The Yellow House

by Martin Gayford

  That signature, which he had used occasionally before and now did more frequently, was a private, rather rude pun. Pronounced in the French manner, “P. Go” came out as “pego,” which was naval slang for penis, so he was signing himself “the cock.”

  Barely had Gauguin received the invitation to exhibit with Les XX in Brussels than another arrived from—of all people—Edouard Dujardin of La revue indépendante. They, too, wanted him to exhibit, in the same show to which Vincent had previously been invited to send pictures. Here was an opportunity for revenge. His enemies were delivered into his hands!

  Gauguin might be bad at remembering names, but he certainly hadn’t forgotten the sneering remarks in Félix Fénéon’s review in that publication almost a year before in which he had been described as “grièche.” Nonetheless, Fénéon was an admirer of Gauguin’s work and had probably suggested this invitation.

  If Gauguin had surmised this, he didn’t care. He lost no time in composing an elaborately ironic letter of refusal to Dujardin. It was intended to sting. He was, he wrote, confused by the honor that they had done him by this invitation. His powers as an artist did not allow him to rival the extraordinary progress made by the pointillists, his work lacked “clarity and luminosity”—a recollection of past slighting criticisms. Therefore, he had decided to avoid all “publicity got up by groups.”

  In contrast, Gauguin wrote a short, polite letter of acceptance to Octave Maus, whose organization hadn’t insulted him and whose invitation was extremely welcome. Then he wrote in glee to Schuffenecker again, forgetting, in his excitement, that he had already told Schuff all about the invitation from Les XX in his previous letter. He enclosed a copy of his refusal to exhibit with La revue indépendante.

  “I would like to see those gentlemen’s faces when they read my letter,” Gauguin gloated, unthinkingly reminding Schuffenecker of the insult he had suffered. “They once wrote in their revue that I was a grièche artist, and I want at least to deserve that description.”

  Now that Gauguin’s career as an artist was rapidly gathering pace, his thoughts turned to the women in his life: his sister and his wife. He hoped that they would at last understand that he had been right all along.

  “I don’t know whether my success,” Gauguin mused, “has come to the ears of my charming sister.” He imagined that his sister Marie, with whom he had long ago fallen out, might be in Peru, attempting to get money out of their rich relations, the Tristan y Moscoso clan. In reality, poor Marie was in Germany making a slender income as a seamstress—an occupation to which Gauguin’s mother had briefly been reduced, considered only one step above prostitution.

  The other individual Gauguin ardently wished to know of his success was, of course, his Danish wife, Mette. Estranged though they were, he and Mette could not quite let go of each other, in part because Gauguin greatly loved his children, especially his daughter Aline. He and Mette exchanged letters, bristling with hurt feelings, with which they usually managed to offend each other, but even this irritable correspondence had now slowed to a trickle. And yet, Gauguin still imagined that his family might be reunited, with Mette admitting he had been wise after all. “My wife has not sent any news,” he complained to Schuffenecker:

  For 3 months I have had not a word from her. As soon as I have a little money from Van Gogh I will send it to her. And if as I hope one day I reach the point of supporting my family by painting we will see perhaps that I am right. In any case what does it matter? I get pleasure from plenty of other things, and it is into my art that all the warmth goes.

  In that last thought, once again, he seemed to echo Vincent, who felt that, to an artist, ecstasy was visual not sexual. “We painters,” he had written to Bernard, “must get our orgasms from the eye.” This was an aspect of the artist’s monastic life, an aesthetic compensation for the deprivation of physical love and comfort: “Anything complete and perfect renders infinity tangible, and the enjoyment of any beautiful thing is, like coitus, a moment of infinity.”

  Gauguin had learned this lesson. On a studio window in Paris in 1894, he wrote, “Ici faruru,” “Here we make love.” And in the remote Marquesas Islands, on the portal of his last house Gauguin carved the words “Maison du Jouir,” which meant House of Pleasure but could also mean that it was a “House of Orgasm.”

  Until he arrived in Arles, Gauguin’s sexual life had been far from flamboyant. Nobody really knew what he had got up to as a youthful sailor; much, much later he boasted of a romance with an opera singer in Rio de Janeiro on his first voyage at seventeen. But this had a fictional ring to it. Throughout the later 1870s and earlier 1880s, despite the frictions with Mette, he had apparently been a faithful husband and devoted father.

  Even after he had left his family in Copenhagen, his behavior had been surprisingly chaste. There were those rumors of an affair with Schuffenecker’s wife, Louise—but in Brittany the Scottish artist Archibald Hartrick related that Gauguin’s one cry then was, “Pas de femmes,” “No women.” He could be caustic about the amours of others, describing the fatter mistress of a fat painter as his “slop-bucket.”

  However, Gauguin was taking enthusiastically to those brothel visits. In doing so—as with the cooking and the homemade canvases—he was following Vincent’s script. All three plans—culinary, practical and amatory—were in the letters Vincent had written to Bernard which Gauguin himself had read attentively while still in Brittany.

  In a sense, to Vincent, all three were part of the household economy. Fundamentally, he thought of sexual intercourse and painting pictures as two competing ways in which energy could be directed: an occasional brothel visit kept the expenditure of energy on women to a frugal minimum. “Don’t fuck too much,” he exhorted Bernard in his direct Dutch way. “Your painting will be all the more spermatic.” He gave examples from the private lives of celebrated artists:

  If we want to be really potent males in our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to not fuck much, and for the rest be monks or soldiers, according to the needs of our temperament. The Dutch, once more, had peaceful habits and a peaceful life, calm, well regulated.

  This was exactly the advice Gauguin passed on to Schuffenecker: “Hygiene and coition—with that well regulated and independent work a man can manage.” Gauguin’s formula for a productive life—“Calm down, eat well, fuck well, work ditto and you will die happy”—was an echo of Vincent’s to Bernard.

  Reclining Nude, 1887

  Vincent sometimes advocated a degree of sexual moderation verging on abstention. Delacroix, for example, that master whom Vincent and Gauguin idolized, “did not fuck much, and only had easy love affairs, so as not to curtail the time devoted to his work.” It was precisely Degas’s detachment from sexual life that made his work “virile and impersonal.”

  There were, however, exceptions to this austere rule: painters who had such robust life-force that they could exert themselves in this way. “Rubens! Ah, that one! He was a handsome man and a good fucker, Courbet too. Their health permitted them to drink, eat, fuck…” And it seemed that Gauguin was one of this vigorous group.

  After all, he had fathered a family of five already. “He is physically stronger than we are,” Vincent informed Theo, “so his passions must be much stronger than ours.” But it was a different matter for those such as Vincent, Theo and Bernard whose health was more precarious and whose blood did not circulate so freely. Sexual intercourse was in any case an activity at which, as Vincent put it, “professional pimps and ordinary fools” excelled.

  There was a hint of defensive insecurity in that. In the summer Vincent had almost become impotent, he confessed, through exhaustion (though that seemed to pass). Was there also a touch of jealousy and disapproval in Vincent’s attitude to Gauguin’s feats in the brothel? He certainly seemed to disapprove of the extravagance involved.

  This, Vincent decided, was the one deficiency in Gauguin’s management of the domestic finances: a tendency to blow it all on “hygienic expen
ses”:

  While I am often absent-minded, preoccupied with aiming at the goal, he has far more money sense for each separate day than I have. But his weakness is that by a sudden freak or animal impulse he upsets everything he has arranged.

  So here was yet another, perhaps unspoken source of tension between the painters.

  Despite his energy-conservation theory of sexuality, Vincent felt sympathy for prostitutes as people. They were fellow misfits—just like painters, “exiled, outcast from society.” The whore, he preached to Bernard, “is certainly our friend and sister.”

  Gauguin came to agree. At the end of his life he wrote an essay, Against Marriage, in which he proclaimed that “‘woman’ who is after all our mother, our daughter, our sister, has the right to earn her living.” A woman, in Gauguin’s critique, was faced with three choices: she could marry, remain a virgin or she was forced to become “what is known as a fallen woman.” In that case, she was “brought down in the world and penned up in specially designated districts”—just like the women in Rue du Bout d’Arles.

  He had tried hard to make his own marriage work but it had proved incompatible with his urge to become a painter; Vincent had been told by Kee Vos-Stricker’s brother that his proposal of marriage would get nowhere without money. They were not the only ones for whom marriage had proved too difficult: many writers and artists of their generation—bohemians—experimented with unconventional relationships. Some of them were happy, some not.

  If the institution of marriage, Gauguin argued:

  which is nothing other than a sale, is the only one declared to be moral and acceptable for the copulation of the sexes, it follows that all those who do not want to or who cannot marry are excluded from that morality. There is no room left for love.

  Although brothels and prostitutes hadn’t played an important part in Gauguin’s life to date, they had in Vincent’s. For him, too, it was a question of either having a wife, children and happy domestic life or following the vocation of the artist. To be a painter was similar to being a priest or monk, with the exception that every couple of weeks you might go to the brothel in order to live a well-regulated, calm existence.

  This strange and contradictory pattern of reasoning—a rationalization of his own lonely state—did not prevent Vincent from having intense feelings of longing and regret for the wife and children he had never had. Many of the paintings of the next few weeks would concern this very matter: he was soon to depict a family.

  7. Musicians in Color

  November 23–December 4

  Towards the end of the week, the two painters went on another evening walk and saw a striking sunset. It was perhaps on Friday, November 23, a cool day on which the sky was almost clear. Once more they had walked over towards the Alpilles, on the road to Montmajour, but now the air was distinctly wintry as the two painters looked at the darkening heavens above them. It was a little before ten past five in the afternoon when the sun dipped behind the horizon.

  Again, Vincent described the sight to Theo: “Yesterday evening an extraordinarily beautiful sunset of a mysterious, sickly citron color—Prussian blue cypresses against trees with dead leaves in all sorts of broken tones without any speckling with bright greens.” And once more, both painters were given an idea for a picture.

  Later, Vincent looked back nostalgically on these shared evening strolls with Gauguin. Eighteen months on, shortly before he left Provence, he painted a picture, from memory, of two figures ambling along a road together in the gathering dusk. The moon has risen, there are stars in the sky, a cypress looms above them. A light is visible in a cottage window.

  On the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-fifth, in the large public gardens on the other side of Arles, the Société Philharmonique gave an open-air concert. The third piece performed was the march from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. It was chilly that day, and Vincent and Gauguin were too busy to attend, despite Vincent’s great interest in Wagner.

  Road with Cypress and Star, letter sketch

  He and Theo had been to several concerts of music by the German composer in Paris. This was of course by no means an unusual taste. The music of Wagner, who had died five years previously in Venice, had long been causing intense excitement and controversy. A movement known as Wagnerism had swept the artistic world, affecting not only other musicians but writers and even painters. During the summer Vincent had read an introduction, by Camille Benoit, to the life and thought of the great composer.

  Vincent was greatly struck by Wagner’s daring identification of music with religious faith, which the composer put in almost blasphemous terms, using the language of Christian worship:

  I believe in God, in Mozart and in Beethoven; I also believe in their disciples and apostles. I also believe in the sanctity of the spirit and in artistic truth whole and indivisible. I believe this art has a divine source, and that it lives in the heart of all men illuminated by celestial light.

  Wagner cast himself as a musical John the Baptist; others, he prophesied, would come afterwards and create the works of art of the future. Vincent predicted that a future artist would do with color what Wagner had done in sound: mix it in new and beautiful combinations that would soothe the mind and speak to the soul: “It will come.”

  The comparison of music and painting was more than just an analogy; many artists and writers believed it to be a profound truth. Indeed, they went further and believed that all the senses vibrated in harmony. The poet Baudelaire had written that “scents, colors and sounds all correspond.” Huysmans, an author Vincent revered, extended his musical feelings even to flavors. He had written in his novel Against Nature of a collection of liqueurs that was also a “mouth organ.” Each liqueur “corresponded with the sound of a particular instrument.” Dry curaçao, for instance, was like “the clarinet with its piercing, velvety note.”

  Vincent had discovered the laws of color while he was living in Nuenen and found them “unutterably beautiful.” Around the same time, excited by the analogies he now perceived between painting and Wagner’s music, he took lessons from the organist of St. Catherine’s Church in Eindhoven, a man called Vandersanden. These were not a success: Vincent continually compared musical chords with Prussian blue or cadmium yellow, so that the organist concluded that he was dealing with a madman.

  It is true that synaesthesia, experiencing one sensation in terms of another, can be found in those suffering from mental problems and those under the influence of hallucinogens. But if Vincent was mad in this respect, so were many other artists and musicians. Gauguin claimed that when he looked at a Delacroix, he had “the same feelings as after reading something.” When he heard a Beethoven quartet, “I leave the hall with colored images that vibrate in the depths of my soul.”

  Cézanne, Gauguin declared, seemed to be a pupil of César Franck’s: “He is always playing the organ.” His work wasn’t just polychromatic, it was polyphonic.

  In Arles, enthusiasts for the new sport of velocipede-riding were increasing day by day, the two-wheel bicycle proving more popular than the tricycle. The town had its own velocipede shop—Fabre in Rue de Grand-Clar—which sold and rented the machines. Free lessons were offered. There was talk of starting a velocipede club.

  Meanwhile, in Paris there was another visible sign of the rapid modernization of the world. Every day that Theo looked out over Paris from his apartment in Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower was a little taller. Soon it would be completed for the great Paris World Fair that was to be held the following year, 1889. Theo wrote about this amazing futuristic structure to the youngest Van Gogh brother, Cornelius.

  Earlier Vincent had thought of showing fifty radiant paintings from Arles at the Great Exhibition. Gauguin was actually to exhibit there. When Gauguin looked at Eiffel’s massive structure, he saw the future, “a sort of gothic lacework of iron.” “This exhibition,” he proclaimed, “is the triumph of iron, not only with regard to machines but also with regard to architecture.” But where was the art to match it?<
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  Of course both Gauguin and Vincent were working to create just that: the painting of the future. In his book Sartor Resartus, Carlyle had a beautiful image for this process. As old beliefs and images crumbled and vanished, “organic filaments of the New mysteriously spun themselves into being.” That was precisely what was happening in the Yellow House: new images, novel ways of seeing the world were emerging out of nothingness.

  Now Vincent made a fresh attempt to paint the subject that stood in his mind for the planting of a new world: the Sower. Its meaning derived from one of the parables of Christ. The sower cast his seed on the land. Some was eaten by birds; some fell on stony ground; but some fell on good ground and that “brought forth fruit: some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.”

  The notion of the possibility of transformation, both artistic and personal, still lay at the center of Vincent’s thought and effort. It could be thought of as growth from a seed. He had written about this very analogy the previous year to his sister Wil, paraphrasing the parable: “In nature many flowers are trampled underfoot, frozen or scorched, and for that matter not every grain of corn returns to the soil after ripening to germinate and grow into a blade of corn.” But people were like grains of corn:

  In every human being who is healthy and natural there is a germinating force, just as there is in a grain of corn. And so natural life is germination. What the germinating force is to the grain, love is to us.

  Some people, some ideas, fell on fertile ground; Vincent was never to know to what an amazing extent that was true of his own work.

  The metaphor of germination meant an enormous amount to Vincent, perhaps partly because of the extraordinary, still unfolding, transformations of his own life from art dealer into preacher into painter. He also hoped for the remaking of human life into something which would escape the bitter suffering that seemed too often to be the lot of mortal men and certainly of Vincent van Gogh. Art was a way of imagining a future world. The Sower was a symbol of resurrection.