Belinda Thomson - Gauguin

Portrait de lartiste, 18934

Belinda Thomson is an independent art historian specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth-century French art. She has published widely on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist topics, including The Post-Impressionists (1983); Vuillard (1988); Gauguin by himself (1993); Impressionism, Origins, Practice, Reception (World of Art, 2000). Exhibitions she has curated or co-curated include Vuillard (19911992) and Bonnard at Le Bosquet (1994) for the South Bank Centre; Patrick Geddes, The French Connection (2004) and Gauguins Vision (2005) for the National Galleries of Scotland; and Gauguin, Maker of Myth, for Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Art, Washington (20102011). In 2011 she was awarded an honorary professorship in history of art at the University of Edinburgh and in 2013 the distinction of Chevalier dans lOrdre des arts et des lettres.

For Richard

I should like to thank the staff of the following museums, art galleries and libraries for facilitating my research for this book: Department of Prints and Drawings, The British Museum, London; Muse Fabre, Montpellier; Cabinet des Dessins, Muse du Louvre, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.; John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester; Manchester Metropolitan University Art Library; The Open University Library; Witt Library, London. I am grateful to many other scholars of the period, in particular to those who have answered queries and provided help: Janine Bailly-Herzberg; Richard Brettell; Gloria Groom; Christopher Lloyd; Barbara Shapiro. A debt of thanks also goes to my family, to my parents and parents-in-law for enabling the research to be done and, last but not least, to my husband, for sharing ideas and discoveries, reading the manuscript with a critical eye and offering unstinting encouragement.

Paul Gauguin made it his business to achieve a high public profile during his lifetime and was one of the first independent artists of his generation to gain international recognition. But his prominence has probably always had as much to do with the dramatic events of his life as with the appeal of his art. Gauguins flight from European civilization to take up a primitive existence in Tahiti became legendary; indeed, it did much to fuel the myth of the artist as tortured soul, destined to be misunderstood and to live outside the bounds of civilized society. Gauguin himself was well aware of the advantage such personal notoriety could have for his work. It did not much seem to matter that his behaviour and character were censured rather than praised; the important thing was to be talked about.

Where does the execution of a picture begin and where does it end? Gauguin was prompted to ask this question about his own monumental canvas DO venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? O allons-nous? of 1897.[] In a sense, it is a question that dominates this book. Few artists have been so unwilling as he was to allow their works to take their chances in the world, or been so keen to control the ways in which they were understood. In many instances, Gauguins creative influence continued, in the form of changes to a title or authoritative written exegeses, long after a work had left his studio, and he often intervened in the equally important stage of public reception and critical interpretation. I have taken the view that the words surrounding his works of art are as vital to our understanding of Gauguin as the works themselves; only by attending to them both can we hope to evaluate the meaning and importance he wanted to have and could have had for his own time.

Gauguin devant son chevalet, 1885

For the historian, Gauguins unfortunate knack of making enemies of formerly faithful friends and admirers means that the copious documentation surrounding his lifes work is more than usually riddled with misrepresentations and half-truths, and needs to be sifted carefully. Indeed, his life and work are full of contradictions. He had been a devoted husband and father but scarcely saw his wife and children for the last eighteen years of his life. He had been a wealthy stockbroker and patron of the arts but then chose the impoverished existence of an artist at the mercy of the buyers whim. Though a profound admirer of the classical tradition, he uprooted himself from his cultural origins and exiled himself from his contemporaries and public on a remote South Sea island. The explanation for this series of paradoxes and self-denials does not lie with Gauguin alone. It has as much to do with the complex set of circumstances in which he and all other artists of the late nineteenth century found themselves, as soon as they attempted to work outside the limitations imposed by the institutions and academic conventions of their day. But Gauguin promoted the notion that within him, and outside his control, two diametrically opposed natures co-existed, the sensitive man and the savage. If the former side was to the fore in his early years, later on it was by cultivating his savage nature that he felt able to forge ahead on his chosen primitive path, hardening him against emotional and material sacrifices. He was fond of quoting Degas, who, prompted by seeing the first collection of brilliantly coloured paintings and strangely barbarous carvings Gauguin brought back from Tahiti in 1893, likened him to the loup maigre of La Fontaines fable, the wolf who is prepared to starve rather than suffer the indignity of a collar and chain. It was a powerful image, but it distorted the realities of Gauguins existence and as an explanation for his character and motivation is seriously deficient.

Pastorales Tahitiennes, 1892

Any assessment of Gauguins contribution to the history of art needs to account for the divergence of views expressed by his contemporaries. On the one hand, artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Czanne and Paul Signac looked on Gauguin with suspicion, variously dismissing him as a charlatan, opportunist and plagiarist; on the other, artists such as Edgar Degas, Aristide Maillol and Maurice Denis, not to mention a whole range of lesser-known disciples, including the so-called Pont-Aven group, admired Gauguins work wholeheartedly, hailing him as the initiator of a formal and decorative revolution. Indeed, almost before Gauguins death the first signs of that revolution were making themselves evident in the work of the rising avant-garde grouped round Henri Matisse, while the renovation of classicism, signs of which had been detected in Gauguins later work, became a reality between the two world wars. He is proving to have new lessons to teach in the twenty-first century, beyond the liberation of form and colour from obedience to nature that was judged by modernist critics to be his most important legacy to the twentieth century. But in investigating, from our own standpoint, the significance of Gauguins art and life, we should never lose sight of the particular and limiting historical factors that determined his ways of seeing.