The Life of Van Gogh
debby
I also didn't know that the people who lived in the town where he lived
didn't like him. Van Gogh was also an epileptic. This article is chock
full of interesting little tidbits. I n Arles, a town where
life imitates art imitating
life
Long-vanished buildings, sites are re-created based
on works painted by pair
By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
Published September 9, 2001
ARLES, France -- Even those who know little about art
know what happened
here. Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear, creating an
enduring picture of the
artist's tortured inner life.
But what led to the incident in Arles was, if less
sensational, nearly as compelling. And that is the story
behind "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the
South," the long-awaited exhibition that is expected to
draw between 750,000 and 800,000 visitors to the Art
Institute of Chicago, beginning with members'
previews this week before opening to the public on
Sept. 22.
A modern-day
visit to Arles, in the south of France,
reveals how
the town and surrounding countryside,
with its
Roman ruins and glimmering grain fields,
inspired Van
Gogh and Paul Gauguin toward new
kinds of
painting. Their paintings, in turn, have
helped shape
this sun-drenched town not only as a
mecca for
tourists, but also physically. Buildings
and gardens
the artists saw have long since
vanished but
now are re-created from paintings.
Still, some
artifacts from the period do exist, and
one of the
most chilling is at the Van Gogh
Foundation,
in a small former palace here. A case
of old
photographs and documents contains a local
newspaper
report from Dec. 30, 1888, that plainly
details the
origin of the drama:
"Last Sunday,
at 11:30 p.m., the named Vincent
van Gogh,
painter, originally from Holland,
presented
himself at the first brothel under police
supervision, asked for the named Rachel, and gave her
... his ear, saying, `Guard this object preciously.'
Then he disappeared. Informed of this act, which
could only be that of a poor lunatic, the police arrived the
following day at the house of the individual, whom
they found lying on his bed, giving almost no sign of
life."
That is one of the first modern descriptions of the
artist-as-madman, an image treated to so many
variations in the last century that it took on the
power of myth. The incident came at the end of almost
nine weeks the artists lived together--Oct. 23 to
Dec. 23, 1888--and was prompted by increasing
disagreements about art that finally drove Gauguin
away. In tandem, they had created more than 50
paintings and many drawings (often of the same
subjects) indicating an extremely complex network of
mutual influence and challenge.
But none of their art remains here, a message clearly
given at the admissions desk to the Van Gogh
Foundation in five languages: "There isn't any of Van
Gogh's work in Arles." It might have added, "or any
by Paul Gauguin either."
The premise of "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of
the South" is that the Arles experience profoundly
changed both artists' work, though the pieces created
here account for only a small fraction of their
oeuvres. How it changed the art will be explored
through 135 paintings and drawings from more than 60
public and private collections.
"Vincent left you physically and mentally exhausted,"
said Peter Kort Zegers, co-curator of the Institute
exhibition, who traveled to Arles to learn about the
artists' lives. "He was an incessant talker, opinionated,
with the zeal of a missionary. Very few people would
be able to be in his orbit. He was like a radio that
could not be turned off."
Yet his spirit lives on here.
The Studio of the South was an artists' collective
envisioned by Van Gogh to ease his lifelong loneliness
and provide the spiritual home he lacked. He had the
dream after failing as an apprentice art dealer,
preacher and suitor in several European cities.
But by deciding to become an artist, he thought to
set things right. Painting was his new religion. The
Studio was his way toward a family--a family of
artists that would engage viewers through paintings of
heightened symbolic feeling rather than naturalistic
appearance.
Stop on way to Marseille
The idea developed slowly. At first, Van Gogh merely
wanted to go south, to a land of warmth and color.
Arles, in those days 16 hours by train from Paris,
was for him "an orientation" on the way to Marseille,
where once lived a painter-hero of Van Gogh's,
Adolphe Monticelli (1824-1886).
But Van Gogh never got to Marseille. The sleepiness
of Arles, which today persists despite an influx of
tourists, allowed him to think it was the haven of
comradeship and renewal he idealized Japan to be.
Working here he believed would somehow normalize the
strangeness of his personality.
Moreover, Van Gogh was an artist who rushed into
snow-covered fields to paint a day after his arrival, in
February. The proprietor of the now-vanished
Hotel-Restaurant Carrel, which was a five-minute walk from
the train station, had never seen anyone like him and
imposed a surcharge on Van Gogh because of the
accumulation of paintings. Van Gogh felt exploited,
so on May 1, he leased a small house (to become
famous as the Yellow House) back toward the station
and outside the walls of the old city. The building,
which was near greenery that has become so shrunken
as to barely accommodate the men who now
gather for lawn bowling, revived the dream of seeing
artists work together in happy community.
Yet his sojourn there was scarcely the idyll he had
imagined.
"The people of Arles hated him," said Yannick Dumont,
a receptionist at the Hotel Jules-Cesar, the
grandest hotel on the Boulevard des Lices, across
from the Public Gardens that now honors Van Gogh's
painting there with a monument. "They thought he was
crazy."
This was the opinion even of family members. Yet, as
art historians have later argued, few artists had as
highly developed a vision of self or of the
contemporary artist's mission. Van Gogh believed the vision
would be shared by other painters.
The imagined community needed a leader, but Van Gogh
felt his own artistic insecurity--he had not sold a
painting--precluded him from assuming that role. The
leader he chose was Gauguin, whom he and his art
dealer brother, Theo, had met in Paris. Like Van
Gogh, Gauguin was self-taught and an outsider.
However, being prone to idealization, it did not
occur to Van Gogh that Gauguin might have different aims
for art or that such aims would be, compared with his
own, relatively unformed.
Gauguin was the only artist to accept Van Gogh's
invitation to Arles--and he waited five months before
coming. He got to know Van Gogh through letters that
provided many ideas about art that were different
from his but many more he could use in articulating
his own personality. Besides, Theo was successful in
selling Gauguin's paintings.
The Studio of the South was for Van Gogh a communal
end point; for Gauguin it appeared as the
beginning of personal freedom.
Some see a humanist
"Van Gogh was a humanist," said Maite Duboquet, 80, a
former antiques dealer who has mounted a show
of reproductions of his work on two floors above her
tiny shop, close to Arles' Roman amphitheater. "He
was full of love," she said, while leafing through a
scrapbook including news photographs of her with
relatives of Van Gogh's and Gauguin's. "I am not [an
art] specialist but was the only person from Arles to
go to his grave on the centenary of his death, in
1990." She put on the shawl pictured in one of the
clippings. It was given her by the niece of Mme.
Ginoux, the cafe owner's wife who wears it in several of
Van Gogh's most famous paintings.
Gauguin was not interested in having his art appeal
to such common folk. Where Van Gogh admired the
compassion of Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875), the
French painter who specialized in scenes of agrarian
labor and domestic life, Gauguin looked to the
picture-making of Paul Cezanne, which was free from
sentiment. If that meant only a few people could
appreciate the abstract poetry of Gauguin's color and
line, that was fine with him.
With few exceptions, Van Gogh seldom painted in
Arles, preferring spots where the town turned into
country. So only a day after Gauguin's arrival on
Oct. 23--never mind he might be tired from more than 24
hours on trains--Van Gogh took him to the Crau, a
stony plain irrigated by canals, north and west of the
city.
Today the outskirts of town are built up with houses
of little architectural distinction. But after 40 minutes
on foot--as Van Gogh and Gauguin
traveled--settlements give way to a broad aisle of trees cutting through
grain fields. In the distance, high up, is
Montmajour, a ruined Romanesque abbey. The artists worked in
this landscape when it was flush with autumnal color.
Months before harvest time, the fields are an
electric yellow tinged with green that is closer than
one might think to the "expressionistic" color of Van
Gogh's paintings.
Gauguin usually preferred to explore a locale slowly,
not painting on site but making drawings he later
would use for canvases created in the studio. Van
Gogh worked directly from life in feverish exaltation.
This difference, which became central to the artists'
disagreement, showed itself on their first full day
together. But in small ways each accommodated the
other's ideas in his work, setting a pattern that kept
peace for some weeks thereafter.
Few buildings exist today that both men painted.
Their studio, called the Yellow House, vanished in 1944,
when the area in which it was located was bombed; an
all-night cafe they frequented disappeared years
later, eventually to make way for a Monoprix, a
low-priced department store. But the landscapes Van
Gogh favored survive in remarkably similar condition,
and the one in Arles where he took Gauguin on their
second week--the Roman burial grounds known as
Alyscamps--continues to be a tourist attraction.
One long alley is preserved. It's now vaulted over by
branches from the trees on either side that dapple the
light, blocking out all but tiny patches of sky. Near
the front is a stone arch; at the back, a church. In
between, just inside the trees, are sarcophagi set
end to end. Here the artists painted for four days. Van
Gogh did four views, one down the center looking each
way, two across the aisle from behind the trees.
Gauguin assayed only two, both fairly close to the
church, in and out of the alley.
All but one of the paintings--Gauguin's--depict
people walking. Van Gogh embedded anecdotes in his
works, showing people interacting, sometimes with
postures that indicate flirtation or romance. His
pictures additionally give a sense of place,
including even buildings and smokestacks of the nearby
railroad workshops. Gauguin, on the other hand, was
interested in form and color, style not content. To
that end, he shifted architectural elements, removed
all trace of the workshops and painted three women
only as a stylized cluster.
Mutual admiration
True to form, Van Gogh dashed off three of his
pictures at the site; Gauguin probably completed his in the
studio. So the difference in their working methods
continued. Still there was mutual admiration, and
occasionally each tried to draw upon, even imitate,
strengths of the other: Van Gogh working more
deliberately, Gauguin more spontaneously.
Van Gogh, who aimed to please his colleague more
often than Gauguin did, was the first to express
discomfort with a way of painting that was not
authentic to him. The feeling would eventually cause great
anxiety. By the fifth week, after much time together
in the studio--the weather was not always good and,
besides, they also did indoor portraits--Gauguin
expressed his hatred of the endless debates over
painting, as well as the people of Arles and the
landscape. The strength of their dislikes they apparently
revealed only in letters to friends or family.
Each then retrenched, boldly painting in the way to
which he was accustomed. Gauguin could embrace
typical Van Gogh subjects without sacrificing his
style; he became even more daring when focusing on
washerwomen along the diminutive Roubine du Roi
Canal, which Van Gogh once had broadened into a
great force of nature. But now Van Gogh lapsed into
old insecurities, made worse by news of the sale of
some Gauguin paintings. Thus arose a fear: Gauguin's
success would take him away to a Studio of the
Tropics, an idea Van Gogh had originated in their
conversations.
As the fear grew, Van Gogh began to tell Gauguin
stories of his life, heroes and belief in art as a
priesthood. He tried, in fact, to convert him. This
was the febrile Van Gogh in full force. And, as before,
Gauguin found much he could use in building a lofty
self-image. But it did not persuade him to stay, and
when the two decided to paint portraits of each
other, Gauguin depicted Van Gogh as a virtual monkey,
implying the inferiority of his attitudes.
Gauguin, after all, believed Van Gogh's paintings
were spontaneous outpourings, not the result of the
forethought he exercised and respected. "Without a
doubt, that man was crazy," he later wrote, and such
feelings began to be expressed as condescension. Van
Gogh reacted and wrote that the atmosphere
became "excessively electric." For the first time,
Gauguin sensed danger in Van Gogh's influence as well
as his person.
Finally, at the end of their eighth week together,
Van Gogh tore out a line from a local news account of a
murder. It read: "The murderer took flight."
According to Gauguin, Van Gogh put the sentence in
Gauguin's hand when he said he was leaving Arles.
Upon returning from a hotel the next morning, Gauguin
was arrested by the police because the house was
bloodied and Van Gogh unconscious.
The Studio of the South had ended. The consequences
of the severed ear had begun.
Van Gogh was taken to a hospital in Arles, which
today is a media center, bookstore and branch of the
University of Aix. Countless people visit as part of
a Van Gogh pilgrimage. Stones with his silhouette from
the destroyed canvas "The Road to Tarascon" are
embedded in the pavement directing visitors to some of
the sites he painted. They all have reproductions of
his pictures next to what inspired them.
"He was crazy, and we came to see the garden of the
hospital where he stayed," said two shy young
students from a neighboring town. But the garden in
the center of the former hospital is itself a
reproduction. "The City of Arles replanted the garden
from the painting and a detailed description in [one
of] Van Gogh's letters," said Andreas Worch, a
student of literature who works each summer in the
bookstore.
More re-created than original
This is better than what happened with the Langlois
Bridge, a subject Van Gogh addressed repeatedly.
Now it has been renamed for him and moved into the
midst of fields, on a canal so narrow the bridge
always has to be up. A grizzled fisherman glanced
toward it and said, "It's fake," though it's not. But apart
from a ruined windmill and staircase leading to a
modern bridge, every other structure he painted,
including the popular cafe on the Forum, is a
re-creation.
Where life once prompted art, art now influences life
in the city.
Gauguin left Arles on Christmas Day, 1888. He and Van
Gogh never met again, though they exchanged
letters and the latter nurtured the hope they might
once more work in tandem. Van Gogh took his own life
in Auvers-sur-Oise to the north of Paris two years
after they painted together. Gauguin went to the tropics
but founded no artists' cooperative. He lived 13
years longer than Van Gogh, and at the end of his natural
life, in the Pacific's Marquesas Islands, he was
attempting to secure a better place in the eyes of
colleagues by rewriting his part in the Arles story.
Though Gauguin was more successful as a working
artist than Van Gogh (who sold only one painting
during his life), both achieved worldwide fame only
after their deaths. Soon after the interlude in Arles, Van
Gogh was judged an epileptic. Even so, the legend of
the ear continued to have greater influence than any
medical explanation.
For more than a century, people have chosen to
believe that only a "poor lunatic" would go so far because
of fears and disagreements about painting.
Jeanne Calment, the Arlesienne who because of her
advanced age became the biggest celebrity here
since Van Gogh, did her part. As a teenager she had
met him, and almost until her death--in 1997, at
122--she enjoyed saying: He was "very ugly,
ungracious, impolite, sick. I forgive him. They called him
loco."
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A review of "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the
South" will appear in next Sunday's Arts &
Entertainment section.