Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art Part 3

One can only admire Van Gogh for this decision. An artist of a childlike simplicity of soul, a combination of Don Quixote, the Good Samaritan and that Jesus of Nazareth whom he loved, Van Gogh was even greater as a man than as an artist. But Gauguin was, as he knew himself later, greater as an artist than as a man. It was natural for him to accept the invitation of a man whom he knew, after all, very slightly, because he saw in this acceptance possible advantages to himself.

Van Gogh's enthusiasm was unfortunately not backed, as was Gauguin's, by a strong reserve of nervous strength. His was one of those souls whose longing for spiritual reality followed inevitably the mystic path traced by William Blake:--

I will go down to self-annihilation and to eternal death Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate, And I be seiz'd and given into the hands of my own selfhood.

Gauguin's path tended to a different goal and followed the way foreseen by Whitman:--

O, to struggle against odds, to meet enemies undaunted!

To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium face to face, To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance, To be indeed a G.o.d!

Van Gogh was a lyric painter. His desire was to lose himself in the ecstacy of the divine. Gauguin was a narrative, an epic painter. His aim was to grow to divine stature through self-realization.

What could there be in common between the fervent admirer of Rembrandt, Delacroix, Monticelli, Ziem, and the brooding, patient workman who was building up his art on the cla.s.sic tradition of Ingres, Cezanne and Degas? Surely even less than between Michaelangelo and Tintoretto.

A drama between these men was inevitable. It was not slow in declaring itself.[1] Of what actually occurred we have only Gauguin's account, of how Van Gogh first attacked him, and then strove to take his own life.

Van Gogh, upon whose shattered nervous organism the shock had spent itself, went voluntarily into a lunatic asylum at Arles, where, as his grip on life grew weaker under the pressure of the inner flame that devoured him, he painted visions of worlds tortured by the sun. Gauguin returned to Brittany, as he said, "armed against all suffering." But he had seen something. In striving to paint Van Gogh's portrait he had seen a vision, once again to quote his own words, of "Jesus preaching goodness and humility." And perhaps, in Vincent's hour of agony, while he lay bloodless and inanimate on the bed in that little room which he had loved and had painted so lovingly, Gauguin had another vision--of the sombre Garden of Gethsemane.

Thus maybe there was awakened still more clearly in his spirit that desire for harmony between the flesh and the soul, between nature and G.o.d, between the earth and the stars that hang over the earth, which he was to seek desperately to the last and strive to realize, despite the baseness of that other part in him, the civilized, unprimitive part, which strove merely to destroy the harmony and to smile at its work of baseness.

[Footnote 1: Gauguin and Van Gogh were actually together from the 20th October to the 23d December, 1888.]

PART III: THE SCHOOL OF PONT-AVEN 1889-1891

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 Cafe 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 t.i.tle: "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 Cafe Volpini had for the most part never heard. Their names were:--E.

Schuffenecker, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Louis Roy, Leon Fauche, 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 Serusier of the Academie 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 Maupa.s.sant and Zola.

The first phase in Impressionism was therefore synthetic and maintained a belief in form.

It was succeeded by an a.n.a.lytical 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, p.i.s.sarro, 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 ma.s.ses, 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 Cezanne, the hermit of Aix, had faced the problem of painting with the Impressionist palette while preserving the ma.s.s 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, a.s.sociating himself with the Impressionists at the outset, had been careful to preserve the cla.s.sic 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, Cezanne 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 Cafe 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 a.n.a.lytical 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 Independante_, 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 j.a.panese. But as a method of painting, it had been derived less from cloisonne enamel than from the technique of the j.a.panese color-print artists.

The artistic G.o.ds 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 gla.s.s 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 Serusier, 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 gla.s.s, 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 rea.s.serted 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-gla.s.s, 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 Cezanne'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 p.i.s.sarro and the other Impressionists. He therefore sought to translate sunlight into color by simplifying and exaggerating the contrast of colors.