I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green.
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ResetNeither Gauguin nor Bernard has written to me again. I believe that Gauguin doesn’t give a damn, seeing that it isn’t happening right away, and for my part, seeing that Gauguin has been managing anyway for 6 months, I’m ceasing to believe in the urgent need to come to his assistance.
Is it true, as I think in moments when I’m in a good mood, that what is alive in art, and eternally alive, is first the painter and then the painting? Well, what difference does that make — but if one sees people working it’s still something one doesn’t find under glass in museums.
As long as we were preparing the way for richer lives for the painters who will walk in our footsteps, that would already be something.
Because instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily in order to express myself forcefully. Well, let’s let that lie as far as theory goes, but I’m going to give you an example of what I mean. I’d like to do the portrait of an artist friend who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because that’s his nature. This man will be blond. I’d like to put in the painting my appreciation, my love that I have for him. I’ll paint him, then, just as he is, as faithfully as I can — to begin with. But the painting isn’t finished like that. To finish it, I’m now going to be an arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the blond of the hair, I come to orange tones, chromes, pale lemon. Behind the head — instead of painting the dull wall of the mean room, I paint the infinite. I make a simple background of the richest, most intense blue that I can prepare, and with this simple combination, the brightly lit blond head, against this rich blue background achieves a mysterious effect, like a star in the deep azure.
Well, I know that one shouldn’t be discouraged because utopia isn’t coming about. It’s just that I find that what I learned in Paris is fading, and that I’m returning to my ideas that came to me in the country before I knew the Impressionists. And I wouldn’t be very surprised if the Impressionists were soon to find fault with my way of doing things, which was fertilized more by the ideas of Delacroix than by theirs.
There’s no better or shorter way to improve my work than to do figures. Also, I always feel confidence when doing portraits, knowing that that work is much more serious — that’s perhaps not the word — but rather is the thing that enables me to cultivate what’s best and most serious in me.
I’ve received a letter from Gauguin in which he talks about painting and complains about not yet having the money needed to come here — but nothing new or different.
Ah... Rembrandt.... all admiration for Baudelaire aside — I venture to assume, especially on the basis of those verses.... that he knew more or less nothing about Rembrandt. I’ve just found and bought here a little etching after Rembrandt, a study of a nude man, realistic and simple; he’s standing, leaning against a door or column in a dark interior. A ray of light from above skims his down-turned face and the bushy red hair. You’d think it a Degas for the body, true and felt in its animality. But see, have you ever looked closely at ‘the ox’ or the interior of a butcher’s shop in the Louvre? You haven’t looked closely at them, and Baudelairer infinitely less so.
At the moment I’m concentrating on doing something to enhance the value of my paintings. You know I have only one means of achieving that end — it’s to paint them.
I’d planned to go to the Camargue, but the vet who ought to have come to pick me up to do his rounds with him left me in the lurch. I don’t really mind, as I’m only moderately fond of wild bulls.
Another hard day’s work today. If you saw my canvases, what would you say about them — you wouldn’t find Cézanne’s almost diffident and conscientious brushstroke there. But since at present I’m painting the same countryside of La Crau and the Camargue — although in a slightly different place – nevertheless, certain color relationships could remain. What do I know about it — from time to time I couldn’t help thinking of Cézanne, particularly when I realized that his touch is so clumsy in certain studies – disregard the word clumsy — seeing that he probably executed those studies when the mistral was blowing. Having to deal with the same difficulty half the time, I can explain why Cézanne’s touch is sometimes so sure and sometimes seems awkward. It’s his easel that’s wobbling.
I’ve sometimes worked excessively fast; is that a fault? I can’t help it. For example I’ve painted a no. 30 canvas — the summer evening — at a single sitting. It’s not possible to rework it; to destroy it — why, because I deliberately went outside to make it, out in the mistral. Isn’t it rather intensity of thought than calmness of touch that we’re looking for — and in the given circumstances of impulsive work on the spot and from life, is a calm and controlled touch always possible? Well — it seems to me — no more than fencing moves during an attack.
I’m beginning to see the advantages here. For myself, I’m in better health here than in the north — I even work in the wheatfields at midday, in the full heat of the sun, without any shade whatever, and there you are, I revel in it like a cicada. My God, if only I’d known this country at 25, instead of coming here at 35 — in those days I was enthusiastic about grey, or rather, absence of colour. I was always dreaming about Millet, and then I had acquaintances in Holland in the category of painters like Mauve, Israëls.
You were fortunate to meet Guy de Maupassant — I’ve just read his first book, Des vers, poems dedicated to his master, Flaubert. There’s one, ‘Au bord de l’eau’, that’s already him. So you see, what Vermeer of Delft is beside Rembrandt among painters, he is among French novelists beside Zola.
I’m working on a landscape with wheatfields which I believe is no worse than the white orchard, for example. It’s of the same kind as the two Butte Montmartre landscapes that were in the Independents, but I think it’s more substantial and that it has a little more style. And I have another subject, a farmhouse and wheat stacks, which will probably be its pendant.
I haven’t left for Saintes-Maries — they’ve finished painting the house and I had to pay, and I also have to buy quite a considerable supply of canvas.
And out of the fifty francs I’ve got one louis left and we’re only Tuesday morning, and so it was hardly possible for me to leave and I fear it won’t yet be possible next week either.
I believe in the victory of Gauguin and other artists—but—between then and now there’s a long time, and even if he had the good fortune to sell one or two canvases—it would be the same story.
Now that I’ve seen the sea here I really feel the importance there is in staying in the south and feeling — if the color has to be even more exaggerated — Africa not far away from one.
I leave early tomorrow morning for Saintes-Maries, on the Mediterranean; I’ll stay there till Saturday evening.