The Odd Couple

I

Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh are linked in the history of art if only because, in the autumn of 1888, they lived and worked together for a few weeks in Arles, France. When Van Gogh invited Gauguin to share the yellow house in town that he was decorating, he imagined they would not only make a life together but establish precedent for an artists’ community:

“Let us screw up our courage for the success of our enterprise,” he wrote, “and get to thinking that you are in the right place here, for I verily believe that all this will last a long time.” It didn’t. From the outset, the men quarreled and soon fell into mutual distrust. However it was not only a personality rupture that drove each to the edge of madness. There were aesthetic reasons as well.

The 1880s in France were a baffling time and place for artists. The conflicts that erupted between Van Gogh and Gauguin were precipitated in large measure by the disorderly state of the avant-garde, which had lost any common objective. The seminal Impressionists of the 1870s were squabbling and, in time, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, and Degas would each go his own way and their loosely defined style would become the province of art historians.

The charisma of Impressionism had been its faith in optical intuition and, as a movement, it hit with the impact of an underground coup. Though renegade, it was also infectious. By the early 1880s many academic painters had taken up the impressionist brush-stroke and palette. Its small demand on drawing and brush skills made it an easy style to adopt. Renoir in the early 1880s would lament that he had exploited Impressionism to its limit only to find that he could no longer draw or paint. Eventually the commercialism of the style, its tenderhearted subject matter and lack of formal authority exposed its aesthetic weaknesses.

Not until 1878 did Gauguin seriously take up painting as a pupil of Camille Pissarro--not finding his style until nearly a decade later, in 1886, the year that Van Gogh went to Paris after several years of painting in his native Holland. By then more than 20 years had passed since Manet assaulted the public with his “Olympia,” and 14 years had passed since Manet sold 51,000 francs worth of paintings in one sale and had a canvas acclaimed at the Salon. Impressionism--what began as a valiant art in the 1860s and early 1870s, so shocking to the bourgeoisie and feeding daily rations to critics--was beginning to look rather bourgeois itself, and any painter with avant-garde aspiration who entered into this world in the 1880s, as Gauguin and Van Gogh did, discovered an art divorced from any political, moral or experimental agenda.

Impressionism, having become an art of untroubled realism, was not endurable by modernist artists who felt impelled to be more than picture painters. Van Gogh and Gauguin’s predicament in 1888 involved much more than their personal psychology. Theirs was a crisis at the root of which was the fact that the reality of art all around them was not a reality into which they could fit themselves as artists.

By 1888, Van Gogh and Gauguin had left Paris to live in Arles and Brittany, respectively. They found greater meaning for themselves and for their canvases among farmers and villagers than in urban life. They also discovered in these rural settings--as did other painters at that time--a religious compass to guide them and their art. Gauguin was raised a Catholic. Van Gogh was Protestant. Both were messianic. Yet they did not attend church, didn’t pray and most likely gave only occasional thought to a heaven or hell.

Van Gogh’s heaven was infinity, not a place of reward for the faithful; he believed in redemption within himself and found this image in the life of a Buddhist monk. Gauguin would find his redemption in the life of alienated renegades, including Satan. Each man turned to religion as a refuge from a world filled with mundane realities; in religious imagery theycould embrace mysteries and act out fantasies.

Van Gogh and Gauguin were no more religious than Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt or Caravaggio, nor were they illustrators of religious incidents. One knows Jesus, the Virgin, the saints and the martyrs through artists’ eyes. Without such imagery, these individuals would have names but no material presence; they would be like ghosts without sheet covers. But Van Gogh and Gauguin rendered themselves in the images of their revered deities. In “Christ in the Garden of Olives” of 1889, Gauguin pictures himself as Christ bent over by his sorrow; his head droops, his hands fall listlessly. Behind him, a dead tree whose branch twists strangely back so that it falls horizontally across another branch, forming a cross. In the background Judas points out the victim to a soldier, while over-all an unseen force causes trees and grasses to bend as if by a great wind. The total mood is of capitulation to suffering. In time, Gauguin would associate Jesus’ sorrows with the maltreatment of the savage. In his state of suffering Christ would represent a by-product of civilization, a residue of alienation and pain.

Van Gogh’s Christ is more obscure; perhaps he is the “Sower” in his painting by that name, perhaps in other paintings he is the sunflower or the writhings of cypress trees. The importance lies not in literal identification but in understanding that Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s imagery is not distinct from who they are. It is at once the artist and the art, like fetishes that are simultaneously spirit and image.

Now compare the self-portraits the two men exchanged just before they moved in together in Arles. Gauguin casts himself in the role of a literary figure, the venerated outlaw Jean Valjean. “I believe,” he writes, “it is one of my best efforts, absolutely incomprehensible so abstract is it.” Describing this portrait to a fellow painter Emile Schuffenecker, he itemizes each contrivance: the features of the face like the flowers of a Persian carpet, the color remote from nature; childish nosegays dotting the wall transforming the room into the chamber of a pure young girl. His cynical glance, emanating from his flower-like eyes, dares the viewer to penetrate the mystery. This is no longer optical impressionism but delusional insight into states of mind with which reality cannot cope.

The portrait that Van Gogh prepared was equally mysterious. He described it at length in a letter to his brother Theo: “At last I have the opportunity to compare my painting with that of my friend. My portrait, which I am sending to Gauguin in exchange, holds its own. I have written to him that I too had enlarged my personality. I conceived it as that of a simple worshiper of the eternal Buddha. And when I put Gauguin’s portrait and my own side by side, mine is as grave as his but less despairing.” Van Gogh’s self-portrait is as stark as Gauguin’s is ornamented. Ash-colored and skeletally outlined, it pushes out from a greenish background as if denying the greenness. The head is close-shaven, the eyes slanted and set in bony Mongol ridges; the skin yellowish beneath its translucent paleness.

II

In “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art,” a book of sensitive insight and generous erudition, Debora Silverman, who holds the University of California president’s chair in modern European history, art and culture at UCLA, argues that Van Gogh and Gauguin tried to discover a new and modern form of sacred art to fill the void left by the religious system they were eager to abandon. Though not the first to take this approach, Silverman brings to her case an alternative and more rigorous approach. Her text is well reasoned and crafted with analytical skill. She focuses on the link between subjectivity and the sacred that she believes ties Van Gogh and Gauguin to the same post and each to his art. Van Gogh and Gauguin “divinized” nature, she correctly says, and they divinized themselves. She describes their common bond as Christ’s Passion. For Gauguin, the sacred fires fueled a self-immolating creativity mobilized as a model of Christ’s singularity and martyrology. For Van Gogh, the sacred light was self-sacrifice to nature and community. For Gauguin, Christ was a singular martyr; for Van Gogh, he was a laborer, consoler and commentator.

Silverman contrasts first Van Gogh’s “Sower” with Gauguin’s “Vision After the Sermon,” a comparison that shows how each projected religion symbolically onto his canvases and exposed the religious legacies that had shaped them. Gauguin, she says, denaturalized nature in a flight to metaphysical mystery, while Van Gogh naturalized divinity in an attempt to make tangible what he believed was the ungraspable infinite.

And she concludes that their connection at Arles did not result in a unified vision any more than their incompatible temperaments could sustain a friendship. The enmity that resulted from their living together can be attributed to the irreconcilability of their religious cultures and mental frameworks that implied radically different conceptions of the status of the self, the value of imagery and the meaning of the visible world. They had different religious backgrounds against which their differences stood out.

When Gauguin joined Van Gogh at Arles in October 1888, he was shown to the guest room that Van Gogh had prepared for him, a room more elegant than others in the house and dubbed by Van Gogh “the lady’s boudoir.” Their life together, at first almost dull in its regularity and dedication to painting, became increasingly volatile. Discussion fired into argument and into criticism of each other’s work that bordered on personal attack. “Vincent and I agree very little indeed in general, and especially in painting,” Gauguin wrote to their mutual colleague Emile Bernard. “He likes my paintings very much, but while I am making them he always thinks that I am wrong here, that I am wrong there. He is romantic and I am rather inclined toward a primitive state.” And Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, “Our discussions are terribly electric. And sometimes we come out of it with tired heads, like an electric battery after discharge.”

Van Gogh was at first taken in by Gauguin’s personality, but his suspicions were easily waylaid by an openhearted appreciation of his friend’s charisma: “I know well that Gauguin had made sea voyages, but I did not know that he was a regular mariner. He has passed through all the difficulties and has been a real able seaman and a true sailor. This gives me an awful respect for him and a still more absolute confidence in his personality.”

Still, his respect soon became tainted with less savory emotions. He saw Gauguin as an aggressively sexual figure, an image that may have activated deep fears about his own manhood. Although rugged in appearance and inclination, Van Gogh had very little control over his emotional spectrum. Only in his art could he impose order upon his emotional outpourings.

As the weeks passed, Van Gogh’s behavior (according to Gauguin) became more and more erratic. Moments of extreme rambunctiousness would alternate with periods of dour silence, and on several occasions Gauguin awakened to find Van Gogh standing over his bed, staring down upon him. After dinner at the close of another nightmarish day, Gauguin had left the house for a walk by himself when he heard a rush of footsteps behind him. As he turned he saw Van Gogh rush toward him with an open razor in his hand. “My look at that moment must have had great power in it, for he stopped and, lowering his head, set off running toward home.”

Choosing not to follow him, Gauguin took a room at a hotel and remained there overnight. The next morning, when he entered the square, he found himself in the midst of an excited crowd and heard the story of his companion’s activities of the preceding night. Vincent had returned to the house and cut off the lower portion of his ear. After staunching the flow of blood with towels and pulling a beret over his head, he walked to the local brothel, where he presented a girl named Rachel with an envelope containing his severed ear, carefully washed.

“Take this in remembrance of me,” he is reported to have said. He then went back home and to sleep. Returning to the house, Gauguin was confronted by the chief of police, who informed him that Van Gogh was dead and intimated that he was a prime suspect in the murder. On finding that his friend still lived, Gauguin instructed the police official to awaken him with great care, “and if he asks for me, tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal to him.” Gauguin’s next act was to send a telegram summoning Theo to Arles.

In December, the last month of his cohabitation with Gauguin, Van Gogh made two unusual paintings, one of Gauguin’s chair, another of his own. His chair--the picture of which he called “The Day”--is of plain wood with a straw seat, straight-backed and without armrests; its character homely and sturdy, a country chair fit for hard use--on its seat, an unlit pipe and a bit of tobacco on a pouch. The chair stands on plain reddish floor tiles. Behind it, against the wall, is a bin of onions; the signature “Vincent” inscribed on its front.

A remarkable contrast is Van Gogh’s rendering of Gauguin’s chair--ornate and theatrically decorative; its high curved back tapering into graceful curved limbs; the seat, plush and rounded, covered with green rush or straw; on the seat a burning candle in a holder stands before two closed books. An exotic carpet of muted reds and greens provides contrast with the deep green wall; in the upper left corner a lamp casts a yellow glow. Vincent titled this canvas “Effect of Night.”

III

In her introduction, Silverman writes that she doesn’t want to deepen the social, political and psychological elements proposed by other writers but instead expand the cultural ground left underemphasized in other interpretations of Gauguin and Van Gogh. She excludes psychoanalysis in favor of more terrestrial considerations, and her discussions of individual works by Gauguin and Van Gogh depend largely on the search and discovery of sources for their beliefs and actions in books they read or from their religious education.

At times, Silverman’s empathy for these painters leads her to stray from the facts. She has Van Gogh inducing Gauguin to Arles by reminding him that it was the sylvan land of the poet Petrarch, but she does not give the reader Petrarch’s assessment of Arles as the sewer where all of the Earth’s impurities assembled. Positioned on the navigable Rho^ne River between Marseilles and Avignon, Arles was known in the 1880s as a port of carnality and was as famous for its seedy brothels as for its hearty bouillabaisse, and the village and farm folk were a tough lot that did not take kindly to Van Gogh. Picasso’s friend, William Uhde, who saw the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” in Picasso’s studio in 1907, uttered a slip of the tongue some years later when he referred to the whores in the picture as “Arlesiennes.”

When introducing Gauguin, Silverman says he was a regular at the Cafe de la Nouvelle-Athenes on Paris’ Place Pigalle where he joined Manet, Degas, Renoir and Pissarro for evening discussions. The truth is he was rarely there, and when he was, he didn’t fit in. The only document suggesting he went to the cafe is a letter to Pissarro written in the summer of 1881, with Gauguin saying, “There is a theory I’ve heard you profess, that to paint it is absolutely necessary to live in Paris in order to keep up with ideas. No one would say so at this moment when not you but the rest of us wretches are going to the Cafe Nouvelle-Athenes to be roasted while you are not faced with anything except living as a hermit.”

Still bourgeois, fully employed as a financial manager and hardly more than an amateur artist--still painting like the pastoral Pissarro--Gauguin was not up to discussions with such urbane and sophisticated artists as Degas and Manet, who had more than 20 years of art world experience behind them. Both disliked Gauguin and would never reconcile their negativity. Renoir didn’t trust him. Of lesser intellectual acumen than the regulars, Monet and Renoir were only occasionally at the Nouvelle-Athenes, while the rustic Pissarro dropped in perhaps once a month--Cezanne and Sisley, never. Other than Manet and Degas, the regulars were intellectuals and writers, including Edmond Duranty, Paul-Armand Silvestre, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Ary Renan, and sometimes George Moore.

The reader is also told that Gauguin was invited to exhibit in all five of the Impressionist exhibitions from 1879 onward, as if he was a welcome addition to the group. Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Renoir and Sisley abstained from exhibiting that year, allowing a shoo-in for a roster of mediocre talents: Adolphe-Felix Cals, Ludovic Piette, Henry Somm, Albert Lebourg, Frederico Zandomenegli, whose names hardly register today in anyone’s mind. Gauguin’s name does not appear on any of the lists proposing artists for the show--not on Gustave Caillebotte’s, Degas’ or Pissarro’s. Only at the last minute and against the wishes of most of the 16 exhibitors, a small sculpture and a few of his watercolors were included hors catalogue, meaning not included in the catalog.

In the 1880 exhibition, the Impressionist line was just as thin, with Manet, Morisot, Renoir, Sisley and Cezanne refusing to show. Gauguin managed to get in on Pissarro’s insistence, to the disgust of Degas, who had his own acolytes to promote. When planning was underway for the 1881 show, Caillebotte made up a list and passed it to Pissarro (they were the only two painters still interested in a group exhibition). At the end of his suggestion-list, Caillebotte appended, “Gauguin, if you wish,” apparently feeling he might offend Pissarro who would support his disciple against Degas’ shouting that he would withdraw if Gauguin were included. In 1882, Renoir protested Gauguin’s attendance, saying he was an anarchist committed to a radical view of Impressionism--a renegade he would indeed soon become.

So it was not, as Silverman says, that the Impressionists welcomed Gauguin to exhibit with them. He was tolerated because he was earning a huge salary and willing to buy pictures. He was included in the exhibitions by default because major figures had withdrawn. Works by him and a few others were needed to help cover the walls.

Anecdotal life histories fill out knowledge of an artist’s character and contribute to biographies, but they are of little value to formal art history if the artist and the artist’s art are not one and the same. In the case of both Van Gogh and Gauguin, one might as well follow Gauguin’s statement: “So you want to know who I am? What if you do see me quite naked? The work of the man is an explanation of the man.”

Can that be reversed to say that explanations of the man explain the man’s work? In the case of Van Gogh and Gauguin, one might say yes, at least to the degree that the work cannot be understood without knowing the artist. Put an armadillo on an Arctic iceberg and it won’t take long to see that individual disposition and environment cannot be isolated one from the other. To take the analogy one step further, there is a limit to the conclusion you can draw if you rely on secondary sources alone: You may know everything about the armadillo and everything about an iceberg, but you’ll never know the circumstances that put them together.

On entering into such textual and linear comparisons, one gets trapped in a mire of cause and effect, and art history becomes a history of explanation. Influence need not be explained as directional. Art historians start with conclusions and then find evidence to support them. Conclusions attract evidence as flowers attract bees.

For instance, in her analysis of Van Gogh’s “La Berceuse,” Silverman draws a simple yet hardly tenable conclusion. The painting is a portrait of a woman acquaintance, Mme. Roulin, holding the rope handle of a cradle that we don’t see. It is an image to which Silverman ascribes great religious significance, seeing in the seated woman a Madonna. That this makes sense to her--with the fact that Arles’ public culture featured handmade creches during the holidays--does not necessarily make it Van Gogh’s objective.

In addition, although Van Gogh read Ernest Renan’s 1863 “Vie de Jesus” (“Life of Jesus”), a book which stressed a religion of humanity and an activist Christ, it seems difficult to believe, as Silverman does, that he would never have been the artist he was had he not read the book. She assigns Renan the role of Gauguin’s mentor as well, saying that, at least in part, Renan, “who presents heart-rendering details of Christ’s agonies,” was responsible for Gauguin’s “Christ in the Garden of Olives.”

Similarly, she attributes Van Gogh’s practice of exchanging paintings with Gauguin to a literary source. She writes, “Van Gogh absorbed from his reading, probably from a text he admired--Louis Gonse’s 1886 ‘L’Art japonais’--the idea that Japanese artists exchanged their work as gifts.” Yet artists of every nationality have exchange gifts with friends. Zola had a collection of artists’ gifts. Cezanne exchanged gifts with Pissarro, Monet with Renoir. Why attribute this idea to a book?

While these may seem small points--and indeed a degree of interpretive license makes for good reading--they suggest a style of scholarship which undermines Silverman’s main argument. This is most apparent in her consideration of Gauguin.

Silverman attributes the primary source of Gauguin’s imagery to Bishop Felix Dupanloup’s six-volume “De l’Education,” published between 1853 to 1866. She transfers, indeed implants, those books to Gauguin’s mind, justified by the fact that as a child Gauguin was trained in a junior seminary school where Dupanloup’s ideas dominated the pedagogy.

When Gauguin turned 11 in 1859, he was enrolled as a boarder in the Catholic School annexed to the Petit Seminaire in the village of La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin near Orleans. He remained there until 17, when he signed up for maritime service. Silverman proposes that just about everything Gauguin thought and painted as an adult resulted from indoctrination endured over his preteen and early teenage years in this school. She tells us that Dupanloup forewarned the young Gauguin of an earthy existence fundamentally grounded in suffering, sorrow and a dolorous reckoning with sin. He promoted idealist anti-naturalism, inwardness and imagination while emphasizing a transgressive human nature and the need to cultivate interior vision in order to subordinate the operation of sensory sight to the experience of divine light. Yet the only recollections of Gauguin’s junior schooling in his own words are in his journal “Avant et apres”--which dates from 1902, the year before his death--in which Gauguin says that at the seminary school, he “learned to distrust everything contrary to my instincts, heart and reason, and also formed the habit of concentrating on myself.”

Silverman interprets Gauguin’s paintings as indelibly stamped by the religious values absorbed at the seminary school. That Gauguin thought to have his canvas, “Vision After the Sermon,” hung in a church at Pont-Aven can be attributed, Silverman says, to the activities he participated in as a boy, such as adorning the Saint-Mesmin chapel at his boarding school on saints’ and other holidays.

Silverman associates Gauguin’s interrogatories in his painting “From where do we come? What are we? Where are we going?,” painted in Polynesia in 1897 when Gauguin was 50, with the structure of Dupanloup’s catechism as a breakdown of questions and answers, such as “Does the soul die?” answered by “Immortality of the soul is proven by the goodness of God.” But interrogatory as a structure of discourse has ancient roots and was a routine in pedagogical discourse then as today. The life-cycle triad of birth, life and death as existentially contemplated had been a romantic commonplace in French thought long before Dupanloup’s pedagogy.

By dipping into a subject’s childhood to explain adult impulses, Silverman ignores Gauguin’s maturing vision, as well as the long history of artists who painted for the church. It also ignores Gauguin’s direct experience over the many months he spent in Brittany, where he became familiar with the customs and daily life of countryfolk.

In writing about Van Gogh, Silverman writes persuasively of how particular elements of Dutch theology infused him with critical resources for modulating the traditional modes of veneration and piety and for divinizing nature and naturalized divinity. This occurred along the lines of the modern Dutch theology that he had studied in Holland. He himself clarified the transposition, saying in a letter, “People nowadays no longer believe in fantastic miracles, no longer believe in a God who capriciously and despotically flees from one thing to another, but feel more respect and admiration for faith in nature.” In this sense, the artist performs a unique role as an agent of revelation, approximating, as she says, the power of Christ. Van Gogh’s displeasure with Gauguin came to the surface when Gauguin identified himself with Christ. But this sort of material leads to psychological depths, to which Silverman is reluctant to descend.

IV

“Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art” is, nonetheless, a remarkably fine book. No one after reading its informative and well-crafted prose will escape having his or her understanding of these artists overhauled. It took better than half a century for the mythical Gauguin of Somerset Maugham’s 1919 “Moon and Sixpence” to be amended by academic labor. Similarly, as the image of Kirk Douglas’ Van Gogh in the movie “Lust for Life” passes with time, we can try to capture the reality. The retelling of the lives of these out-of-the-ordinary painters has continued but with enhanced documentation allowing the myths to undergo regular refurbishing. Silverman has offered yet another refurbished Gauguin and Van Gogh, reconstituted by facts while still shrouded in myth.

She is at her best when explaining the artists’ working principles and the stage sets on which they performed. Biographical text is set off from pictorial analyses, and both are separated from her analyses of the materials and techniques that, like the brush strokes of the Impressionists and Cezanne, participate in the imagery. Still, at times in her analyses of pictures and their contexts, she says too much. Her sensitivity to Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s paintings is impressive. At times Silverman is overly empathetic, but her self-investment in her subjects yields returns as acuity of perception.

Gauguin and Van Gogh were indeed remarkable men and artists. They withdrew from normal society in order to find themselves, which entailed creating themselves and art that justified itself. Their models were those whose lives were ordained for sacrifice and death, and they eradicated themselves in their hero’s image. They each bore their cross up their own Gethsemane, and nailed themselves to it, leaving behind few that mourned their passing.