Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [90]
The public was slow to recognize his merit, and Gauguin found himself without tobacco for his pipe, sometimes going for three days without food. His painting “Breton Village in the Snow” was hung upside down as “Niagara Falls” and sold for only seven francs. “It isn’t difficult to make art,” he noted ruefully. “The whole trouble is in selling it.” Yet, he wrote his wife, safely ensconced with her bourgeois relatives in Denmark, “The more trouble I have the stronger I seem to grow.” A visitor also noted, “He gave the strong impression of one who had sacrificed everything to art though half-knowing he would never profit from it.” Often without money for materials — in Tahiti he was reduced to spreading thin paint on coarse sacking — Gauguin kept his wit. “It is true,” he said, “suffering stimulates genius. It is as well not to have too much of it; otherwise it merely kills one.”
What kept him going, and kept him on the move, was his “terrible longing for the unknown,” as he said, “which made me commit many madnesses.” This quest led him to devise a totally new method of painting based not on his perception of reality but his conception of it. He refused to reproduce surface appearances, instead transforming colors and distorting shapes to convey his emotional response to a scene. “Life is color,” Gauguin said. “A painter can do what he likes as long as it’s not stupid.”
“The dream caught sight of,” is how he summed up what he was after in art, “something far stronger than anything material.” Portraying his dreams was the essence of Gauguin’s nonnaturalistic art: “A strong feeling can be translated at once,” he said. “Dream over it and seek the most simple form for it.” The painter Maurice Denis acknowledged Gauguin’s pioneering discoveries : “Gauguin freed us from all the restraints which the idea of copying nature had placed upon us.”
Seeking pure sensation untainted by “sick” civilization, Gauguin spent his last ten years in the South Seas, where he felt, as he wrote, “Free at last, without worrying about money and able to love, sing and die.” He lived in a native hut with a 13-year-old Tahitian mistress, turning out vividly hued, symbolic paintings, wood sculpture, and woodcuts. Shortly before his death at age 56 in the Marquesas Islands, Gauguin remained the unrepentant individual: “It is true I know very little but I prefer the little that comes from myself,” he wrote. “And who knows whether this little, taken up by others, won’t become something great?”
Gauguin’s contributions taken up and extended by others include flattening forms, using intensified color arbitrarily for emotional impact, and — above all — presenting his subjective response to reality. Gauguin’s South Seas paintings demonstrate these tendencies. “la Orana Maria” (native dialect for “I hail thee, Mary”) portrays the Annunciation, radically reinterpreted. Gauguin retained the angel’s greeting to the Virgin and halos for Mary and Jesus. Everything else he recast in Tahitian terms, except the composition, adapted from a Javanese bas-relief. The simplified figures, the firm outlines in rhythmic patterns, the symbolism drawn from primitive and Far Eastern sources, the rich colors — especially lilac, pink and lemon — expressed the vitality that non-European culture embodied for Gauguin.
“I wanted to establish the right to dare everything,” Gauguin said just before his death. “The public owes me nothing ... but the painters who today profit from this liberty owe me something.” He dared to portray an internal reality, and those who profited were Expressionists like Munch, Symbolists like Redon, Fauves like Matisse, Cubists like Picasso, and a whole slew of abstract artists. It’s no wonder Gauguin is among the founders of modern art.
Gauguin, “la Orana Maria,” 1892, MMA, NY. Gauguin used flat planes, abstracted figures, and bright colors in his best-known paintings of Tahitian natives.
VINCENT AND PAUL
Ever since they first met in Paris, van Gogh was positive he had found a kindred spirit in Gauguin. While Gauguin