Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning Part 6

The desire of the Neo-Impressionists to improve upon the Impressionistic vision was a sincere one, and in their striving for dramatic means for heightening the already intense emotional power of their forerunners'

work, they showed themselves to be animated by an ambition for change and improvement without which no vital innovation can be made. Their desire was commendable, but their science was inadequate. Their modern spirit was best shown in their search for the significance of line in its harmonic relation to colour and tone. The impetus to this search emanated from Seurat who dictated to his biographer, Jules Christophe: "Art is harmony; harmony is the a.n.a.logy of contraries (contrasts), the a.n.a.logy of likes (gradated), of tone, of tint, of line;-tone, that is to say, the light and dark; tint, that is to say, red and its complement green, orange and blue, yellow and violet; line, that is to say, horizontal directions.... The means of expression is the optical admixture of tones and tints and of their reactions (shadows) following fixed laws." Delacroix had already turned his eyes in the direction of the harmony of lines and colours. It will be recalled that he wrote in his Journal: "If to a composition, interesting in its choice of subject, you add a disposition of lines, which augments the impression, a chiaroscuro which seizes the imagination, and a colour which is adapted to the characters, it is then a harmony, and its combinations are so adapted that they produce a unique song.... It is good not to let each brush stroke melt into the others; they will appear uniform at a certain distance by the sympathetic law which a.s.sociates them."

The Neo-Impressionists, taking their cue from Seurat's observations, state that the first consideration of a painter before a blank canvas should be to determine what curves and what arabesques are going to divide the surface, and what colours and tones cover it. Even in this aim they went further than the Impressionists who neither ordered nor synthesised their works formally. The Neo-Impressionists say they do not commence a canvas until they have determined its complete arrangement.

Then, guided by tradition and science, they harmonise the composition with their conception. That is to say, they adapt the lines, colours and tones to an order which aesthetically expresses the character of emotion their model calls up in them. They hold that horizontal lines give calm; ascending lines, joy; descending lines, sorrow; and that the intermediary lines represent the infinite variations of emotions that lie outside these first three types. But they offer no explanation of the a.n.a.logies between these intermediate lines and the kinds of emotion they are supposed to call up. They go on to explain that hot tints and light tonalities should be applied to ascending lines, cold tints and sombre tonalities to descending lines, and an equal amount of light and dark to the horizontal lines. "Thus," they add, "the painter becomes a creator and a poet."

All this theorising would be important for the dramatic ill.u.s.trators were it entirely true. But while a line placed horizontally may represent calm, the same line made perpendicular or laid at an angle of forty-five degrees will also produce calm. The straight line varies so little in its significance, no matter at what angle it is placed, that its direction is negligible from an emotional standpoint. The _degree of curve_ in a line is its emotional element, and only when varying curves come in contact is the highest formal emotion obtained. The straight line is the lifeless, the static, the immobile. As such it can serve only as a foil to the curved line, for it is the straight that makes the curved of value. Their theory concerning hot colours and high tones is sounder than their linear theory; but in copying a joyous landscape is one not _forced_ to put on high tonalities and hot colours, since it is in _seeing_ these high values that we experience the sensation of joy?

And is it not from the low values in nature that we receive our sensation of sorrow? One may accentuate the colours and tones, but if they are too strongly intensified they will approach the other extreme and produce dead and mournful landscapes. This accentuation the Neo-Impressionists carried to the limit permitted by their pigments.

Their ideas of line and of joyous and sombre colours are undoubtedly of value if profoundly and extensively comprehended and properly applied.

But, in order to become significant, line must only delimit organisation and become volume; and colour, instead of merely producing joy and sorrow, must bring about form. Then again, there is that world lying on the further side of flatness which must be explored.

With all their theorising and attempts to obtain brilliancy, the Neo-Impressionists produce only grey work. From the first these artists were too coldly intellectual, and it matters little whether their science was right or wrong when we contemplate their pictures. Were their science perfect they could never have created art which goes beyond the arabesque and the poetry of arrangement, for they were not fundamental even in their aims. They have all painted different subjects in slightly varying manners, but, apart from Seurat's, all their canvases have these things in common: a uniform range of colour, a set method of technique, and the hard and "noisy" contrasts which in their larger works produce a veritable din. Those of the Neo-Impressionists who are still living claim to have completed Cezanne, p.i.s.sarro and Delacroix, to have perfected a method, to have expanded logically the Impressionists to something worth while, to be in accord with Rood and Chevreul, to have brought great harmony into painting, to have taken painting into the pure realms of poesy and symphonic musical composition. Alas, that their claims have no substantiation in our receptivities!

[Ill.u.s.tration: UN DIMANCHE a LA GRANDE-JATTE by SEURAT]

Seurat, the founder, was the only genuinely artistic man of the movement, and an early death denied him his chance to develop. Though seduced by too exacting a process, he has nevertheless given us some sensitive and delicately beautiful canvases. Le Chahut, Le Cirque and Un Dimanche a la Grande-Jatte are saturated with light, and in them is an undeniable order of parallel lines. His colours were never as harsh and acid as those of his confreres, and his pictures have a blond tonality which the other men of the movement entirely lack. His crayon drawings, from the standpoint of tonal experimentation, are interesting and seem almost like paintings. He had a great talent, and had he lived we might have expected great things from it. He was more vitally interested in style than in technical methods, and in his conclusions stemmed directly from Delacroix. His spottings were much smaller and more effective than those of the other Pointillists. His desire was to express an idea through the medium of nature, not to copy nature in order to relate the sensation it gave the artist. His painting was synthetic. All details and accidents of colour and silhouette he set aside as useless. His is an art of parallels and a.n.a.logies, of sensitivity and a.n.a.lysis; in fact, it has all those qualities which, were they present in greater strength, would produce significant pictures. He was of one piece; and his development, once he had begun to paint, was an even one toward a definite goal. In him, alone of the members of the group, we find an artist and not an ill.u.s.trator. Those who liken him to Aubrey Beardsley have less reason for their comparison than the ones who see parallels between Gainsborough and Renoir. Compare the quoted remarks of Seurat concerning tone, line and colour with Signac's summing up of his method, and the temperamental differences between the artist and the scientist will at once be seen. Signac says his method is "observation of the laws of colour, the exclusive use of pure tints, the renunciation of all attenuated mixings, and the methodical equilibrium of elements."

One of the most noted followers of the Neo-Impressionistic methods was the Hollander, Vincent van Gogh. Although generally considered in critical essays as an unrelated phenomenon in the art heavens, he is closely allied to Signac and to Delacroix through Seurat. He adopted painting, one is inclined to believe, because his verbal eloquence was inadequate to bring the Belgian miners to repentance. He had studied for the ministry, but like most men who, finding themselves strictly limited in one vocation, essay another, he found himself equally limited in his second. He drifted back to Holland and began to study painting in the studio of Mauve, a relative of his by marriage. His ardent, even flamboyant, desire to do good to everyone who crossed his path needed an outlet, and he found an emotional subst.i.tute for pamphleteering in the physical and mental exertion of painting. In this work he could preach unchecked, secure from arrest. He loved Millet because Millet loved the down-trodden. He loved Delacroix because of that artist's dramatic inspiration. He loved Daumier because he imagined he saw in Daumier a satire on the beast in man. He loved Monticelli because in that Provencal he sensed a wild gypsy mind and a kindred unrestraint in the use of colour. And he loved Diaz because Diaz was a poetic woodman.

Before coming to Paris Van Gogh had studied in the Antwerp Academy, and while in the French capital he met and was influenced by p.i.s.sarro. Here he also became acquainted with Bernard and Gauguin, adopting the Divisionistic methods from Seurat. He used only pure colours on his palette and mixed them only with white and black. Later he went to Arles where in two years, from 1887 and 1889, he painted the great bulk of his work, averaging four canvases a week through sickness, drink, insanity and disease. In him we have a perfect example of just how little can be done with pure enthusiasm unorganised by intellectual processes. His pictures display an entire lack of order, whether it be of colour, line or silhouette: there was never any form in them. His work is plainly the labour of the fanatic who, in a fury of pent-up desire to express himself, suddenly seizes a palette and brush and applies colours almost at random. Indeed, some of his pictures were completed in a few minutes.

Even many of those in which the symbology had to be thought out at length, were painted in an hour.

That Van Gogh was an ill.u.s.trator is undeniable; but he was an ill.u.s.trator of the abstract gropings of an unbalanced mind avid for dramatic emotions, rather than of exterior nature. His landscapes seem to portend the calm before some great upheaval, or to express a supernatural energy poised for an act of total annihilation. In them there are frenzied lines running zigzag and at random, and rolling clouds of purple and lurid yellow hanging over raucously bright roofs.

His portraits remain with us as memories of a feverish nightmare. They are too hollow and immaterial to appear even as a depiction of form. His colours carried out this feeling of dramatic terror, and because they were not harmonised with either line or tone, they became all the more chaotic. He never kept to the spots that Signac and Seurat had given him. His impatience was too great; the fire burned too furiously. He elongated them into strips like straw, and they give his work the appearance of haystacks. He covered with one stroke more s.p.a.ce than Seurat covered with twenty strokes.

This has been called his own _apport_ to art. In Gauguin, however, the same stroke is used, not so heavily loaded with pure colour, to be sure, but just as long. But in Gauguin the strokes are less noticeable because they all have an a.n.a.logous direction. With Van Gogh they rush wildly about, now one way, now another, sometimes covering the canvas entirely, sometimes separated to let the white show through. This separating was not done for the same reasons as in Signac, but because Van Gogh's impatience was too great to permit him to go back and cover. His figures are outlined in broad black or coloured lines, and colours are juxtaposed with their complementaries. In a Portrait d'Homme, done in 1889, the background is laid in with a bright green over which are superimposed polka-dots of pure vermilion surrounded by a darker green, the whole striped with yellow and light vermilion flourishes. On this is a yellowish face whose pompadour hair is made of black, vermilion and light violet. The collar is light green, red and blue; the striped cravat, red and white; the coat, violet and green; the shirt, pure green outlined in pure lake, with orange b.u.t.tons on it; and the picture's inscription-Vincent, Arles, '89-is signed in vermilion. In this painting is evidenced his impetuous method. He seemed to feel that the greater the exertion, the greater the relief from that repressed pa.s.sion which egged him on to action.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT DE L'ARTISTE by VAN GOGH]

Landscapes he liked, and he took pleasure in doing copies of other men.

In such works there was no hard and set reality to follow as in still-lives and portraiture. Here the colour could be splashed on almost haphazardly. He himself said that still-life was a relaxation. He felt this because to paint still-life his enthusiasm was restricted. Anything served for a subject-an old boot, a single vase, a coffee-pot. One imagines he tossed these models onto a table from the opposite side of the room, and painted them in whatever position they fell. In this carelessness the public sees "inspiration." And indeed his canvases were inspired, but only in the same way a starving man is inspired to throw himself upon a sumptuous meal. He painted because he was forced to, and when painting is merely a physical necessity indulged in to express an unordered religious mania, it ceases to interest the aesthetician who searches for a complete cosmos bodied forth in subjective form.

As a decorator Van Gogh is too turbulent and forward; as a painter of easel pictures he is too chaotic and unintelligible; but as a blast of misdirected enthusiasm he is not without power. His symbolism, while not being of the variety which presents Grecian figures as abstract virtues, is nevertheless of the same order. He tells us that in painting a young man he loved, he would make the head a golden yellow and orange, and the background a rich and intense blue, as well as transcribing the physical likeness to epitomise his love. Thus depicted the young man would be "like a bright star in the boundless infinite taking on a mysterious importance." Again he writes: "Had I had the strength to continue, I would have done saints and holy women from nature, who would have seemed to belong to another age. They would have been the bourgeois of the present, having many parallels with the old primitive Christians." We see what he was after.

Van Gogh possessed all the modern socialistic ideals. He held that individuals could do nothing alone, but should work in communities, one doing the colour, one the drawing, another the composition, etc. In his desire for this democratic art factory is seen his absence of self-confidence. It is not strange when we consider his adherence all his life to so childish a technical programme as Divisionism. This adherence marked the main difference between him and Gauguin. The latter detested the Divisionistic method. He wanted to adapt nature's colour and effect to decoration, while Van Gogh wanted to make only abstract dramatic tapestries. They both succeeded; and though the canvases of Gauguin have the peaceful utilitarian destiny of interior decoration awaiting them, Van Gogh's work, once we are rid of the modern habit of welcoming all disorganised and purely enthusiastic work as profound, will be laid aside forever. He was psychiatric and expended the greater part of his feverish energy through the channel of painting. But he did little more than use a borrowed and inharmonious palette to express ideas wholly outside the realm of art.

VIII

GAUGUIN AND THE PONT-AVEN SCHOOL

The descriptive in art has always seduced the eye of the superficial majority. From this accidental and nugatory side of painting the public has derived all its enjoyment. The moment a depicted object is recognised, the general pleasure in the arts increases; and the moment the accepted vision of the object is modified or distorted, this pleasure decreases and in many instances ceases altogether. One school which deals with a certain cla.s.s of subjects has its own admirers; while another school which treats of dissimilar subjects has a different following. Furthermore, the manner in which subjects are portrayed-realistically or impressionably, poetically or prosaically-has its individual adherents. Persons whose temperamental tastes make them antipodal to one method of transcription become enthusiastic over another, irrespective of the fact that the aesthetic merits of the different procedures are equal. Those whose criterion is prettiness are naturally attracted to Whistlerian and Cubistic modes. Idealists lean toward the symbolic and transcendental painters like Van Gogh and Redon.

Hardy persons who live largely on the physical plane prefer Ribera, Franz Hals, Sorolla or Durer. Simple sensualists admire Goya, Rubens, Bronzino, the erotic prints of the j.a.panese, or the pictures of the Little Dutchmen. Biblical students choose the primitives or the painters of religious subjects. Architects like Guardi, Gentile Bellini and Ca.n.a.letto. Personal tastes in life dictate tastes in art; the reason some have a wider taste than others is because their interests are larger.

The average person forms his art attachments in the same way he chooses friends. For this reason many art lovers are pa.s.sionately attracted to Gauguin, while others, obsessed with the theories of modernity, are impervious to the inherent appeal he incontestably possesses. The Impressionists were enamoured of nature. Their pictures have an almost human physiognomy and are thoroughly joyous. In them one senses the abstract love of beautiful country-sides, blue distances and scintillating lights. They arouse an emotion in the popular mind because of the familiarity of their themes. Gauguin was not content with the landscapes of civilisation. He wanted something more elemental-scenes where an unspoilt and untamed nature gave birth to a race of simple and colourful character. He felt the need of harmonising his people with their _milieu_. To him it seemed inconsistent to place a fully dressed man or woman in a primitive forest or on the banks of a turbulent stream innocent of commercial traffic. There was a positive immodesty in combining a puny figure, whose body was too distorted by work to show itself unclothed, with the majestic nakedness of a primeval landscape.

Millet's peasants in plowed fields and Raffaelli's clothed figures in busy streets were not incongruous; but in most of the landscapes of Gauguin's day cultivated moderns stalked where Corot had once put nymphs and t.i.tian, Antiopes.

Gauguin's sense of harmony in idea precluded any such irrelevancies and anachronisms. His painting was perhaps the highest and most consistent type of ill.u.s.tration the world has produced. Judged from this standpoint, on which it was based consciously, his art was complete. And inasmuch as he did not strive for profounder things, it is from this standpoint that he must be approached. What impetus he gave to art came out of his desire to view nature simply, like a child, at the same time equipped with all the weapons of a modern intelligence. His art consequently has not only the interest of historic reconstruction but an added interest which, in spite of our veneer of cultivation and education, we all feel at times for perfect la.s.situde and elemental unrestraint. No man is so intellectual that he cannot enjoy occasional recreation and a forgetfulness of mental activities. Indeed the greatest minds react so completely at times that they demand the crudest stimulants-melodrama, wild Arabian chants, romance and physical intoxication. Gauguin, appearing in the midst of gigantic and epoch-making aesthetic endeavours, embodied this spirit of reaction. It was a grave and serious world in which he found himself-the world of Cezanne, Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. His nature was too timid and simple for him to throw himself into the whirlpool. Instinctively he sought a haven far removed from the strife about him.

In the contemplation of the canvases of this modern savage we enter that side of the broad field of aesthetics where the whole world can escape, as for a holiday, from the stress of intellectual research, there to enjoy art simply and receptively, as one enjoys a dream of strange lands. In Gauguin there is a power which impels our interest, hunts out our instinct for the exotic and calls to the fore a romantic love of adventure and a desire for far countries. In this appeal no other painting succeeds like his-not even the Persian landscapes, the Chinese pictorial visions of heaven, or the lurid images of Gustave Moreau. In Gauguin's South Sea Island canvases are crystallised our hopes for a Utopian peace, our vague memories of an untramelled prehistoric age. Calm and sunlight, the sea and wild mountains-all are here. And we find ourselves amid a peaceful, music-loving and simple people who, we imagine, would welcome the tired traveller and gather round him with offerings of fruit and flowers as he lands on their golden beach.

Gauguin is purely an image-maker. So abstract a painter is he that his 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 Bora.s.sa school, Manet and Degas. All these men are ill.u.s.trators 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 pa.s.sionate 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 p.i.s.sarro, 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 p.i.s.sarro, Gauguin had painted as an amateur; and as early as 1873 he had exposed a landscape. But when he became personally acquainted with p.i.s.sarro, 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 nave-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 Tahtiennes 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 a.s.sises a l'Ombre des Palmiers and Varaoumati 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 Cla.s.sicists. 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sage. 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 p.i.s.sarro 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; cla.s.sic, if the artist leaned temperamentally in that direction; barbaric, if his tastes so inclined him; Gothic, Chinese, j.a.panese 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 pa.s.sivity 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 c.u.mbersome, 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 Munzer, 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 a.s.sert 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, Bocklin, 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 Sca.r.s.ellino 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.