by Sue Prideaux at The Spectator: In 1855, Paul Gauguin’s widowed mother Aline returned to her husband’s family in Orleans after seven years in Peru. She brought back her daughter Marie, eight-year-old son Paul and her collection of pre-Columbian artefacts. They had no commercial value but those strange objects, sprouting the heads of birds and animals, had a power that the westernised world had lost touch with. They sank deep into the imagination of her wild, headstrong boy, who often described himself as ‘a savage from Peru’.
After the sensory overload of South America, France and school were grey, cold and miserable. With education over, Gauguin insisted on going to sea and served in the navy in the Franco-Prussian war. He yearned for adventure, but his mother’s wealthy protector, Gustave Arosa, found him a job as a futures broker.
Gauguin loathed industrialisation and always favoured handmade over mass-produced; but he proved very good at making money. He married in 1873 and took up painting and sculpture with passionate absorption, spending more and more time in his studio. While his Danish wife Mette looked after their growing family, he made friends with the Impressionists, invited them home to dinner (Mette enjoyed entertaining) and bought several of their paintings.
Then came the stock market crash of 1882, and years of misery followed. Gauguin couldn’t find a job or sell his paintings, and Mette took the children to live with her family in Copenhagen. With nothing to lose, he set out for the most remote and primitive part of France: Brittany. In Pont-Aven, to which he returned several times, he worked like a madman. Loading his paintings with colour and imagery, he fused the magical and the familiar, attempting to ‘show an inward and an outward state simultaneously’. In 1877 he started making ceramics. I confess that hitherto I have ignored these dark and faintly menacing objects, but Sue Prideaux describes them so vividly in Wild Thing that I shall look closer at the
images of strange beings that had been brewing inside him… globular, asymmetrical imaginings awkwardly anthropomorphised, interrupted by faces, limbs and orifices.
Over the next ten years Gauguin struggled on, his moments of hope regularly dashed, his money worries constant; but he was making a name for himself among the modernists. Vincent van Gogh idolised him, and begged him to come to Arles, where he would be master of an artists’ colony – the Studio in the South. Van Gogh bought 12 rush-bottomed chairs for Gauguin’s (non-existent) ‘disciples’ and painted three canvases – the ‘Sunflowers’ – to adorn his guest’s tiny room.
Gauguin’s stay in Arles, from October to December 1888, must have been a nightmare. Although the two men were painting during the day (Prideaux is good on how they inspired and challenged each other), van Gogh was obviously very disturbed. He talked all the time and dragged Gauguin along for all-night blinders of sex and booze in the village. The final straw came when van Gogh suddenly threw a glass of absinthe at his friend. Gauguin ducked and left the bar – only to find van Gogh coming after him with a cut-throat razor. Gauguin did not go home until the following morning, to be met by the chief of police – who immediately accused him of murder. Only when they went upstairs, following a trail of blood, did they find van Gogh fast asleep, having hacked off his ear. Much of Prideaux’s riveting chapter about this is based on Gauguin’s 200-page memoir Avant et Après. The manuscript was lost soon after the painter’s death, and only came to light three years ago.
Among those who thought about where art would go after Impressionism, Gauguin was recognised as the leader of the Synthesist-Symbolists. He maintained that art should be free of labels; but the more he worked, the more he wanted to touch the authentic, uncorrupted source that all art seemed to spring from. It had shrivelled in the hothouse commercialism of Europe. Might it be more evident in a world still untouched by western ‘civilisation’? In 1891 he raised enough money to buy paints, 100 metres of canvas and a passage to Tahiti.
More here.
