Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

by Willard Huntington Wright

THE descriptive in art has always seduced the eye of the superficial majority. From this accidental and nugatory side of painting the public has derived all its enjoyment. The moment a depicted object is recognised, the general pleasure in the arts increases; and the moment the accepted vision of the object is modified or distorted, this pleasure decreases and in many instances ceases altogether. One school which deals with a certain class of subjects has its own admirers; while another school which treats of dissimilar subjects has a different following. Furthermore, the manner in which subjects are portrayed—realistically or impressionably, poetically or prosaically—has its individual adherents. Persons whose temperamental tastes make them antipodal to one method of transcription become enthusiastic over another, irrespective of the fact that the æsthetic merits of the different procedures are equal. Those whose criterion is prettiness are naturally attracted to Whistlerian and Cubistic modes. Idealists lean toward the symbolic and transcendental painters like Van Gogh and Redon. Hardy persons who live largely on the physical plane prefer Ribera, Franz Hals, Sorolla or Dürer. Simple sensualists admire Goya, Rubens, Bronzino, the erotic prints of the Japanese, or the pictures of the Little Dutchmen. Biblical students choose the primitives or the painters of religious subjects. Architects like Guardi, Gentile Bellini and Canaletto. Personal tastes in life dictate tastes in art; the reason some have a wider taste than others is because their interests are larger.

The average person forms his art attachments in the same way he chooses friends. For this reason many art lovers are passionately attracted to Gauguin, while others, obsessed with the theories of modernity, are impervious to the inherent appeal he incontestably possesses. The Impressionists were enamoured of nature. Their pictures have an almost human physiognomy and are thoroughly joyous. In them one senses the abstract love of beautiful country-sides, blue distances and scintillating lights. They arouse an emotion in the popular mind because of the familiarity of their themes. Gauguin was not content with the landscapes of civilisation. He wanted something more elemental—scenes where an unspoilt and untamed nature gave birth to a race of simple and colourful character. He felt the need of harmonising his people with their milieu. To him it seemed inconsistent to place a fully dressed man or woman in a primitive forest or on the banks of a turbulent stream innocent of commercial traffic. There was a positive immodesty in combining a puny figure, whose body was too distorted by work to show itself unclothed, with the majestic nakedness of a primeval landscape. Millet’s peasants in plowed fields and Raffaelli’s clothed figures in busy streets were not incongruous; but in most of the landscapes of Gauguin’s day cultivated moderns stalked where Corot had once put nymphs and Titian, Antiopes.

Gauguin’s sense of harmony in idea precluded any such irrelevancies and anachronisms. His painting was perhaps the highest and most consistent type of illustration the world has produced. Judged from this standpoint, on which it was based consciously, his art was complete. And inasmuch as he did not strive for profounder things, it is from this standpoint that he must be approached. What impetus he gave to art came out of his desire to view nature simply, like a child, at the same time equipped with all the weapons of a modern intelligence. His art consequently has not only the interest of historic reconstruction but an added interest which, in spite of our veneer of cultivation and education, we all feel at times for perfect lassitude and elemental unrestraint. No man is so intellectual that he cannot enjoy occasional recreation and a forgetfulness of mental activities. Indeed the greatest minds react so completely at times that they demand the crudest stimulants—melodrama, wild Arabian chants, romance and physical intoxication. Gauguin, appearing in the midst of gigantic and epoch-making æsthetic endeavours, embodied this spirit of reaction. It was a grave and serious world in which he found himself—the world of Cézanne, Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. His nature was too timid and simple for him to throw himself into the whirlpool. Instinctively he sought a haven far removed from the strife about him.

In the contemplation of the canvases of this modern savage we enter that side of the broad field of æsthetics where the whole world can escape, as for a holiday, from the stress of intellectual research, there to enjoy art simply and receptively, as one enjoys a dream of strange lands. In Gauguin there is a power which impels our interest, hunts out our instinct for the exotic and calls to the fore a romantic love of adventure and a desire for far countries. In this appeal no other painting succeeds like his—not even the Persian landscapes, the Chinese pictorial visions of heaven, or the lurid images of Gustave Moreau. In Gauguin’s South Sea Island canvases are crystallised our hopes for a Utopian peace, our vague memories of an untramelled prehistoric age. Calm and sunlight, the sea and wild mountains—all are here. And we find ourselves amid a peaceful, music-loving and simple people who, we imagine, would welcome the tired traveller and gather round him with offerings of fruit and flowers as he lands on their golden beach.

Gauguin is purely an image-maker. So abstract a painter is he that his pictures are merely the point of departure from which our thoughts leap into an unlimited world of pleasurable visualising. They move us emotionally, even mentally, but never æsthetically. We feel before them exactly what we feel when reading that extraordinary and unique book of his, Noa Noa. Indeed he was more literary than artistic, and to appreciate him fully one should read first his biography written by Jean de Rotonchamp,—then Noa Noa. After that his pictures will take on a new meaning. He makes his dreams so forceful that we too start to dream before them. His art is of the same calibre as that of Altichiero, Michelino da Bosozzo, Ortolano, the Borassa school, Manet and Degas. All these men are illustrators of a high order; all are impelled by the complete sincerity of their visions; and all are interesting because of their freedom of expression. It is a new adventure each time we see one of their works, for adventure is merely contact with the unexpected. In Gauguin this imprévu is not restricted to unconventionality of balance and the extraordinary arrangement of objects; but expresses itself in the actual subject-matter as well. His savages, ready to kill or love with equal unconcern, bring up to us our childhood enthusiasms for the tales of Swift, Defoe and Pierre Loti. His pictures epitomise the call of the natural, the delight in perfect freedom, the ideal of an unclothed age.

But though his work is calm and outside the world of strife and endeavour, his life was turbulent, and tortured by reiterated disappointments. Toward the end he wrote to a friend that he fell over-often, and arose only to fall again. As with the sailor new horizons ever stretched before him, and their promise of better things was never consummated. His energy was drained by a continual struggle against the forces of civilisation just as the sailor’s is weakened by unceasing battles against the elements. The spot where at last he found refuge was far from his ideal. But in this ideal world he always imagined himself living, and his painting took on its colour and atmosphere. Just as he advised his followers to draw a curtain in front of their models, so he drew the veil of imagination before his eyes and saw only what he wished to see. In this almost fanatic idealism he was undoubtedly actuated by fear of life’s gross realities, for he was not content merely to live apart: he was forever attempting to ameliorate the trying conditions which arose from French misrule in the Marquesas. For his pains he was condemned to gaol and later was made an outcast. This friction with the established order, however, had to do only with Gauguin the man. Gauguin the artist remained to the end a contented and passionate dreamer.

To understand his art and its actuating impulses it is necessary to know something of his colourful and adventuresome life. Of all modern painters, he, more than any other, was reflected in his work. As a youth he had gone to sea and served a six-year apprenticeship before the mast. He next became a successful banker and to all outward appearances was satisfied with the status of a wealthy citizen. But all the time the love of change and the nostalgia for strange lands were at work within him, and though spending six days a week in an office he painted every Sunday. It was Pissarro, admired by Gauguin from the first, who persuaded him to forego everything save his art. This he did in 1883. From that time on he became a derelict who had to seek support from his friends. Although at times he was forced to work in offices, edit papers and grow fruit, the donations from those he knew were the backbone of his resources. He had met Van Gogh in Paris in 1886, and two years later accepted the latter’s invitation to visit him on the bounty of Van Gogh’s brother Theodore at Arles in the south of France. Here, where he had expected to find conditions conducive to work, his life was, according to his own accounts, in constant danger. The Dutchman, he says, attacked him often, and sometimes Gauguin, awaking with a start, would see Van Gogh stealing across the room to him with a knife. Such a life was impossible, and after a regrettable incident in which he was blamed for the amputation of Van Gogh’s ear, he returned to Paris. The year before this he had made a short trip to Martinique, and while in Europe had lived at Pouldu, Copenhagen, Rouen, Pont-Aven, Concarneau and Paris. Again he went to Brittany. He wanted quiet and was ever ill at ease among the superficialities of a hypocritical civilisation. But there, while protecting a negress, he was attacked by some sailors, and his injuries forced him to return once more to Paris. The negress had preceded him, and when he arrived he discovered that she had robbed him of his entire studio equipment.

At this time, Verlaine, Moréas, Aurier, Julien Leclerc and Stuart Merril, who called themselves the symbolist poets, saw in him a comrade. In 1891 they gave a benefit performance in the Vaudeville for him and Verlaine. Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse was staged for the first time, and Gauguin’s share of the proceeds was enough to pay his passage to his longed-for tropics. Two years later found him back again with many canvases and a strange and grotesque costume, heavy rings on every finger, wooden shoes and a cane of his own carving. He was impatient for praise and admiration and large sales; but none of these came to him. At a sale of his work in the Hôtel Drouot in 1895 so small a sum was realised that his friends again took pity on him, and Carrière secured him a cheap passage back to his beloved islands. His adventures in the tropics make poetic and romantic reading. His premature death, at which only one old cannibal was present, was a fitting climax to a life given over to a hopeless search for the ideal.

While still in a banker’s office, and before he had met Pissarro, Gauguin had painted as an amateur; and as early as 1873 he had exposed a landscape. But when he became personally acquainted with Pissarro, who had a way of inflaming the minds of the younger and naturally revolutionary men of his day, his impulses toward art became overpowering. His early training under this violent heretic was so thorough that he never made a concession to the public or retrogressed toward scholastic formulas. Being a born painter, he quickly absorbed the ideas of the Impressionists, and exposed with them in the Rue des Pyramides in 1880 and 1881. His first canvases were wholly Impressionistic and much like Guillaumin’s. Even as late as 1887, after he had known Cézanne and had become imbued with the blazing brilliancy of Martinique, Gauguin still clung to his earlier technique. His Paysage de la Martinique is one of his best-ordered works and also one of his most fluent. However, he had become dissatisfied with Impressionist precepts and had gone to Brittany to get closer to a more natural people, to a cruder and more rugged landscape. There he had seen and admired the Gothic statues, the simplicity of which appealed to him intensely. On his return from the South Seas these statues, direct, stiff and archaic, combined with his late vision of scintillant light and hot, luscious colour, became active influences in his work.

Gauguin had a considerable amount of Peruvian Indian blood in him, and his desire for the South was not a superficial one. Rather was it an atavistic necessity for the wild that made him intolerant of cities and culture and highly complex modes of living. This same instinct, manifesting itself through his art, drove him toward a simple and direct statement of a vision, toward an unrestraint which no civilised community would permit him. He wanted something naïve—something expressed by broad planes and rich colours. He had imitated the Impressionists, copied Manet’s Olympia and seen Giottos; and by reducing these varied influences to their simplest terms he made his art. Émile Bernard, an indifferent painter and writer, who temperamentally was not unlike Gauguin, claims priority for this manner of painting; but even if it were true, it would mean nothing. Gauguin’s canvases of 1888 give undeniable promise of what he would eventually do, and in 1889 his Jeunes Bretonnes fully reveals the trend of all his later endeavours. Bernard was at best but a clever imitator, and his canvases in Gauguin’s style appear inferior and superficial when compared with such pieces as Tahïtiennes and Ruperupe.