Painting
GAUGUIN MANY of the Gauguins at the Tate, particu- larly it seems those painted in Tahiti and the Marquesas, have been set by their owners in wide, elaborately carved frames whose mould- ings are swollen with the ornament of Renais- sance and Post-Renaissance design. They have been hung against amply folded damask draperies whose pattern is equally redolent of European art of the ages of Reason, civilised refinement and Taste; the colour of these hang- ings is overpoweringly tactful and genteel. Indeed the atmosphere of the galleries and the assertive detail of a minutely documented catalogue could hardly be more 'cultured.' We arc determined, it seems, to make this wild. independent man respectable and his art Old Masterly. I mention this not only because 1 find such presentation inappropriate and dis- turbing, but because it forces one to consider that primitivism which Gauguin sought to re- discover in his life and art and which repre- sents his most influential legacy to the twentieth century. He was not just the first artist to embrace the primitive but, I believe, the only painter of consequence whose work has not been deformed or devitalised by this dangerous attachment—and I do not exempt from this even Picasso. The most effective and devastating criticism of pseudo-primitive art can be made by bringing it into the presence of the real thing. The virtues of a primitive, natural life such as they are can hardly be borrowed at the stylistic level.
Gauguin's distrust of scientific materialism and the naturalistic tendencies of nineteenth- century art could no doubt be partly explained as•a romantic reflex from the conditions of his earlier life and the comparative failure of his earlier art, but his conversion once accom- plished was brave, serious and sustained. His primitivism is never picturesque, for his philosophy and his artistic integrity prevented that. This excellent exhibition, however, does show how his devotion to the primitive operated at different levels which need to be distinguished. It is significant that having -moved to the Pacific permanently in 1891, his work was to grow less primitive in form than .much of the work he had done in Brittany in the previous five years. Perhaps the experience of living, at best simply, at worst like a dog, forced him to a more suave and idealistic use of-line, shape and colour than is to be found in such a picture as The Vision after the Sermon. The most powerful and affecting of his pictures are those, I believe, in which his search for emotional fervour, for spirituality.. for what lies beyond visual perception, either engages with such ordinary subjects as flowers or landscape or his own face, or with the primitive and unsophisticated aspects or that Western civilisation to which he belonged. particularly the life and faith of the Breton peasants. The Vision is one of these and so
also is the magnificent still life of sunflowers (No. 61) painted in Tahiti in 1901. His philosophy of primitivism had found its pic- torial language long before he went to the Pacific and while the beauty of many of his South Sea pictures is not to be denied any more than the development there of his tech- nical fluency, I doubt whether the new-environ- ment added to his artistic stature. It is true that he came to know a tribal people as no other European artist has done, but he could not achieve identity with their foreign and exotic culture and so give his rendering of their life and mythology something beyond the visitor's rapture and admiration. The painting called Three Tahitians is a magnifi- cent example, however, of his wholly non- picturesque appreciation and enjoyment of these people; miraculously it expresses a physical presence which is not European through a Western sensibility and sense of form. Indeed, I doubt whether any other European artist has so truly and unaffectedly conveyed the spirit of an alien culture. And occasionally Gauguin seems to discover a mystery which transcends local mythology and conveys the very essence of that primitivism for which so many Europeans have yearned in the last century and a half. Such a work is Nevermore, of which he himself wrote, 'I wanted to suggest by means of a simple nude a certain long-lost barbarian luxury.' This picture finds levels of meaning and formal poetry far beyond his normal range.
BASIL TAYLOR
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