Gauguin [antikvár]

Gauguin Art is o source of visual ond spiritual energy. It stimulates and realizes ouroppetites forsymbols, images and values. It gives form ond direction to thoughts and moods of which we are sometimes only incoherently conscious, as well as creating new/ thoughts or nev^ values, new dreams. The art that lasts - most of whot we call "great art' - is the art that can sustain that energy and intensity of experience in a way that is meaningful not only to different generations, but to different eras or centuries, sometimes even to different civilizotions. We might be tempted to soy that such art rises above taste to achieve a condition akin to "universal tnjth". But this is too simple and too exclusive. The vagaries of taste, its concern with ephemeral and anecdotal details, are oil part of the meaning of art at any one time. The arbitrary fashion of any one epoch can tap new and very particular aspects or levels of great art's energy, just as the great art itself inevitably reflects the fashion and teste of its own time. A part of its quality as energy is that it can furnish universal and idiosyncratic tnjths equally well. In Paul Gauguin's case, a large part of what has made his art so meaningful to so many lies in the imoge or presence of the man that is left behind (his actions, beliefs and lifestylel as much as in the art objects he made. The objects stand os symbols of all that he stood for. In the modern world this is not altogether exceptional. Nor is the type of image he presents: hero and anti-hero, victim ond tyrant simultaneously, as he confronted the modern dilemma of personal freedom. Gauguin resented the modern world and the reassuring force of his resentment still lives as a prop through his painting. He valued Man. He resented the debasing, debilitating, dehumanizing effects of an increasingly industrial society, of the bourgeois consciousness - things associated with 'modernization' and 'progress" - as well as what he saw as the "unnatural' influences of the Church and of sophisticated Western culture. Picasso, his greet successor as a legendary presence, was in no doubt of the significance in art of the artist himself. 'It's not what the artist does that counts', he wrote, "but what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Emile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our interest is Cé-zanne's anxiety - thot's Cézonne's lesson; the torments of Van Gogh - that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is sham." What is exceptionol in Gauguin's case is the degree to which this applies. He was seen as a symbol by progressive thinkers in his own time - "the supreme primitive man" Mallarmé called him, and Van Gogh wrote: 'In my opinion, he is worth even more as a man than as on artist.' His anxieties, dreams and hopes have remained a hypnotic focus of attention and identification for Western man ever since. His art stands as a set of symbolic images of these. It is easy enough to belittle the popular image as drawn in The Moon ond Sixpence, but 'the actual drama of the man' has ployed a very real role in the minds of thous-onds. To read his art as something other then this is to deal in sham. The symbol of escape (from stockbroker's ogent to painter,- from Europe to an exotic paradise) was real to him and remains a real source of energy for others. Gauguin recognized the artist as a dreamer of his own and other people's dreams. His recognition of whatartcoufd dofortheindividual in the modern world sprang from his own needs ond frustrations. The fact that he had the courage and stubborn determination to reolize thot possibility - even though it meant taking on so much, and often in total isolation - has done much to keep the value of the dream alive. As well as giving marvellous copy to a popular romantic legend of escapism, this is essentially what his art means at any level. Whereas to get at the meaning of Von Gogh, most of us hove to peel away several skins of popular legend equating madness with artistic genius and so on; with Gouguin this is nottrue.The biography doesn't shroud the paintings. Cézonne said that Gauguin wasn't a painter ond, by French nineteenth-century standards, he was not essentially o painter. Painting as a medium was not a sacrament to him. Soon after his arrival in Tahiti he wrote to a friend: "You could say that I was born to make a trade from art and that I can't bring it off. Maybe glass, maybe furniture, earthenware or'thot sort of thing - these lie at the heart of my natural obilities far more than what is properiy called pointing.' lAugust 18921 His attitude to the medium of painting was fundamentally different from that of Cézanne and most of his other great contemporaries. Gouguin made images - hard, clear, simple images that stay in the mind, reverberating through our consciousness. He shored little of the nineteenth century's concerns with a modern reassessment of a great European tradition of painting, norwas he much committed to the French involvement with the actual process of making the painting. The important thing for him was the fermenting of the ideo: its translation into the painted image should be as rapid, uncomplicated and instinctive as possible. He was free of the French obsessions with technique, with be/tepe/n-fure, with the actual stuff of the painting. "I detest this messing about with the pigment", he wrote, comparing himself to Vincent Van Gogh. What is more, the images that he made in his mature paintings were to him essentially magical and symbolic, rather than in any sense records of what the eye saw. He condemned the Impressionists as "too lowbrow" because their paintings proceeded from the dictates of the eye and did not originate "of the mysterious centre of thought". His paintings came from the reality of the mind and the soul rather than from the external reality that the eye sees.