Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

by John Gould Fletcher

For Van Gogh the future only held the liberating spiritual worship of the sun, which was to raise his art to its highest pitch of lyric ecstacy and to destroy the brain that had created it. For Gauguin the future held a long and stoic struggle with the ironic destiny that left him half-an-European to the end, his work only a broken fragment of what he had dreamed.

It is a pity, in a way, that these men ever met. But their meeting and the drama which was played out later between them, had in it the inevitable quality of Greek tragedy. For the moment their meeting was without result, except that perhaps it woke Gauguin to a realization that to be a great artist one must love life as well as love art. In short, one must be religious. But where was Gauguin to find his religion?

Certainly not in Paris, the capital of intellectual skepticism. Nor, for the moment, in sleepy and mournful Brittany. The memories of his early initiation into the splendors of the tropics awoke in him and he undertook, in 1887, a voyage to the Martinique in company with a young painter, Charles Laval.

There is no doubt that this journey completely revealed to Gauguin his own primitivism, although it left him for the time an invalid, threatened with dysentery, suffering from constant intestinal pains, and although it brought Laval to the brink of the grave.

If the reader wishes to know something of what Martinique was at this time, he should turn to Lafcadio Hearn's "Two Years in the French West Indies." Hearn, like Gauguin, was a disillusionized cosmopolite, disgusted with the banal artifice, the blatant commercialism, the pedantic and Puritanic hypocrisy of our Occidental civilization. Like Gauguin, Hearn found in the West Indies a revelation of a world which had not lost touch with Nature—a world of men who were content to remain, in Nature's eyes, something as ephemeral and as harmonious as the trees, the flowers, the beasts among which they lived. Like Gauguin again, Hearn was nearly destroyed by this vision, but yet kept faith with it to the last.

The Idol.

In the pictures which Gauguin produced during his stay in Martinique, we find the first rude indications of his later manner—the manner of a mystic poet who sees all life, the life of man, of vegetation, of the earth and the sea, as being parallel, harmonious manifestations of the same Divine presence and therefore essentially in unity with each other.

If Gauguin did not realize himself in Martinique, he at least found himself on the road to realization. But the unchecked power of the sun, steadily sapping not only the white race, but also the race of mixed blood, with which he, like Hearn, felt so much sympathy, banished him from this Eden at the same time as it gave him a hint for the future.