Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art Part 4

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 apres le Sermon_[4] and carved the two superb bas-reliefs _Soyez Amoureuses et vous serez Heureuses_ and _Soyez Mysterieuses_. 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 Cezanne's essays in Synthetic Impressionism the more severely linear and decorative design of either Bernard or Gauguin. Cezanne, later on, even went so far as to a.s.sert 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 gla.s.s, 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 j.a.panese.

In short, it was as complete a rejection of Impressionism as possible and a return to the linear arabesque and decorative s.p.a.cing 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, Cezanne 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 Cafe 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 Serusier, Chamaillard, and the Dutchman, De Haahn.

Acting under the influence of these, and especially under that of Serusier, 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 a.n.a.lyze his own methods.

All art is a synthesis, and no artist can be at the same time synthetic and a.n.a.lytical.

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 t.i.tle 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Serusier 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 seash.o.r.e to do landscapes."

Gauguin's teaching in this respect exactly agrees with the methods practiced for centuries by the great Chinese and j.a.panese 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 att.i.tudes. 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 embarra.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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. G.o.d 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 pa.s.sing 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 Mysterieuses_; when he drew the lithographs: _La Cigale et les Fourmis_, and _Leda_ 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?" The terrible little picture, _Les Miseres 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 G.o.d) 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 Cla.s.sic tradition than of the Gothic. Gothic as well as Cla.s.sical 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.