdam. But no words could cover the disgrace of his departure. Despite the long drought of models, he left destitute and in debt. He had to wait for Theo’s next letter to buy a train ticket, and he stole out of town to avoid paying Schafrat the last month’s rent. That meant having to leave his collection of prints and almost all his paintings and drawings behind in the studio—years of labor left to the equal mercies of his creditors and his mother.

His final leave-taking from the parsonage played out in an ugly scene that echoed bitterly for months afterward: “I am not going to write home,” he told Theo in December. “I told them that quite simply when I went away.… They got what they wanted; for the rest, I think of them extremely, extremely little, and I do not desire them to think of me.” In a parting blow on the eve of his departure, a letter arrived from the paint dealer in The Hague who had hung his pictures in the window. “He wrote that Tersteeg and Wisselingh had seen them,” Vincent reported miserably, “but did not care for them.”

Still, he left Nuenen undefeated. His new art had given him a new surge of courage. “My power has ripened,” he claimed, even as he conceded that he might have to “begin all over again from the very beginning.” In a farewell visit to Kerssemakers in Eindhoven, he encouraged his friend’s artistic ambitions in terms that surely reflected his own stubborn hope: “One doesn’t become a painter in one year,” he said, “nor is it necessary. But there is already one good thing among the lot, and one feels hopeful, instead of feeling helpless before a stone wall.”

For the first time, he expressed a sense of urgency—a sense of limited time, closing doors, and evanescent opportunity. Only days before his departure, he vowed to take up an entirely new medium, pastels, suddenly enchanted with the
vivid, gossamer creations of the great French pastellists Chardin and La Tour—images as distant from the lumpen peasants of
The Potato Eaters
as Paris from Nuenen; images rendered not in dirt, but in light and air; images, he marveled, that “express life with pastel which one could almost blow away.”

“I don’t know what I shall do and how I shall fare,” he wrote as he left Nuenen, Brabant, and Holland for the last time, “but I hope not to forget the lessons which I am thus learning these days: in one stroke—but with absolutely complete exertion of one’s whole spirit and being.”