PAUL GAUGIN: MAKER OF MYTH: AT THE TATE MODERN
PAUL GAUGIN: MAKER OF MYTH: AT THE TATE MODERN
Paul Murphy, London
This exhibition offers us delights about the life and times of Paul Gaugin (1848-1903). These are structured thematically but not necessarily temporally: self-portraits, still lives, Breton landscapes, reclining nudes in Tahiti. Gaugin was a man essentially alone, undergoing a journey from conventionality to outrageous infamy, the pain of total isolation and death.
Gaugin’s paintings exhibit pastel tones of indigo, vermilion, magenta. Relaxed, cheerful, invigorating, joyful. The paintings are about openness to experience: suffering, rejection, the misunderstanding of an ignorant, uncaring world. Gaugin persistently refers to himself as a suffering Christ in his paintings, as in his 1889 painting Christ in the Garden of Olives; alone, rejected by everyone. Christian themes absorbed him and he seemed to need a moral arbiter of his own actions.
The influence of Christianity and conventional morality was one he sought to escape by increasingly distant wanderings, firstly to Denmark, then Brittany, Panama, Martinique lastly to Tahiti and then an even more remote chain of Tahitan islands, the Marquesas.
Gaugin’s family fled Paris after the 1848 revolution that brought Napoleon III to power. Gaugin’s father, a journalist of Republican views failed to survive the then hazardous sea journey to Peru. Gaugin grew up in Peru, later referring to himself (in a letter to van Gogh) as an Inca. The family then returned to Paris some six years later, when the din created by the revolution died down.
There’s no doubt that Gaugin lived through interesting times. He sought to exploit French prestige and colonialism, becoming part of the empire but also in unique contradistinction to it.
Gaugin precociously began whittling wood, making wood carvings from childhood onwards. The exhibition provides little information about Gaugin’s early life, apart from the barest biographical details. Eventually he went to sea, living a life (one imagines) made up of work, constant drinking and amusement with prostitutes. He eventually returned to Paris at the age of 23, landed a job at the Paris stock market, marrying a Danish woman, Mette Gad, having five children with her. While he worked at the stock market Gaugin painted as a hobby, managing to have work accepted by the various Impressionist exhibitions in Paris that represented the cutting edge of art at that time. However, the stock market crash of 1882 changed Gaugin’s life. He decided to relinquish his former existence, pursuing his art as a profession, abandoning his wife and family. It is a story we’re familiar with through the novel by Somerset Maugham The Moon and Sixpence. Selfish, self-possessed artist Charles Strickland abandons his family firstly for Paris and then for a life of wandering in exotic locales while making paintings of naked Polynesian women. Eventually Strickland's existence seems ennobled through his lingering death from leprosy and an intriguing postscript where a former friend seeks out his lost work. It is reprised by Tony Hancock in The Rebel, another portrait of Gaugin that manages to summarise Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards the French, attitudes that incorporate fear and loathing of intellectuals and a large dollop of reverse snobbery.
Gaugin's unsentimental voyages into the unknown are very like those of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), who abandoned one life for another, travelling firstly to Java, as a soldier in the army of the Netherlands (first he enrolled in Spain's Carlist war, was given a small sum for his efforts but Rimbaud used the money to travel to Paris, pick up his royalties, then enlist in another army bound for the Java) then to the most sketchy existence imaginable as a slave trader in Abyssinia. But Rimbaud seems a character from the adult world. Gaugin is forever fighting with his constant need for self-gratification. In many ways he represents the repression inherent in bourgeois society of that time rather than an antagonist of that society.
Gaugin is summarised by his selfishness, abandoning his wife, taking pre-pubescent Polynesian girls for lovers (even though this was the norm at the time) without informing them, of course, that he was in the throes of syphillis. Gaugin seemed unable to shake off the passions that often make him seem more brute than man. Indeed he was quite aware of a basic philosophical question: is man an animal or an angel or, better still, am I, Paul Gaugin, a sublime creator or a monster?
On the way Paul Gaugin encountered another, possibly more genuine, outsider figure Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) in one of the most intense encounters in art history. The relationship is famously depicted in Vincente Minelli's film Lust for Life, where van Gogh, rather than Gaugin, is an intimately realised portrait of a new kind of man who is unpretentious, intensely driven, realist yet visionary. He encounters the truths of bourgeois society, the lurid emptiness, pathetic unreality of the job at the bourse, the vain social intercourse of the interminably respectful. Yet van Gogh is a doomed figure, useless at the business side of painting, as Gaugin points out. This is an image that would appeal to American audiences in the 20th century. Indeed van Gogh/Kirk Douglas, Paul Gaugin/Anthony Quinn seem to represent ordinary Americans, hammy, ham fistedly inarticulate, yet determined and decent. Gaugin's celebrity, unrecalcitrant enfant terrible, paedophile and pornographer. It's hard to imagine a more unsuitable pairing as housemates, driven together to find mutual protection from all the uncaringness and ignorance out there.
One sense of Gaugin's life is an escape from the West to a pre-Edenic existence, at once naive, primitive, uncomplicatedly (and heterosexually) erotic, yet also intense and passionate. His vision is also that of Jean Jacques Rosseau's vision of the 'noble savage', a Polynesian idyll replete with antique religions, stone idols and fences adorned with skulls (like Mistah Kurtz's fence in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness). Encounters with savage customs, exotic languages, totems, erotic taboos completely removed from the reality of Tahiti, for the truth is that the island had become thoroughly Europeanised and Christianised by the time Gaugin arrived. Gaugin struggled to find evidence of native religions in Tahiti, so he transposed images of artifacts and idols he had seen in photographs in Paris into paintings he made, as in his 1892 painting Parahite te Marae. Obviously he sought to entertain his French audience with a Rousseauesque version of paradise, but had to begin to invent one when it became apparent that the Tahiti he sought to depict was a figment of his own imagination.
Gaugin's wish to escape from Europe was later echoed in the exile of the Die Bruecke group of artists in Germany, who left Europe behind, simply ceasing to be Europeans. Both van Gogh and Gaugin were largely self-taught, like Die Bruecke (which consisted of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Erich Heckel (1883-1970), Emil Nolde (1867-1956), Max Pechstein (1881-1955), Otto Mueller (1874-1930)) consisting of architecture students from Dresden. Their style is thus unrestrained by academic conventions, since they simply didn't know about them. Gaugin distanced himself from his contacts among the Impressionists, he wanted to move onto forge his own style, which is sometimes thought to be post-Impressionist, but could be more accurately described as pre-Expressionist. He was also influenced by artists from the previous generation like Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) and Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). In paintings such as Still Life with Three Puppies from 1888 and Vision after the Sermon: Jacob's struggle with the Angel from the same year Gaugin pushes the horizon line above the canvas and flattens perspective. He adopts a self-consciously primitive style of drawing. What Gaugin has realised is that perspective, the ne plus ultra of post-Renaissance art, is arbitrary and conventional. It is thus unsurprising to hear that Gaugin influenced Picasso, Matisse, Vuillard, the Nabis, the Fauves, die Bruecke, das Blaue Reiter, Kandinsky: a role call indeed of all the important names in modern art.
Gaugin's relentless self-promotion, personal myth making makes it impossible for us to separate out the myths he created, the often brutal realities he encountered, yet who would want to. In many ways Gaugin anticipates Post-Modernism, where the division between 'truth' and the myths created by individuals about their own existence become indistinguishable. Gaugin's life was restlessly poised between fantasy and reality, incumbent in his Maison du Joire (House of Pleasure or House of Orgasm). This boisterous titling is especially joyful since Gaugin happened to live near the Catholic Bishop of Tahiti. He wandered through the more remote islands of the archipelago, dying in 1903 of a heart attack induced by syphillis. He had previously suffered several heart attacks and - its thought - attempted to commit suicide two years before his death. He was simultaneously engrossed in a dispute with the colonial authorities over his rabble rousing and refusal to pay taxes. Gaugin patently believed that he was big and strong enough to take on the system and win. The Catholic authorities relented, sanctioning his burial in the Catholic graveyard, but many of Gaugin's paintings and sketches were destroyed by the Tahitan authorities, the rest being auctioned off.
This exhibition brings together a great deal of material to present a new vision of Gaugin but more particularly the era he lived through. In a sense we now have a view of Gaugin unclouded by the shimmering romances of Minnelli et al. It’s a tale that tells us about Gaugin’s personal odyssey through a world that was crumbling around him, about his personal opportunism but also his intense idealism. He comes out of it as a creator Hell bent on forging the consciousness of a new age.
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