John Gould Fletcher

“ If Gauguin did not realize himself in Martinique, he at least found himself on the road to realization. But the unchecked power of the sun, steadily sapping not only the white race, but also the race of mixed blood, with which he, like Hearn, felt so much sympathy, banished him from this Eden at the same time as it gave him a hint for the future.
His health demanded a return to France. He came back, bringing with him pictures—experimental, tentative efforts to reconcile the glow and gloom of the tropics with Pissarro's analysis of paler northern sunlight. ”

“ An artist of a childlike simplicity of soul, a combination of Don Quixote, the Good Samaritan and that Jesus of Nazareth whom he loved, Van Gogh was even greater as a man than as an artist. But Gauguin was, as he knew himself later, greater as an artist than as a man. ”

“ Paris with her art-theories had nothing now to teach Gauguin. He must find his own way, create his own tradition. Aloof alike from the theories of the Impressionists and from those of their successors, the Pointillists—theories of the disassociation of tones and of the analytic disintegration of light, based on the scientific treatises of Chevreuil and Helmholtz—he was painfully tending back to the old decorative tradition that a picture must be an unit, the harmonious expression of a single emotion. Hunger proved again the best friend of the independent artist. ”

“ To be indeed a God!
Van Gogh was a lyric painter. His desire was to lose himself in the ecstacy of the divine. Gauguin was a narrative, an epic painter. His aim was to grow to divine stature through self-realization.
What could there be in common between the fervent admirer of Rembrandt, Delacroix, Monticelli, Ziem, and the brooding, patient workman who was building up his art on the classic tradition of Ingres, Cézanne and Degas? ”

“ Hearn, like Gauguin, was a disillusionized cosmopolite, disgusted with the banal artifice, the blatant commercialism, the pedantic and Puritanic hypocrisy of our Occidental civilization. Like Gauguin, Hearn found in the West Indies a revelation of a world which had not lost touch with Nature—a world of men who were content to remain, in Nature's eyes, something as ephemeral and as harmonious as the trees, the flowers, the beasts among which they lived. ”

“ With Gauguin's last return to Tahiti there opened for him the final and most important phase of his life, the last stand of the savage against encroaching civilization. The letters that he sent to de Monfreid during this period are painful reading. They breathe the weary cry of a man who knows that Fate's dice are loaded against him, the complaint of a warrior who realizes that fighting is useless, but who has no choice but to fight on. ”

“ Nature was becoming to them no longer the mother and nurse of man but a collection of chemical formulas for soil, air, sunlight. Only Puvis de Chavannes remained, aloof and misunderstood, painting great decorations that seemed but the remembrance of some golden age of the past, and easel pictures of a profound, hopeless pessimism.
Gauguin began to paint, and the protest against science, against materialism, against unemotional vision began. At the outset he attempted to follow the scientific formulas of the Impressionists. ”

“ In Rousseau's prose, in Whitman's poetry and in Gauguin's painting we see the only gleam of hope for self-tortured humanity, and the promise of a land where nature and man are one and where reigns a peace that passes all understanding. ”

“ Thus unconsciously, almost without volition on his part, he was led to understand that the Primitives everywhere were the truly great artists, since they expressed great human emotions about man and nature, without troubling whether their vision was or was not exact. And so he fought, bitterly, savagely, for the actual restoration of primitive art and life; for the cause of natural humanity against the cause of mechanical, dehumanized efficiency. ”

“ The truly strong spirits of this world are not those who exist solely on the surface of things. One can only sympathize with them, share their imaginings through long and patient study. Gauguin was not altogether strong; on some sides he was weak, as he himself admitted. But his work increased in vitality and in strength as his aim became more clear. Schuffenecker's studio was useful to him; he stayed in Paris just long enough to sell as many pictures as he could and to copy Manet's Olympia, a picture he greatly admired. Then once more he took the road to Brittany. ”

“ The physicists, chemists, philosophers had proven that the world of appearances was not the real world—that everything that existed was merely a question of ions and electrons, of radiant or non-radiant energy, or perhaps of elasticity and inelasticity. These young art revolutionaries, who gave themselves so many queer labels, were not, as many supposed, either insincere or insane. They were merely smitten with the desire to make painting—and not only painting, but even other arts as well—a branch of abstract science. ”

“ It is not easy to read between the lines of Gauguin's self-imposed reserve and self-determined resolve to shock the bourgeoisie. If we attempt to do so, we find a man so set upon his own path that he was almost without friends. Van Gogh he loved without understanding. Daniel de Monfreid he perhaps loved and understood. The shadowy figure of Tehura, a figure perhaps idealized, was to be the only woman who greatly moved him.
Puvis de Chavannes, an artist to whom Gauguin owed much, similarly held himself aloof from all. So did Degas and Ingres, two other artists of Gauguin's stamp. ”

“ Gauguin was a mystic who sought instinctively for religious illumination, not in the systems of philosophers and theologians, but in nature and in man. Among the higher types of civilized man he saw only a false system of morality, politics and religion, which elevated the wealthy above the level of the rest of humanity and forbade to the thinker, the artist, the independent workman, the very right to live. ”

“ And so in his pictures we realize the truth of the remark made by Van Gogh after the disaster that parted them: "Gauguin made one feel that a good picture should be the equivalent of a good action."
And indeed it is so. Every artist carries upon his shoulders a profound moral responsibility. This responsibility is not, as supposed, the duty of teaching us to conform to the modern official distortion of Christian ethics, by which we are ruled. It is not the duty of upholding a system of negations, of prohibitions, of compromises, striking at the very roots of life. ”

“ Gauguin therefore boldly called his pupils anarchists and left to them this remark: "Do what you please, so long as it is intelligent." This did not prevent him from having a great respect for art tradition. He knew that tradition is not a "recipe for making art," but the sum-total of collective human intelligence working in the past on the same problems that face the artists of to-day. He realized that the essential substance of art is always the same. Art is an eternal renewal of this substance. "The artist is not born of a single unity. ”

“ The hordes of tourists, of bad artists, of dealers in journalese, who rave about Brittany, Cornwall, or Ireland as picturesque summer-resorts, show that civilization has obtained its revenge on the savage who prefers to remain a savage.
Paul Gauguin did not assuredly go to Brittany to discover the picturesque. Had he done so his painting would have ranked no higher than the painting of Charles Cottet or of Lucien Simon. His real home as an artist, as he was later to discover, lay elsewhere—under less troubled skies, in the midst of more tropical vegetation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just as the scientific spirit, conquering art before the war, led to the extravagances of Cubism and Vorticism so, since the war, it has attacked life itself; and made of national existence, no longer a problem of human bravery, resource and intelligence, but merely a problem of relative man-power and munitions. We have learned to speak of "man-power" as our books on physics speak of "horse-power." ”

“ This new metaphysic, this new attempt at absolute realism, this final development of scholastic art-dogma, as narrow and soul-destroying in its way as the rules for painting religious ikons, evolved and practiced for centuries by the Byzantine monks of Mount Athos, was rapidly conquering the whole field of aft when the past war broke out. Nor has the war altogether suppressed its manifestations.
The enormous destruction of human life, of nature, of art, in the past war has been altogether out of proportion to the military results achieved by either side. ”

“ Gauguin wished to write the story of his conversion to savagery—the conversion of a man who realized that he himself was tainted with civilization, incapable of becoming more than half-a-savage, yet realizing utterly that savagery was naked, healthy and sound, while civilization was corrupt, over-luxuriant and decaying. ”

“ Yet it is undoubtedly true that in the primitive stages of art the artist is able to do almost everything. The interchangeability, the essential unity of all the arts, is the strongest characteristic of art in its early stages. As civilization and consequently technique become more advanced, it grows more and more difficult for a man to become master of any single branch of art. Perhaps that is why, in our modern industrialized states, the arts tend to disappear, to become the interest and hobby of a rapidly diminishing minority.
The painter Schuffenecker and his family. ”

“ For him life means singing and making love." It is easy to picture the effect of such phrases on the mind of a born lover of repose like Gauguin. Tahiti held out the hope that Martinique had failed to realize; the hope that he might be the first painter of the tropics. Gauguin's imagination was fired by the idea. He declared that he intended to quit Europe and live in Tahiti henceforward. There he could perhaps forget all the hardships of the past, and die forgotten by Paris, happy and free to paint "sans gloire aucune pour les autres." ”

“ Schuffenecker is scarcely to be pitied. He seems never to have realized that Gauguin was the sort of man whom it was worth while trying to love and understand. In losing Gauguin, he lost the one thing that was ever likely to bring him fame, the reputation which his studio had already acquired in the eyes of certain amateurs, as housing Gauguin's collection of pictures and sculptures by himself, by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Odilon Redon. ”

“ He is Gauguin, the savage who hates a wearisome civilization; something of a Titan who, jealous of his Creator, in his idle moments makes his own little creation; a child who breaks up his toys to make others ”

“ Van Gogh, upon whose shattered nervous organism the shock had spent itself, went voluntarily into a lunatic asylum at Arles, where, as his grip on life grew weaker under the pressure of the inner flame that devoured him, he painted visions of worlds tortured by the sun. Gauguin returned to Brittany, as he said, "armed against all suffering." ”

“ But if we treat genius as ordinary humanity and insist upon it conforming in every particular to ordinary standards, it is quite certain that we will never have any genius worthy of the name. Gauguin sinned in good company, with Michaelangelo who thought Raphael had plotted against him, and with Berlioz who has left on record his opinion of Wagner's music. To understand Gauguin one must share to some extent the opinion of Flaubert—which, incidentally, Browning almost endorses—that the man is nothing, the work is all. ”