[4] Now known as La Lutte de Jacob avec l'Ange.
III
The exhibition at the Café 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 Sérusier, Chamaillard, and the Dutchman, De Haahn.
Acting under the influence of these, and especially under that of Sérusier, 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 analyze his own methods. All art is a synthesis, and no artist can be at the same time synthetic and analytical.
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."