In the chain of painterly innovation that would come to define modernism in art, Paul Gauguin formed a key link. That in itself is a reason not to miss Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic, an exhibit on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 20. While this is not a full-scale retrospective, it is the first major Gauguin show to be mounted in New York since 1959 (the last one was also at the Met). And although the show is not as well laid out as it might have been—the 119 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures are arranged in close proximity to one another, at times a little too close for comfort—it contains examples from every phase of Gauguin’s career and clearly reveals the many influences with which he grappled and that he sought to assimilate, often within a single painting. One sees in these works the early impact of Impressionism and Cézanne; the subsequent effect of Japanese art and of the Symbolist movement, of which Gauguin became a recognized leader; and finally the emergence of his mature style, which was at once unique, varied, and inspiring.
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Like Vincent Van Gogh, with whom he spent a brief but eventful time in the south of France, Paul Gauguin led a turbulent and somewhat notorious life. Born in Paris in 1848, he was taken by his parents to Lima, where his mother had relatives (among them the president of Peru), when he was three. His father died en route; four years later, his mother took him back to France to settle in Orléans, where he completed his education at the lycée. At seventeen, he joined the merchant marine and then the navy, spending several years sailing much of the world. After his mother’s death in 1871, he returned to Paris at the age of twenty-three and began a decade-long career in stock brokering and banking. Along the way, he married a Danish woman, fathered five children, and started collecting contemporary works of art by, among others, Manet, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, and Pissarro, amassing what at the time was a truly remarkable collection. He also took up Sunday painting.
Gauguin’s business career ended with the stock-market crash of 1882. Thereafter, he devoted all his time to painting. Within a few years, and after a failed attempt to live with his wife and children in Copenhagen, he would enter into the poverty that plagued him until the end of his life. He also suffered bouts of depression, one leading to a failed suicide attempt in the South Seas, where he first settled in 1891 and, after a brief hiatus, returned in 1895 to spend the rest of his life. But through all of his various crises, including physical hardship and serious illness, he maintained an overriding conviction of his own greatness—a conviction that frequently grated on or alienated others.
In the public mind, the notoriety that surrounded Gauguin after he moved to Tahiti, where he set up house with a young woman and fathered more children before succumbing to syphilis in 1903, has sometimes tended to overshadow his art. As his collected writings make clear, he was often at odds with people—whether the official art establishment, reactionary art critics, the Catholic church, or the community of French colonials who tried to befriend him in Tahiti. Overbearing and demanding, he mooched off his friends while evidently making passes at their wives and girlfriends. He was half-educated and mostly self-taught as both a thinker and an artist. But he was also a powerful stimulus to younger painters and others, including important Symbolist poets and critics who came to champion him as a leader of the avant-garde.
It was his art, not his life or what people thought of him, that concerned him most. As he wrote characteristically in an 1888 letter to Emile Schuffenecker, another painter who had forsaken the stock market:
I know that people will understand me less and less. What does it matter if I become remote from other people; for most of them I’ll be a riddle, for a few I’ll be a poet, and sooner or later what is good comes into its own.
Never mind; be that as it may, I tell you that I will succeed in producing first-class things—I know it and we’ll see.
In this, Gauguin was as good as his word. Having begun as a collector of Impressionist art, he became acquainted with many of the leading painters of the day; after he began to paint seriously, he considered himself to be carrying forward the Impressionist banner. But by the late 1880’s, he had developed a twofold critique of Impressionism: that the optical realism it sought was, ultimately, yet another effort to imitate reality, in the tradition of tronipe l’oeil; and that, as such, it failed to get at the deeper reality beyond visual sensations.
It was in pursuit of this intangible reality that Gauguin left Paris for the rugged coastal villages of Brittany—Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu—in early 1888. What he was after he indicated in a letter to Schuffenecker: “I like Brittany. Here I find a savage, primitive quality. When my wooden shoes echo on this granite ground, I hear the dull, muted, powerful sound I am looking for in painting.”
In Brittany, writes one of the contributors to the catalogue for the Met exhibit, “Gauguin discovered the wellspring of his art: his intense desire to capture the soul of a naive culture.” I would put it somewhat differently: in Brittany, he found the formal means of fulfilling a desire that had already come to him, in inchoate form, in his response to a visit he had made to Martinique in 1887, during which he wrote of endlessly sketching in order to “penetrate the true character” of the local Negro women. In hitting on those formal means, what proved decisive was his encounter in Brittany with a younger painter and intellectual named Emile Bernard, who was steeped in the ideas of the Symbolist movement of the Parisian literary avant-garde and was seeking to apply them to painting.
The spirit and goals of this new movement were described by one of its leading lights, the poet Stephane Mallarmé:
To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which consists of the pleasure of comprehending little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream. It is the perfect utilization of this mystery that constitutes symbolism: to evoke an object bit by bit in order to show a mood or, conversely, to choose an object and extract a mood from it by a series of decipherings.
Bernard’s application of this aesthetic to painting, which Gauguin beheld for the first time in Pont-Aven, is described by the historian John Rewald:
Bernard had done powerfully modeled still lifes which suggested in certain ways the influence of Cézanne, though more simplified in design. His landscapes showed a tendency to convert his subjects into large, flat patterns, and his portraits . . . were extremely strong in their contrasts of solid planes, in the sharpness of their lines, in the balance of their masses. If Gauguin had really been preoccupied with synthesis, here was certainly a far-reaching attempt to achieve it.
Through his collaboration with Bernard, Gauguin was able to recognize what it was he had been struggling toward: the development of an aesthetic based on simplification of forms (in contrast to the complicated technique of Impressionism or the “scientific” approach of the emerging pointillists, led by Georges Seurat) and on what he called an “exaggerated” use of color (another kind of simplification). This would enable him to incorporate more fully into his work his imaginative response to the life, including the spiritual or mental life, of the people and the place in which he sought to immerse himself. His guiding principle was expressed in a letter to Schuffenecker: “A bit of advice, don’t copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result.”
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At the Met, one can see good examples of the works created during this formative period, including The Yellow Christ (1889), a work inspired by a crucifix Gauguin came upon in a local church. Another painting from this period, Washerwomen at the Roubine de Roi, Aries, executed in late 1888, shows how Gauguin would combine Cézannist brush-work and modeling of the landscape with the use of broader, flatter areas of color to delineate the forms of his figures. Still another, religiously-themed painting, which is not in the Met show, is Jacob Wrestling with an Angel (1888), about which the great Impressionist Camille Pissarro, Gauguin’s first and only teacher, had some disparaging things to say in a letter to his son:
I do not criticize Gauguin for having painted a vermilion background, nor do I object to the two struggling warriors and the Breton peasant women in the foreground; what I do mind is that he swiped these elements from the Japanese, the Byzantine painters, and others. I criticize him for not applying his synthesis to our modern philosophy which is absolutely . . . anti-mystical.
Pissarro was not alone in reacting negatively to Gauguin’s experiments in simplification and “synthesis.” But his alarm over the “backward” direction he thought his former protégé was headed in made no difference to Gauguin; armed with a new clarity about his aims, he quickly surpassed Bernard and became the recognized leader of the new “synthesist” (a term that he himself preferred to Symbolist) movement. His rise was abetted in no small part by his tireless and persuasive efforts at self-promotion, which led, among other things, to a break with Bernard over Gauguin’s failure to give the younger man due credit for his role.
By this time, too, Gauguin had developed a renewed and deeper appreciation of Cézanne—an appreciation that would seem to have gone unreciprocated. In fact, just before Gauguin left France in April 1891 on his first trip to Tahiti, Cézanne is reputed to have complained that he had “stolen my petite sensation in order to roam with it through the South Seas.” (As for the “petite sensation” itself, a reference to Cézanne’s method of building a painting’s surface with small strokes of color, one of its effects was well captured in a phrase of Gauguin’s, who remarked that Cézanne’s “backgrounds are as imaginative as they are real”; the same could be said of Gauguin, only more so.)
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The paintings at the Met offer ample justification for Cézanne’s complaint, but most of all they show the truly remarkable variety of sources that Gauguin drew upon—among them, in addition to those already cited, Egyptian and Javanese art—and then how he varied his formal techniques in order to express his vision of Tahiti. That vision itself he would later seek to explain to those who, in his words, held it “to be incomprehensible”:
[A]s I want to suggest an exuberant and wild nature and a tropical sun which sets on fire everything around it, I have to give my figures an appropriate frame. It really is open-air life, although intimate; in the thickets and the shaded brooks, those whispering women in an immense palace decorated by nature itself with all the riches that Tahiti holds. Hence these fabulous colors and this fiery yet softened and silent air.
But [one might say that] all this does not exist!
Yes, it exists as the equivalent of the grandeur and profundity of this mystery of Tahiti, when it must be expressed on a canvas one meter square.
In short, it was in Tahiti that Gauguin finally came into his own. There, he found a way to bring together all of the disparate influences that he had been drawn to and admired, to align more closely his means and ends, to wed style—his own newly emerging style—both to his sense of place and to his growing interest in the decorative. As he wrote in an 1889 essay:
Why real roses, real leaves? Decoration involves so much poetry. Yes, gentlemen, it takes a tremendous imagination to decorate any surface tastefully, and it is a far more abstract art than the servile imitation of nature. In the Dieulafoy Gallery at the Louvre, have a close look at the bas-reliefs of the lions. I maintain that enormous genius was required to imagine flowers that are the muscles of animals or muscles that are flowers. All of the dreamy, mystical Orient is to be found there.
A dreamy quality is, indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Gauguin’s most accomplished works. There are, of course, substantive ideas, mainly religious, hovering about such paintings as Te Aa No Areois (The Seed of the Areois)[1892], Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) [1891], Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Is Watching) [1892], and Hina Tefatou (The Moon and the Earth) [1893], but they are hardly noticeable. And whether one interprets those ideas in terms of Symbolism, Catholicism, or native superstition, it seems clear that the paintings are not intended to be expressions of ideas per se. Rather, the ideas, or their indications, seem to have served for Gauguin the same function as nature: that is, they helped him to organize the acts of imagining and to execute his compositions.
In other words, the ideas are relevant insofar as they belong to what might be called the anthropological essence of Gauguin’s art. Presumably because he understood that to get at the soul of any culture, one must understand the character of its women, groups of women were a subject to which he was already drawn in Brittany. In Tahiti, now mostly unclothed, they, and especially his young mistress Tehura, became a dominant motif.
Gauguin’s treatment of Tahitian women, with their solid, child-woman bodies, their pensive faces, their deliberate but relaxed comportment, gives his paintings a muted haunting air, an air of indescribable meaning, of mystery suggested but not resolved. Just as his renderings of the landscape convey the stillness and heat and enveloping lushness of the physical surroundings, so he engages the nature of these Tahitian women and the depth of their interior life, creating in the process surfaces that seem infused with a delicate and intangible softness.
“A fully clothed woman by [the academic painter] Carolus-Duran is smutty,” wrote Gauguin. “A nude by Degas is chaste.” Degas was another painter Gauguin greatly admired, and something similar could be said of Gauguin’s own women, who are unselfconscious in their nakedness, who are full of unspoken thoughts in their half-smiles, but who, unlike Degas’s, are usually quite aware of being observed. The subdued eroticism of these women seems simply continuous with their imagined environment, as unobtrusive as the half-hidden angel in Hail Mary.
What is not unobtrusive is color. From his fantastic orchestrations of color—as in Te Poipoi (Morning) [1892]—one gets the impression that at some point color itself, as embraced, mediated, and deployed by Gauguin’s own peculiar genius, was given free rein. What Rewald writes of one painting could apply to others as well:
The glowing tropical colors are emphasized, but they are of a nature quite different from those he had recently used in France. While they are strong and powerful throughout, he has avoided the sharp clashes which he had favored in some of his earlier synthesist works. His reds and blues, his purples and yellows exist side by side without feuding; in spite of their forcefulness, the general aspect . . . is less one of contrast than of harmony. Nobody before him had ever painted with such pungent colors, not even van Gogh.
Such harmony is brilliantly achieved in The Siesta (1891-92), a work whose theme and composition recall Manet. An even more dazzling effect occurs in Tahitian Women Bathing (1892), a painting that is said to have been unfinished but that leaves one stunned by the intensity of the contrasting color, the monumentality of the main figure (a woman who stands facing away from the viewer), and the drastically simplified design. Two Tahitian Women (1899) is differently executed but raises a question to which it seems there can be no answer: is one captivated by the beauty of the figures, in this case particularly the woman on the left, or by the extraordinary beauty of the painting? In such works and others, Gauguin’s art creates a real and unreal world of which the women he painted were a central part.
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Despite such achievements, it must be said that the Met show also raises another question, and that is the question of Gauguin’s greatness. There can be little doubt that, along with Cézanne and van Gogh, he “ranks as a founding father of modern art,” as the critic Clement Greenberg put it in a 1946 review of a Gauguin show in a New York gallery. More than two decades earlier, the critic Roger Fry had succinctly described the nature of these same artists’ breakthrough as the overthrow of “the pseudo-scientific assumption that fidelity to appearance was the measure of art.” One consequence of this revolution, Fry added, was that we were “no longer cut off from a great deal of barbaric and primitive art, the very meaning of which [had] escaped the understanding of those who demanded a certain standard of skill in representation before they could give serious consideration to a work of art.”
Both van Gogh and Gauguin have been described at times as “primitivists.” And this, indeed, is the basis on which Greenberg ultimately rested his judgment that Gauguin was not a great painter, even granting “his genius, his revolutionary accomplishment, and the major influence he exerted on major painters.” Rather, Greenberg contended, Gauguin’s was “a case of premature and uneven development,” and Greenberg then itemized what he saw as the formal problems in his work:
Gauguin either too drastically simplifies the large, central masses or complicates excessively the distribution of the smaller, subsidiary spots of color. Frequently he commits both errors in the same picture. Hence they tend to be noisy; the brilliant hues and spectacular contours strike us at their own will, so to speak, without coherence or dramatic unity. And frankly, Gauguin does not draw well enough.
Although the term “noisy” seems particularly inapt, there is a good deal of truth in this critique—the unevenness of Gauguin’s development and art is certainly evident in the show at the Met. And yet the very things that Greenberg cited as deficiencies seem to me an inseparable part of what makes Gauguin’s art, at its best, so powerfully pleasing to both the mind and the eye. It is also odd that a formalist critic like Greenberg, a champion of “pure painting” in the mode of abstraction, would have objected to what would seem to be one of Gauguin’s boldest accomplishments—namely, works in which color and contour “strike us at their own will.”
But what is most interesting about Greenberg’s critique is that he located the source of Gauguin’s formal failings in his decision to leave France for Tahiti on what the critic believed was an impossible mission:
The “mystical” literature that Pissarro accused Gauguin of trying to inject into modern art and the romanticism of the primitive and the exotic that subsequently replaced it are the sources of [his] stylization, which is the encompassing fault of Gauguin’s later painting. . . . [H]e did not understand that his dissatisfaction with Europe could not be relieved by transporting himself elsewhere in space and culture, that he remained in the 19th century wherever he went. . . . The result is something partly artificial, something that lacks reality, however much of genius it shows.
Here again, although there is much truth in what Greenberg says, what he found deficient may actually be considered one of Gauguin’s essential virtues. Visitors to the Met show will notice two paintings executed in the tropics that look, or partially look, as if they were painted in France. But they will also see one of the most beautiful works, A Farm in Brittany (1894), that clearly contains a memory of Tahiti but in no way suffers from what Greenberg called “the divided aims that hurt so much of Gauguin’s paintings.” On the basis of this and many other works, it is hard to credit Greenberg’s contention that Gauguin “would, perhaps, have realized himself more fully had he stayed closer to the spirit of Impressionism.”
It is even harder to credit the idea that Gauguin, in leaving France behind, was doomed to fail. For the conflicts, artistic and non-artistic, he took with him to the South Seas were no less on display in France and, indeed, seem to have been part of his very nature. That in Tahiti he did not fully resolve those conflicts is clear, but whether that settles the question of his greatness is not. It may be that Gauguin’s divided nature, expressed in his art, is exactly what causes us to want both to doubt and to affirm his greatness as a painter.
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