pictures are merely the point of departure from which our thoughts leap
into an unlimited world of pleasurable visualising. They move us
emotionally, even mentally, but never aesthetically. We feel before them
exactly what we feel when reading that extraordinary and unique book of
his, Noa Noa. Indeed he was more literary than artistic, and to
appreciate him fully one should read first his biography written by Jean
de Rotonchamp,--then Noa Noa. After that his pictures will take on a new
meaning. He makes his dreams so forceful that we too start to dream
before them. His art is of the same calibre as that of Altichiero,
Michelino da Bosozzo, Ortolano, the Borassa school, Manet and Degas. All
these men are illustrators of a high order; all are impelled by the
complete sincerity of their visions; and all are interesting because of
their freedom of expression. It is a new adventure each time we see one
of their works, for adventure is merely contact with the unexpected. In
Gauguin this _imprevu_ is not restricted to unconventionality of balance
and the extraordinary arrangement of objects; but expresses itself in
the actual subject-matter as well. His savages, ready to kill or love
with equal unconcern, bring up to us our childhood enthusiasms for the
tales of Swift, Defoe and Pierre Loti. His pictures epitomise the call
of the natural, the delight in perfect freedom, the ideal of an
unclothed age.
But though his work is calm and outside the world of strife and
endeavour, his life was turbulent, and tortured by reiterated
disappointments. Toward the end he wrote to a friend that he fell
over-often, and arose only to fall again. As with the sailor new
horizons ever stretched before him, and their promise of better things
was never consummated. His energy was drained by a continual struggle
against the forces of civilisation just as the sailor's is weakened by
unceasing battles against the elements. The spot where at last he found
refuge was far from his ideal. But in this ideal world he always
imagined himself living, and his painting took on its colour and
atmosphere. Just as he advised his followers to draw a curtain in front
of their models, so he drew the veil of imagination before his eyes and
saw only what he wished to see. In this almost fanatic idealism he was
undoubtedly actuated by fear of life's gross realities, for he was not
content merely to live apart: he was forever attempting to ameliorate
the trying conditions which arose from French misrule in the Marquesas.
For his pains he was condemned to gaol and later was made an outcast.
This friction with the established order, however, had to do only with
Gauguin the man. Gauguin the artist remained to the end a contented and
passionate dreamer.
To understand his art and its actuating impulses it is necessary to know
something of his colourful and adventuresome life. Of all modern
painters, he, more than any other, was reflected in his work. As a youth
he had gone to sea and served a six-year apprenticeship before the mast.
He next became a successful banker and to all outward appearances was
satisfied with the status of a wealthy citizen. But all the time the
love of change and the nostalgia for strange lands were at work within
him, and though spending six days a week in an office he painted every
Sunday. It was Pissarro, admired by Gauguin from the first, who
persuaded him to forego everything save his art. This he did in 1883.
From that time on he became a derelict who had to seek support from his
friends. Although at times he was forced to work in offices, edit papers
and grow fruit, the donations from those he knew were the backbone of
his resources. He had met Van Gogh in Paris in 1886, and two years later
accepted the latter's invitation to visit him on the bounty of Van
Gogh's brother Theodore at Arles in the south of France. Here, where he
had expected to find conditions conducive to work, his life was,
according to his own accounts, in constant danger. The Dutchman, he
says, attacked him often, and sometimes Gauguin, awaking with a start,
would see Van Gogh stealing across the room to him with a knife. Such a
life was impossible, and after a regrettable incident in which he was
blamed for the amputation of Van Gogh's ear, he returned to Paris. The
year before this he had made a short trip to Martinique, and while in
Europe had lived at Pouldu, Copenhagen, Rouen, Pont-Aven, Concarneau and
Paris. Again he went to Brittany. He wanted quiet and was ever ill at
ease among the superficialities of a hypocritical civilisation. But
there, while protecting a negress, he was attacked by some sailors, and
his injuries forced him to return once more to Paris. The negress had
preceded him, and when he arrived he discovered that she had robbed him
of his entire studio equipment.
At this time, Verlaine, Moreas, Aurier, Julien Leclerc and Stuart
Merril, who called themselves the symbolist poets, saw in him a comrade.
In 1891 they gave a benefit performance in the Vaudeville for him and
Verlaine. Maeterlinck's L'Intruse was staged for the first time, and
Gauguin's share of the proceeds was enough to pay his passage to his
longed-for tropics. Two years later found him back again with many
canvases and a strange and grotesque costume, heavy rings on every
finger, wooden shoes and a cane of his own carving. He was impatient for
praise and admiration and large sales; but none of these came to him.
At a sale of his work in the Hotel Drouot in 1895 so small a sum was
realised that his friends again took pity on him, and Carriere secured
him a cheap passage back to his beloved islands. His adventures in the
tropics make poetic and romantic reading. His premature death, at which
only one old cannibal was present, was a fitting climax to a life given
over to a hopeless search for the ideal.
While still in a banker's office, and before he had met Pissarro,
Gauguin had painted as an amateur; and as early as 1873 he had exposed a
landscape. But when he became personally acquainted with Pissarro, who
had a way of inflaming the minds of the younger and naturally
revolutionary men of his day, his impulses toward art became
overpowering. His early training under this violent heretic was so
thorough that he never made a concession to the public or retrogressed
toward scholastic formulas. Being a born painter, he quickly absorbed
the ideas of the Impressionists, and exposed with them in the Rue des
Pyramides in 1880 and 1881. His first canvases were wholly
Impressionistic and much like Guillaumin's. Even as late as 1887, after
he had known Cezanne and had become imbued with the blazing brilliancy
of Martinique, Gauguin still clung to his earlier technique. His Paysage
de la Martinique is one of his best-ordered works and also one of his
most fluent. However, he had become dissatisfied with Impressionist
precepts and had gone to Brittany to get closer to a more natural
people, to a cruder and more rugged landscape. There he had seen and
admired the Gothic statues, the simplicity of which appealed to him
intensely. On his return from the South Seas these statues, direct,
stiff and archaic, combined with his late vision of scintillant light
and hot, luscious colour, became active influences in his work.
Gauguin had a considerable amount of Peruvian Indian blood in him, and
his desire for the South was not a superficial one. Rather was it an
atavistic necessity for the wild that made him intolerant of cities and
culture and highly complex modes of living. This same instinct,
manifesting itself through his art, drove him toward a simple and direct
statement of a vision, toward an unrestraint which no civilised
community would permit him. He wanted something naive--something
expressed by broad planes and rich colours. He had imitated the
Impressionists, copied Manet's Olympia and seen Giottos; and by reducing
these varied influences to their simplest terms he made his art. Emile
Bernard, an indifferent painter and writer, who temperamentally was not
unlike Gauguin, claims priority for this manner of painting; but even if
it were true, it would mean nothing. Gauguin's canvases of 1888 give
undeniable promise of what he would eventually do, and in 1889 his
Jeunes Bretonnes fully reveals the trend of all his later endeavours.
Bernard was at best but a clever imitator, and his canvases in Gauguin's
style appear inferior and superficial when compared with such pieces as
Tahitiennes and Ruperupe.
The Impressionists went toward descriptive beauty, but Gauguin searched
for and found an emotional interpretation of nature adapted to large
decoration. It is problematical whether or not he is artistically
indebted to Van Gogh, for one can attribute the fact that he painted his
best European pictures immediately after his return from Arles either to
Van Gogh's teachings or to the effects of southern colour and
atmosphere. The question though is of little importance. Every man, no
matter how great or small, goes through a formative period in which he
receives numerous influences. At any rate, just before Van Gogh died he
called Gauguin "_maitre_." During their final periods, however, we know
that the two men differed totally; and in 1891 Gauguin showed that he
was under no man's influence. In the Femmes Assises a l'Ombre des
Palmiers and Vairaoumati Tei Oa, he was already the Gauguin we know so
well. The first is a sunlit landscape with the hills and palm-trees
broadly and flatly painted. The women who are seated in the great pool
of cool shade have all the sagely childish drawing that we find later in
his more complete pictures. In the second, the flowered stuffs, the
heavy limbs and the perpendicularity of design, which appear so
frequently later on, are more than suggested; and the colour has all the
beauty of his best efforts.
It was after Gauguin's first sojourn to the Islands that he came back to
France a barbarian, eager to stupefy the world of arts not only by his
pictures but by his very attire. In this he failed. The public had
barely recovered from its Impressionist shock, and Gauguin went to
Brittany. Here he gathered about him many of the painters he had known
before, as well as some new ones, and formed a group of young men who
were ready to react against the pettiness of the Neo-Impressionistic
methods and to establish a new art school. They called themselves
Synthesists, afterward Cloisonnists, and some of them later became
Classicists. Here forgathered Serusier, Maurice Denis, Filiger, De Hahn,
Seguin, Verkade, Anquetin, Laval, Louis Ray, Chamaillard, Fauche,
Bernard and Schuffenecker, few of whom are discoverable today. Among
these painters the slightest tendency toward divisionistic methods was
looked upon as heresy; and religious pictures were in the ascendant,
especially with Verkade. The enthusiasm of these young men for their
simple and "synthetic" retrogression to the elemental led them to
decorate tavern walls and ceilings, to paint windows and barn doors, and
to proclaim themselves on all occasions as the only authoritative and
vital artists of the day. They had forgotten Renoir and Cezanne because
they detested all intellectual and scientific accuracy. And they had not
known the latter with sufficient intimacy to be directly influenced by
his work. Under the sway of Gauguin's unsophisticated aesthetics and
Bernard's rhetorical eloquence they went far afield in their search for
a simple and elemental synthesis. Zeal was not wanting. They argued,
caroused and fought continually. This last activity was the cause of
Gauguin's lameness all the rest of his life. Little or nothing of
lasting merit came out of this group which, though it moved from
Pont-Aven to Pouldu, has come to be known as the Pont-Aven School. Most
of its members are dead or have been swallowed up in the commercial
currents of today. A few, like Bernard, Fauche and Schuffenecker, are
doing indifferent art. They contributed nothing to the modern idea
outside of the impetus they gave to the anti-academic spirit. There was
among them more enthusiasm than talent, more polemical energy than
genius.
Gauguin, though he talked as loudly as the others, painted also. At
length their conversations lost their novelty for him. He felt once more
the call of his Islands. He was still after an ideal, a congenial
setting. These things France could not give him. Again, the necessity of
accepting charity from his friends was too humiliating a trial for a
nature so timid. His high-handed attitude was only a mask to hide his
desire to shrink away. He was always uneasy in cities and unhappy among
people who did not try to understand him. He detested the
artificialities of Parisian women. His robust sensuality craved a more
solid and artless Eve. In France his nature, so responsive to the glow
of colour and the primitive lure of archaic forms, saw only chill tints
and inutile complications. To him the South meant the richness and heat
of romantic emotions, the satiety of the senses. It appealed to his deep
love of chaotic and untrammelled nature. He had tasted it before in his
seafaring, and he turned to it now as to an only salvation. It was at
this time that Carriere arranged the passage. Gauguin was never to see
Europe again.
The Impressionists had made infinitesimal spots of colour in order to
imitate as exactly as possible the colour effect of nature and to
increase the dynamic power of a canvas by making it give off a light of
its own. By this technique they had incorporated both air and sunlight
into their art. The Neo-Impressionists made mathematical the
Impressionists' haphazard stippling and had turned the spots into almost
symmetrical squares. The squares were slightly separated, and the bare
canvas was permitted to show between them in order to achieve a greater
brilliance and a more vivid light. Van Gogh later elongated these
squares into threads until his pictures resembled tapestries. There was
no longer the technical unconcern in painting which Pissarro and Monet
had prescribed. Paradoxically enough, while art was growing more
scientific it was also becoming less significant. With the men of
Pont-Aven the reaction against a too technically self-conscious painting
began to set in. Their ardent advocacy of primitive conception and
method was the rebound from the pseudo-scientific verbiage which, in the
"advanced" studios, took the place of good painting. Consequently they
favoured the broad arrangement of surfaces; classic, if the artist
leaned temperamentally in that direction; barbaric, if his tastes so
inclined him; Gothic, Chinese, Japanese or primitive--all according to
which his inclination led him. But all work had to be completed during
the first fury of inspiration, conceived imaginatively, and executed
from the decorative standpoint. Gauguin, by his quick wit and youthful
impetuosity, easily dominated the circle and developed, through the
constant interchange of opinions, his vague ideas concerning a
"synthetic" art. On his third and last voyage to the Islands his
greatest work was done. Here he carried out those ideas which had had
their inception at Arles and which had become crystallised at Pont-Aven.
He made his art entirely out of colour, but instead of profiting by the
teachings of Daumier and Cezanne whose visions were the most
simultaneous in the history of art, he chose rather to emulate the early
and ingenuous schools of plastic expression. In this his painting was
retrogressive.
But there was another and more important side to Gauguin. He at least
strove for a larger and more purely emotional interpretation of nature
than had been attempted before: and our interest in him is due largely
to the broad and peaceful vision he gives us. Monet put many greens in
one tree. Gauguin saw the tree as green, but by depicting it in broad
planes of pure pigment, he made it a more intense green than Monet could
ever have done. "A metre of green is greener than a centimetre of
green," said Gauguin; and this principle he applied to all his work.
Instead of portraying light by colour as the Impressionists did, he
interested himself only in the colour which resulted from light. Thus he
was able to raise his paintings to the highest possible pitch of purity,
while still being preoccupied with nature. In painting a landscape where
a woman with a cerulean blue dress was seated among green trees on an
ochre beach with purple hills in the rear, and where the yellow sunlight
shone on the tree trunks and in the woman's hair, Gauguin would first of
all draw apart the blues as much as possible. The woman's dress would be
painted almost blue-green, and in order to contrast this colour with the
other blue in his subject, he would paint the sky blue-violet-violet.
Thus he would produce a greater range of emotional colour than if the
two blues had been pale and similar in tint. Furthermore, he would make
the sunlight a yellow-orange-orange and the sand a spectrum yellow. The
trees would then be recorded as yellow-green and the hills as
red-red-purple. By this process all the parts of the picture were
differentiated, with the result that the canvas had a strong carrying
power. This power was further increased by the figures being sharply
outlined.
Gauguin's composition has little importance. It takes the form of
perpendicularities, and rarely is any rhythmic order discernible. It is
of a piece with the Romanesque painting in Saint-Savin near Poitiers.
All his objects are personifications of calm, and are rooted in their
environment as well as in the earth. They do not seem merely to pose
there: Gauguin's work is not superficial to this extent,--but they grow
naturally out of their matrix like flowers or trees, unconscious but
immovable. The passivity which pervades them is not the calm of
completion or of the perfect rest which comes after mental exercise, but
rather the calm of the lethargic mind which avoids thought, dislikes
action and is content to dream. Technically this feeling is caused by
lines at right angles to the horizon, by big simple planes on which the
eye can rest free from the disturbance of line opposition, by large flat
patterns of dark tonality conducive to peace and introspection. Even the
contoured volumes have a greater extent of base than of apex and thus
add to the picture's aspect of immobility. Gauguin's drawing is
interesting in that it portrays a race highly susceptible of
picturisation. His models are impelling because it is an adventure to
explore their parts, their joints, their distortions and disproportions.
Their beauty is heavy and cumbersome, like that of the stone images of
the Aztecs.
That which interests us most in Gauguin however is his colour. In this
medium he arrived at a sumptuousness unsurpassed by preceding painters.
His art was a new application of the old principle of wall decoration.
Many had made use of broad planes of colour before his advent, but none
had heightened the significance of these planes sufficiently to express
nature. He was the first realist in decoration, and from him come, by
direct descent, Matisse and a horde of lesser men like Fritz Erler, Leo
Putz, R. M. Eichler, Adolf Muenzer, Rodolphe Fornerod, Alcide Le Beau and
Gustave Jaulmes. The aesthetic import of a Puvis de Chavannes is almost
equal to that of Gauguin, but the former's greys and grey-blues appear
washed-out and dead, while Gauguin's pictures vibrate with the heat of
tropical sunlight and the richness of tropical colour. Gauguin, however,
could get no orders. His work was too sensuous. Interior decoration
would have had to be far more joyous than it was at that time for his
exotic creations to find a place on walls and ceilings.
Gauguin's animating desire was to synthesise his picture--to make each
part of them relative to all the other parts, to order them as to
colour, line and tone in such a way that they would give forth the
impression of a simple vision, a perfect ensemble. This desire was in
the air of the day. The Impressionists had unconsciously approached
synthesis by using light and air as a solvent. Cezanne had gone much
deeper and ordered form by means of colour. In Seurat Gauguin saw almost
completely set forth an expression which by its simplicity satisfied
him. Some assert that he was also influenced by Degas. But whether this
is so or not, certain it is that there is more of Ingres in him than of
Giotto. With Seurat as a starting-point--that is, the linear Seurat of La
Baignade and Un Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte--Gauguin quickly abolished the
tiny and labourious spotting which Impressionism and Pointillism had
taught him, and branched out into simpler design and greater chromatic
brilliancy. By these departures he achieved his synthesis. But this
triumph must not be overestimated. There are degrees of synthesis.
Rubens, Giotto, Degas, Ingres, Boecklin, Botticelli--all are synthetic,
but all are by no means of equal importance. While synthesis is
necessary to art, it is not the ear-mark of great art alone. The order
which is obtained by three harmonious lines is not so extended an order
as that found in the multilinear drawings of Pollaiuolo: and this
complication of aesthetic ordonnance is what makes a Donatello more
significant than a piece of negro sculpture, a Scarsellino greater than
a Matisse, and an El Greco more puissant than a Mazzola-Bedoli.
Furthermore, when this complete surface order extends itself into three
dimensions it becomes an infinitely greater moving power. When from
simple straight lines on a flat surface the artist carries his creation
into opposition, development and finality, he is pushing the frontiers
of his painting to art's extreme limits.
Gauguin's temperament was simple in the extreme. He had fallen under the
sway of Manet: he had gone to a rugged country of primitive instincts
where singular costumes were a part of the landscape: he had studied the
stone and wooden figures in the old churches and cross-roads of
Brittany, and had found the elemental to his liking. Consequently in
synthesising his art he used simple forms, straight lines and large
planes of shadow and light, all of which were presented on a flat
surface, so that all the parallelisms and elementary curves of the
picture would deliver themselves to the average spectator at first
glance. His method of filling or balancing a canvas was little more than
primitive, and the curved lines of light and shadow, which are intended
to entice the eye, are so isolated that when we at length arrive at
their end we discover they are without rhythmic intention. Nor is there
a generating line out of which the others grow.
Gauguin's linear harmony is no greater, if a trifle more diverse, than
in the Byzantine mosaic decorations in S. Vitale. Indeed the emotion we
experience before each of them is to all purposes the same. The richness
of medium in the mosaics is amply compensated for by Gauguin's richness
of foliage forms and floral designs. The decorative colours in both are
equally effective. As moderns we might get more enjoyment out of
Gauguin's heat and brilliance and the diversity of his silhouette, but
at the same time there is a greater archaeological attraction and a more
spiritual interest for us in the ancient work. Intrinsically one is as
great as the other. Those seeking for calm will find it in equal degree
in both, for in each it is produced by the same method: by the static
representation of form rather than by a sequence of movement. Gauguin's
sculpture has the same qualities as his paintings, and resembles the
religious effigies of some barbaric tribe. The figures are upright and
rigid, their backs against a straight support, as in Egyptian
architectural art.
[Illustration: DEUX TAHITIENS by GAUGUIN]