Every decade, or thereabouts, a revolution occurs in the multicoloured
world of the Seven Arts; in Paris, at least a half dozen times in the
year, a new school is formed on the left bank of the Seine or under
some tent in the provinces. Without variety--as well as vision--the
people perish. Hence the invention known as a "new art," which always
can be traced back to a half-forgotten one. After the hard-won
victories of Impressionism there was bound to ensue a reaction. The
symbolists crowded out the realists in literature and the
Neo-Impressionists felt the call of Form as opposed to Colour. Well,
we are getting form with a vengeance, and seldom has colour been so
flouted in favour of cubes, cylinders, and wooden studio models and
muddy paste.
Paul Gauguin, before he went to the equator, saw the impending change.
He was weary of a Paris where everything had been painted, described,
modelled, so he sailed for Tahiti, landing at Papeete. Even there he
found the taint of European ideas, and after the funeral of King
Pomare and an interlude of flirtation with an absinthe-drinking native
princess, niece of the departed royalty (he made a masterly portrait
of her), he fled to the interior and told his experiences in Noa Noa,
The Land of Lovely Scents. This little book, illustrated with
appropriate sketches by the author-painter, is a highly important
contribution to the scanty literature dealing with Gauguin. I've read
Charles Morice and Emil Bernard, but beyond telling us details about
the Pont-Aven School and the art and madness of gifted Vincent Van
Gogh, both are reticent about Gauguin's pilgrimage to the South Seas.
We knew why he went there, now we know what he did while he was there.
The conclusion of the book is illuminating. "I returned to Paris two
years older than when I left, but feeling twenty years younger."
The cause of this rejuvenation was a complete change in his habits.
With an extraordinary frankness, not at all in the perfumed manner of
that eternal philanderer, Pierre Loti, this one-time sailor before
the mast, this explosive, dissipated, hard-living Paul Gauguin became
as a child, simulating as well as could an artificial civilised
Parisian with sick nerves the childlike attitude toward nature that he
observed in his companions, the gentle Tahitians. He married a Maori,
a trial marriage, oblivious of the fact that he had left behind him in
France a wife and children, and, clothed in the native girdle, he
roamed the island naked, unashamed, free, happy. With the burden of
European customs from his shoulders, his almost moribund interest in
his art revived. Gauguin there experienced visions, was haunted by
exotic spirits. One picture is the black goddess of evil, whom he has
painted as she lies on a couch with a white background, a colour
inversion of Manet's Olympe. With the cosmology of the islanders the
Frenchman was familiar.
He has, in addition to portraying the natives, made an agreeable
exposition of their ways and days, and their naive blending of
Christian and Maori beliefs. His description of the festival called
Areosis is startling. Magical practices, with their attendant
cruelties and voluptuousness, still prevail in Tahiti, though only at
certain intervals. Very superstitious, the natives see demons and
fairies in every bush.
The flowerlike beauty of the brown women comes in for much praise,
though to be truthful, the ladies on his canvases seem far from
beautiful to prejudiced Occidental eyes. This Noa Noa is a refreshing
contribution to the psychology of a painter who, in broad daylight
dreamed fantastic visions, a painter to whom the world was but a
painted vision, as the music of Richard Wagner is painted music
overheard in another world.
"A painter is either a revolutionist or a plagiarist," said Paul
Gauguin. But the tricksy god of irony has decreed that, if he lasts
long enough, every anarch will end as a conservative, upon which
consoling epigram let us pause.
If I were to write a coda to the foregoing, loosely heaped notes, I
might add that beauty and ugliness, sickness and health, are only
relative terms. The truth is the normal never happens in art or life,
so whenever you hear a painter or professor of aesthetics preaching the
"gospel of health in art" you will know that both are preaching pro
domo. The kingdom of art contains many mansions, and in even the
greatest art there may be found the morbid, the feverish, the sick, or
the mad. Such a world-genius as Albrecht Duerer had his moment of
"Melencolia," and what can't you detect in Da Vinci or Michael Angelo
if you are overcurious?
"Beauty," like that other deadly phrase, "beautiful drawing," is ever
the shibboleth of the mediocre, of imitators, in a word, of the
academy. These men of narrow vision pin their faith to Ingres (which
is laudable enough), but groan if the "mighty line" of Degas is
mentioned; yet Degas, a pupil of Ingres, has continued his master's
tradition in the only way tradition should be continued, _i. e._, by
further development and by adding an individual note. Therefore, when
I register my overwhelming admiration for Velasquez, Vermeer, and
Rembrandt I do not bind myself to close my eyes to originality,
personal charm, or character in the newer men. There is no such thing
as schools of art; there are only artists.