Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning

picted object is recognised, the general pleasure in the arts increases; and the moment the accepted vision of the object is modified or distorted, this pleasure decreases and in many ins

are equal. Those whose criterion is prettiness are naturally attracted to Whistlerian and Cubistic modes. Idealists lean toward the symbolic and transcendental painters like Van Gogh and Redon. Hardy persons who live largely on the physical plane prefer Ribera, Franz Hals, Sorolla or Dürer. Simple sensualists admire Goya, Rubens, Bronzino,

es and scintillating lights. They arouse an emotion in the popular mind because of the familiarity of their themes. Gauguin was not content with the landscapes of civilisation. He wanted something more elemental-scenes where an unspoilt and untamed nature gave birth to a race of simple and colourful character. He felt the need of harmonising his people with their milieu. To him it seemed inconsistent to place a fully dressed man or woman in a primitive forest or on

the same time equipped with all the weapons of a modern intelligence. His art consequently has not only the interest of historic reconstruction but an added interest which, in spite of our veneer of cultivation and education, we all feel at times for perfect lassitude and elemental unrestraint. No man is so intellectual that he cannot enjoy occasional recreation and a forgetfulness of mental activities. Indeed the greatest minds react so completely at times that they deman

s out our instinct for the exotic and calls to the fore a romantic love of adventure and a desire for far countries. In this appeal no other painting succeeds like his-not even the Persian landscapes, the Chinese pictorial visions of heaven, or the lurid images of Gustave Moreau. In Gauguin's South Sea Island canvases are crystallised our hopes

tonchamp,-then Noa Noa. After that his pictures will take on a new meaning. He makes his dreams so forceful that we too start to dream before them. His art is of the same calibre as that of Altichiero, Michelino da Bosozzo, Ortolano, the Borassa school, Manet and Degas. All these men are illustrators of a high order; all are impelled by the complete sincerity of their visions; and all are interesting because of their freedom of expression. It is a new adventure each time we see one of thei

e sailor's is weakened by unceasing battles against the elements. The spot where at last he found refuge was far from his ideal. But in this ideal world he always imagined himself living, and his painting took on its colour and atmosphere. Just as he advised his followers to draw a curtain in front of their models, so he drew the veil of imagination before his eyes and saw only what he wished to see. In this almost fanatic idealism he was

in 1883. From that time on he became a derelict who had to seek support from his friends. Although at times he was forced to work in offices, edit papers and grow fruit, the donations from those he knew were the backbone of his resources. He had met Van Gogh in Paris in 1886, and two years later accepted the latter's invitation to visit him on the bounty of Van Gogh's brother Theodore at Arles in the south of France. Here, where he had expected to find conditions conducive to work, his life was, according to his own accounts, in constant danger. The Dutchman, he says, attacked him often, and sometimes Gauguin, awaking with a start, would see Van Gogh stealing across the room to h

to his longed-for tropics. Two years later found him back again with many canvases and a strange and grotesque costume, heavy rings on every finger, wooden shoes and a cane of his own carving. He was impatient for praise and admiration and large sales; but none of these came to him. At a sale of his work in the H?tel Drouot in 1895 so s

d scholastic formulas. Being a born painter, he quickly absorbed the ideas of the Impressionists, and exposed with them in the Rue des Pyramides in 1880 and 1881. His first canvases were wholly Impressionistic and much like Guillaumin's. Even as late as 1887, after he had known Cézanne and had become imbued with the blazing brilliancy of Martinique, Gauguin still clung to his earlier technique. His Paysage de la Martinique is one of his best-ordered works and also one of

civilised community would permit him. He wanted something na?ve-something expressed by broad planes and rich colours. He had imitated the Impressionists, copied Manet's Olympia and seen Giottos; and by reducing these varied influences to their simplest terms he made his art. émile Bernard, an indifferent painter and writer, who temperamentally was not unlike Gauguin, claims priority for this manner

of little importance. Every man, no matter how great or small, goes through a formative period in which he receives numerous influences. At any rate, just before Van Gogh died he called Gauguin "ma?tre." During their final periods, however, we know that the two men differed totally; and in 1891 Gauguin showed that he was under no man's influence. In the Femmes Assises à l'Ombre des Palmiers and Va?raoumati Téi Oa, he was already the Gauguin we kn

rd and Schuffenecker, few of whom are discoverable today. Among these painters the slightest tendency toward divisionistic methods was looked upon as heresy; and religious pictures were in the ascendant, especially with Verkade. The enthusiasm of these young men for their simple and "synthetic" retrogression to the elemental led them to decorate tavern walls and ceilings, to paint windows and barn doors, and to proclaim themselves on all occasions as the only authoritative and vital artists of the day. They had forgotten Renoir and Cézanne because they detested all intellectual and scientific accuracy. And they had not known the latter with sufficient intimacy to be directly influenced by his work. Under the sway of Gauguin's unsophisticated ?sthetics and

ded attitude was only a mask to hide his desire to shrink away. He was always uneasy in cities and unhappy among people who did not try to understand him. He detested the artificialities of Parisian women. His robust sensuality craved a more solid and artless Eve. In France his nature, so responsive to the glow of colour and the primitive lure of archaic forms, saw only chill

ich Pissarro and Monet had prescribed. Paradoxically enough, while art was growing more scientific it was also becoming less significant. With the men of Pont-Aven the reaction against a too technically self-conscious painting began to set in. Their ardent advocacy of primitive conception and method was the rebound from the pseudo-scientific verbiage which, in the "advanced" studios, took the place of good painting. Consequently they favoured the broad arrangement of surfaces; classic, if the artist leaned temperamentally in that direction; barbaric, if his tastes so inclined him; Gothic, Chinese, Japanese or primitive-all according to which his inclination led him. But all work had to be completed during the first fury of inspirati

y colour as the Impressionists did, he interested himself only in the colour which resulted from light. Thus he was able to raise his paintings to the highest possible pitch of purity, while still being preoccupied with nature. In painting a landscape where a woman with a cerulean blue dress was seated among green trees on an ochre beach with purple hills in the rear, and where the yellow sunlight shone on the tree trunks and in the woman's hair, Gauguin would first of all draw apart the blues as much as possible. The woman's dress would be painted almost blue-green, and in order to

es, unconscious but immovable. The passivity which pervades them is not the calm of completion or of the perfect rest which comes after mental exercise, but rather the calm of the lethargic mind which avoids thought, dislikes action and is content to dream. Technically this feeling is caused by lines at right angles to the horizon, by big simple planes on which the eye can rest free from the disturbance of line opposition, by large flat patterns of dark tonality

express nature. He was the first realist in decoration, and from him come, by direct descent, Matisse and a horde of lesser men like Fritz Erler, Leo Putz, R. M. Eichler, Adolf Münzer, Rodolphe Fornerod, Alcide Le Beau and Gustave Jaulmes. The ?sthetic import of a Puvis de Chavannes is almost equal to that of Gauguin, but the former's greys and gre

is more of Ingres in him than of Giotto. With Seurat as a starting-point-that is, the linear Seurat of La Baignade and Un Dimanche à la Grande-Jatte-Gauguin quickly abolished the tiny and labourious spotting which Impressionism and Pointillism had taught him, and branched out into simpler design and greater chromatic brilliancy. By these departures he achieved his synthesis. But this triumph must not be overestimated. There are degrees of synthesis. Rubens, Giotto, Degas, Ingres, B?cklin, Botticelli-all are synthetic, but all are by no means of equal importance. While synthesis is necessary to art, it is not the ear-mark of great art alone. The order wh

l to his liking. Consequently in synthesising his art he used simple forms, straight lines and large planes of shadow and light, all of which were presented on a flat surface, so that all the parallelisms and elementary curves of the picture would deliver themselves to the average spectator at first glance. His met

re equally effective. As moderns we might get more enjoyment out of Gauguin's heat and brilliance and the diversity of his silhouette, but at the same time there is a greater arch?ological attraction and a more spiritual interest for us in the ancient work. Intrinsically one is as great as the other. Those seeking for calm will find it in equal degree in

H?TIENS

truly significant work. He arrived at the brilliancy of nature by a method distinctly different from nature's; and while refusing to be dominated by the past, his temperament was such that he fabricated an art much closer to antiquity than that of

its means had lost their ability to inspire artists. The second cycle was one of research, and during it artists were so narrowly focused on nature that they lost sight of the foundation laid down during the first cycle. Had their concentration not been rudely disturbed their data hunting would have carried them hopelessly afield. Gauguin exposed the futility of the meticulous imitation of nature's effects, and by so doing took a step forward toward liberty of method. For this reason he is of importance. Painters were rapidly becomin