Page 29 - Studio International - February 1966

Perspective is nullified by the high viewpoint; colours palpable solidity; an achievement of visualization to
and forms are placed precisely in space against the which the still-life painters of the twentieth century are
soft white surface without losing their physical reality. still indebted. The spatial organisation of Japanese
The blue goblets play their part in the orchestration of prints and the 'realizations' of Cezanne meet here, but
a flat pictorial surface without compromising their the glowing colour and the poetry are Gauguin's alone.
It was the quality of formal inventiveness that raised
Gauguin above his satellites in Brittany. Only in his
work does the outline of a single rock become the
vehicle for the expression of a personal tension, the
synthesis of an intuitive response to nature. Compare
Gauguin's View of the Farmyard at Le Pou/du with
Meyer de Haan's of the same subject.
In his superb Madeleine at the Bois d'Amour Bernard
achieved a measure of Gauguin's poetry and authority,
but within two years a bitter break with Gauguin,
the lack of a driving creative (as opposed to religious)
conviction, and the self-consciousness of the too­
precocious drove him further and further down a
cul-de-sac from which (like his contemporary Maurice
Denis) he was never to emerge. The Pieta of 1890
marks the beginning of the end.2
Perhaps the climax is the group of works of 1889 by
Gauguin, shown together at the Tate, for which the
human figure, real or surreal, serves as subject matter:
The Belle Angele, the Yellow Christ, the Breton Calvary,
the Life and Death, and the Self-Portrait with the
Yellow Christ. For all these the human face and figure
provide inspiration, but the human figure treated
abstractly and sculpturally and used to convey those
aspects of the human experience which are a condition
of life itself. The crouching woman who constantly
reappears throughout Gauguin's work from 1889
Gauguin
Still life with Three Puppies 1888 onwards is a symbol not of the despair of Gauguin or
Oil on wood of his generation but of despair as an inevitable factor
36j, X 24½ in.
Signed and dated PGo '88 in human life at any time or place.
Lent by the Musee des Arts Pissarro disapproved of Gauguin for looking back­
Decoratifs, Paris
wards to 'the Japanese, the Byzantine painters and
3
Le Christ Vert others' • But Gauguin's art was not so much relevant
(Le Ca/vaire Breton) 1889 to the conditions and manners of his period as to the
Canvas
36!,: X 28¾ in. state of human thought and imagination in the 1890's,
Signed and dated 'P. Gauguin 89' and to the dilemma of life at all times. It is relevant to
Lent by the Musees Royaux des
Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels us now in that it has formed a part of the visual
education of the twentieth century. His art changed
our vision. His figures, though they rarely appear to
communicate with each other, strike chords in us by
virtue of the experiences which we are shown to share
with them. □

'Quoted by Rewald History of Impressionism page 561.
'He wrote to Gauguin '_ .. the more I get involved, the more I
approach the non-affirmative, emptiness, hollowness, to such
an extent that whenever I do something that seems ... well
grasped, I dare not touch it any more for fear of spoiling it'.
Bernard to Gauguin, Autumn 1889. Fifty years later he was to
claim all credit, as had Gauguin, for the innovations of 1888-90.
3 'I criticise him for not applying his synthesis to our modern
philosophy which is absolutely social, anti-authoritarian. and
anti-mystical' -Camille Pissarro Lettres a son Fils. April 20th
1891.
61