Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) also learnt painting from Camille Pissarro, whose style he copied closely in his early work, but at least he was never a Realist. His father was a Breton, but his mother was a Peruvian Creole, and a passion for the Tropics was in his blood. As a boy he ran away and went to sea, but after several voyages in various parts of the world he returned to Paris and entered business life. One day in a shop window he saw some pictures which brought back memories of the light and color he had seen in the Tropics; he made inquiries as to the authors, and so became acquainted with Pissarro. Gauguin was thirty at this time, and though he began painting now as a amateur, it was not till two years later, in 1880, that he began to exhibit, and another year passed before he decided to give all his time to art. Gauguin soon broke away from the dogmas of the neo-Impressionists, though his debt to them is confessed in the splendor of his color—and for a time he was influenced by Cézanne, this influence showing itself in a tendency towards simplification. Gauguin made certain innovations of his own, he deliberately simplified forms and reintroduced the fashion of binding them with heavy dark outlines, and while his style grew more decorative his subjects became more imaginative.

In one of his letters Van Gogh records that while Gauguin was living with him at Arles he (Van Gogh) was for a while ‘led into working from imagination.’

The association of Gauguin and Van Gogh was unfortunate, for their aims and temperaments were too distinct to mingle with ease. Van Gogh was all humility, Gauguin was proud and haughty, and though the warm-hearted Dutchman venerated his friend, the latter’s cold cynicism often got on his nerves and contributed to his depression. Van Gogh wanted to devote his life to suffering humanity; Gauguin wanted to forget the suffering and dwell in an ‘enchanted land.’ After Van Gogh’s mental collapse at Arles, Gauguin went to Brittany and established himself at Pont Aven, where he found ‘big, simple mortals and an unspoilt Nature.’ But even rural France was too sophisticated for a man whose romantic temperament found its ideal among the unspoilt barbarians of the Pacific. In 1891 Gauguin sailed for Tahiti, where he fulfilled his intention to paint a primitive folk in a primitive style. Admitting the technical interest and decorative merit of Gauguin’s Brittany pictures, it remains doubtful whether he would have been so great a figure in modern art had he not, like R I Stevenson, been fascinated by the life and manners of the Kanakas. His Tahitian pictures with their exotic subjects made a wide appeal to the popular imagination, though they did not become generally known till after the artist’s death in 1903. But if he complained bitterly at the lack of purchasers for his pictures, Gauguin delighted in his new home, and never regretted having left Europe. ‘I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into truth, into Nature.’ Nevertheless he idealized the Nature he found in the Pacific; he dwelt in a land of dreams and his pictures were charming conventions. When a literary friend in Paris quarrelled with his ideal, Gauguin replied: ‘Your civilization is your disease, my barbarism is my restoration to health.’

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)