Bad Dog

Dear brother,

I feel what Pa and Ma instinctively think about me (I don’t say reasonably).

There’s a similar reluctance about taking me into the house as there would be about having a large, shaggy dog in the house. He’ll come into the room with wet paws — and then, he’s so shaggy. He’ll get in everyone’s way. And he barks so loudly. In short — it’s a dirty animal.

Letter to Theo van Gogh, 1883

Listen. I’ve had some terrible dates. Cheap, loud talkers, aggressive gropers, who conveniently forgot that they were married; men who stole my valued prints (I could not afford paintings.) as well as precious years of my net life ( but that’s on me.) So I’m not an expert, but I am certainly not - well, I probably am - some babe in the woods when it comes to “regrettable dates.” I have said “yes” to many things I should have not. But even I would not have dated van Gogh. He was a loon, a ginger, a drooling deadbeat, who, on a “good day” dressed poorly, bathed rarely, followed women into their own houses and, God in heaven, sucked the paint right off his brushes. In his entire life he sold exactly one painting for the equivalent of $80.00 in 1888, which was then resold in 1905 for $10,000, and today would be worth. . . .well, let’s just say the last painting of his that sold, twenty eight years ago, sold for 92 million, which, with inflation, would be worth at least 152 million today, and that was twenty eight years ago. Today, it would easily sell for at least 400 - 500 million more. Not bad, I’d say, for a drooling paint sucker.

And that is because? Well, easy, really. No one else in the world has ever - ever - painted like van Gogh. He “followed his bliss,” in a manner of speaking. His bliss was inscrutable to fairly everyone else in the room - but even they acknowledged (especially his literally, supportive brother, Theo, an art dealer in Paris) his incredible talent. And that was his ability to “naturalize divinity” through his stone cold confidence in the power of color and his singular longing to translate the infinite. And, incredibly, he actually succeeded. To see even one van Gogh painting in the most crowded museum is to feel the stillness that clings to you inside a shrine. He was interested genuinely in materializing the divine and he felt certain that his process of revealing it was right. He really believed, “the radiance and vibration of coloring offers something of the eternal” . . . It’s just that any other method of expressing himself was, for all who encountered him, an embarrassing mess.

He got fired from so many jobs that, by the age of twenty five, he didn’t even try to work any more. He just “borrowed” money, every month and sometimes twice a month, from his compassionate younger brother, Theo. And the reason that he kept getting fired was that he refused to do any-thing that he was asked. He was offended! Once, when he was thirty, unemployed, and living with his parents, he wrote to Theo, explaining how his father, who had already tried to have him involuntarily committed to an insane asylum, was trying to kick him out of the house again because he was unwashed, unrepentant, and most offensively of all, Catholic (His father was a Protestant pastor). He said to Theo, “Well, I won’t!.” He said, “I don’t like his tone!” Yet he was clearly articulate, thoughtful, and naturally poetic. Truthfully, his letters could be considered “found poems”. He was a rare and miraculous hothouse flower. Until he wasn’t. When he started to have one of his “fits,” he was as crazy as a tick. He was absolutely mortifying. His neighbors in Arles, Provence, presented their petition to a judge to have him sent to an insane asylum because, among other things:

“. . .In my capacity of manager of the house resided in by the said Vincent Van Goghe, I had occasion yesterday to talk with him and to observe that he has become insane, because his conversation is incoherent and his reason wandering. Further, I have heard that this man is given to touching the women who live in the neighbourhood; he has similarly assured that they no longer are even safe in their homes, because he enters their houses”
Or “. . . The said Van Goghe, who lives in the same quarter as me has for some time become increasingly mad; also everyone is frightened in the neighbourhood. Women especially no longer feel safe because he is given to touching them and makes obscene remarks in their presence. In my case, I was seized by the waist in front of Madame B.'s shop by this individual the day before yesterday, Monday, and lifted in the air.”

So, for the record, he was creepy and incontinent as well as during this period (1888 - 1890) doing his absolutely most astonishing work. Like, for example, La Berceuse, (which he translated as “the lullaby, or “she who rocks the cradle.”) The image, of which van Gogh made five versions, was begun before he was committed to the asylum at San Rémy, but not finished until January or March 1889, during his confinement. By that point, he had regained his sanity, and calmly described it in a letter to Theo:

“It is a woman dressed in green (olive green bust and pale Veronese skirt). Her hair is all orange and plaited. The color of the face is done in chrome yellow. with, of course, broken tones to give a natural look to it. The hands that hold the rope to rock the cradle are the same color. . . .”

Van Gogh conceived La Berceuse as a response to a story that Gauguin had told him - yes, that Gauguin, the Tahiti guy with syphilis, who lived at that time with van Gogh, fought with van Gogh, and, most famously when van Gogh sliced off his ear, hopped on the next train that was heading out of town. However, he had previously regaled van Gogh with a story of “the Icelandic fishermen, exposed to all the dangers, alone on the sad sea.” Inspired by this, van Gogh wanted:

“ . . .to paint a picture in such a way that sailors who are at once children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of their Icelandic fishing boat would have that old sense of being rocked come over them and remember their own lullabies.”

In fact, he envisioned it as a sacred triptych, surrounded by panels of sunflowers on each side,. . . as a consolational painting and any resemblance to his own desolate life, “alone on a sad sea” was, surely, . . . a coincidence.

Because, in the end, his death was, to all, a death foretold. He knew as well as anyone that this painting as much as every other painting he had done would be going to Paris, where it wasn’t going to sell. I mean, of course, it would have been nice. There is such a thing as validation and dignity. But in some quiet place in his brain, van Gogh knew well enough what his art would be worth:

“I cannot help it if my paintings do not sell. But the time will come when people realize that they are worth more than the cost of the paint.”

And at that point, although his output of paintings was increasingly furious, van Gogh was aware that he was painting for his death. He had realized, alone, on the “sad sea of life,” that his oeuvre was more salable dead than alive. And so in 1890, after committing himself once again to the asylum at San Rémy, after realizing that Theo, his brother, his closest confidante and, of course, financier, now had different priorities with his wife and new child, van Gogh made one last move, to Auvers-sur-Oise, a town north of Paris, where he painted his last color-drenched paintings of wheat fields and flowers. And, somewhat more ominously, of wheat fields and crows. In June 1890, about one month before he shot himself in the chest, he painted a portrait of Dr. Gachet. In a letter, he described it to his sister Wilhelmien:

“So the face of Dr. Gachet shows you a face the colour of an overheated brick, and scorched by the sun, with reddish hair and a white cap, surrounded by rustic scenery with a background of blue hills; . . .”
“ . . . his clothes are ultramarine - this brings out the face and makes it paler, notwithstanding the fact that it is brick-coloured. His hands, the hands of an obstetrician, are paler than the face.”
“Before him, lying on a red garden table, are yellow novels and a foxglove flower of a somber blue hue.”

***Portrait of Dr. Gachet 1890, Oil on Canvas***

He was an artist, a genius, and, indelibly, a poet. As Thoreau has said, “All men lead lives of quiet desperation,” but his was a comet that roared through the sky. If I had met him, would I have dated him? It’s pretty exciting to live in that world. I know. I have, but no. He was also a ginger and totally broke. I’d like to think I might have overlooked the paint-sucking, but then - I’m almost positive - I would have pushed him away.