I
In 1889 there opened in Paris on the Champ-de-Mars the Universal
Exposition, to celebrate the centennial of the taking of the Bastile. Of
this exhibition and of the palace built to house it, nothing now remains
except the melancholy Eiffel Tower.
The pictures admitted to the exhibition were, rather naturally, of a
kind sanctioned by academic officialdom. Wherefore visitors who happened
to patronize the Café Volpini near the entrance were doubtless startled
to find upon the walls a hundred pictures of a kind calculated to shock
all their susceptibilities in art matters. Their perplexity cannot have
been greatly lessened by the receipt of a catalogue bearing this title:
"Catalogue of the Exposition of Pictures of the Impressionist and
Syntheticist Group, held on the Premises of M. Volpini, at the
Champ-de-Mars, 1889."
The exhibitors were people of whom the respectable patrons of the Café
Volpini had for the most part never heard. Their names were:--E.
Schuffenecker, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Louis Roy,
Léon Fauché, Georges Daniel, Ludovic Nemo (a pseudonym of Bernard's) and
lastly, Paul Gauguin. Lithographs, printed in black upon yellow paper
and not less extraordinary than the pictures, were also visible upon
request. These were by Bernard and Gauguin.
The result of this exhibition was that the public laughed, the papers
protested, the young students of art in the various ateliers of Paris
were stimulated to furious discussion. But a few spirits, more
venturesome or more prophetic, took the trouble to test the new ideas. A
few, chief among them Sérusier of the Académie Julian, even set out to
visit the birthplace of the new movement, a lonely inn kept by a family
of the name of Gloanec at Le Poldu, a short distance from Pont-Aven.
A brief survey of the history of Syntheticism is necessary to an
understanding of the theories of the new school. Here we enter upon
debatable ground. It has already been said that the chief opponents of
the academicism of Cabanel and Bougereau were the Impressionists. Their
movement was already through its second phase and entering upon its
third. The earliest of the Impressionists, led by Manet, insisted that a
picture was only nature seen through a temperament; in other words, that
a picture must be naturalistic. This doctrine found parallel literary
expression in the writings of the de Goncourts, de Maupassant and Zola.
The first phase in Impressionism was therefore synthetic and maintained
a belief in form.
It was succeeded by an analytical phase, based upon the application to
color of the scientific theories of light, of Rood, Chevreuil and
Helmholtz. To Claude Monet, the founder of this new school of
Impressionism, nothing mattered in a picture but the atmosphere. Form
was abandoned.
After Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Guillamin, a new group, of whom
the chief were Seurat and Signac, attempted to combine the tenets of
their two sets of predecessors. They retained formal composition but
broke up color into minute points or dots. This third generation of
Impressionists were originally termed Neo-Impressionists but now, more
frequently, Pointillists.
Three artists stood out against the tendency towards scientific theory.
Puvis de Chavannes had, within the very precincts of the official salon,
created an art based on something wholly distinct, alike from the
photographic and frigid eclecticism of Cabanel and Bougereau and from
the work of both Manet and Monet. Puvis was a decorator who could think
and paint only in terms of walls. He had achieved, after a long
struggle, a decorative synthesis of his own, based upon the ruthless
simplification of masses, contours and coloring. Reserved, cold,
solitary, he had emptied his art of all rhetorical emphasis and in his
old age was tending closer and closer to the methods of Giotto, that
father of all European painting.
Paul Cézanne, the hermit of Aix, had faced the problem of painting with
the Impressionist palette while preserving the mass structure of his
true spiritual ancestors--the Venetians and El Greco. As a result he was
thought to be mad and even considered by some to be a myth, for he lived
far from Paris and had for long enough sent no pictures to be exhibited.
Finally, Degas, associating himself with the Impressionists at the
outset, had been careful to preserve the classic line and composition of
Ingres, who might be called the last of Florentines. Degas was
considered an artist of small importance because, unlike Manet, he
scorned to give himself airs. He lived a retired life in Paris, and did
not exhibit.
These three men--Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne and Degas--had, through
their own inner necessity, become syntheticists. But no one of them
preached Syntheticism, because their adherence to the creed was
unconscious. The doctrine was first voiced by the men who exhibited with
Paul Gauguin at the Café Volpini in 1889, who lived and worked with him
at the Gloanec inn, near Pont-Aven. It was from these men that the
reaction against Impressionism started, a reaction which, in its turn,
was destined to provoke another reaction towards the theories of
mathematical and analytical abstraction of line, color and form, which
we know as Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. It was these men surrounding
Gauguin, who forged the last living link in the chain of art tradition
which goes back through Giotto and Cimabue to the Byzantine mosaics,
and, through these, to the first essays in art of cave-men and savages.
With Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism we may be witnessing the beginning
of a new tradition. With Gauguin and his fellows we see the renaissance
of an old one.
II
As early as 1886, in an article in the _Revue Indépendante_, the
well-known critic Eduard Dujardin had spoken of a group calling
themselves the Cloissonists, who painted in flat patches of tone,
divided from each other by black lines.
Cloissonism, as the name indicates, was borrowed from the Japanese. But
as a method of painting, it had been derived less from cloisonné enamel
than from the technique of the Japanese color-print artists.
The artistic gods of the Cloissonists were Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro.
It may be remembered that since 1865 men like Zola, Manet, Monet,
Whistler, the de Goncourts--in short the entire generation of the
naturalists--had collected these color prints, written about them,
talked about them.
Gauguin himself, when he returned to Paris at the close of this year
1889, pinned a frieze of Hokusai and Utamaro prints round the walls of
his studio.
But the existence of this somewhat baroque and exotic school of
Cloissonism, of which the leader was Anquetin (later ranked with the
Syntheticists), does not fully explain the use of Syntheticism with its
greater insistence upon decorative unity, and its clearer affinities to
the work of the Italian primitives.
As to the origin of Syntheticism we have divergent statements from
contemporary witnesses.
The English artist, A.S. Hartrick, who was studying in Paris from 1886
to 1889 and who knew personally both Gauguin and Van Gogh, ascribes the
Synthetic theory to Gauguin in these terms:--
"From a study of thirteenth century glass he (Gauguin) got an idea of
design and color which exactly suited his state of development, and he
then proceeded to translate it into an art of his own, using oil paint
as a vehicle."[1]
Of similar opinion is the well known French artist and writer, Maurice
Denis, whose work has done so much to popularise Gauguin. He declares in
his book "Theories,"[2] that Gauguin was the "incontestable originator"
and master of the new movement, to which he gives two names:
Neo-Traditionism and Symbolism. In the first account which he wrote of
the movement in 1890, an account obtained from the lips of Paul
Sérusier, one of the earliest of Gauguin's disciples after 1889, Denis
includes the following interesting paragraph:
"Did not Paul Gauguin originate this ingenious and unpublished history
of modeling?
"At the beginning there was the pure arabesque, as little deceptive of
the eye as possible; a wall is empty; cover it with symmetrical spots
of form, harmonious in color:--stained glass, Egyptian pictures,
Byzantine mosaics.
"From this comes the painted bas-relief:--metopes of the Greek temple,
the church of the Middle Ages.
"Then the attempt to attain to the ornamental deception of the eye
practised in Antiquity is resumed in the fifteenth century by the
Italian primitives, who replace the painted bas-relief by paintings
modeled to imitate bas-relief, but in other respects preserve the first
idea of decorative unity. Recall also under what conditions
Michaelangelo, a sculptor, decorated the Sistine ceiling.
"Perfection of this modeling; modeling in high-relief. This leads from
the first academy of the Caracchi to our decadence."
Emile Bernard holds a contrary opinion. His view was originally
published in the _Mercure de France_ and reasserted in his preface to
the letters written to him by Van Gogh.[3] Bernard, who revolted from
the Atelier Cormon with Anquetin, had, as we have seen, been repulsed
by Gauguin in in 1886. After a brief return to Paris he went off to
Saint-Briac, where he covered the walls of the inn with frescoes and
painted the windows, in imitation of stained-glass, employing essence of
turpentine as a medium. In 1888, before Gauguin came to Arles, Bernard
was brought into contact with him again through the mediation of
Theodore Van Gogh and, although young enough to be Gauguin's son (being
about twenty at this time), shared with him the honors of the Volpini
exhibition.
Bernard claims that he, and he alone, invented Syntheticism, and bases
his claim on the evidence of the pictures (all dated) which Gauguin
painted previous to 1888, and in which Gauguin was still definitely
Impressionist in technique. He maintains that Gauguin abruptly changed
his style after the second meeting in 1888, when he first saw what his
younger rival had been doing. Furthermore, Bernard contends that this
style was solely based upon the application of Cézanne's discoveries in
technique.
Against these contentions there are three objections to be made.
In the first place it is known that Gauguin, during his stay in
Martinique in 1887, painted pictures that are undeniably essays in
syntheticism. Martinique showed Gauguin the impossibility of painting
tropic sunlight by means of the Impressionistic division of tones.
Always purely intuitive as an artist, Gauguin began to realize at
Martinique, however vaguely, that one cannot reproduce the natural
decomposition of light by the artificial decomposition of color
attempted by Pissarro and the other Impressionists. He therefore sought
to translate sunlight into color by simplifying and exaggerating the
contrast of colors.
In the second place, Bernard's argument leaves unexplained why it was
not he, but Gauguin, who after 1888 painted those magnificent pictures
_Le Christ Jaune, Le Christ Vert_ and _La Vision après le Sermon_[4] and
carved the two superb bas-reliefs _Soyez Amoureuses et vous serez
Heureuses_ and _Soyez Mystérieuses_. Moreover, the careful reader of Van
Gogh's letters to his brother will find that throughout '88 and '89
Bernard stood in relation to Gauguin as a pupil to a master. Finally,
even if Bernard's contention be partially true and if his own essays did
induce Gauguin to reject the last vestiges of Impressionism, his story
fails to account for the masterly grasp of Synthetic Symbolism shown by
Gauguin immediately after their second meeting.
It is quite impossible to trace to Cézanne's essays in Synthetic
Impressionism the more severely linear and decorative design of either
Bernard or Gauguin. Cézanne, later on, even went so far as to assert
that Gauguin had misunderstood him. Therefore it is clear that the
opinions of A.S. Hartrick and of Maurice Denis better fit the facts.
Gauguin was the sole originator of the Synthetic style. That style was
derived, perhaps mainly, from the careful study of thirteenth century
glass, which does perfectly what Gauguin wished to do: translate the
effect of sunlight into luminous color. But it was also derived from
Egyptian painting, Byzantine mosaics and the Kakemonos of the Japanese.
In short, it was as complete a rejection of Impressionism as possible
and a return to the linear arabesque and decorative spacing of balanced
color and form practiced by the primitives of all times and preserved,
in the nineteenth century, in the works of artists whom Gauguin admired:
Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne and Degas.
[Footnote 1: "Post-Impressionism," by A.S. Hartrick. _Imprint,_ May,
1913.]
[Footnote 2: Paris, l'Occident, 1912.]
[Footnote 3: Paris, Vollard, 1911.]
[Footnote 4: Now known as _La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange_.]
III
The exhibition at the Café Volpini brought notoriety to Gauguin. Various
young artists, wearying of the academic "receipt for art"--the phrase is
Gauguin's--which they were being taught in the ateliers of Paris, took
the road for Pont-Aven. Among these were Paul Sérusier, Chamaillard, and
the Dutchman, De Haahn.
Acting under the influence of these, and especially under that of
Sérusier, whose mind was metaphysical and filled with Neo-Platonic
mysticism, Gauguin attempted to become the teacher of a definite
doctrine. Hitherto he had been an artist of the type of Ingres, working
purely intuitively, with one eye upon tradition and another upon nature.
But his new pupils were eager for a theory, a formula, and a formula
this hater of the dogmatic attempted to create.
Artists are singularly unhappy in their attempts to explain themselves.
Whistler is not the only example of an artist who might have been
greater had he not wasted so much time in controversy. The public always
takes too literally the efforts of an artist to analyze his own methods.
All art is a synthesis, and no artist can be at the same time synthetic
and analytical.
Gauguin was no exception to this rule. Take for example, his
often-quoted statement about the use of primary colors:--
"Always use colors of the same origin. Indigo is the best basis. It
becomes yellow in saltpeter, red in vinegar. You can obtain it at any
chemist's. Keep to these three colors."
Gauguin himself did not follow this precept. An examination of his
palette shows that it was arranged thus, from left to right:
--ultramarine, silver white, emerald green, veronese green, yellow
ochre, burnt sienna, yellow chrome, vermilion, and crimson lake. No
artist needs to be told that many of these colors are dangerously
fugitive, whether used pure or in mixture.
So with another celebrated saying: "Seek harmony and not contrast, the
agreement and not--the clash of color." This saying not only goes
contrary to the previously quoted remark on the use of primary colors,
but is opposed to those equally famous dicta: "Does that trunk of a tree
seem to you blue? Paint it as blue as possible," and, "A mile of green,
is more green than half a mile."
It is therefore more valuable to summarize the main lines of Gauguin's
teaching than to quote this or that paradoxical remark. Gauguin was not
a man holding a high-school debate on theory, but a creator. He refused
even to be called a decorator, he preferred the title of artisan. He
declared outright that he had no technique. "Or perhaps I have one, but
very vagabond, very elastic, according to the way I feel when I awaken
in the morning, a technique which I apply to my own liking in order to
express my thought, without taking account of the truth of Nature,
externally apparent. People think nowadays that all the technical means
of painting are exhausted. I do not believe it, if I am to judge by the
numerous observations which I have made and put into practice....
Painters have still much to discover."
Gauguin therefore boldly called his pupils anarchists and left to them
this remark: "Do what you please, so long as it is intelligent." This
did not prevent him from having a great respect for art tradition. He
knew that tradition is not a "recipe for making art," but the sum-total
of collective human intelligence working in the past on the same
problems that face the artists of to-day. He realized that the essential
substance of art is always the same. Art is an eternal renewal of this
substance. "The artist is not born of a single unity. If he adds a new
link to the chain already begun, it is much. The artist is known by the
quality of his transposition."
The "transposition" that he himself strove for may be clearly read in
his pictures. He strove incessantly for a renewal of the decorative art
of the great Venetians, by blending the Venetian glow of color with the
calm line of Primitive and especially of Egyptian Primitive design. His
problem was essentially the same as that of Puvis de Chavannes, the
problem of how to cover a flat wall space with design and color so as to
leave it still essentially a wall and not, as Veronese and Tiepolo left
it, an optically deceptive piece of stage-scenery. Puvis had solved the
problem by the artificial means of lowering his scale of colors and by
simplifying his drawing. Gauguin solved his by the elimination of
modeling, and of graduations of tone, and by reducing his drawing to the
strongest possible arabesque of outline. In everything he sought for the
essential form, the form that contains all the other inessential forms.
As Sérusier puts it: "The synthetic theory of art consists in reducing
all form to the smallest possible number of component
forms:--straight lines, arcs of a circle, a few angles, arcs of an
ellipse." And to express this form he sought for the most harmonious
balance of color. Maurice Denis says:--"Recall that a picture, before
being a war-horse, a nude or some anecdote, is essentially a flat
surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order."
[Illustration: Tahitian Women.]
Therefore and above all, Gauguin told his pupils not to draw from the
model, but from memory. He admitted that it was useful for young
painters to have a model, as all knowledge of facts could only be
obtained from the study of models. But he added that it was better to
draw a curtain before the model while painting it. One of his pupils
declared: "We went into the country to paint seascapes and to the
seashore to do landscapes."
Gauguin's teaching in this respect exactly agrees with the methods
practiced for centuries by the great Chinese and Japanese painters. He
would have enjoyed that story of a Chinese painter, who was sent out by
the Emperor to paint the most celebrated landscape views in the Empire,
and who returned without having painted anything. When the Emperor asked
him: "But where are your pictures?" he replied: "I have them here"--and
pointed to his forehead. Gauguin, with his hatred of copying either from
nature or from the masters of the past, would also have appreciated the
Chinese idea of a "copy"--a free rearrangement of old material according
to one's temperament.
Lastly, he counseled his pupils not to paint movement but repose. "Let
everything you do breathe peace and calm of soul. Avoid all animated
attitudes. Each of your figures should be perfectly static. Give
everything a clear outline." This counsel sounds strange to ears
deafened by the tumult of modern life and by the clamorous theories of
Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists. But to Gauguin it was the basis of
his own mystical religion. He gave it to the world, however, not for
this reason, but because he realized that painting to be decorative
must be architectural. He himself was a builder, an artisan. In Brittany
he painted the walls and windows of the inn where he lived; he made
furniture, carved and ornamented a pair of wooden sabots for himself,
worked at bas-reliefs, decorated pottery. Movement, restlessness, would
have but troubled the lines of that ideal building, which, even then, he
was erecting in his dreams.
Such was the doctrine of Paul Gauguin. It may seem strange that such
ideas could have ever been considered revolutionary. In the Far East at
all events, they had been the commonplaces of art for centuries.
Revolutionary or not, Gauguin went on his way undisturbed. From an
examination of his letters, and of the statements of those who knew him,
the fact emerged that this "anarchist" preserved throughout his life a
great respect for artists of the past. Rembrandt especially, in his
mystical and visionary phase, appealed to him and Rembrandt's influence
may be traced in more than one of Gauguin's Tahitian pictures.
Velazquez, Rubens, Proudhon, Corot, Whistler--Gauguin was able to learn
something from all these men as well as from Memling and Holbein. As for
his pupils, the measure of the intelligence they displayed in following
his precepts may be judged by the fact that Gauguin remarked about one
of them: "His faults are not sufficiently accentuated for him to be
considered a master," and by the fact that the first synthetic picture
of another was, according to Maurice Denis, painted on the lid of a
cigar box!
IV
It is in the works of this period that we must seek for a solution of
Gauguin's mystic doctrine and for an explanation of the struggle that
went on in his soul: a struggle that was solved finally by his denial of
civilization and affirmation of pagan savagery at Tahiti.
Gauguin, as has been seen, was not naturally but only deliberately a
teacher of others. Especially in his intimate and personal concerns, he
commonly guarded an air of defiant reserve. In the matter of views on
art, he contented himself with the expression of dogmatic and
paradoxical opinions which, if disputed, were merely affirmed with
greater violence.
It is related of him that, if any one persisted in holding an opinion
contrary to his own, Gauguin would reply only by an oblique glance from
those cold gray eyes an answer that usually reduced the speaker to an
embarrassed silence.
Nevertheless, we owe to the fortunate preservation of various
fragmentary notes, made in the solitude of his last desperate years,
indications of what Gauguin's religious and political opinions were.
Here are some of them:--
"If I gaze before me into space, I have a vague sense of the Infinite;
nevertheless I am the conclusion of something that has been begun. I
understand then, that there has been a beginning and that there will be
no end.
"In this I do not possess the explanation of a mystery, but merely the
mysterious sense of this mystery--and this sensation is intimately
linked to the belief in an eternal life, promised by Jesus.
"But then, if we in ourselves are not the beginning when we come into
the world, it is necessary to believe, with the Buddhists, that we have
always existed.
"A change of skin.
"All this is very strange.
"The unfathomable mystery remains what it has always been and what it
is, unfathomable. God does not belong to the scholar, the logician. He
belongs to the poets, to their dreams. He is the symbol of Beauty,
Beauty itself."
From these and other jottings we can understand what was passing in
Gauguin's mind when he painted the pictures: _Le Christ Jaune_ and _Le
Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers_; when he carved the contrasted bas-reliefs:
_Soyez Amoureuses and Soyez Mystérieuses_; when he drew the lithographs:
_La Cigale et les Fourmis_, and _Léda_ which bears the defiant
inscription "Honi soit qui mal y pense."
Gauguin was a mystic who sought instinctively for religious
illumination, not in the systems of philosophers and theologians, but in
nature and in man. Among the higher types of civilized man he saw only a
false system of morality, politics and religion, which elevated the
wealthy above the level of the rest of humanity and forbade to the
thinker, the artist, the independent workman, the very right to live.
Against the organized materialism of the nineteenth century, he
recognized in Jesus Christ a revolt and a protest; but a revolt and a
protest that had failed. Humanity had not yet produced, save by
exception, the higher type of man, the man capable of "selling all and
giving to the poor," the man chosen "to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." A
terrible epoch, he foresaw, was coming in Europe for the next
generation: an epoch where the tyranny of money would destroy mankind.
Therefore, in contemplating Christ, he was moved by a sense of despair,
of the futility of this sacrifice. His attitude to Christianity became
purely Protestant. Across his pictures there moves no gracious shadow of
the beneficent Virgin, sharing with humanity the joys and sorrows of
maternity.
In _Le Christ Jaune_ he gives us the symbol of a faith which has proved
impotent to elevate mankind to its level. _Le Christ au Jardin
d'Oliviers_ echoes the awful cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" The terrible little picture, _Les Misères Humaines_ sums
up in its two figures the despair and hypocrisy of our vaunted
civilization. Even the later Tahitian _Birth of Christ_ renders nothing
but the physical anguish and exhaustion of maternity. In the _Ia Orana
Maria_, or the Salutation to Mary, the Virgin is represented merely as a
happy human mother.
Nature, on the other hand, seen by him luxuriant and unfettered, as at
Martinique, taught him the uselessness of revolt, struggle and effort,
the need of fatalism, of resignation. He grew to believe that man was
better, more rational, more harmonious when no longer struggling against
the inexorable laws of birth, begetting, and death. Thus in his art he
aimed at repose, the quietism of the Buddhists. His knowledge of
Buddhism was not deep--indeed in his eyes, Buddhism, too, was a vain
revolt against nature--but his respect for Buddhistic doctrine remained
greater than his respect for Christianity. At the bottom of his soul
there dwelt an old, old thought, the essence of all paganism: "Eat,
drink and be merry, for to-morrow we may die."
As he put it later in the pages of his Tahitian recital:--
"To the eyes of Tagatha (the God) the most splendid glories of kings and
their ministers are but dust and spittle:
"To his eyes, purity and impurity are like the dance of the six
serpents:
"To his eyes, the search for the Way of Buddha is like the coming of
flowers."
It is only by meditating long on this disillusioned mysticism of a man
who was never more than half an European, that we are able to understand
how the same mind could have conceived the exasperated sensuality of the
bas-relief, _Soyez Amoureuses et vous serez Heureuses_ and the somber
despair of _Le Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers_. That mind, as we have
seen, was neither wholly Christian or Pagan--though the untamed Pagan
element in it was destined slowly to get the better of the more refined
Christian side. Therefore it is useless to ask ourselves whether Gauguin
as an artist, displayed more of the Classic tradition than of the
Gothic. Gothic as well as Classical strains remained mingled in him up
to the last. Throughout his work there runs a longing--obscure,
tormented, and ultimately foiled--for a natural religion: a religion
that would reconcile man with nature in one harmony, a religion, which,
like the rest of his striving, would be a synthesis.
V
By the end of the year 1889, Gauguin's name had acquired a certain
renown, and he naturally gravitated back to Paris. Being however still
without resources, he took residence once more with Emile Schuffenecker.
At that period, the literary and artistic school which had produced
naturalism and impressionism was growing rapidly old-fashioned. Paris
was on the verge of her æsthetic nineties. A small group of writers,
chief of whom were Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Huysmans, had proclaimed a
sort of revolt against the nineteenth century, and had been, in
consequence of their love for the remote past, at first labelled
Decadents. This title was soon abandoned for the better designation of
Symbolists.
Gauguin appeared to the smaller fry of Symbolism as a sort of hero. Here
was a man whose revolt was something not fictitious. He had definitely
broken away from his own commercial surroundings. He had defiantly
ruptured his own family ties. He had abolished Impressionist science and
had sought to restore art to its primitive condition, revealing in the
process the inexhaustible strength and vitality of peasant and popular
art. His appearance amongst them, in a sailor's jersey, a sailor cap,
sailor's trousers, and carved wooden shoes, excited a sensation. He
became to the facile crowd of hero-worshipers and hangers-on, a sort of
symbol.
Some critics have stated that Gauguin's head was turned by this
adulation, but in reality, under a new veneer of affectation, he
remained what he had always been. No man was less fitted for living in
the midst of cultivated society than he. For a time, during that strange
epoch of his financial career, he had indeed become, to outward seeming,
largely an European; but this was merely on the surface and had
completely vanished in the course of his later vagabondage. An
invincible shyness and indisposition to reveal himself to others were in
him, masked by an appearance of sullen reserve and discourtesy. This
shyness disappeared when he was with children, peasants, or natives. But
to every one else Gauguin attempted to be as rude as possible, in order
to keep them at a distance. And, generally, he succeeded.
It is small wonder then that Schuffenecker shortly found his guest again
intolerable, and that Gauguin had to seek out a more modest lodging.
Schuffenecker is scarcely to be pitied. He seems never to have realized
that Gauguin was the sort of man whom it was worth while trying to love
and understand. In losing Gauguin, he lost the one thing that was ever
likely to bring him fame, the reputation which his studio had already
acquired in the eyes of certain amateurs, as housing Gauguin's
collection of pictures and sculptures by himself, by Cezanne, Van Gogh,
and Odilon Redon.
Gauguin shortly found a better friend perhaps the only real friend he
ever had--who was willing to give him the use of a studio. This was
Daniel de Monfreid, who had, incidentally, under the name George Daniel
taken part in the Volpini exhibition.
It is worthy of note that what brought them together was not a community
of taste in matters of art, but a common love of the sea.
De Monfreid, like Gauguin, had been a sailor. He was a man enjoying a
certain competence who had taken to yachting as an amusement. Every
summer, he dropped his palette and brushes, put on his master mariner's
cap, which he had won after an apprenticeship aboard a coasting vessel,
and set forth in his own schooner of thirty-six tons for a cruise in the
Mediterranean. This went on for years until de Monfreid, weary of
dodging quarantine restrictions, and getting entangled in the
complications of maritime law, retired from the sea, generously offering
his schooner to the Naval School at Cette, where she ultimately met her
end. At this period he was known to his artistic friends in Paris as
"the captain," and had been introduced to Gauguin by Schuffenecker, on
the former's return from Martinique in 1887.
To this man all lovers of Gauguin's art owe an immense debt. Whether it
was due to the independent and roving disposition, shared by both, or to
their common love and experience of the sea, or to the fact that both
were painters (de Monfreid's experiences in the Mediterranean had made
of him a good colorist), or to a certain bond of savage frankness and
nomad primitiveness to which all the rest of their common tastes were
due, is unknown. The fact remains that the friendship between them was
of that ideal kind that is never broken: the friendship between the
creator and helper, which all artists long for and to which so few
attain. In finding de Monfreid, Gauguin experienced almost the last
stroke of good fortune that he was to have in life. The last stroke of
all came a little afterwards when, in the year after accepting de
Monfreid's hospitality, he suddenly decided to leave Europe for Tahiti.
[Illustration: Hina Maruru (Feast to Hina).]
The happy discovery of a letter which Gauguin wrote at this time to a
Danish painter, Willemsen by name, clears up the long-vexed point of
what induced him to take this decision.[1] He chanced to attend, or to
read the report of, a lecture on Tahiti, given by a certain Van der
Veere. Van der Veere apparently pitched the tone of his discourse to
suit the tastes of a fashionable audience. He pictured Tahiti as a
terrestrial paradise where money was unknown. "Under a sky without
winter, upon an earth of a marvelous fertility, the Tahitian has only to
lift his hands to gather in his food; so he never works. For him life
means singing and making love." It is easy to picture the effect of such
phrases on the mind of a born lover of repose like Gauguin. Tahiti held
out the hope that Martinique had failed to realize; the hope that he
might be the first painter of the tropics. Gauguin's imagination was
fired by the idea. He declared that he intended to quit Europe and live
in Tahiti henceforward. There he could perhaps forget all the hardships
of the past, and die forgotten by Paris, happy and free to paint "sans
gloire aucune pour les autres." And if his children could join him
there, all the better--his isolation would then be complete.[2]
The young Symbolists of course shouted "Bravo!" at the news of the
proposed voyage. Tahiti! Another symbol! They had already spoilt Gauguin
sufficiently for serious art, by persuading him to embark on various
symbolistic enterprises, such as the production of a masterpiece
entitled _Loss Of Maidenhood_, which has fortunately vanished, and an
etching representing Mallarmé with Poe's Raven in the background.
Perhaps their eagerness to see Gauguin safely embarked for Tahiti only
concealed a growing boredom with their idol of yesterday.
At all events Gauguin was fêted, wined, dined. Thirty of his works were
auctioned off at the Hôtel Drouot, producing the small sum of nine
thousand six hundred and eighty francs. The Government consented to make
his voyage to Oceania an official "artistic mission," on condition that
this did not involve them in a responsibility for the expenses. A
banquet was held at the Café Voltaire, where all the Symbolists were
assembled. Gauguin has left some ironical observations on this or on a
similar banquet, which show clearly his opinion of the ceremony. Finally
a benefit performance was given by the Théâtre d'Art for the departing
artist and also for Verlaine, then rapidly sinking into the squalor of
his last years.[3]
The most interesting fact about the performance was that, included in
the program by a strange stroke of irony, Maurice Maeterlinck's play
_L'Intruse_ made on this occasion its first appearance on the stage.
Death walked the stage before Gauguin's eyes, as if to show him what to
expect. And yet he did not draw back.
On the fourth of April 1891, Gauguin, abandoning Paris, started on his
voyage of discovery to Tahiti. Morice, in his interesting book on
Gauguin, declares that when the decision was irrevocably made, and the
mission to Tahiti had been stamped with official approval, Gauguin's
self-possession momentarily abandoned him, and he broke down, and wept.
And when Morice asked the reason, he replied in these strange, tragic,
touching words:--
"Listen to me.... I have never known how to keep alive both my family
and my thought. I have not even been able, up to now, to keep alive my
thought alone. And now that I can hope for the future, I feel more
terribly than I have ever felt, the horror of the sacrifice I have
made, which is utterly irreparable."
With this knowledge in his heart, Gauguin abandoned civilization.
[Footnote 1: _Les Marges_, Paris, May 15, 1918.]
[Footnote 2: Gauguin had also undoubtedly read Loti's book. His letters
show that before deciding upon Tahiti he had considered the possibility
of going to Tonkin or Madagascar.]
[Footnote 3: It may be noticed that Gauguin received no financial profit
whatever from this performance, and Verlaine very little.]