Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art

By Carol Zemel

In Carol Zemel's insightful reinterpretation of Van Gogh's work and career, the artist is seen as a determined modern professional instead of the tortured romantic hero that legend has given us. Zemel's fresh approach emphasizes the utopian idealism that infused both Van Gogh's life and his pictures. She looks at the artist's career from 1882 to 1890 through six utopian projects or professional schemes, each embodying a specific societal crisis for Van Gogh's generation: women and sexuality, the rural artisan, republican citizenry, professional identity, the burgeoning art market, and the construction of a modern rural ideal. Zemel reveals how each endeavor, as Van Gogh treated it, offered a vision of utopian possibility. She also analyzes broader historical problems encountered by all avant-garde artists of the late nineteenth century. Zemel carefully examines Van Gogh's letters and work and also draws from municipal archives, local histories, nineteenth-century literature, and contemporaneous criticism. Her handsomely illustrated book, essential reading for art historians and scholars of late-nineteenth-century history and French studies, will also captivate anyone interested in Vincent van Gogh.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
In Carol Zemel's insightful reinterpretation of Van Gogh's work and career, the artist is seen as a determined modern professional instead of the tortured romantic hero that legend has given us. Zemel's fresh approach emphasizes the utopian idealism that

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520338388

Carol Zemel

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VAN GOGH’S PROGRESS

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF ART

Walter Horn, Founding Editor

James Marrow, General Editor

I The Birth of Landscape Painting in China, by Michael Sullivan

II Portraits by Degas, by Jean Sutherland Boggs

III Leonardo da Vinci on Painting: A Lost Book (Libro A), by Carlo Pedretti

IV Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, by Lilian M. C. Randall

v The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans, by John M. Rosenfield

VI A Century of Dutch Manuscript Illumination, by L. M. J. Délaissé

VII George Caleb Bingham: The Evolution of an Artist, and A Catalogue Raisonné (two volumes), by E. Maurice Bloch

VIII Claude Lorrain: The Drawings—Catalog and Plates (two volumes),

by Marcel Roethlisberger

IX Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance, by Juergen Schulz

X The Drawings of Edouard Manet, by Alain de Leiris

XI Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, by Herschel B.

Chipp, with contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor

XII After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters, 1870-1900, by Alfred Frankenstein

XIII Early Netherlandish Triptychs: A Study in Patronage, by Shirley Neilsen Blum XIV The Homed Moses in Medieval Art and Thought, by Ruth Mellinkoff

XV Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by Kathleen Cohen

XVI Franciabigio, by Susan Regan McKillop

XVII Egon Schiele’s Portraits, by Alessandra Comini

XVIII Manuscript Painting in Paris During the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles, by Robert Branner

XIX The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a

Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery (three volumes), by Walter Horn and Ernest Born

XX French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries, by Jean Bony

XXI The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora, by Suzanne Lewis

XXII The Literature of Classical Art: The Painting of the Ancients and A Lexicon of

Artists and Their Works According to the Literary Sources, by Franciscus Junius (two volumes), edited by Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl

XXIII The Armor of Light: Stained Glass in Western France, 1250-1325,

by Meredith Parsons Lillich

XXIV Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, by Joshua C. Taylor

XXV Corinthian Vase-Painting of the Archaic Period (three volumes), by D. A. Amyx

XXVI Picasso’s Guernica: History, Transformations, Meanings, by Herschel B. Chipp

XXVII Lovis Corinth, by Horst Uhr

XXVIII The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1274-1422,

by Anne Dawson Hedeman

XXIX Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio, by Janet Cox-Rearick

XXX Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art, by Whitney Davis

XXXI The Forum of Trajan, by James Packer

XXXII Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, by Ruth Mellinkoff

XXXIII Giambologna: Narrator of the Catholic Reformation, by Mary Weitzel Gibbons

XXXIV The Two-Headed Deer: Illustrations of the Rãmãyana in Orissa, by Joanna Williams

XXXV Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz

XXXVI Van Gogh’s Progress: Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art, by Carol Zemel

DISCOVERY SERIES

I The Devil at Isenheim: Reflections of Popular Belief in Grunewald’s Altarpiece,

by Ruth Mellinkoff

il The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael, by Walter Horn, Jenny White

Marshall, and Grellan D. Rourke

in The Amolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double Portrait, by Edwin Hall

The preparation of this work was made possible in part by a grant from the National

Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication

Fund of the College Art Association of America.

MM

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution provided by the Art Book

Endowment Fund of the Associates of the University of California Press,

which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

A CENTENNIAL BOOK

One hundred books

published between iggo and igg§

bear this special imprint of

the University of California Press.

We have chosen each Centennial Book

as an example of the Press’s finest

publishing and bookmaking traditions

as we celebrate the beginning of

our second century.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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VAN GOGH’S PROGRESS

Utopia, Modernity, and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art

CAROL ZEMEL

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1997 by Carol Zemel

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zemel, Carol M.

Van Gogh’s progress: Utopia, modernity, and late-nineteenth-century art / Carol Zemel.

p. cm.—(California studies in the history of art; 36)

A Centennial book—T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08849-2 (alk. paper)

1. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890—Philosophy. 3. Utopias.

I. Title. II. Series.

ND653.G7Z458 1997

759-9492—dc2O 96-4850

Printed and bound in Hong Kong

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Eunice Lipton and Ken Aptekar

CONTENTS 10

CONTENTS 10

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 SORROWING WOMEN, RESCUING MEN IMAGES OF WOMEN AND FAMILY

2 THE SPOOK IN THE MACHINE: PICTURES OF WEAVERS IN BRABANT

3 MODERN CITIZENS: CONFIGURATIONS OF GENDER IN VAN GOGH’S PORTRAITURE

4 SELF-PORTRAITS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

5 BROTHERHOODS: THE DEALER, THE MARKET, THE COMMUNE

6 THE REAL COUNTRY: UTOPIAN DECORATION IN AUVERS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS

Van Gogh’s letters are identified throughout this book according to the numbering system in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Boston, 1981). The letters to Theo van Gogh and a small number of other texts are preceded by an L. Letters to Emile Bernard are preceded by B; letters to Anton van Rappard, by R; letters to Wilhelmina van Gogh, by W. Letters from Theo van Gogh to Vincent van Gogh are preceded by T.

Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings are identified with numbers preceded by the letter F or by the letters SD (Supplementary Drawings), following the system inJ.-B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh (New York, 1970). Unless noted otherwise, all works are oil on canvas.

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES (following page 116)

1. Vincent van Gogh, Weaver, Facing Front (F27), 1884

2. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Zouave (F423), 1888

3. Vincent van Gogh, The Postman Roulin (F439), 1888-89

4. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Man (F533), 1888

5. Vincent van Gogh, The Italian Woman (F381), 1887-88

6. Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse: Madame Roulin (F508), 1889

7. Vincent van Gogh, L ‘Artésienne: Madame Ginoux (F488), 1888

8. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait as a Painter (F522), 1888

9. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin (F476), 1888

10. Vincent van Gogh, Irises (F608), 1889

11. Vincent van Gogh, Le Père Tanguy (F363), 1887

12. Vincent van Gogh, Undergrowth with Two Figures (F773), 1890

13. Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield under Stormy Sky (F778), 1890

14. Vincent van Gogh, Roots and Tree Trunks (F816), 1890

FIGURES

1. Vincent van Gogh, LArlésienne (F488), 1888 5

2. Paul Gauguin, La Belle Angèle, 1889 5

3. Vincent van Gogh, Sien in a White Bonnet (F931), pencil, black chalk, 1882 16

4. Vincent van Gogh, The Seamstress (F1025), pencil, chalk, 1883 21

5. Vincent van Gogh, Two Women Strolling (F988a), pencil, 1882 26

6. Berthe Morisot, The Mother and Sister of the Artist, 1869-70 26

7. Vincent van Gogh, Sorrow (F929), pencil, 1882 27

8. Vincent van Gogh, The Great Lady, illustration in L185,1882 27

9. Vincent van Gogh, Sorrow (F929a), chalk, 1882 29

10. Jan Toorop, In de Nes, 1888 30

11. Laboreras Cottage (Illustrated London News, 1872) 35

12. T. Walter Wilson, Widowed and Fatherless (Graphic, 1878) 33

13. Luke Fildes, Houseless and Hungry (Graphic, 1869) 34

14. Louisa Starr, Hardly Earned (Illustrated London News, 1875) 34

15. Vincent van Gogh, Woman Mourning (Facing Right) (F935), pencil, pen,

sepia, 1882 36

16. Vincent van Gogh, Sien with Cigar, in White Clothes, Sitting on the Floor

by the Stove (F898), pencil, chalk, pen, sepia, 1882 37

17. Vincent van Gogh, In Church (F967), watercolor, pen, pencil, 1882 38

18. Vincent van Gogh, Prayer Meeting (Two Kneeling Figures, One Standing)

(F1058), pencil, chalk, 1883 39

19. Vincent van Gogh, Sien Walking (F1052), pencil, chalk, 1883 40

20. Vincent van Gogh, Sien Sewing and Little Girl (F1072), pencil, ink,

chalk, 1883 40

21. Johannes Blommers, Washday, watercolor 41

22. Vincent van Gogh, Sien and Child Walking in Rain (F1048), pencil, 1883 42

23. Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Girl Wearing a Shawl (Facing Left) (F1007),

chalk, pencil, 1883 42

24. Vincent van Gogh, Girl Kneeling before Cradle (F1024), chalk, pencil, 1883 43

25. Vincent van Gogh, Sien (Facing Left) with Child in Her Right Arm

(F1061), pencil, watercolor, 1882-83 44

26. Vincent van Gogh, Mother and Child (F1067), charcoal, pencil, 1883 43

27. Vincent van Gogh, Public Soup Kitchen (Fi020a), chalk, 1883 46

28. Vincent van Gogh, Woman Weeping, Sitting on an Upturned Basket

(F1060), chalk on paper, 1883 47

29. E. G. Dalziel, Sunday Afternoon, 1 P.M.: Waiting for the Public House to

Open (Graphic, 1874) 49

30. Vincent van Gogh, Woman on Her Deathbed (F841), chalk, pencil, watercolor, 1883 31

31. Vincent van Gogh, Interior of a Weaver’s Workshop with Baby Chair

(F1118), pencil, ink, 1884 36

32. Adriaen van Ostade, Siesta of the Weaver) 1650 57

33. Vincent van Gogh, Loom with Weaver (F30), 1884 58

34. Vincent van Gogh, Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Left, with Oil Lamp

(F1123), pen, 1884 59

35. Léon Lhermitte, Woodworker at His Lathe, 1868 64

36. Max Liebermann, Weaver Workshop, 1882 65

37. F. Skill, Distress at Coventry (Illustrated London News, 1881) 66

38. Paul Renouard, Un Canut à son metier (Llllibstration, 1884) 67

39. W. Bazett Murray, Jute Industry: Mat Weaving in England (Illustrated

London News, 1881) 68

40. Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (F82), 1885 yi

41. Weaver Cottage, Nuenen, photograph 72

42. Vincent van Gogh, Four Figures in Attic (Weaving Shed) (F1111), ink, 1884 y4

43. Vincent van Gogh, Weaver with Loom and Spinning Wheel (F29), 1884 75

44. Vincent van Gogh, Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Left (F1114), pencil, watercolor, 1884 76

45. Vincent van Gogh, Weaver and Loom (F35), 1884 77

46. Ryckebusch, Un Tisserand (Llllustration, 1881) 77

47. Vincent van Gogh, Interior with Weaver (F37), 1884 81

48. Anton van Rappard, Weaver, ink, 1883-84 82

49. Vincent van Gogh, Weaver: Half-Length, Facing Right (F1122), ink, 1884 83

50. Vincent van Gogh, Weaver, Facing Front (F27), 1884 84

51. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Zouave (F423), 1888 95

52. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Milliet, Second Lieutenant of the Zouaves

(F473), 1888 95

53. Eugène Bellangé, Seated Zouave, 1888 96

54. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Zouave (F424), 1888 97

55. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Zouave (F1472), watercolor, 1888 99

56. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Patience Escalier (F444), 1888 101

57. Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin (F432), 1888 103

58. Vincent van Gogh, The Postman Roulin (F439), 1888-89 105

59. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Man (F533), 1888 106

60. Nineteenth-century cravats 107

61. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Armand Roulin (F492), 1888 108

62. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Armand Roulin (F493), 1888 109

63. Paul Cézanne, Boy with a Skull, 1896-98 111

64. Vincent van Gogh, Woman Sitting in the Café du Tambourin (F370), 1887 113

65. Vincent van Gogh, The Italian Woman (F381), 1887-88 114

66. Vincent van Gogh, La Mousmé (F431), 1888 116

67. Vincent Van Gogh, Madame Roulin and Her Baby (F490), 1888 ny

68. Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse: Madame Roulin (F508), 1889 118

69. Vincent van Gogh, La Berceuse, illustration in L592,1889 120

70. Vincent van Gogh, Parisian Novels (F358), 1887 122

71. Paul Gauguin, The Night Café, 1888 123

72. Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Madeleine Bernard, 1888 124

73. Wilhelmina van Gogh, photograph 126

74. Vincent van Gogh, The Novel Reader (F497), 1888 128

75. Vincent van Gogh, Memory of the Garden at Etten (F496), 1888 12g

76. Vincent van Gogh, L'Arlésienne (F542), 1889 131

77. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet (F573), 1890 133

78. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at Easel 138

79. Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait (F2o8a), 1886 13g

80. Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait as Wounded Man, 1844-54 140

81. Vincent van Gogh, Two Self-Portraits; Fragments of a Third (F1378r),

pencil, ink, 1887 143

82. John Russell, Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, 1886 144

83. Vincent van Gogh and Emile Bernard at Asnières, photograph, 1886 143

84. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait (F178v), 1886 146

85. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait (F545), oil on artist’s board mounted

on cradled panel, ca. 1886/87 147

86. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait in Grey Felt Hat (F344), 1887 148

87. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Alexander Reid (F343), 1887 148

88. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait in Straw Hat (F469), 1887 130

89. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait as a Painter (F522), 1888 132

90. Paul Cézanne, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1885-86 133

91. Cormon’s studio, photograph 133

92. Detail of letter W4,1888 133

93. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin (F476), 1888 13g

94. Charles Laval, Self-Portrait, 1888 160

129• Ravoux family, Auvers, photograph 220

130. Vincent van Gogh, The Man with a Pipe (Dr. Gachet) (F1664),

etching, 1890 221

131. Vincent van Gogh’s place card at Dr. Gachet’s, 1890 222

132. Camille Pissarro, Factory near Pontoise) 1873 223

133. Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, oil

on canvas, ca. 1665 224

134. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Inter Artes etNaturam, 1890 226

135. Vincent van Gogh, illustration in letter W22,1890 227

136. Vincent van Gogh, Women Crossing the Fields (F819), oil on paper

mounted on canvas, 1890 228

137. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Marguerite Gachet (F772), 1890 230

138. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, 1890 231

139. Paul Gachet, Madame Gachet at the Piano, 1873 232

140. Vincent van Gogh, The Plain of Auvers (F775), 1890 233

141. Vincent van Gogh, illustration in letter L645,1890 233

142. Paul Gauguin and Meyer de Haan, murals, inn at Le Pouldu,

photograph, 1889 238

143. Vincent van Gogh, installation plan for Les XX in letter L614,1889 241

144. Camille Pissarro, Spring and Summer, overdoor panels, 1872 242

145. Claude Monet, Grainstack (Snow Ejfect\ 1891 244

146. Claude Monet, Grainstack (Sunset), 1890-91 245

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the mid-1980s, having published a study of Van Gogh criticism and the formation of his legendary status, I began again to write about the artist, this time a cultural biography. I soon found myself stymied by the biographical monograph and the art historical protocols of artistic genius, career development, struggle and mastery; these were the terms and representations I had previously sought to unpack. A conversation with Jake Jacobus at Dartmouth College in 1986 helped me see beyond the conventions of biography, to conceptualize a study of interrelated Van Gogh projects and themes, and once again to use the artist as a lens onto the wider culture. In the process, I tried to raise new questions and issues in Van Gogh scholarship. The urgencies of my own generation’s approach to culture—our commitment to a social history of art and, as feminists, to issues of gender in visual forms—are evident in the chapter topics. Nevertheless, it took years to produce what often seemed to me and everyone around me like an endless book. I am indebted to many people for help, support, and encouragement along the way.

In the Netherlands, my work was enormously facilitated by the staff of the Vincent van Gogh Museum, who, each time I turned up, made that research center a friendly institutional home. I am grateful to the curators Louis van Tilborgh and Sjaar van Heughten, to the librarians Anita Vriend and Monique Hageman, and especially to the documentalist Fieke Pabst, whose archival skills and good cheer made scaling the mountain of documents less daunting. Professor Evert van Uitert of the University of Amsterdam generously encouraged my project with invitations to deliver papers and to publish text. Gerard Rooijakkers and Corvan der Heijden shared their extensive research on material culture in Brabant with me and guided me through the Eindhoven archives. Many good friends made Amsterdam a gezellig environment. Lili Jampoller shared her home and library with me and listened tirelessly to my Van Gogh speculations; Debora Meijers and Hans van der Kamp always bolstered my spirits and dispelled anxieties; Harm van Duin andjay Henry Kester, Jaap Jong, Minke Krings, Erik Couvée andjanine Otten gave me shelter, entertained me, and performed emergency research tasks. In France, the warm friendship and good company of Hélène Hourmat and Maria Ivens made my forays into Paris art and culture a great adventure; without them, I could hardly have managed the maze of French archival and research proprieties relatively unscathed. At home in Buffalo, Elizabeth Felmet, secretary of the Department of Art History, and Leslie Walker, slide librarian, unstintingly and cheerfully helped pull together the maddening details of clerical and photographic work.

Grants from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York in 1981 and the American Philosophical Society in 1987 facilitated summer research in Holland and France. In 1991-92 a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities gave me an essential year in Paris and enabled me to bring my project to completion. Grants from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities subsidized publication. At SUNY-Buffalo, I am grateful for the support of Dean Kerry Grant and the Arts and Letters Dean’s Research Fund for easing the considerable cost of photographs.

No scholar could ask for a more supportive editor than Deborah Kirshman at the University of California Press. Her enthusiasm for the manuscript and her efforts on its behalf encouraged me through the detailed stages of publication and enabled me to see that there was a bigger picture after all. I am especially grateful to Stephanie Fay for her meticulous copy-editing of my text, and for her patience as I pushed press schedules to their limit.

Over the years, friends and colleagues read portions of this study. For their critical insights and support, I thank Linda Nochlin, Debora Silverman, Kathleen Corrigan, Kristin Richardson, Paul Tucker, Maureen Ryan. In Buffalo, I am fortunate to be part of a remarkable feminist writing group; Elizabeth Cromley, Hester Eisenstein, Claire Kahane, Elizabeth Kennedy, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Isabel Marcus, and Suzanne Pucci were exceptional readers, scrupulous critics, and editors of numerous drafts; our meetings prodded me forward when my courage and energies flagged. Eunice Lipton and Ken Aptekar shared my pleasure in Van Gogh’s pictures. They also read my text, listened to my arguments, offered suggestions, and made a virtue of impatience, as they nudged, pushed, nagged, cajoled, and cheered me on. In loving friendship, I owe my greatest thanks to them.

INTRODUCTION

I am trying to finish canvases which will undoubtedly secure me the little corner that I have claimed. Ah, the future of it all… but since old Pangloss assures us that everything is always for the best in the best of worlds—can we doubt it?

L574, January 1889

In a letter from Arles a few weeks after his breakdown, Vincent van Gogh invoked the wise doctor of Voltaire’s Candide to declare his ambitions and affirm his future. It was not the only time that Van Gogh would summon a Panglossian optimism, and his tone, as usual, maintains some Voltairean irony.¹ After all, Pangloss’s cheerful outlook was comic as well as sage, and the claim that tout va pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes sardonically acknowledged an imperfect world. For the artist, more optimist than cynic, good father Pangloss offered some comfort in the face of difficulty and disappointment—a cockeyed optimism, perhaps. It seems no accident that Van Gogh invoked utopian satire at times of stress. His comments on those occasions, as in the letter quoted in the epigraph to this introduction, are resigned yet undaunted, accepting yet ambitious, critical yet idealistic, drawn from particular to more general issues. In their acknowledgment of setbacks and their reach for an idealized future, they are symptomatic, I believe, of an unshakable belief in progress and a utopian approach to both personal problems and professional concerns.

Van Gogh worked hard to construct an œuvre with which he would be identified— what his letter calls the little corner that I have claimed.² Notwithstanding his modest tone, there are various ambitious projects in Van Gogh’s œuvre meant to launch idealistic cultural programs for specific audiences. Pictures of weavers he painted in 1884 were intended to celebrate rural artisans for an urban public; portraits of people in Arles painted in 1888 were salable in Paris as social types, but they were also designed as inspirational decorations for the Yellow House, Van Gogh’s proposed communal studio and refuge. Van Gogh infused even his collection of self-portraits and his schemes for making and marketing pictures through cooperative brotherhoods, or for exhibiting in unusual venues, with idealistic meaning and purpose.

This book is about several such projects that Van Gogh undertook and the utopian values that gave them form. My title, Van Gogh’s Progress, derives from a double borrowing. It calls to mind, perhaps most obviously, John Bunyan’s allegorical tale, Pilgrim’s Progress, one of Van Gogh’s favorite texts when he was young,³ and in doing so, it suggests the unremitting idealism that infused his practice. But it also derives from an eloquent passage by Walter Benjamin. Describing an image by Paul Klee of the angel of history, Benjamin notes that the angel faces the past and the record of human tragedy. But a storm … blowing from paradise catches his wings and hurtles the angel forward into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. That storm, Benjamin writes, is what we call progress.⁴

Without sacralizing Van Gogh’s image further, one might imagine the artist in this angelic stance: facing the past with nostalgic longing, sighting disaffection and cultural debris, and, with great storms of energy, developing projects in the name of progress and a perfected modernity. I mean the metaphor to redraw somewhat an image of what scholars such as Griselda Pollock have characterized as Van Gogh’s conservatism—the elaboration of bourgeois cultural constructs and values, like his figures of artisanal labor or his notion of the countryside. Without relinquishing the insights and importance of class in any account of the artist’s outlook and images, the Benjaminian metaphor moves the assessment from any specific ideology or politics—any specific row he should have hoed or path he might have progressively followed—to what Benjamin called an ethics of progress, as a conceptual framework in which Van Gogh worked.

Within that progressivist framework, then, I use a notion of utopia to characterize further Van Gogh’s enterprise—his picture making and the conduct of his professional career. Indeed, like the double stance of Benjamin’s angel, Van Gogh’s utopian vision—to the extent that we may find a singular vision—is both nostalgic and progressive. In pictures and projects, his outlook was antiurban, anticapitalist, communitarian; he envisioned a multiclassed rural society of good people—artists among them—living productively with simple needs. In biographical terms, one might describe his utopia as the fantasy of a middle-class Protestant Dutchman, raised in the country and more at ease in environments like Brabant and Provence, where nature and peasants seemed the palpable realities, than in urban centers and their cultural marketplaces.

But such a totalizing overview, however true as a general account of the artist’s utopian outlook, flattens the diversity of Van Gogh’s projects and reduces their complexity as idealistic and ambitious schemes. I propose another way to consider the issue. What interests me in Van Gogh’s pictures, in his letters, plans, and career moves, is neither the evidence of artistic development nor a singular vision but the signs of a utopian impulse that is critical of many aspects of modernity and programmatically committed to improvement, progress, and change. Again and again, with great enthusiasm and energy, Van Gogh developed strategies to reach broader audiences, to promote popular art forms, to represent alternatives to urban civilization, and to foster creative communities. He persisted in these projects even though his work provoked arguments, his exhibitions were little noticed, and factional disputes often eroded his plans for cooperative enterprise.

One might heroize his resolve as a pilgrim’s progress. But disappointments go hand in hand with a desire for progress and utopian enterprise. Utopia is, after all, no-place; promise and impossibility are part of its name. It is too easy to pronounce these projects failures and consign them to Van Gogh’s naive idealism or to pick away at the incompleteness of his utopian ideal. More interesting than the measurable success or failure of his utopian projects is their exploration of crucial issues in nineteenth-century culture. Pictures of weavers, for example, frame the crisis of artisanal production and industrialization with an unstable nostalgia for ruralist ideals. Van Gogh’s plans for group exhibitions in Montmartre and for an artists’ commune in Arles place idealistic notions of career management in the context of a burgeoning capitalist art market. And decorative landscapes painted in Auvers, another example, present a panorama of ideal settings for a diverse republican citizenry. In their engagement with pressing cultural issues, these are complex undertakings, not simple formulations of utopian fantasy, and their utopian features, rather than welding a perfected whole, instead chart dimensions of instability and urgency in nineteenth-century cultural life. For the historian Van Gogh’s projects are not only components of a remarkable œuvre but also an illuminating lens through which to pinpoint the malaise of a moment and to locate its most vigorous hopes and energies.

That Van Gogh was not alone in this utopian impulse makes the issue and his approach all the more meaningful. The work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes offered the most obvious and perhaps the most conventional example of utopian designs. Set in Edenic landscapes peopled with classically gowned figures or statuesque nudes, Puvis’s pictures invoked a mythic Golden Age to inspire a noble future. Van Gogh admired their "strange and providential meeting of very far-off antiquities and crude modernity; they suggested, he thought, a continuation of all kinds of things, a benevolent renaissance ordained by fate" (L614a). There was also no shortage of utopian schemes among the painters of his own generation. The Neo-Impressionist landscapes of Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro’s peasant imagery, Paul Gauguin’s and Emile Bernard’s medievalized representations of Brittany, Gauguin’s painted prelapsarian fantasy of Polynesia, even Claude Monet’s serial paintings of the 1890s and Paul Cézanne’s magisterial images of Mont-Sainte-Victoire: all these may be seen as corrective visions. They are pictures that renounce urban fray and decadence, that replace, or in some cases infuse, the spectacle and flux that Baudelaire and the Impressionists considered the essence of modernity with a perfected vision of order and stability.⁵ If transience had fascinated one generation, these painters were determined to locate and picture what endured.

To that end, many of these pictures—those by Gauguin and Bernard, especially, and certainly those of Puvis—present utopia as an atemporal costumed land. Van Gogh’s approach, however, was grounded in a recognizable modernity. No matter how much his pictures were affected by the cultures of Japan and seventeenthcentury Holland, and despite some nostalgia for a good old days, they clearly refer to nineteenth-century conditions and circumstances. The 1888 portrait LAr- lésienne (F488; Fig. 1 and Plate 7), for example, represents Marie Ginoux as an icon of regional—in this case, Provençal—femininity. Unlike Gauguin’s picture of a Breton woman, Angèle Satre, flanked by primitive pottery and framed in a medievalized roundel as La Belle Angèle (Fig. 2), Van Gogh’s portrait format maintains a sense of his subject’s activity and, with her novels (in another version, her gloves and parasol), affirms her modernity. Gauguin’s archaizing allusions—to medievalized Brittany or primitivized Tahiti—are typical of his utopian constructs. They characteristically enclose the utopian fantasy in some distant time or place. Van Gogh’s approach is less distancing. His images, whether of weavers in Brabant, citizens in Provence, or landscapes in Auvers, insist on contemporary references to refashion the modern world.

Keeping in mind this commitment to modernity, how then to approach and assess Van Gogh’s utopian projects? In his monumental study of the subject Frank Manuel has suggested interpreting utopias as psycho-social constructs, whose symbolic meaning, much like the suggestive allusions of dreams or unconscious fantasies, may assuage the conflicts of their maker and society and so serve as a sensitive indicator of where the sharpest anguish of an age lies.⁶ Seen in these terms, the picture of rural plenty in Van Gogh’s Auvers landscapes may invert and

deny urban tensions and discontents, and pictures such as Daubigny’s Garden and the Plain of Auvers (see Figs. 121,140) may be seen as specifying a utopian promise of shelter, abundance, and natural harmony.

But utopia means more than the obverse of some unhappy state. The complexities of Van Gogh’s projects—their internal shifts and turns and the dynamics of their