Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art Part 8

The immense industrial development which occurred during the nineteenth century took place so rapidly and universally, that no one was able to estimate its significance or dispa.s.sionately to weigh its effects. At the outset of the century the vital idea that pervaded Europe and America was the spiritual idea of liberty and the rights of man, born in the fires of the French Revolution. After 1848 this idea gradually vanished, and another took its place; the purely material idea of progress. The perfected application of steam and the consequent development of machinery; the immense tapping of the world's resources of coal, metals, agricultural products; the equally immense, universal exploitation of human effort necessary to develop these resources to their maximum; the creation of an international finance, resting upon vast h.o.a.rds of wealth in the hands of a limited few, whose world-wide interests were linked together by railways, steamship lines, telegraphs, telephones; the ordered regimenting of mankind into a small capitalist cla.s.s, invisibly controlling the old, decayed aristocracy, the official church, the machinery of the law; a larger middle cla.s.s, dependent upon and subservient to the capitalists; and an immense laboring cla.s.s, exploited in the interests of the two preceding cla.s.ses: all these were virtually the creation of a single century.

Against this overwhelming flood of change, a few exceptionally gifted men vaguely protested, affirming the greater value of human life over mechanical invention; maintaining the antique dignity of man. Their protest was incoherent, individualistic. These men were like broken and scattered fragments of d.y.k.es, still unsubmerged and striving to hold back the waters of a flood. Among them must be ranked the artist whose life-story I have written.

All that is vital and valuable in French painting of the nineteenth century, since Ingres, springs directly from the enthusiasm and spiritual energy of the French Revolution. The somber fury of Delacroix, the colossal caricature of Daumier; the peasant art of Millet; the sane realism of Courbet; the mordant irony of Degas and Forain; even the feeling for nature and the open air which the Impressionists gave us, all represent phases of humanity's vague and enormous hunger for personal freedom, for human liberty and development. When Gauguin arrived on the scene, the reaction was already taking place. The official, academic painters were merely ringing the changes upon a stock of outworn formulas. On the other hand, the Impressionists were striving to render nature scientifically, unemotionally. Nature was becoming to them no longer the mother and nurse of man but a collection of chemical formulas for soil, air, sunlight. Only Puvis de Chavannes remained, aloof and misunderstood, painting great decorations that seemed but the remembrance of some golden age of the past, and easel pictures of a profound, hopeless pessimism.

Gauguin began to paint, and the protest against science, against materialism, against unemotional vision began. At the outset he attempted to follow the scientific formulas of the Impressionists. But, by the purest instinct he discovered, as Cezanne had already discovered, that the sensation of light could not be painted, could only be rendered in color. And he also discovered (this time the discovery came from Puvis de Chavannes) that the sensation of form could not be painted either--that out of the variety of shifting forms offered to us by nature, the artist must select those most significant to him and that even these must be transposed, altered, accentuated or suppressed to suit the harmony of the composition. Thus unconsciously, almost without volition on his part, he was led to understand that the Primitives everywhere were the truly great artists, since they expressed great human emotions about man and nature, without troubling whether their vision was or was not exact. And so he fought, bitterly, savagely, for the actual restoration of primitive art and life; for the cause of natural humanity against the cause of mechanical, dehumanized efficiency.

Unless we realize this fact, we have not grasped the key, either to his art or to his life. Gauguin himself admitted that his painting was only a fragmentary indication, an unrealized promise of an unaccomplished world. And he may have had knowledge also of the fundamental discord and disorder of his own life, but have despaired of ever attaining to harmony with himself. At least the caricature of himself in _Contes Barbares_ is here to remind us that he was not altogether the spoiled child that some imagine him to be. Having both the world and himself to struggle against, he at least determined that his pictorial work should represent the best part of his personality, even if his life proved only to be, as he said in his last letter to de Montfreid, "a downfall followed by an attempt to rise, followed by another downfall." And so in his pictures we realize the truth of the remark made by Van Gogh after the disaster that parted them: "Gauguin made one feel that a good picture should be the equivalent of a good action."

And indeed it is so. Every artist carries upon his shoulders a profound moral responsibility. This responsibility is not, as supposed, the duty of teaching us to conform to the modern official distortion of Christian ethics, by which we are ruled. It is not the duty of upholding a system of negations, of prohibitions, of compromises, striking at the very roots of life. It is a far n.o.bler, far more difficult task. The duty of the artist is to affirm the dignity of life, the value of humanity, despite the morbid prejudices of Puritanism, the timid conventionality of the mob, despite even his own knowledge of the insoluble riddle of suffering, decay and death. This duty Gauguin in his art strove to accomplish. He affirmed his faith in man and in the scene of man's labor, the earth. Cezanne, perhaps a more accomplished painter, endowed perhaps with a deeper respect for nature and for the style of the great painters of the past, shrank from making Gauguin's affirmation. He accepted in his own life a compromise; in his art he ruthlessly eliminated the role of the creative and interpretive imagination. And then, towards the end of his life, Cezanne complained that Gauguin had vulgarized him.

"Gauguin has not understood me; never will I accept the lack of gradation and of tone; it's nonsense."

It would have been better for Cezanne to have said that he could not, dared not understand Gauguin.

Nor is this all that Gauguin accomplished. He restored painting to its proper place in the ordered hierarchy of the arts. He showed us that its place is between architecture and music, and that sculpture is its twin sister. He was the first man to suspect that the progress of the scientific spirit among the Greeks had produced the same effects in disa.s.sociating and destroying the arts, as has the progress of the scientific spirit in the present day. He believed, and constantly affirmed, that painting was entering upon a new musical phase and he built up his pictures on a definite scale of color harmonies, as well as upon the chosen architectural proportions of form, which, whether given by perspective or not, seemed to him necessary. Thus he reconciled the Venetians and the Primitives, and showed that the goal of both form and color is decoration.

William Blake might perhaps have admired this rude artisan, who painted his dream of a golden age in his own way, who steadfastly strove to grasp the essential truth in every tradition: Egyptian, Cambodian, Persian, Chinese, Gothic, Greek and Renaissance. But Gauguin could never, had he known of Blake, have pardoned in him the ultimate ascetic negation, the contemptuous denial of earthliness, of "the delusions of the G.o.ddess Nature." In Gauguin, the spirit never conquered the flesh, and he remained to the end, a man. Blake was possibly the greater visionary: Gauguin is certainly the better stone on which to build.

V

After Gauguin's death, his art rapidly became almost forgotten in France. He remarked himself towards the end of his life that there were not fifty of his pictures in that country. Even the few there are, hang in scattered private collections, each containing one or at most three or four. The great bulk of his work is in Germany, Scandinavia and Russia. It proved impossible even in 1911 to raise sufficient money to buy _L'Esprit Veille_ for the Louvre.

It is greatly to be regretted that no museum or collection has been able to a.s.semble a considerable quant.i.ty of his work. Gauguin was, above all things, a decorator, and half a dozen of his pictures make a greater effect than one. One does not judge Puvis de Chavannes, another decorator, solely by his easel pictures, but by the great decorative schemes in Paris, at Amiens and in Boston. This remark applies equally to other decorators, such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Tintoretto and Veronese. A room hung with twenty Gauguins would produce an immense effect of monumental power. That such a room exists in Moscow can be small consolation to Western Europeans at present.

His pupils and followers either plodded along unimaginatively, like Serusier, or drifted off into academicism, like Bernard, or watered down their technique into the tasteless picture-book and stage-costume decoration of Maurice Denis. None of them seized Gauguin's secret of remaining simple, direct and savage. Aristide Maillol is an honorable exception. A sculptor and tapestry designer, he was able to work upon the indications that Gauguin had left for the guidance of these branches and to show us, in part at least, how they might be realized.

The main stream of French art simply ignored Gauguin. Instead of making with him a bold leap backwards to the origins of all tradition, it went forward to even more scientific and unemotional essays in painting. The Neo-Impressionists with their spots of complementary colors were followed by disciples of Cezanne, who sought to reduce all forms to certain geometrical primaries, basing their doctrine on certain words which the master of Aix had let fall concerning the simplification of form. Out of these emerged Matisse, whose art became, through a more and more ruthless elimination of modeling, through a more and more arbitrary placing of colors, an abstraction, an utterly unemotional series of hieroglyphs. Then Pica.s.so came upon the scene, eliminated color altogether and began to paint the abstract geometry of form. The Cubists followed Pica.s.so. The Futurists in their turn started another kind of abstract painting, the painting of mechanical energy, the dynamism latent in form.

The Expressionists, meanwhile, held to Van Gogh's and Gauguin's idea that the picture must represent some emotion, but they denied Gauguin's corollary that some form derived from nature was necessary to transpose this emotion into its pictorial equivalent. Consequently they eliminated form and strove to paint abstract emotion. Finally, the Vorticists combined Futurism and Expressionism into a single whole and painted the abstraction of an abstraction--the emotion of dynamic energy, thus declaring painting to be an absolute-thing-in-itself, an art utterly innocent of any ill.u.s.trative purpose whatsoever.

The motives of all these confused art movements, perplexing and apparently in-congruous, were identical. They were all actuated by a mania for scientific discovery, a desire to a.n.a.lyze phenomena until the reality behind phenomena could be found. The physicists, chemists, philosophers had proven that the world of appearances was not the real world--that everything that existed was merely a question of ions and electrons, of radiant or non-radiant energy, or perhaps of elasticity and inelasticity. These young art revolutionaries, who gave themselves so many queer labels, were not, as many supposed, either insincere or insane. They were merely smitten with the desire to make painting--and not only painting, but even other arts as well--a branch of abstract science. The world of phenomena had been proved to be an illusion, making some abstract concept. Therefore they strove to paint, not what seemed to them unreal, but their absolute conceptions. This new metaphysic, this new attempt at absolute realism, this final development of scholastic art-dogma, as narrow and soul-destroying in its way as the rules for painting religious ikons, evolved and practiced for centuries by the Byzantine monks of Mount Athos, was rapidly conquering the whole field of aft when the past war broke out. Nor has the war altogether suppressed its manifestations.

The enormous destruction of human life, of nature, of art, in the past war has been altogether out of proportion to the military results achieved by either side. However true it may be to hold the Germans as primarily responsible for this destruction, in the first instance, yet it remains true that none of the contending forces can escape responsibility for the later developments of the struggle. Apart from Germany's undeniable guilt in starting the war, civilization as a whole must answer for the horror of its method. A piece of heavy artillery is equally destructive, whether it be cast at Essen or at Le Creusot; a Cap.r.o.ni aeroplane can carry as many bombs as a Gotha; the submarine was first employed in war by the Americans; the machine gun is an English invention. For all these devices of destruction we of the twentieth century, with our belief in purely material progress, stand guilty to-day; and the blood of our guilt has reddened earth already for over four years and may continue to do so for many generations to come.

The past war before it came to an end had long ceased to be a contest between national ideals and had become a struggle between man and an inhuman, scientific, organized machine. And the machine was victorious.

Just as the scientific spirit, conquering art before the war, led to the extravagances of Cubism and Vorticism so, since the war, it has attacked life itself; and made of national existence, no longer a problem of human bravery, resource and intelligence, but merely a problem of relative man-power and munitions. We have learned to speak of "man-power" as our books on physics speak of "horse-power." The task we, in the war, set ourselves was a grisly paradox; we proposed to save civilization, to undo a great wrong, by destroying the very basis of human life on which all civilization stands.

It is therefore with a sense of liberation that we now turn back to a few artists who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, foresaw that material progress would end in annihilating humanity, that nature and humanity, hand in hand, are more sacred than all the sh.e.l.ls that could ever be produced, the guns that could ever be mounted or the laws that could ever be written. With a sense of spiritual release we revert to those who dreamed of the great return to nature--to Rousseau, Whitman, Gauguin, as well as to others who, although perhaps lesser men than they, followed in their path--David Th.o.r.eau, Richard Jefferies.

They were the prophets of the new gospel that must some day prevail--the gospel that will set humanity above material progress and nature above aesthetic negation. Their vision was of something not in themselves but of something higher and n.o.bler, as Gauguin knew when he deliberately caricatured himself in _Contes Barbares_. As he knew also, the vision was of something stated only fragmentarily, inscribed as a promise, a foretaste, an indication of what might be. In Rousseau's prose, in Whitman's poetry and in Gauguin's painting we see the only gleam of hope for self-tortured humanity, and the promise of a land where nature and man are one and where reigns a peace that pa.s.ses all understanding.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CONSULTED

WORKS OF BIOGRAPHY:

1. Paul Gauguin par Jean de Rotonchamp, Imprime a Weimar par les Soins du Comte de Kessler et se Trouve a Paris, chez Edouard Druet, Rue de Faubourg Saint Honore, No. 114. 1906. Edition limited to 250 copies.

2. Gauguin, by Charles Morice. Floury, Paris, 1919. This and the preceding work are the standard sources of Gauguin's life.

3. Lettres de Paul Gauguin a Charles Daniel de Monfreid. Paris, Cres, 1919.

4. White Shadows in the South Seas, by Frederick O'Brien. New York, The Century Co., 1920. A travel book, with a few new sidelights on Gauguin's final period.

5. Avant et Apres. Paul Gauguin aux Marquises. 1903. 100 copies only published in photo-reproduction from the original ma.n.u.script. A translation into German has also appeared. Kurt Wolf Verlag, Berlin, 1920.