Colourful prophet
GAUGUIN Tate Modern Until 16 January 2011
Gauguin is a major figure in the development of modern art — a pioneer in the move away from naturalism; a brilliant colourist; and a prominent example of the driven, self-absorbed avant-gardist, who sacrificed himself and others in pursuit of his self-appointed role as a prophet.
In 19th- and 20th-century art, it is not always easy to know when the details of the artist’s life should be treated as part of the meaning of the work, and when they should be disentangled. Does van Gogh express anything beyond his own neurotic personality? Do we read back Rothko’s suicide into this colour-field painting?
Disagreeable / impressive
In this exhibition the curators are specifically tying the meaning of many of Gauguin’s works into his own self-identity as an avant-gardist, leading the reaction away from the prevailing materialism and positivism of his day, and using art to reveal the non-material aspects of human life and experience. This is a tricky path, because especially his beautiful paintings of unclothed Tahitian women remind you that he was also a feckless abandoner of wife and children, and a Western sexual predator seeking a self-centred, easy life in an imagined tropical paradise. His works remind me of the dilemma raised in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus: how can such a disagreeable specimen of humanity create such beauty?
Nevertheless, Gauguin’s work remains deeply impressive. He was a powerful force in the 1880s who recognised the shortcomings of Impressionism and sought to work in a different direction. Impressionism was a direct outworking of materialism and positivism, the belief that the only existence is the physical world, and our only knowledge is what comes to us through our senses. Hence, the Impressionists painted only what they saw, their work becoming increasingly formless as they focused on the light that reached their retinas. The Post-Impressionists sought in varying ways to re-instil formal strength and composition into their work, manipulating appearances to achieve aesthetic harmonies.
At the same time, they rejected the idea of illusionism, that a painting should look as much as possible like what it represented. In an ironic twist of logic, the Post-Impressionists argued, as Delacroix and Manet had done earlier, that painting is not at all the same as what it represented, and therefore to be ‘truthful’, art should abandon naturalism in order to be overt about its true nature as something artificial. As Gauguin reportedly told one of his pupils, a painting, before it is anything else, is just a flat surface with colours on it.
Sense of the spiritual
Gauguin, however, differed from other Post-Impressionists, such as Seurat and Cezanne, in that he used this move away from naturalism and illusionism to reintroduce into his work a broader sense of human experience. Whereas much 19th-century work merely focused on outward appearances, Gauguin wanted to insist that there is much more that makes us human — at the very least our emotional response to what we see, but also a sense of transcendence, of mystery, of the spiritual realm. Gauguin first sought to express this through his representation of overtly religious Breton peasant women, above all in his breakthrough piece ‘The Vision after the Sermon’ (1888), its deep red background serving to deny an illusionistic sense of depth and at the same time emphasising the other-worldly nature of the vision.
Later in Tahiti, he would add Tahitian titles to suggest mystery in the interrelationships of the figures. Sometimes threatening demonic figures are introduced to underline the reality of the human sense of the spirit world. And all along his wonderfully rich, inventive colour sense underlines that these are not photographic reports of things seen, but iconic images that point you beyond the mundane trappings of your own material existence.
Gauguin’s dream of a tropical paradise, where food could be plucked from the trees and he could live without money, was disappointed. Tahiti had already been colonised by the very French civilisation that he was trying to escape. His decision to live in the forest with the ‘natives’ brought him into continuing conflict with the authorities.
Whatever one’s reservations about his character, there is also something deeply heroic about his commitment to his work, persevering through desperate poverty and, latterly, disease. His paintings, and his letters, of which many survive, speak of a man who is deeply serious in his drive to create meaningful and beautiful images. The paintings, both in Brittany and in Tahiti, also show a genuine sympathy and respect for the ‘primitive’ people that Gauguin painted. There is a sense of his feeling of exclusion from some kind of spiritual ‘knowing’, and a genuine respect for this — in his view — simpler, less civilised, non-rationalistic society.
As in so much of life, there is much to admire and to enjoy in this exhibition, as well as much to weep over.
