Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

by Willard Huntington Wright

The Impressionists went toward descriptive beauty, but Gauguin searched for and found an emotional interpretation of nature adapted to large decoration. It is problematical whether or not he is artistically indebted to Van Gogh, for one can attribute the fact that he painted his best European pictures immediately after his return from Arles either to Van Gogh’s teachings or to the effects of southern colour and atmosphere. The question though is of little importance. Every man, no matter how great or small, goes through a formative period in which he receives numerous influences. At any rate, just before Van Gogh died he called Gauguin “maître.” During their final periods, however, we know that the two men differed totally; and in 1891 Gauguin showed that he was under no man’s influence. In the Femmes Assises à l’Ombre des Palmiers and Vaïraoumati Téi Oa, he was already the Gauguin we know so well. The first is a sunlit landscape with the hills and palm-trees broadly and flatly painted. The women who are seated in the great pool of cool shade have all the sagely childish drawing that we find later in his more complete pictures. In the second, the flowered stuffs, the heavy limbs and the perpendicularity of design, which appear so frequently later on, are more than suggested; and the colour has all the beauty of his best efforts.

It was after Gauguin’s first sojourn to the Islands that he came back to France a barbarian, eager to stupefy the world of arts not only by his pictures but by his very attire. In this he failed. The public had barely recovered from its Impressionist shock, and Gauguin went to Brittany. Here he gathered about him many of the painters he had known before, as well as some new ones, and formed a group of young men who were ready to react against the pettiness of the Neo-Impressionistic methods and to establish a new art school. They called themselves Synthesists, afterward Cloisonnists, and some of them later became Classicists. Here forgathered Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Filiger, De Hahn, Seguin, Verkade, Anquetin, Laval, Louis Ray, Chamaillard, Fauché, Bernard and Schuffenecker, few of whom are discoverable today. Among these painters the slightest tendency toward divisionistic methods was looked upon as heresy; and religious pictures were in the ascendant, especially with Verkade. The enthusiasm of these young men for their simple and “synthetic” retrogression to the elemental led them to decorate tavern walls and ceilings, to paint windows and barn doors, and to proclaim themselves on all occasions as the only authoritative and vital artists of the day. They had forgotten Renoir and Cézanne because they detested all intellectual and scientific accuracy. And they had not known the latter with sufficient intimacy to be directly influenced by his work. Under the sway of Gauguin’s unsophisticated æsthetics and Bernard’s rhetorical eloquence they went far afield in their search for a simple and elemental synthesis. Zeal was not wanting. They argued, caroused and fought continually. This last activity was the cause of Gauguin’s lameness all the rest of his life. Little or nothing of lasting merit came out of this group which, though it moved from Pont-Aven to Pouldu, has come to be known as the Pont-Aven School. Most of its members are dead or have been swallowed up in the commercial currents of today. A few, like Bernard, Fauché and Schuffenecker, are doing indifferent art. They contributed nothing to the modern idea outside of the impetus they gave to the anti-academic spirit. There was among them more enthusiasm than talent, more polemical energy than genius.

Gauguin, though he talked as loudly as the others, painted also. At length their conversations lost their novelty for him. He felt once more the call of his Islands. He was still after an ideal, a congenial setting. These things France could not give him. Again, the necessity of accepting charity from his friends was too humiliating a trial for a nature so timid. His high-handed attitude was only a mask to hide his desire to shrink away. He was always uneasy in cities and unhappy among people who did not try to understand him. He detested the artificialities of Parisian women. His robust sensuality craved a more solid and artless Eve. In France his nature, so responsive to the glow of colour and the primitive lure of archaic forms, saw only chill tints and inutile complications. To him the South meant the richness and heat of romantic emotions, the satiety of the senses. It appealed to his deep love of chaotic and untrammelled nature. He had tasted it before in his seafaring, and he turned to it now as to an only salvation. It was at this time that Carrière arranged the passage. Gauguin was never to see Europe again.

The Impressionists had made infinitesimal spots of colour in order to imitate as exactly as possible the colour effect of nature and to increase the dynamic power of a canvas by making it give off a light of its own. By this technique they had incorporated both air and sunlight into their art. The Neo-Impressionists made mathematical the Impressionists’ haphazard stippling and had turned the spots into almost symmetrical squares. The squares were slightly separated, and the bare canvas was permitted to show between them in order to achieve a greater brilliance and a more vivid light. Van Gogh later elongated these squares into threads until his pictures resembled tapestries. There was no longer the technical unconcern in painting which Pissarro and Monet had prescribed. Paradoxically enough, while art was growing more scientific it was also becoming less significant. With the men of Pont-Aven the reaction against a too technically self-conscious painting began to set in. Their ardent advocacy of primitive conception and method was the rebound from the pseudo-scientific verbiage which, in the “advanced” studios, took the place of good painting. Consequently they favoured the broad arrangement of surfaces; classic, if the artist leaned temperamentally in that direction; barbaric, if his tastes so inclined him; Gothic, Chinese, Japanese or primitive—all according to which his inclination led him. But all work had to be completed during the first fury of inspiration, conceived imaginatively, and executed from the decorative standpoint. Gauguin, by his quick wit and youthful impetuosity, easily dominated the circle and developed, through the constant interchange of opinions, his vague ideas concerning a “synthetic” art. On his third and last voyage to the Islands his greatest work was done. Here he carried out those ideas which had had their inception at Arles and which had become crystallised at Pont-Aven. He made his art entirely out of colour, but instead of profiting by the teachings of Daumier and Cézanne whose visions were the most simultaneous in the history of art, he chose rather to emulate the early and ingenuous schools of plastic expression. In this his painting was retrogressive.

But there was another and more important side to Gauguin. He at least strove for a larger and more purely emotional interpretation of nature than had been attempted before: and our interest in him is due largely to the broad and peaceful vision he gives us. Monet put many greens in one tree. Gauguin saw the tree as green, but by depicting it in broad planes of pure pigment, he made it a more intense green than Monet could ever have done. “A metre of green is greener than a centimetre of green,” said Gauguin; and this principle he applied to all his work. Instead of portraying light by colour as the Impressionists did, he interested himself only in the colour which resulted from light. Thus he was able to raise his paintings to the highest possible pitch of purity, while still being preoccupied with nature. In painting a landscape where a woman with a cerulean blue dress was seated among green trees on an ochre beach with purple hills in the rear, and where the yellow sunlight shone on the tree trunks and in the woman’s hair, Gauguin would first of all draw apart the blues as much as possible. The woman’s dress would be painted almost blue-green, and in order to contrast this colour with the other blue in his subject, he would paint the sky blue-violet-violet. Thus he would produce a greater range of emotional colour than if the two blues had been pale and similar in tint. Furthermore, he would make the sunlight a yellow-orange-orange and the sand a spectrum yellow. The trees would then be recorded as yellow-green and the hills as red-red-purple. By this process all the parts of the picture were differentiated, with the result that the canvas had a strong carrying power. This power was further increased by the figures being sharply outlined.

Gauguin’s composition has little importance. It takes the form of perpendicularities, and rarely is any rhythmic order discernible. It is of a piece with the Romanesque painting in Saint-Savin near Poitiers. All his objects are personifications of calm, and are rooted in their environment as well as in the earth. They do not seem merely to pose there: Gauguin’s work is not superficial to this extent,—but they grow naturally out of their matrix like flowers or trees, unconscious but immovable. The passivity which pervades them is not the calm of completion or of the perfect rest which comes after mental exercise, but rather the calm of the lethargic mind which avoids thought, dislikes action and is content to dream. Technically this feeling is caused by lines at right angles to the horizon, by big simple planes on which the eye can rest free from the disturbance of line opposition, by large flat patterns of dark tonality conducive to peace and introspection. Even the contoured volumes have a greater extent of base than of apex and thus add to the picture’s aspect of immobility. Gauguin’s drawing is interesting in that it portrays a race highly susceptible of picturisation. His models are impelling because it is an adventure to explore their parts, their joints, their distortions and disproportions. Their beauty is heavy and cumbersome, like that of the stone images of the Aztecs.

That which interests us most in Gauguin however is his colour. In this medium he arrived at a sumptuousness unsurpassed by preceding painters. His art was a new application of the old principle of wall decoration. Many had made use of broad planes of colour before his advent, but none had heightened the significance of these planes sufficiently to express nature. He was the first realist in decoration, and from him come, by direct descent, Matisse and a horde of lesser men like Fritz Erler, Leo Putz, R. M. Eichler, Adolf Münzer, Rodolphe Fornerod, Alcide Le Beau and Gustave Jaulmes. The æsthetic import of a Puvis de Chavannes is almost equal to that of Gauguin, but the former’s greys and grey-blues appear washed-out and dead, while Gauguin’s pictures vibrate with the heat of tropical sunlight and the richness of tropical colour. Gauguin, however, could get no orders. His work was too sensuous. Interior decoration would have had to be far more joyous than it was at that time for his exotic creations to find a place on walls and ceilings.

Gauguin’s animating desire was to synthesise his picture—to make each part of them relative to all the other parts, to order them as to colour, line and tone in such a way that they would give forth the impression of a simple vision, a perfect ensemble. This desire was in the air of the day. The Impressionists had unconsciously approached synthesis by using light and air as a solvent. Cézanne had gone much deeper and ordered form by means of colour. In Seurat Gauguin saw almost completely set forth an expression which by its simplicity satisfied him. Some assert that he was also influenced by Degas. But whether this is so or not, certain it is that there is more of Ingres in him than of Giotto. With Seurat as a starting-point—that is, the linear Seurat of La Baignade and Un Dimanche à la Grande-Jatte—Gauguin quickly abolished the tiny and labourious spotting which Impressionism and Pointillism had taught him, and branched out into simpler design and greater chromatic brilliancy. By these departures he achieved his synthesis. But this triumph must not be overestimated. There are degrees of synthesis. Rubens, Giotto, Degas, Ingres, Böcklin, Botticelli—all are synthetic, but all are by no means of equal importance. While synthesis is necessary to art, it is not the ear-mark of great art alone. The order which is obtained by three harmonious lines is not so extended an order as that found in the multilinear drawings of Pollaiuolo: and this complication of æsthetic ordonnance is what makes a Donatello more significant than a piece of negro sculpture, a Scarsellino greater than a Matisse, and an El Greco more puissant than a Mazzola-Bedoli. Furthermore, when this complete surface order extends itself into three dimensions it becomes an infinitely greater moving power. When from simple straight lines on a flat surface the artist carries his creation into opposition, development and finality, he is pushing the frontiers of his painting to art’s extreme limits.

Gauguin’s temperament was simple in the extreme. He had fallen under the sway of Manet: he had gone to a rugged country of primitive instincts where singular costumes were a part of the landscape: he had studied the stone and wooden figures in the old churches and cross-roads of Brittany, and had found the elemental to his liking. Consequently in synthesising his art he used simple forms, straight lines and large planes of shadow and light, all of which were presented on a flat surface, so that all the parallelisms and elementary curves of the picture would deliver themselves to the average spectator at first glance. His method of filling or balancing a canvas was little more than primitive, and the curved lines of light and shadow, which are intended to entice the eye, are so isolated that when we at length arrive at their end we discover they are without rhythmic intention. Nor is there a generating line out of which the others grow.

Gauguin’s linear harmony is no greater, if a trifle more diverse, than in the Byzantine mosaic decorations in S. Vitale. Indeed the emotion we experience before each of them is to all purposes the same. The richness of medium in the mosaics is amply compensated for by Gauguin’s richness of foliage forms and floral designs. The decorative colours in both are equally effective. As moderns we might get more enjoyment out of Gauguin’s heat and brilliance and the diversity of his silhouette, but at the same time there is a greater archæological attraction and a more spiritual interest for us in the ancient work. Intrinsically one is as great as the other. Those seeking for calm will find it in equal degree in both, for in each it is produced by the same method: by the static representation of form rather than by a sequence of movement. Gauguin’s sculpture has the same qualities as his paintings, and resembles the religious effigies of some barbaric tribe. The figures are upright and rigid, their backs against a straight support, as in Egyptian architectural art.