Thus maybe there was awakened still more clearly in his spirit that desire for harmony between the flesh and the soul, between nature and God, 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.
[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 Café 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 title: "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 Café Volpini had for the most part never heard. Their names were:—E. Schuffenecker, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Louis Roy, Léon Fauché, 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 Sérusier of the Académie 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 Maupassant and Zola. The first phase in Impressionism was therefore synthetic and maintained a belief in form.