Fatata te Miti means simply “by the sea,” but what a curious vision Gauguin’s imagination has created from this scene of two Tahitian girls on the beach! The artist has found himself in a disquieting, primeval world where rich tropical colors and exotic forms of life, both human and vegetable, engender a haunting air of mystery. Gauguin painted this in 1892, during his second year in Tahiti. He had fled from Western civilization for he believed its materialistic culture rejected the artist as a useful citizen. He turned to the Pacific islands because he felt the need to become a primitive in both life and art. Only by returning to the primitive’s simple standards might man rediscover significant meaning in his life and work.
The almost forgotten religion of the Maori cult stirred Gauguin’s mind to prodigious creative activity. Lingering superstitions delighted him; phosphorescent fungi on the trees glowing in the twilight, as he painted them here, were thought to represent the spirits of long dead ancestors. In his art he evolved an expressive symbolism. He spoke of “the music of the picture,” a “magic accord” of the colors and arabesque patterns, which “addresses itself to the most intimate part of the soul.”
Canvas. 26¾ × 36 inches Dated 1892
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Still Life
Chester Dale Collection
Against rigid horizontal and vertical lines in the background, Cézanne has juxtaposed the curves of apples, bottles, and folds of drapery in turbulent, sweeping lines. He delighted in painting still-life subjects, for here were things that, unlike people, did not want to move but remained uncomplainingly motionless during the long hours, even days, that Cézanne needed for his intensive, exacting studies.
Realizing that Impressionists sacrificed the pictorial structure he admired in the Old Masters’ works, Cézanne took the formless touches of the Impressionists’ broken color and made each brush stroke a distinct “little plane.” In an apple, for example, he realized its form and color by integrating these small modulating planes of color so that the apple appears solid, round, and glowing with light. Yet Cézanne was aiming beyond simply reproducing the appearance of an apple. He strove for a total form in which every brush stroke in his composition is integrated. Every touch of paint, like a link in a chain, must contribute to the consistent unity of the picture. He believed a picture should give a unified sensation in which “every color-touch must contain air, light, the object, the plane, the character, the drawing, the style.” By abstracting nature into the painter’s colored planes, Cézanne paved the way for the abstract styles of the present century.
Canvas. 26 × 32⅜ inches Painted c. 1890