Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/silhouette-of-people-in-cave-c7xBEFBJhkg) 9.6.2024.
Origin
Every few years movers in colorful jerseys, blue jeans and thick-soled shoes come to get me. They wrap me in plastic and bands of foam padding. Then they slide me into a wood crate that’s a perfect fit, was made just for me. When I’m secure, they load me into the back of a truck and take me to the airport. Not long after that I’m in the air and on my way to Los Angeles, London, or Sao Paulo. Exciting cities where important people await my arrival.
Hanging in an exhibit that thousands come to each day, where I stand out even in the best company, is when I’m happy. I’m admired for who and what I am, a masterful work of Vincent’s, one of the last he made in that feverish creative burst in Auvers when he was being cared for by my namesake. I was a diversion from the tormenting spirits that would overwhelm him in a field of tall grass with a shopkeeper’s gun in his hand. Three days was all he needed to finish my expressive structure of lines, colors and forms that makes me a world-famous painting.
You may think I live a glamorous life. All the attention, travel, pictures taken and so many articles written about me. But it isn’t always that way. A museum catalog can give you my basic facts: my height and width, the year of my making, my provenance. But you’ll read nothing of my internal life. From the moment Vincent finished me, the evil spirits haunting him, I began to see life as a great work of art isn’t easy.
Like you, I’ve lived and learned. Like you, I’ve known disappointment and desperation. Feelings that started when Theo’s wife Johanna showed me in public for the first time and I didn’t sell. Snubbed by everyone. They preferred others to me. That was in 1893, in Copenhagen. A long time ago, I know. But who doesn’t remember their first rejection. That stab in the belly that strikes without warning. That makes you ill and stays with you forever.
After that, Johanna stored me in a room with others by Vincent. Stunning yellow wheat fields. Violet, hallucinatory courtyards. A friendly postman. Like me, they were beautiful visions of Vincent’s. I saw them when Johanna lit the oil lamp to show us to strangers. After Theo died, she became the executor of Vincent’s paintings. It was Johanna who collected their letters and got them published. Without Dear Theo Vincent and I would not be thought of as we are. We owe all our fame to Johanna.
Four years went by before Ambroise Vollard, one of the most important art dealers in Europe, bought me. That was in 1897. When he picked me out I knew my fortunes would change. And they did, but not the way I had hoped.
Vollard was a clever businessman. I’m tempted to tell you conversations I overheard him have about artists I’m sure you love. Vincent included. But it’s hard to keep a grudge for so long. At the time Johanna was alone, unsure of the value of Vincent’s works. In the end, she yielded to his superior negotiating skills. He paid one-hundred-fifty francs for me when he knew I was worth a great deal more.
Right away Vollard put me in a group exhibit in Paris. A fine one too. Well attended and publicized. That was where Alice Ruben Faber, a beautiful woman with dark eyes and long brown hair, spotted me next to one of Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings. While I’m not as exotic as a bare-breasted native woman holding a crude wood bowl with mangoes in it, I’m deeper, truer, more honest and open with my feelings. That was why Alice favored me. Why she bought me from Vollard for an amount that gave him a nice profit. Even so, I was happy to go to a fine home in Copenhagen occupied by a sensitive, intelligent woman.
While I knew Alice loved me, she loved many things, and she had many things to love. There’s a photo of her taken with me when she was pregnant. She’s filled with life, a few months from being a mother for the first time. A full smile fills her face that induces one of your own. In it there’s no evidence she intended to transfer ownership of me to the art dealer Mogens Ballin a month after it was taken. I was with her for less than a year.
It goes without saying I wasn’t happy with Ballin. He was an insensitive man who kept me locked in a dark room for seven years. To him I was an object to hold onto until the time to sell me was right, instead of one of intrinsic beauty and profound depth, with feelings and a soul that aches to be wanted. Did Vincent in his maddened state foresee that? Is that the reason he gave me, as a perceptive critic described, the heartbroken expression of our time?
Finally, in 1904, Ballin sold me to Harry Kessler, though I had wanted to go with the gray-haired lady, Mrs. Land. Three times Mrs. Land came to see me. Three times I was unscrolled on a dusty table for her to look at.
She was a warm woman. It was a joy to be the object of her gaze. Each time she went there she stayed longer, her thoughtful eyes rolling over me. The last time she visited she pleaded with Ballin to lower his price. There was something about the angle of my head resting in my hand that touched her. The books on the table next to me did too. She loved to read, she told him. But mainly it was my melancholic appearance that reflects my sorrow for the human condition and not my own troubles as everyone thinks. Mrs. Land knew this. I could tell it was how she felt too. But at the end of the day I didn’t go home with her.
For four years I hung in Harry Kessler’s Berlin home. Fourteen of the finest, most richly decorated rooms you’ll ever see. I had impressive company. Cezanne, Bonnard, and Renoir were on the other walls. They were the friends I shared my time there with. I was the only painting by Vincent that Harry owned. In truth he didn’t like Vincent much. He thought he was a crude sensibility. But he wanted to tell his friends and associates he owned one. That was the reason he took me from Ballin. Otherwise, he favored Cezanne’s cold cylindrical abstractions and Bonnard’s pleasing mix of pastel colors I much prefer over Cezanne. Then, after a few years, he gave up on me just as Alice had. He didn’t want me for the reasons Mrs. Land did. Most who’ve desired me for more than my value didn’t have the money to pay for me. Those who could afford me didn’t want to keep me for long. Plenty others were available to them.
In 1911 the museum director Georg Swarzenski purchased me from a gallery in Paris for the new Stadelsches Kunstinstitute in Frankfort. I was proud to be one of the museum’s main acquisitions. In Swarzenski’s learned opinion I was an example of artistic experience transmitted as perfect and direct as possible. A work of great profundity and true substance. I wanted to stay there forever.
That was a glorious time in my life. Vincent was famous, as was I. Those who loved art identified with the honesty he expressed in his paintings. They felt the struggle and tension of his life in them. They must have seen in him, in me, their own difficulties exposed.
For twenty years I was secure with my place in the world. I thought it would last forever. But over time we learn nothing does. Comfort’s illusory. Political stability is too. The climate in Germany changed. People were angry at unseen forces that complicated their lives. They were incited by a single man to do something about it. My friends and I in the Stadelsches Kunstinstitute feared the evil lurking about us. For good reason. The unseen forces stepped out of the shadows. At the Fuhrer’s request Joseph Goebbels took control of the visual arts. The Fuhrer believed modern art was decadent. That Vincent belonged to a long line of depraved artists and was a danger to the German people’s morale. On his orders I was taken down and locked away. In that room I dreaded each approaching footstep. I never stopped worrying I would be harmed.
When the war began in 1938, Franz Koeings, a courageous man, a lover of art, of Vincent, of me, negotiated for my release. It wasn’t easy. It took months to convince Goebbels I should be rescued from oblivion. Those negotiations were done in secret. As was my escape. One night Franz rolled me up, shut me in a suitcase and snuck me across the border. In Amsterdam I was relieved to no longer be thought of as a pathetic example of cultural Bolshevism, nor included in exhibitions themed “degenerate art.”
Soon I had a private owner, a stern, ambitious gentleman from the United States.
Seigfried Kramarsky brought me to his duplex on New York’s West Side with a curving staircase connecting two floors. It had a glorious view over Central Park’s treetops. He was extremely rich. Whispers about him mentioned figures as high as five hundred million dollars. Chauffeurs were available to him and his family whenever needed. Maids and butlers too. Not a word about money was ever spoken. Whatever was desired could be bought.
I shared a large, bright room with a delicate interior design with paintings not quite like me. Some were much older. Nevertheless, they were impressive. A self-portrait by Rembrandt. A Franz Hals. A Piero della Francesca. It was a comfortable life for us. I was treated with respect. Well taken care of. In secret, though, I desired to go back to a museum where I would be appreciated by more than friends and guests.
When Mr. Kramarsky died, I hoped that would happen. A year earlier Vincent’s vases of sunflowers and another of irises brought tens of millions. Knowing that, his daughter Sonja put me up for auction at Sothebys.
Immediately, there was speculation I would be the highest priced painting ever sold. I was locked in a vault until the bidding started. Once it did it took just a few minutes for that to happen. When the final number was called out I was valued at eighty-two million dollars. Overnight fame came to me just like that. My photo was reproduced on the front page of major newspapers throughout the world. Yet I continued to despair. The look in my eyes hadn’t changed. No museum could afford me. Only an international bank. Three days later I was flown to Tokyo, put up in a special room where I was gawked at for my celebrity, my value as a commodity. That was what my life came down to.
Fame comes and goes. Money does too.
The next year Asian currencies collapsed. Economies followed. The bank that purchased me was in trouble. I was transferred like worthless notes and securities back to Soethebys where I now spend my days in a subbasement like an item of furniture that can’t be sold. In storage, wrapped in cotton inside a box, owned but not loved, I yearn to give myself to others, to everyone who wants to look at me. Isn’t that what art is for? To be shared? But here I am, left to the whims of my owners and the state of the market, that speculative and evil exchange that makes a few want to spend millions on me then store me away and wait until my value goes up. They feel nothing for me. Nor for the people who want to see me.
I’m lonely. I don’t get out much. Not for the last five years. I sit and wait. But for what? This must be the reason Vincent gave me the sad expression he did. Why the gentle Dr. Gachet looked this way and Vincent propped my head up on one elbow as if to show my submission to the fates greater forces had in store for me.
Did he anticipate what would become of me? That I would suffer as he did. Only for longer. For much, much longer.
About the Author: Paul Perilli's recent fiction appears in Fairlight Books, The Write Launch, The Fictional Café, The Writing Disorder, Unlikely Stories, and others. Recent nonfiction appears in Otoliths, The Blotter, O:JA&L, and is forthcoming in Bridge Eight Press. His novelette “The Luckier I Get” is forthcoming in Aethlon.
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