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Indianapolis Museum of Art
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Channels: European ArtPaul GauguinTalks
Join Dr. Gloria Groom, Curator of European Painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, as she discusses the personal life of Gauguin, the themes prevalent in his work and the 1890's.
To me, Gloria possesses the ideal blend of scholarship and professionalism with a down-to-earth directness that is invaluable. Please allow me to introduce
a cherished colleague, Gloria Groom.
[Applause]
Thank you Ellen, lovely, and thank you David and your family and everyone. I came back from Fort Worth
last week where I gave a lecture and, of course, in Texas everything is bigger, but I think Indianapolis is bigger.
This museum has really grown exponentially since I was last here in 2003 for a Pissarro Symposium and looking at your docent class, this is big!
So, I am thrilled to be here. Can we drop lights and make me not the center of attention and get the art up? Very good. Alright,
I am showing you the Homage to Cezanne, a painting that most of you probably know, it's at the Musee d'Orsay and I am using it as an introduction for this talk,
which is really about, sort of, the anxiety of influences. As you can see, I've labeled the artists that we'll be talking about today,
Redon, Vuillard, Bonnard, the artists who were in Vollard's stable, and we will talk more about Vollard as a dealer, but I am showing you this.
It's 1900, so by now, Gauguin is in Tahiti, he is not really a part of the art world, but I am showing it because it is a painting that speaks to influences.
As you know, it's called the "Homage to Cezanne" and they are looking at Cezanne's still life on the easel, that is center of the painting and Vollard, the dealer,
is smack-dab in the center himself. He is a kind of peering over it, grasping on to this pole, but it's also about Gauguin, because the painting by Cezanne
was, for a long time, in Gauguin's collection. It was one of his prized Cezannes and he owned quite a few and the one he said he would only let go if he was destitute. And indeed,
he became destitute in Tahiti and needed medical attention and so was forced to sell this. So by the time it's in his gallery, it no longer belongs to Gauguin,
it belongs to a dentist and its being shown as a kind of an emblematic symbol of the gallery that really brought Cezanne,
this artist who had been forgotten in the south of France, to the public attention again. But it's also about Redon, on the far left, the older artist who was actually
of Gauguin's generation, who is shown kind of wiping his glasses and this was, indeed, a revelatory year for Redon
where he moves from the black and white works on paper that he had been known for the past twenty years. These kind of mysterious closed eyes
looking into the interior states, to an art of color. And, in fact, the pastel that you see on the right, "The Beacon," began its life as a black and white charcoal drawing
and it was when he meets these younger artists that he starts thinking about color and he goes over it with pastel and turns it into something quite different.
But also in the painting, besides the fact that the Cezanne is indeed a sort of a nod to Gauguin, on the wall behind
Vuillard, with his big red beard, is a painting that is obviously a Gauguin. We think it's an amalgam and with the Gauguin Tehamana that we have in our collection
and the one in Russia you see on the right. So, it's kind of showing that these are all artists who have been in each
others' circles and what I'd like to talk about tonight is some of these influences and some of the ways that Gauguin permeated the world of the younger artists,
as well as older artists in the 1890s. Maurice Denis, who was the head of this group of artists who call themselves the Nabis, at least at the beginning their career
meaning prophet because they saw themselves as the harbingers of a new art, would later write of Gauguin's influence that he, "Gave us
one or two incontestably true ideas at a time when we were without direction." In 1900, around the time the painting the "Hommage to Cezanne" was done,
Gauguin wrote to a critic Charles Maurice from Tahiti and he said in conjunction with the youth of today, meaning the Nabis, that, "They are profiting
and they owe all of it to me. They have plenty of talent, but perhaps without me they would not exist, without me would the world accept them?" You know, Gauguin had a
really small ego and never thought of himself as much, but basically, he is saying that these artists could not have been artists unless he had been in their picture.
So, in the next forty-five minutes what I would like to lay out is this larger picture and a term I will call the anxiety of influences
about young artists who are beginning their careers, who are looking for direction and about an older artist who has a past and who is desperately
trying to re-invent himself. Now, we all know the story of Gauguin, how he was a sailor, how he became a stock broker and lived with his guardian Gustave Arosa
and became very much influenced by the collection that Gustave Arosa had of Daubigny and Corot and Pissarro and how he was introduced to Pissarro
who really taught him some of the basics of painting, so very talented man that could pick up, as an amateur, to become a professional artist
and I am showing you your Pissarro and your Gauguin as an example of Gauguin learning from Pissarro who would consider him his student
and Gauguin would always be thought of as kind of a recruit of Pissarro and I think you can even see in this comparison that the Gauguin,
he already has his distinctive take on whatever he is taking from. He never just copies; he does something quite different from it
and I think it's wonderful that Rick Bretel, in a recent catalogue, talks about this very brooding and fascinating landscape and he says, "We seem to be in a sunken section
of a large plane escaping the wind that whips above our heads, raising the question where are we? Why are we here? What is being painted?"
and, this is my favorite and this is such a Dr. Bretel, "How do we escape?" speaking of Gauguin's landscape. So, that is really the point.
With Gauguin you don't escape, it's an art of interiority. It's an art that looks back on itself. It's exactly the antithesis even while he was raised
on Pissarro and his impressionism, he is never really a full Impressionist. Impressionism is about capturing those transitory effects of nature,
the light, it's looking out, it's observing the natural world and then transcribing into paint those kind of natural conditions and this is Monet from our collection.
Just a few of our paintings that he did in the '80s when Impressionism was moving into, yet, another chapter. And by 1886, even artists such as Monet
were thinking it was a kind of a dead end, that they needed to go in a slightly different direction. And at the last exhibition of the Impressionists in 1886,
you had a glimpse of what, at least one, direction would be and that would be Pointillism that would be the new Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism
which was exemplified by Seurat's watershed painting of... ["Oh! You know, that is my cell phone going off, I am so sorry. It's probably my kid calling, going
aren't you home?"] And, so watershed movement in the history of art and as you know Pissarro meets Seurat in 1885
and immediately becomes fascinated by this new calculated way of regulating brushwork of applying colors and complimentary colors
and so he exhibits in 1886 and that is really the time when Gauguin, who has been always in the wake of Pissarro
and his Impressionist friends, decides not to follow Pissarro into this new chapter of technique and to break off completely with Pissarro.
Now, at the last Impressionist exhibition, Gauguin also exhibited, but his works, which were incredibly bold and daring, were largely ignored because they were small scale
and, of course, Seurat in his own room with the artists of the same ilk dominated the exhibition, but I think you can see already in 1886,
these women, the simplified forms, the fascinating zones of color and I want you to be sure and note, in particular, the woman on your left
who seems to be throwing herself into the waves. This becomes one of his repeated motifs and for Gauguin it's all about observation,
but then memory and imagination and repetition and you will see that again and again. He is an artist who has this, almost like Kandinsky will do later on,
he picks out these kind of coded symbols and he uses them in different contexts throughout his career.
Now, Gauguin had already taken on a subject similar to Seurat's Parisiennes in the Bon Nous, Paris, in his Strolling Parisienne, but interestingly
the one of the few modern life subjects he takes on, La Parisienne, you know, the typical elegant woman strolling, he does it in a very primitive crude material of wood,
so that he is once again starting with this paradox of things that don't quite make sense and that will be one of the tropes throughout his career.
He is desperately trying to find his own path and really what he finds it in is, not so much painting, but the objectness of things.
He is an incredible decorator from the very beginning of his career even in these very early interior scenes and the still life from our collection on the right,
he is different. He is using the interior as a mood setter and how does he do that...well his interior was quite different. He was a sailor.
He did live for a while with his guardian who had ceramics, who had tapestries like the North African wall hanging you see in the still life. He did grow up
in a very different environment from the Impressionists living in France and so he shows, he includes some of those elements
of his more exotic lifestyle and, as you know, Gauguin would always consider himself as a savage. That was the myth, that was the mythic persona he presented to the world
in order to establish a route for himself that was different from the Avant-Garde of the Impressionists of his day. So you see in the "Interior,
rue Carcel," a very odd juxtaposition of the still life and the people are kind of smashed, it's Gauguin and his wife and in the still life
you see the root-wood tankard from Denmark, where his wife was, and a metal pitcher, which some art historians have considered
a kind of a portrait of a marriage gone bad, the sort of awkwardness. I think that's reading a little bit into it and biography certainly plays into art history,
but in this case, I think, you know, a pipe is pipe, but it does come back again, the tankard does have
symbolic resonance for Gauguin because it reappears in other paintings such as the one of the child sleeping, one of his five children from 1884,
but I am showing it here not only because there it is, if that is indeed Mette his wife, whom he is going to leave in the following year.
If that is indeed her, it's also all about Cezanne, you know? He can escape from Pissarro because he denies Neo-Impressionism. He denies the Pointillista.
But he can't escape from Cezanne, with whom he is an unofficial student. I mean, Cezanne, he surrounded himself with and he admires
his constructivist stroke and he buys Cezanne for his collection when Cezanne, as I said, was still very unknown and had not the market that he would develop thanks to Vollard in the '90s.
So you see this background, these elements of wallpaper which Gauguin translates in his own, to kind of these dream-like motifs that will reoccur again and again. When you get to Tahiti,
it will be the leaves off the Pandanus trees, or whatever they are, they will start to make this evocative environment. But it starts with Cezanne
and I think even you can see how he has used, how Cezanne would use like a compotier, this fruit holder and he will include some kind of element from his own
domestic home and, of course, that leads us to your fabulous portrait..."portrait", not really, but this odd juxtaposition
and collage of elements. I think it's one of the most...I think it's the first time Gauguin really advertises himself as an artist, a symbolist, and as an artist
who his on a completely different path and I think you have here, you have the background of the, sort of the Cezannesque background, you have the portrait that reminds us
a some Degas erratic cropping of things, so it's very immediate and we have this sense of being there but you also have this
incredible object. So, while you have the still life, the tablecloth, the unusually formed fruits, the fruits that had kind of
a life of their own that Cezanne of course brings to art, you also have this weird object. That's an object that is Gauguin's own
and I think that is where Gauguin really can make his name in a way that has nothing to do with painting. Whereas the Impressionists
with the exception of Degas, whose Little Dancer, Age 14, was the only sculpture he exhibited. The Impressionists were purely painters,
they did not dabble in three-dimensional. But that is where Gauguin, from the very beginning, shows himself to be a master
and that he can create these objects and he starts in marble and he moves to wood and then eventually he moves to unglazed stoneware and he calls them
"my monstrosities" and they are very, very unusual and unfortunately most of them are destroyed or lost or whatever and so we don't really have an idea
and we only know this one because it appears in letters and it appears later on in other paintings.
But also in this painting, I think you will see that this is a painting at the Art Institute of the "Woman in front of the still life" by Cezanne and he is giving Laval
that same kind of closed-eyes gesture, as if he doesn't really understand, he is kind of looking in and this mask-like physiognomy
and again using a Cezanne in the background of the woman, in front of the Cezanne, that was that same still life we saw earlier.
So very collage-like elements that combine and make sense but they don't. There is an element of ambiguity and indeterminacy
that I think is very important to Gauguin and will continue on in his career. We don't really know what Cezanne thought of Laval.
He was one of those unfortunate creatures who came under Gauguin's alpha-personality and was victimized by it, as Meyer de Haan
would be, as most of Gauguin's younger friends that he took up along the way. But, as I said, I think it is in these three-dimensional that Gauguin works out
ideas that he would then apply to his art. So, maybe it goes: drawings, then three-dimensional, and then using some of the concepts
of the sculpture itself to get back to a painting that is completely different from the mainstream, Avant-Garde moment at the time.
I draw attention to the "Leda and the Swan Vase" at the lower right, which is metamorphosing, you know, it's the Leda and the Swan story
but it takes place on a vase. So, it has this kind of almost continuous movement and you will see that again in his works too, where there is this kind of interesting fluidity
between figures that change into something else and metamorphize.
Now, in 2001, as Ellen said, we took on Gauguin in dialogue with other artists, in particular with van Gogh, with whom he had a very turbulent relationship
in Arles for eight and a half weeks, which ended in the, you know, the ear incident. And other artists, the young Bernard, who is so well represented
in your collection and Laval and others and we took on how Gauguin in a way that Pissarro referred to negatively
as bricolage, as taking here and there like a sailor picks up things when he travels. How Gauguin would use ideas
that were being tossed about, either in correspondence with one to the others, or in their paintings, and he would use it and assimilate it and make it his own. And we have to remember that
Gauguin was one of the very first artists among these younger artists; he wrote about art. He articulated some of the new theories and so, as ideas came in,
he was, not only writing in letters, but he was actually starting to write articles, "nos entitique".
He was starting to get the new art ideas out. Now, the Impressionists never wrote about their art. Seurat, unfortunately, rarely wrote about his art. So we don't have
a lot of theories from these other artists, but with Gauguin, being that small ego, he had to let it out and he had to assimilate
and appropriate from these artists and in particular van Gogh.
Now, when he goes to Pont-Aven, the first time is in 1886, he doesn't do much, he observes. And that would be a characteristic of Gauguin, is to kind of
take notes, walk around, take it in, because it's going to come back out again in a memory imaginative form. It's not going to be something that is purely observed,
because that is the way of Impressionism and that window onto nature is now closed.
So, when he returns to Pont-Aven in 1888, then you see the richness of the area and some of the, you may have been there and these kinds of things he saw,
these crude carvings on 15th, 16th century churches, these kinds of Breton activities, wrestling for example, and he takes it in
and he brings it back out in something that's quite amazing, such as the "Young Wrestlers," which you see on the right, which is not really observed at all,
but re-thought and as he told Schuffenecker, "Don't take art, you know, don't look at nature, and don't draw too much from nature,
but dream on nature, meditate on it. Let it have an incubation period". And, of course, that was the thesis of the exhibition we did in 2001,
because van Gogh was exactly the opposite. Van Gogh went out; slash, slash, slash, pigment on the canvas, it's done.
Gauguin; thought, thought, thought, cerebral, cerebral, cerebral, reimagining it, memory, and so obviously, besides their very different personality types,
they approached their art in completely different fashions.
Now, I am just joined this in because this is from our collection and I have a slide of it, but it's just to remind you that in 1886 this was still the picturesque way of depicting
the Bretons, even though they didn't wear their coifs except for ceremonies, it was still very...for artists it was still...they were known for their beauty
and their grace and artists like Dagan-Bouveret were still making, they still found a market with paintings that exalted the costumes of the people from Pont-Aven.
So, what Gauguin was doing was extremely radical. At the end of the summer, he and Bernard had both produced the masterpieces that would stamp them in art historical annals forever.
Gauguin's "Vision after the Sermon" and Bernard's "Bretons in the Field." An important step was made for Gauguin at this time,
as he wrote to Schuffenecker, his friend and artist, he said, "Now, I am going to sacrifice everything, execution and color and I am sacrificing it for style."
And that is what happens, is that now it is the surface, it's abstraction over representation.
It's the surface and subject that are coming together in a way that they had never come together before. He is self-consciously making up
a new language. Now, Bernard was doing the same, but Bernard was more of a pattern and on the surface alone, not so much the integration of the subject to surface.
Gauguin was doing something very revolutionary. With the "Vision after the Sermon," he was literally creating a new art for a new subject,
which was the nature of religious experience, how do you visualize religious experience and that is what he was doing with these women who are praying so hard,
they are having the vision of Jacob wrestling with the Angel. Now, Gauguin's influence was radical and fast.
Serusier goes there, Serusier is the head of an art group at the Academie Julian. He is the older artist, with artists like Maurice Denis that I showed you before, and he goes to Pont-Aven
and the first thing he does is a peasant painting, very much in the spirit of Degnan-Bouverey. That same summer,
he barely meets Gauguin, but has the one encounter where Gauguin says, you know, "How do you see that tree? If it's purple, paint it that color." And he creates "The Talisman."
He creates what is really supposed to be the landscape of the Bois d'Amour in Pont-Aven. This, you know, it's that big, it's at the d'Orsay,
it's on that little piece of cardboard and he brings it back to this friends in Paris, who only know of Gauguin by reputation but not by art and suddenly there is this
new conversation among the artists who were working in a more naturalistic, realistic style because they were in art school and you have
Denis responding with the "Sunlight on the Terrace," the painting you see at the lower right, which is really about as abstract as Denis going to get,
which is these patches of colors, these interlocking shapes that suggest a terrace, that suggest sunlight and trees but really don't give you
much information at all.
But the artists that were left in Paris because, with the exception of Serusier and Jan Verkade, none of the artists that you saw at the beginning of the lecture actually met Gauguin.
With the few exceptions, they could only see Gauguin, if Gauguin's work was being shown in Paris. Fortunately, van Gogh's brother continued to believe in Gauguin
and showed his ceramics and paintings at his gallery in Paris and Gauguin was also seen in avant-garde exhibitions in Brussels
but the most important exhibition that we know the younger artists, the Nabis, saw was the one that took place outside the grounds
of the Universal Exhibition of 1889, and that was the exhibition where Gauguin showed, in a cafe, seventeen works of art, including some ceramics,
some paintings and the wonderful zincographs, these canary yellow pages that had been printed on a zinc plate that you have in your collection and that are amazing,
even now, for their style and their incredible daringness of pattern. And, what I said before, about memory and repetition
and imagination, comes very much to the fore. If you remember the "Leda and the Swan Vase", well... now he is making a design for a plate,
which becomes the front of this portfolio of zincographs and the girl bathing at the right is very repeated image in his works from Pont-Aven and later on he will pick it up,
that same form will appear in Tahiti.
He goes back and forth, so it's works from Brittany, where he had been, but it's also back in, even to the Martinique experience, where he travelled with
Charles Laval and brings up those memory paintings and works them again into a print and that's something he will do continually.
There is no evolution with Gauguin. You know, you think of Monet, Monet does this, then Monet does this series, he does that series and then he does Waterlilies.
Gauguin is everywhere. He is as circuitous as his art and as ambiguous and indeterminate as the kinds of subjects he takes on,
so there is no way of knowing he borrows from the Japanese prints that he admired so much,
he borrows from Degas. He ceases to borrow from Pissarro but he can't quit borrowing from Cezanne and then he picks up non-western influences along with western influences,
but it's not so much a collage because he synthesizes, which is the word he brought to the art world, "synthesize." These are two of the
Martinique paintings, just to show you what those zincographs were based on, and these same poses of women would appear again in his work whether they be Bretons or whether they be Tahitian,
it's certain codes like the woman that was throwing herself into the waves, you will see again and again, but what's very clear, even from 1887, so this is just
a year after he breaks with Pissarro, is that he is the colorist. He is the colorist of all.
Now there is one other influence on Gauguin that we haven't talked about that I want to bring up here and that is the artist Puvis de Chavannes, an older artist, who by the time 1886,
1887 was recognized as the father of mural painting. He was the one who had renovated mural painting with these flat
matte fresco-like colors, large paintings. He did a lot of murals for French public institutions, but he also painted on smaller scale
and they looked like murals. This was an artist that was revered not only by the official art world but by the Avant-Garde and certainly Seurat, you think of the
Grand Jatte and those people, in frieze-like fashion, and Gauguin, all of these artists were looking at him and the other thing that Puvis brought was the simplified forms and mood.
His landscapes tend to be about, you see the grove of trees, the "Sacred Grove", "The Poor Fishermen", they set a mood and it's the colors
and it's the simplified forms working together to set an overall emotional quality
and that's what Gauguin was looking for. He was looking for a way to express ideas and emotions with the paint itself.
So, Puvis offered him of style that was decorative and eloquently expressive and, as I said, Gauguin
fluctuated between different modes of influences. So, when he gets to Arles and the very first thing he does when he joins van Gogh at Arles, as you know, is your painting,
the "Landscape near Arles." It's a painting that was done on the canvas that van Gogh had supplied him. It's a painting that was done on the suggestion
of van Gogh, who had done also haystacks earlier that summer, but Gauguin takes it on and makes it something quite different.
I think you can see, in this comparison with your Cezanne, how he is always looking back to Cezanne as well, the way it's painted, these regularized strokes
but we know from radiographs, we know about the canvas, but we also know that his typical way of working is to draw out
the subject in blue, so blue paint and then to work with it. Sometimes, he would actually allow the blue paint to show through
so you'd have these outlining but many times you would just go over it and that's what he has done here.
Some people think yours is unfinished. I looked at it today and I don't think it's unfinished at all. I think he knew exactly where he was going.
It's a subject that he doesn't repeat. So, it's an experiment that he doesn't decide belongs in his repertoire
but I don't think it's an unfinished. I think he very much got to where he wanted to go with it. That same summer at Arles he does the
"Arlesiennes, (Mistral)" from our collection and I think you can see that kind of mood setting that comes from Puvis De Chavannes. So, you have Cezanne, you have Puvis, this very enigmatic
simplified forms, expression through the actual way that the forms work in space.
Our painting, too, has a history that's quite different. We know that it began its life as a vertical and we know that the very first subject he started painting was from Brittany.
So, he's in Arles but he gets blocked, and he can't think of what to do. So he starts redoing things from his sketchbook,
which are animals that he knew in Brittany and that would also become one of his characteristics, would be to pick up on something that he had done before
in order to de-block his imaginative skills and then obviously, he figured out what he wanted to do and then switched the canvas around.
It would be fun to look at all the Gauguin's in x-rays; I mean that's something we should think about doing.
So, now back to Nabis because the next half, and I will keep my time, is going to be about how they assimilated Gauguin and what Gauguin actually meant to these
young Parisian artists and that's something very key to the subject. Gauguin needed to leave Paris, he had a past, he had a wife, he had kids.
He also had that Impressionist, late-comer to Impressionism moniker attached to his name. So, he needed to leave Paris. The artists that we'll be talking about, the Nabis,
were very much in Paris. They loved Paris. They loved the theater, the music, everything that it had to offer. They had no intention of isolating themselves
in this little, you know, village on the coast. So, their, what they take from Gauguin, is very much what they can see.
Denis would be their spokesman. So it's through Denis that they learn a little bit more, that he starts articulating some of these new theories.
I should just mention who they are. So, in order, you have Vuillard and his brother-in-law Roussel and Bonnard. These were the secular Nabis.
These were the Nabis that did not believe an occultism that did not go down the neo-Catholic route that Denis and Serusier would do. So, they kind of divide up into those two,
but they each took what they needed from Gauguin. And I think in this comparison, you can easily see how Serusier who, as I said, was the only artist who met Gauguin,
is re-assimilating that mood scape. That kind of simplified forms and the ambiguity and the mystery that Gauguin was able to bring to his canvases
through color and just the juxtaposition of these two people who seemed to be emerging from the blue trees.
The blue trees themselves, however, are a memory of the "Grande Jatte" where we have those trees of Puvis De Chavannes, "Sacred Grove."
So he is taking them and putting them in a new mode. Now, as I said Gauguin offered them a new expression for religious experience and this would be very important
for an artist such as Maurice Denis and very early in 1891, he paints his "Easter Mystery." Using like Gauguin,
certain forms, these are souls, these sort of white hooded figures that would reappear again and again in his early paintings,
sort of codes that he would use for expressive purposes. It's a very complicated painting, every bit is enigmatic as a Gauguin where you have sort of the
host being given to the communicates at the top and then the three Marys at the tomb and then an overlay of Pointillism because, at first, Denis and the Nabis,
they weren't going to let Neo-Impressionism go unchallenged. They were picking up on everything and Seurat is just as big a guy as Gauguin at this time
so they were going to be left out. Although, in the end, they tended to go more towards the pure symbolism of Gauguin.
And I think you also have one of the most abstract and amazing paintings that Gauguin ever did in his early career, which he never really repeats. He never gets this close to radical abstraction
"The Flageolet Player," which has been described by Sam Josefowitz as, heads of fluctuating number at the top, these kind of white
rocks that you see. But the most interesting interpretation comes from Dario Gamboni, in a book he has just recently written on potential imagery
and he sees this as an anthropomorphized woman and I am not going to be able to tell you from here
but if you can look over, you see that there is a woman whose hair is cascading down on the rock and that you are seeing her buttocks towards the bottom.
I find this really quite amazing and I am not certain that even Gauguin would have that kind of potential imagery in mind.
I think it's more of this radical perspective that makes you see what you know in a different way and certainly that's what happens with the Gouffre
that he shows in this other painting on the left, with a cow, that you are seeing it from this vantage point that seems impossible
and then the heightened color in a very different way of showing nature when you have nature obviously, but it's taken away from,
so it's observation and then re-thought and re-imagined within his studio. Now, Bernard, as I said, was less of a radical when it came to the
whole idea of subject and surface. He was more about the patterning and the rhythmical, certainly radical in certain ways,
but, on the other hand, he never went as far as Gauguin in meshing together new ideas about new experiences in painting.
He was more limited, in a certain way. He was younger, too. So, he didn't have all of the experience that Gauguin brings to the table,
but is more about patterns. And Gauguin was so much about associative properties. This idea of the repeating image,
but it doesn't just repeat, it repeats in wood or it repeats in painting or it repeats on paper. He was like a giant Rorschach Test.
You know, he sees something and then he will go "Oh yeah, you know that would be really good as a wood sculpture," or, "That would be good as a wood engraving, which looks like I rolled the wood
sculpture onto a paper support." So, that's what's happening in his portrait of Meyer de Haan, but I could give you many other examples
where this person, this artist with whom he had had a brief and intense relationship, another victim of Gauguin's ego,
he redoes them in a three-dimensional form and then later on returns to it in a woodblock form, but it's the same idea that this is his emblem
for Meyer de Haan. This man with his hand right up to his mouth with this, you know, he is a Dutchman and he has this bright red hair and Gauguin emphasizes all of that,
exaggerates 'til it becomes a mere caricature, which is another aspect of his work. Memory, associations, these would mark
Gauguin's work. In your painting, "Christmas Night," which you seen on the right, it has elements that you see in other paintings and woodblocks. We can't even date it correctly because we don't know
because Gauguin would return to Breton subject, as I showed you, even when he is past Breton...and even when he's through with Brittany,
or he is in Tahiti. So, we think that this was done, probably, towards the end of his life since it was shipped, we think it was one of one shipped to the Gallerie Vollard in 1900s.
So therefore, it wouldn't seem to be one that was done at the end of his life. It also seems to have been among in his sale
that was posthumous.
Now as I said, he is anti-Impressionist and even when Monet, by the '90s, goes into a more symbolist mode and he starts working on these series as the way to get at emotions
and he brings paintings back into his studio and no longer works en plein air but rather looking at them and trying to harmonize them,
it is a seriality that Gauguin can understand. For Gauguin, he is working on a parallel seriality, where you take an icon,
you take a motif, such as Meyer de Haan, with his hand in his mouth and you repeat it again and again, but is always in a different context,
it's not the same landscape with the same grain stacks that are done at different times of day under different atmospheric effects.
So it's symbolism, there is symbolism that Monet brings in the 1890s and there was Gauguin's
which was much more, in some ways, broad-reaching, because it is associative. Anything can be brought into the picture and reused
in a way that that same motif can have a different meaning. Whereas Monet's, "The Grain Stack" is always a grain stack. It may look different under different light, but Gauguin
is taking it out of one context and putting it into another.
So, for the Nabis this was incredibly important. This young group of artists, calling themselves the Prophets, you know they are in art school, they are bored and they need to figure out
what they are going to do with themselves. They bypass Impressionism. So, Gauguin bypasses Realism of Courbet because he starts right away looking at Pissarro and Cezanne.
The Nabis bypass Impressionism because you know what, that's old hat by the late '80s. They are going to be looking going straight to Symbolism and in artists like Roussel
I think you can see how he is using Gauguin's ability to completely simplify to the point it's almost wallpaper
in the small, very enigmatic and symbolic, you don't even know, if you didn't know the title was "Le Pecheurs"
you wouldn't know that was a fisherman. You don't necessarily see the fishing pole until you've looked at it, it's a sort of mysterious and enigmatic and indeterminate.
Vuillard, too, I mean, in the same year he paints his grandmother. He gets accepted at the Salon for a charcoal drawing of his grandmother
and then he starts getting involved with the Nabi artists and they are talking theories and all of a sudden, he is doing a seamstress, because his mother was a corset-maker
and his sister was a seamstress, and he starts making these almost tiles of color and ditto for when he goes outside the home
to take on subjects that Toulouse-Lautrec had taken on and they were friends but how different is he taking them on. I mean, it's all about the flatness, zones of color,
and, I think, just as you saw in the "Flageolet Cliff" painting, where it's very, you know, anthropomorphic, we don't know, in the image at the called "The Flirt,"
that's the title that has been given to it. You can read it. You don't see the man's hand. You read is differently; Which is negative space? Which is positive space? It's a very odd
and disturbing image and Vuillard would only take this so far. He would, this was his Gauguin period about five years
and then all of the artists, in fact, go on their own way, but he was a catalyst for the beginnings of their direction in a new kind of art.
Likewise for Bonnard, I return to the portrait of Laval, comparing it to a lithograph and there is also a painting, the same subject by Bonnard where you see
the odd format from cropping off the person, in this case Bonnard's brother-in-law coming in at the right corner.
This caricatural quality that I talked about, and the non-narrative that's very unusual formats that forces the composition
to be something different than a representation or narrative. The other way was, of course, these motifs, "The Blue Trees," which you see reappearing
in Nabi art again and again and again, not necessarily blue but certainly the idea of trees that reach from the top to the bottom of the canvas that flatten out the canvas because
they are verticals and because you can't see the horizon. That's what Gauguin was doing with "The Blue Trees" and Verkade actually calls his "Paysage Decoratif,"
a decorative landscape, and certainly landscape was a perfect foil for some of these more abstract ideas of Gauguin's because you didn't have to deal
with the figures. Verkade actually, was one of the artists who said that there should be no more paintings,
there only are decorations and Gauguin himself said, "all art is decoration," but they didn't mean it so much in the fact that there would never be a painting,
they meant that paintings to be something more than an easel painting framed and sold at a dealers. It shouldn't just be a commodity; it should be something more essential to our lives.
These are just more examples of these trees that have come from Puvis, they get retranslated through Gauguin, and through Gauguin, channeled through the younger artist,
in this case Roussel and Serusier. And Serusier, as I said, was much more interested in occult art, and so he even gives his paintings titles
that suggest more directly the occult, "The Incarnation of the Bois Sacre" where bois sacre is simply the sacred wood.
And Vuillard, who didn't do landscapes, Vuillard was really the ultimate mama's boy and most of his paintings have to do with interiors
in the early part of his career. But even though he wasn't doing the sacred woods, he was still using those verticals to flatten out the space,
so in this case, it's the verticals of the architecture in his own home, the screens, the wood dividers between one room and the other
that he is using in a similar fashion to set a mood, to set a sense of mystery and to emphasize the indeterminate.
Gauguin's other big contribution to the Nabis was the artist as a messiah, as God-like.
Now, this was an idea that he did not come up with himself, van Gogh was the one that brought it to him van Gogh who had trained as, you know to be a pastor
who felt that the art was a consolation and that the artist was closest to God. This would be an idea that Gauguin would take and use it again
and again in his writings and also in paintings such as "Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ." For those of you have been to the Tremalo Chapel,
you will remember the "Yellow Christ," which is now transposed through memory into this, and on the other side of him, he has one of his ceramics with a figure
with his finger in his mouth, kind of like the Meyer de Haan again the juxtaposition of the God and the savage, the two mythic sides of Gauguin's
personality.
Now, the Nabis, would not only in their name, which meant prophet in the Hebrew, the word for prophet, but they would take that idea and almost play with it.
In the early parts of their careers, they dress up, there is Serusier showing Paul Ranson one of the Nabis artist
dressed in kind of a wizard outfit. They would meet and they call it the temple. They would have words for the Philistine, they would have a special language,
this wouldn't last that long and they wouldn't call themselves Nabis in public. They were still wanting to fit into the Parisian art scene
and didn't want to be seen as kooks. But on the other hand, they were using this kind of inner language to separate themselves out from those who didn't understand
and even Vuillard, who was the least occult of them all, would show himself as this kind of rarefied being and would write about, in his journal, the importance of art
as a kind of a messianic mission, the mission of art.
And, as I said, they would use Gauguin's retooling of religious subjects as a means for their own expressions and the very, very Catholic Maurice Denis,
this is about, later on his Christ would look like Christ, they would look like the kind of we grew up with them, you know on the walls of our schools and then Vuillard taking on sleep
as another metaphor for some kind of spiritual awakening with the Tao cross, very non-coincidentally over the head of the sleeping woman.
Now, the other contribution, and I think in my top ten this is number one, was the idea of art as decoration, art as decor. Gauguin...
he wrote to Schuffenecker that, you know, he was meant to be a decorator, he was meant to decorate, his talents lie in that, not so much in painting
but in furniture making and in ceramics and certainly, he wanted to, but he never had the opportunity, and I think that's one of the saddest things of Gauguin
is that he launched a whole movement that sought decoration as a positive rather than superficial thing,
and yet, he was not really able to benefit from that same movement. By then he had gone to Tahiti and his life took a completely different turn.
But this is a reconstruction of the Inn at Le Pouldu, done by several artists, but certainly
Gauguin did a number of the paintings here and you can see that they were fitted into the wood or painted directly on the wood
and it was a total environment and this was an artist's environment, the idea of artists working together and art being integral to life.
Now at the Art Institute, we just bought this incredible thing, and I am going to go very quickly just to show you. It's a cabinet or buffet by Gauguin and Bernard and it's our only instance where we know
they worked together on a piece of furniture. Probably, we know, in the summer of 1888, and Gauguin again returns for this carving, he returns to motifs that he had used,
so he had maybe made drawings and then he may be put something on a vase, now it's coming back from a painting into a three-dimensional object
or maybe the three-dimensional object preceded the painting, we don't really know and this is another side, on the side of the buffet,
you have this memory of Martinique, so now he is showing you figures carved in wood and painted from the Martinique experience.
He was always thinking in terms of something beyond the easel, which is why I named that exhibition that, because it is really the crux of it all
that painting was not so as to be confined to the canvas, the stretch canvas. Gauguin made many designs that were never realized,
so this is a design for bookcase. He made wood carvings and there is that woman throwing herself into the wave which you see both in the bookcase
as well the panel, "Be Mysterious". He was always thinking about...it was almost like he couldn't keep his hands still.
Like you know, you are giving something and he is starting to whittle or he is starting to draw or he is starting to paint. The myth is, of course, that while he was sailor, merchant sailor,
he was whittling away on little pieces of wood. Whether or not that's true or not, it's his sculptures and his wood carvings predate
his innovations in his paintings. To narrate again just to show you how many times the same motif could reappear in a different context; as a fan, as a small painting,
different formats that were unbelievably different from the canvas that it was an easel painting. There was a landscape sized, there was a portrait size.
Gauguin broke through all of those formats and that was another contribution to the Nabis, who suddenly realized you didn't have to work on a stretched canvas,
you could cut a canvas to fit your need and certainly Bonnard was one of the biggest fans of Gauguin's innovations.
He actually submitted a design for a library with wallpaper and cabinets to the Ecole des Beaux Arts,
it was rejected immediately, of course. But I think you can see the way he would use those undulating patterns, those kinds of ways,
we saw those in the wallpaper in the very earliest images by Gauguin to suggest another world, to suggest something beyond the narrative being seen.
Very decorative, very almost proto-Art Nouveau. And Denis too, Denis did very few wood carvings
but he would not even have attempted a wood carving, I am certain, had he not known about Gauguin's work in this area and I think even upstairs
you have your Cuno Amiet, which I think has to come from having had some sort of knowledge of these incredible wood carvings of Gauguin
that were being shown in Paris. Now what was different from the Nabis and Gauguin, as I said, was that, Gauguin launched this whole idea of artist decoration,
the Nabis took it to its logical conclusion. They actually became artists well-known for their decorative projects. Maurice Denis certainly, he painted ceilings for people
such as this cupola for one of his friends. These were people who had Gauguins in their houses, so you know it's all intertwined and Denis would invite friends
and critics to come see the decorations once they were put on the ceiling, or wherever, they were going. They were on canvas, they were glued to places so they were totally portable
such as this one, you see the, he has drawn out the dimensions in a letter to the artist Henri Larroux, a friend, and he would invite people to come see
like mini-exhibitions, so the whole notion that Gauguin wanted so much to be a part of, was carried on by the Nabis. This is simply a book
that talked about the Decorators of Today 1912, 1914 that talked about Denis and Vuillard , there are two volumes,
where they were actually known as decorators, as well as painters. Just to give you some examples, paintings that were either done just for themselves, this is Maurice Denis,
not for any reason or Vuillard's, panels that would be put over the doors of a dressing room of a family he knew.
Again, the idea of a frieze, the patterning, totally different subject matter, it has nothing to do with Brittany, it has nothing to do with Tahiti
but we are talking about the idea of melding surface and subject into a decorative format and Roussel, who also did these
as a kind of competition for a real mural design, of course, it was rejected. You have a painting upstairs by Roussel. This is very much in this spirit
of these women that are kind of clothed in other-worldly garb, carrying on conversations in sort of a sacred grove, the trees reaching up.
This unusual horizontal format and I would love to think that if Gauguin had managed to have a better personality, because he was really annoying
and people didn't like him, so he couldn't find patrons and the Nabis were, you know, they were assimilators. They went in and they found,
they were nice to people and they got critics to come and they treated people well and people treated them well. Well, Gauguin was not that way
and that's why he could not return to Paris. His best friend told him "Don't come back, you know, you are a hero as long as you are not amongst us."
But I like to think that what would it had been like, you know? This is a painting by Vuillard that's almost twelve feet tall, twelve feet long in the Art Institute
that was done for a specific interior and this painting by Gauguin which was done, it's about this big and it was just done and sent to Paris but I think it has
all of the decorative elements you can imagine blowing this up on to another scale. This is the painting that Degas greatly admired and bought immediately.
This is just a picture showing how the painting was glued to the walls in this, it's a terrible photograph, of this library in Paris.
How these would have worked, not as easel paintings, but as decoracion.
Now by 1900, the time this painting was done, everything had changed. The Nabi artists, themselves, had split up and they were not together at all and this kind of
mystical theoretical circle that they were, Gauguin had started a relationship with the dealer. He was sending his paintings
and works on paper back to Vollard. He was being basically kept alive by the canvases and the materials that Vollard would send him in Tahiti,
they had a very tense and unhappy relationship as Gauguin tented to have with pretty much everyone. And the Nabis were now being also marketed
through Vollard and this is just to show you, I think, a great contribution of Gauguin that was visible in the portfolios or prints that
Vollard commissioned of these younger artists, which I don't think would have happened had not Gauguin shown that art print, had he not brought works on paper
that had just as much a significance as his works on canvas. He made no distinction, canvas, ceramic, works on paper, they are all the same,
they are all art, they are all part of our experience and I think that is a great legacy of Gauguins to the younger generation and certainly
Vollard picked up on that and took advantage of the people's need to have works on paper, as well as paintings and
reproductions, reproductive prints. Now, these are just three of the many, many paintings that Gauguin sent back to Vollard that were being
on the market, that were snatched up immediately, and you can see as I said, his style, it's not evolutionary. It doesn't continue in a line, it's all over the place, so
Vollard tells him he should paint cats and he does, you know? And so he is sort of like and it's not like he gets more and more abstract. He is not like Matisse, you know, it gets one way,
it's back and forth, push and pull, tension, and it's really all about Gauguin's, what he needs to do and I just wanted to, in closing, start, with just a small
comment on that sadness I had that Gauguin was not able to fulfill his dream of being a decorator. After his death and because of Vollard
and the market for his works, people like Count Kessler bought Gauguin's. So we don't know exactly how it went into his home, but now,
whole interiors are being designed for the art, so you have Henri Van de Velde, a great Belgium designer, designing works to make sure that the
living room ensemble suits the dimensions of the Maurice Denis painting, that was an easel painting, but now is going to serve as a decoration. So you have the whole full circle,
where now it's the interior is being made to suit the art.
So, Gauguin was a catalyst. In 1888 alone, just look at the variety of works he was able to put, well, I guess the portrait of Laval is 1886,
but 1888, the buffet, the ceramic, "The Old Women at Arles." The expression of abstract thoughts through whatever medium he chose.
This idea of the total ensemble of working from memory or working together, and I am only showing you this, now, because this painting of the Femme Caribe is on the lower door,
you can see in the interior, but it's also her gesture, this very gesture that was taken off a Javanese frieze is repeated in the Calvary
that you see in the stone, in this painting that looks like it's inspired by oxen in Brittany. So, his mind is like everywhere,
everywhere and it's so rich and fertile and that's one of his great talents. Although, Denis was the first to appreciate,
to articulate, Gauguin's ideas that a painting above all is just, before it's a subject of any sort, before it's a battle horse, before it's a nude,
it's really line, color and form on a two-dimension or a flat surface. He was the first one to articulate it, but he didn't take it as far as one would think and, in fact,
by the time, Matisse was taking Gauguin's precepts to very original and new level, Denis was writing out
against the dangers of abstraction. None of these artists I have talked about, however, could deny the explosive innovations that Gauguin brought to the art world
of 1890s and when Gauguin died in 1903 in the Marquesas, Redon wrote that Gauguin had discovered, and I quote,
"Something extremely original, the repercussions of which can be seen in the work of others. He was a master, in the strongest sense of the word, if mastery means
being highly influential and handing down new basic principles." And I think even in these later still lifes by Redon that you can see the
odd vases, this wonderful mystery of even something as simple as a still life arrangement shows that he, too, has taken in the lesson of Gauguin.
And while Gauguin's public manifestos about art began as a reaction against Neo-Impressionism, against Seurat's work, his art would be forever linked
to the younger artists. As much for, no matter what scale, it was that sort of monumental statements that Gauguin was able to make
and for his break with naturalism and the triumph of imagination and memory over nature.
Thank you!
[Applause]
That's me, this summer, and that's your painting at the Tremalo Chapel.
Great, I love this periode (fantastic website btw!)
This is a brilliant new addition to Art Education. The Indianapolis Museum of Art deserves a tremendous "THANK YOU" from all of us who cherish art education and the dissemination of information.
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