ART.
GAUGUIN AT THE LEICESTER GALLERIES.
THERE are strong similarities between the characters of Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin. They both shared the same urge for escape from civilization. It may have been a fear of that reality which was at hand that made them create for themselves a romantic fantasy in distance for which they ultimately sought fulfil- ment in foreign places. The public, too, has taken an altogether unwholesome interest in their lives and letters— an interest which has led, in Gauguin's case, to a much overstrained enthusiasm for his paintings. Strange as it may sound to his many devotees, who have formed all kinds of aesthetic creeds from his work, Gauguin has appealed chiefly because of his subject-matter. The mere fact that this subject-matter was drawn from a kind of fantastic dream-world and not from a purely naturalistic world makes not the slightest difference. His work, in the main, is much more interesting psychologically than it is aesthetically. It should, indeed, prove of great value to the shrewd psychologist of the New School.
The critic, however, is not concerned with the analysis of the psychological symbols which manifest themselves in pictures ; his chief purpose is to study the manner in which these symbols have • been combined, related and organized in order to build a pictorial unity. Symbols scattered haphazard on a canvas do not become art any more than dreams slung across the breakfast table at some unhappy listener become literature. Art arises out of the desire for constructive unity. The artist is a kind of emancipated engineer whose constructions are not required to perform any mundane functions. The difference between the picture and the engine is that the former does not work and that its form of construction is dominated from within, while the latter must work and can be judged from its functional efficiency. The picture is in the nature of a kind of graph which embodies certain unconscious, aesthetic (biological perhaps) principles of construction.
Gauguin is an interesting enough painter ; perhaps it would be more correct to say that he was an interesting man. But when considered as a constructive artist, he becomes of very little significance and cannot be compared with either Van Gogh or Cezanne. He has practically neglected the fine legacy of three-dimensional art that has been bequeathed by Western tradition. By three-dimensional art I do not mean paintings which merely express atmospheric recession in space, but rather paintings like Mantegna's Agony in the Garden (National Gallery), where the artist seems to have wandered into the precincts of the space depicted, arranging and relating to each other each solid form as he went—where not only every square inch of the canvas but where every cubic inch of the space, has been brought into rhythmic sequence. Since we are not dealing with flat Euclidean shapes we must perforce drop the use of the term pattern and refer to arrangements or organization of forms in describing a picture of this. kind. This form of picture shows a completer sense of constructional organiza- tion than the picture conceived as a flat pattern. Purists may offer many arguments against this class of painting ; but most of such arguments can be easily countered. Suffice it to say, here, that if ,the artist, is' competent enough to convey the illusion of space and volume, it is quite legitimate. And there have been many such artists ; •ha Gauguin is not one of them. Apart from his lack of tedinicat ability, he was also incapable of conceiving in thiee dimensions. Most of his sponsors have very considerably' kept from us the fact that, at one time, the artist studied stained glass ; and it has been left to Mr. Hart-rick, in his foreword of the catalcigue, to divulge this very important fact. It is important 'because it explains _most of the best qualities in _Gauguin's "painting : these qualities are a refresliing`harmony of colour, 'a good sense of spacing and a seemingly siecidental nature of pattern which gives freedom to the design. AlLof these qualities can be accounted for by his intimacy _with early examples of stained glass. The last-mentioned characteristic is the most considerable of the three.: It gives to a picture the semblance of its having sprung into _existence of its own accord rather than of its having been artificially manufactured : it gives a feeling of growth to a painting. As' expressionsof this quality two paintings executed in Martinique (Nos. 48 and 56) form good examples. UnimpressiYe as it seems at first sight, one little picture does display definite three- , dimensional values of arrangement (No. 61). The surge and twist of the masses of- corn on which, the figures stand does express a spatial grasp of the subject ; yet one feels, at the same time, that Cezanne would have done greater justice to this theme. , One of : the most pleasant.:paintings at the Leicester sGalleries (pleasant_ in a deCoratiye way) is Baigneuses : Tahiti (No._ 54). • • , Gauguin is the precursor of the naive school of painters. His much-talked-of naivete„ howeyer, was very often the result of a technique which was paralyzed through an undisciplined preoccupation with the disruptive struggles in
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