‘Dancing’, conversely, is built around perspective. It gives off the vertiginous sense of the dancers about to burst out of the frame. The painting is flecked with detail so it almost shimmers. This, of course, is Guaguin still under the spell of the Impressionists. (It could even be argued that the Impressionists used form merely as a means to convey light.) Though both fine in their own right, the two works point to man undecided between Impressionism and Symbolism.
Yet in another work from 1888, the famous ‘Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling With The Angel’ (above), Gauguin sets the contradiction to work for him. The bonnetted women in the foreground are Impressionistic, their white hats coloured into contours, yet the background is vivid with solid blocks of ruddy pigment. Gauguin explained that this background “only exists in the imagination”, that the Bible scene is the vision the women are seeing after their sermon. ‘Yellow Christ’, 1889, has a similar division, if in less rigidly separated spatial planes. (This formal separation between ‘real’ foreground and ‘vision’ background recalls the ‘dreaming children’ of Paris we saw earlier.)
Sombre Savagery in Tahiti:
Yet by the time we reach Tahiti Gauguin had tired of this rapproachment and Symbolism had won. Impressionism was concerned with the inter-relationship between what was there and what our senses took in. Symbolism, and Gauguin from this point on, cares only for what’s already in our heads. Achille Delarouche said of these in 1894: “Whether (they) are an exact representation of an exotic reality matters little to me. Gauguin has used this extraordinary landscape as the locale for his dream.” Like Jimmy Stewart in ‘Harvey’, Gauguin wrestled with reality before finally winning out over it.
Or, a little more accurately, Impressionism is not so much abandoned as conquered by Symbolism. Questions which used to be concerns consequently no longer seem to matter. Perspective can now be conveyed in multiple ways, sometimes within one painting, without any particular jarring effect.
It also, to some degree, undercuts the criticism that Gauguin was merely concocting a primitive from his own prejudices. Partly he saw Tahiti as the land of his dreams, but there’s also a sense where it was merely a means to him to get at his dreams. Gauguin himself explained in 1892, “my artistic centre is in my brain – and not elsewhere.” What he was trying to convey was something in his head.
Try contrasting Gauguin to an image from the contemporary pulp magazine ‘Journal des Voyages’ which appears elsewhere in the exhibition. A Negress beams decorously out of the cover like an alluring shop assistant. She is no black woman, but quite definitely a Negress - in the way an apple in a still life is an apple. She’s a mere token, there to titillate and to please.
Gauguin’s women, while no more real, are at least symbols – they are not going to offer everything to the viewer so easily. Their existence is not contingent on ours. Moreover, they are phlegmatic as much as they are exotic. They often meet the viewer’s gaze, but recognise us quite impassively while they go about their lives. There is a sombre quality to them, a sense in which they simply are. They are Mona Lisas without the smile. Look, for example, at 1893’s ‘Woman Holding a Fruit’ (below). Look, for that matter, at the detail on the exhibition poster.
Did Gauguin actually recognise that there was something essentially inscrutable to these Tahitian women, a barrier beyond any geography? Or was it yet another projection of what was in his own mind?
The most likely answer is something of both. But I’d like to imagine he was tapping into something inherent to folk culture – what the Spanish call duende, or exquisite sadness. As argued in previous posts on folk and country music, true folk culture does not idealise a happy past or lament its passing – instead it is flatly fatalistic. While we might rail against conditions and try to ask penetrating questions, these women seem to see past all that – but the knowledge traps them into simple acceptance.
Of course it is entirely possible that I am merely grafting my own perspective onto Gauguin, even as he grafted his onto these women in the first place. But that is simply to describe what always happens.
Nor should we go overboard in Gauguin’s rehabilitation. These women remain depersonalised representations of the Other. A room is given over to ‘The Eternal Feminine’, an unchanging nature straight out of Simone de Beavouir’s accusation that women were trapped in a life of “immanence” while men were allowed “transcendence.” The women may be granted a little mystery within their strictly delineated realm, but that is all.
The nature of nature:
However, as ever, we are really taken back to the way Gauguin saw things. It is his art which is being granted more depth, not his sense of sexual politics. Ultimately, just as each individual woman is only there to represent Woman, Woman herself is used to present a view of something else. And that thing is nature.
Nowadays we are divided between two opposing views. One sees it as a kind of rudimentary machine, which now needs updating through genetic tampering and the like. The other takes the inverse view, that nature is a machine too sophisticated for us, an intricate set of interlocking systems whose micro-complexity we struggle to understand. In the heat of debate we fail to see what these conceptions have in common. We cannot understand Gauguin’s nature either, but that is because it is too simple, too savage. We can only connect to it through our dreams, not our brains.
This quality is perhaps conveyed most irrefutably in Gauguin’s palette, which is rich in an earthy sense, vivid without being bright. Like Bacon or Guston, Gauguin has one of those signature palettes you could recognise at a thousand paces. Those big blocks of colour can make his works look enticingly easy, like you could knock off some yourself given a roller and an afternoon. Yet they also have an unsettling quality, haunting and inscrutable, hinting at something we haven’t quite got yet. They’re like one of those games which take a minute to learn but a lifetime to master. As Searle says, “The simpler Gauguin’s paintings are, the better they seem.”
This theme is presented remarkably consistently, despite the ranges in his style. It is there in the early still lives, the fruit in the bowl still resonant of the forest from where it came. And from there it grows. There’s a recurrent image of a figure reclining on the landscape, in those bold colours somehow looking giant. It’s there embryonically in ‘The Little One is Dreaming’ (seen above), more clearly in the Britanny-era ’The Loss of Virginity’ (1890/1) and the Tahitian ‘The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch’, (1892, both above). A simple change to a standing figure would change so much, make it stand astride the landscape like the Colossus of Rhodes. As it is, the lying figure does not look apart from the landscape but in some way incorporated into it. (A theme we also found in the later sculpture of Henry Moore during his Tate Britain exhibition).
Notably, two of these three pictures should, logically, be interiors. But neither feels like it, there is nothing limited or confining about them; the walls just seem to dissolve into unimportance, they belong with the rolling hills and vast horizon line of the third. Nature cannot be kept at bay; it is in everything, including us. The notation tells us that, unlike the Impressionists, Gauguin preferred to draw in the studio. Yet the effect of his work is quite the opposite.
Breaker of Myth:
I have at times felt that contemporary exhibitions can tend to stuff Modernism back into a box, the very box many of its practitioners were straining to break out from. I have even, at times, felt this strongly enough to have to remind myself that there wasn’t actually some kind of conspiracy. However, at other times Modernism bigged itself up with a set of self-aggrandising myths which can and should be punctured.
Gauguin is perhaps more easily absorbed into the world of Tate retrospectives than Duchamp or Rodchenko. But nevertheless this is a superlative show, which works hard to contextualise (rather than flatter or rubbish) him and largely strikes the nail on the head. It might skimp a little on his relationship with van Gogh, but overall complaints are few. Perhaps my praise is partly down to it being grist to my mill, its approach based on the assumption that there is still something valuable to Modernism once all the bohemian clichés have been stripped away.
I have, incidentally, no good reason for the lateness of this – it just kind of happened! Truth be told, in deciding what to write up my eyes are always bigger than my belly. And I tend to go for the most recent on the list, as it is freshest in my mind. This increases the risk of other items getting perpetually shunted back into near-absurd levels of lateness. I would like to promise, however, that this sort of thing will never happen again... just as soon as my wealthy patron reveals himself and I no longer have to go into work every day.
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