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Deserted

Two chairs. Each of them dominating the painting it appears in. Positioned at an angle, touching the edges of the canvas, they have a monumental quality, and seem to be saying: "Go ahead, sit down." Both chairs are unoccupied. There are only one or two objects on them, waiting to be removed or picked up by the person they belong to. Both of these chairs dominate the pictures, filling the painted space, solid, palpable; yet they are intensely related to each other, too, like two panels of a diptych that achieve new unity in being brought together. Juxtaposed, the chairs will be looking at each other, as it were, offering an invitation to talk, to confide, or else, back to back, they will have turned away from each other, as if they had nothing more to say and existed in different worlds.
"Now, at any rate", wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo in December 1888, when he painted the two chairs, "I can tell you that the latest two studies are most remarkable. One chair made of wood and extremely yellow wicker, up against the wall, on red tiles (by daylight). Then Gauguin's armchair, red and green, a nocturnal mood, the wall and floor similarly red and green, two novels and a candle on the seat. On canvas, the paint thickly applied." The curious subjects van Gogh was taking were furniture in his house at Arles and represented the daily meeting-place of van Gogh and his guest, Paul Gauguin. The two painters would sit talking about Art and the affairs of the world, debating, quarrelling, till things went up in their faces: Gauguin's sojourn was to be inseparably linked to the nervous breakdown from which van Gogh was never fully to recover. "A few days before we parted", van Gogh subsequently wrote to A. E. Aurier, describing the nocturnal painting of Gauguin's chair, "before illness forced me to enter a home, I tried to paint his empty chair."
The two paintings are his statement of the friendship of the two artists. His own chair, simple and none too comfortable, with his dearly-loved pipe lying on it, stands for the artist himself. It is meant just as metaphorically as the more elegant, comfortable armchair where Gauguin liked to settle. Everyday things, purely functional objects, acquire symbolic power. The eye of love sees the mere thing as representing the man who uses it quite matter-of-factly. We may well be tempted to recall the pictorial tradition that provided van Gogh with his earliest artistic impressions. Dutch Calvinism sternly insisted on an iconographic ban that prohibited all images of the Holy Family except symbolic ones: the danger that the faithful might be distracted from their prayers by the beauty of the human form had to be avoided at all costs. Thus Christ could be represented by a 'vacant throne,' the symbol of judgement and power. It was enough to prompt responses of awe and devotion. Van Gogh's unoccupied chairs pay respect to a tendency to avoid representation of the human figure. Gauguin is there, seated in his armchair, even if we cannot see him -- according to this formula.
The break in the two artists' friendship had become inevitable. When Gauguin decided to leave, he left the ruins of van Gogh's dreams of an artists' community in the South behind. "As you know, I have always considered it idiotic that painters live alone. It is always a loss if one is left to one's own devices", van Gogh had written to his brother, describing his longing for solidarity amongst painters. When he lost Gauguin, he also lost his overall perspective on Life. Thus we must see the two chairs as facing away from each other, expressing the irreconcilability of day and night -- a polarity van Gogh establishes in the very colours used in the paintings.
Empty chairs had been a feature of van Gogh's thinking since childhood. The memories that crowd behind this single image are connected with deep mournfulness, with thoughts of the omnipresence of death. "After I had seen Pa off at the station, and had watched the train as long as it, or even only its smoke, was still in sight, and after I had returned to my room and Pa's chair was still drawn up to the table where the books and periodicals still lay from the day before, I felt as miserable as a child, even though I am well aware that we shall soon be seeing each other again." Irrational though the twenty-five-year-old's grief at the sight of the chair may seem, it was a constant tendency in van Gogh: to endow the most banal of objects with the properties of a momento mori. In 1885, when his father had died, van Gogh arranged his smoking tackle as a still life, simple yet laden with significance. It is no coincidence that a pipe and tobacco pouch are on his own wicker chair in the 1888 painting.
And we must not forget Charles Dickens, the English novelist, who (according to van Gogh) approved a pipe as a tried and tested prophylactic against suicide. Dickens's own vacant chair had been made famous by an illustration in The Graphic: "Edwin Drood was Dickens's last work", Vincent wrote to his brother, "and Luke Fields, who had got to know Dickens through doing the little illustrations, entered his room the day he died and saw his vacant chair. And that is how it came about that one of the old issues of The Graphic carried the moving drawing, 'The Empty Chair'. Empty chairs -- there are a great many of them, more will be added to their number, and sooner or later there will be nothing left . . . but empty chairs."
Van Gogh's life's work as an artist remains ambivalent to a degree that has not yet been fully recognized. His paintings are notable for their immediacy, their sensuous impact. They draw their power from the painter's affectionate openness towards all things, towards Man and Nature. Still, the pleasure that he takes in a veritably naive identification with the world is continually overshadowed by profound eschatological intuitions, by apprehensions of transience and death. The hand that reaches out tenderly is retracted at the last moment because it has too often been hurt. There can be no doubt that van Gogh learnt from experience; indeed, his life precluded him taking a straight and simple course. Yet van Gogh naturally remained a child of his age. He grew up in a century when people for the first time saw their own existence as everything, with no transcendental support system -- a century that produced many odd and even self-destructive characters.
The Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr gives the title 'The vacant throne' to the final chapter of his essay in cultural criticism, The Loss of the Centre [Verlust der Mitte]. Sedlmayr writes: "It must be added that the artists have been among those who suffered the most in the 19th and 20th centuries, the very people whose task it has been to render the Fall of Man and of his world visible in their terrible visions. In the 19th century there was an altogether new type of suffering artist: the lonely, lost, despairing artist on the brink of insanity. It was a type that previously only occurred in isolated instances, if that. The 19th century artists, great and profound minds, often have the character of sacrificial victims, of victims who sacrifice themselves. From Hölderlin, Goya, Friedrich, Runge and Kleist through Daumier, Stifter, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky to van Gogh, Strindberg and Trakl there was a line of solidarity in suffering at the hands of the times. All of them suffered from the fact that God was remote, and 'dead', and Man debased."
Van Gogh's chairs constitute a metaphor of the crisis of the entire century, a metaphor that corresponds to the somewhat forced pathos of Sedlmayr's account. We cannot grasp van Gogh's own via dolorosa, through to his fits of madness and final suicide, in isolation from the century he lived in. Van Gogh's ailment was the maladie du siècle, the self-fulfilling Weltschmerz, that Sedlmayr attempts to explain by the loss of belief in God. In his History of Modern Culture [Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit], Egon Friedell (albeit in rather more specific terms) moves in the same direction: "It has been claimed, frequently and emphatically, that our existence may have become more quotidian and grey but is the more rational, but this is a mistake. The 19th century was the inhuman century par excellence; the triumph of technology mechanized our lives totally, rendering us stupid; the worship of Mammon has irredeemably impoverished mankind, without exception; and a world without God is not only the least moral but also the least comfortable that can be conceived. As he enters the Present, modern man reaches the inmost circle of hell along his absurd and necessary path of suffering."
Thus it is only consistent if we write the history of van Gogh's art and life, less in a personal than in a historical sense. The causes for his failure in life, and for the subsequent rapid (all the more rapid) success of his cultural counterworld, need not be sought in the untouchable torments of a solitary visionary. Quite the contrary: the reason lies in van Gogh's tireless ambition for recognition, even if only in the image society had fashioned and could accept, the image of the outsider, the isolated genius. If ever there was a genius against his own will, it was Vincent van Gogh.