Gauguin, van Gogh, and the Language of Vision Notes

Gauguin, van Gogh, and the Language of Vision

Introduction

The climate of art shifted in the 1880s due to:
- A crisis in Impressionism.
- The rise of Symbolism (literary and artistic).
Impressionists felt dissatisfied with:
- The informal nature of their paintings.
- Passive recording of optical sensations.
A need arose for a more spiritual or emotional approach in art.
This need was evident in:
- Cézanne's structured compositions.
- Seurat's science-based Neo-Impressionism.
- Van Gogh and Gauguin's subjective attitudes after 1888.

Post-Impressionism

Term coined by Roger Fry (British art critic) in the 20th century.
It's an imprecise term to describe artists with distinct styles and thoughts like Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.
Cézanne and Seurat focused on pictorial order, influenced by Impressionism's color release.
Van Gogh, Redon, and Gauguin were influenced by literary Symbolism.
They aimed to transform art into a medium for:
- Personal emotions.
- Fantasy.
- Reverie and dreams.
Within Neo-Impressionism and Symbolism, subgroups emerged with individual styles.
Artists sought new meanings, moving away from classic Impressionism.
New styles were described as:
- Academic
- Primitive
- Aesthetically refined
- Philosophically weighted
- Or a mixture of these.

Pioneers of Literary Subject Matter and Fantasy

Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Odilon Redon, who pioneered literary subject matter and fantasy in the 1870s, gained prominence after relative isolation.
They helped birth a bizarre, new romantic beauty and a revised artistic process.
Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel Against Nature (1884) expressed the new spiritualism.
Arthur Symons called Against Nature the "breviary of the decadence."
Decadence: A literary movement in France and England, characterized by:
- Delight in the perverse and artificial.
- Craving for complex sensations.
- Desire to expand emotional and spiritual experience.
In 1884, the Belgian association of artists, the XX, was formed and became a platform for new forms of advanced art, including Symbolist painting.
The Society of Independent Artists was formed in Paris, challenging the old order and romantic Impressionists. Redon was a leader.
Their first exhibition included Seurat's Bathers, which was ridiculed as un faux Puvis de Chavannes.

Symbolist Manifesto

Moréas identified Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine as father figures of the Symbolist movement.
Baudelaire: Considered the true precursor of the movement.
Mallarmé: Endowed it with a sense of the mysterious and inexpressible.
Verlaine: Broke the chains of verse in its honor.
Key features of the Symbolist position in painting and poetry can be traced to these poets.
Subjectivity: Acknowledges Baudelaire's concept of poetic imagination as symbols of transcendental reality.
Mallarmé's influence: To suggest rather than state things directly.
Verlaine's verse and musical diction reinforced Mallarmé's objectives by seeking ultimate truths behind the visible world.
Schopenhauer's view that the world is a representation of subjective imagination provided the intellectual basis for spiritual adventure.
His writings encouraged pessimism and cultivation of eccentricity, which became features of the fin de siècle (1890s).

Symbolist Aesthetic

Moréas's statement drew upon Schopenhauer's idealism.
"Symbolist poetry endeavors to clothe the Idea in sensitive form."
Gustave Kahn: Tired of the ordinary and wished to place symbols in any period or dreams.
The aim was to objectify the subjective (externalize the Idea) rather than subjectify the objective (nature seen through temperament).
The differences between the Impressionists' liberty with nature and the Symbolists' subjective moods.

Symbolism vs. Romanticism

Symbolism's egocentric focus contrasts with the outgoing nature of earlier 19th-century Romanticism.
Romantic poets and painters were militant, while Symbolists were morbid and specialized aesthetically.
Symbolists took an escapist route, setting themselves against the age's extroversion.
They turned away from social action and science, seeking refuge in dreams of beauty or artifice.
Oscar Wilde predicted the success of decadent Romanticism: "Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temple of wonder, will return to the land."
Émile Verhaeren rejected the heroism of early Romanticism, expressing a love for the absurd and impossible.

Rediscovery of Idealist Painters

Paintings by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98) and Gustave Moreau (1826-98) began to gain public attention.
They espoused poetic subject matter, opposing traditional iconography.
They faced criticism and isolation but inspired a new generation in the 1880s when a spiritual approach to painting was needed.
Their appeal coincided with the rise of Victorian Symbolist painting and the Pre-Raphaelites in England.
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) offered a vision of "beautiful romantic dreams" against the age of progress.
The French discovered William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 in Paris.

Influence of Pre-Raphaelites

Minor Symbolist artists in Paris turned to the Pre-Raphaelites for a new image of beauty.
They looked to William Morris for decorative style and Aubrey Beardsley for themes.
Burne-Jones first exhibited in Paris in 1878 and gained international recognition.
His combination of spiritual content and primitive style appealed to an artistic public seeking refuge in fantasy.
Puvis was inspired by Burne-Jones's King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid at the 1889 Paris International Exhibition.

Rossetti and the Symbolist Female

Rossetti's paintings of Elizabeth Sidal foreshadowed the femme fatale of French Symbolism.
Walter Pater described this beauty in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as a product of "strange thoughts and fantastic reveries."
Pater's Lady Lisa: A mixture of femme fatale and sacrificial victim, empress and erotic slave.
This type was found in paintings by Jan Toorop, Ferdinand Hodler, Gustave Klimt, Aubrey Beardsley, and others.
Moreau, Puvis, and Redon gained prestige in this context.

Gustave Moreau

In The Apparition (1876), Moreau summarized concepts linking Pre-Raphaelite beauty with his poetic tradition, exemplified by Baudelaire's femme damnée.
His painting combines mythic subject matter with a "beauty of inertia" and "necessary richness."
His technique and imagery influenced Huysmans in Against Nature.
Moreau introduced the image of pitiless womanhood, influencing Munch, Klimt, and Schiele.
The prototype was the goddess of the Decadents dominated by eroticism and mysticism.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Puvis's Summer (1873) contrasted Moreau's fancies with a simple pastoral scene.
While different in mood, both works shared neotraditional styles and revivalist myth-making.
A critic noted that Puvis's summer season was nonspecific and a dream of a Golden Age.
This defined Symbolism in painting as vague, universal, and yearning for an ideal world as an escape from reality.

Symbolism Defined

Puvis created an idyllic art without classical personification or allegorical attributes.
He aimed for an ennobling art comprehensible to all.
He believed that clear thoughts have a plastic equivalent.
He defined symbolism as mediating upon the thought buried in emotion until it appears lucidly, then searching for an image that translates it exactly.
Émile Bernard: Form and color became most important, reducing forms to their geometrical base to reveal a mysterious hieroglyph.
Symbolists sought and emphasized significant distortion in contrast to classical artists.

Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) related to Puvis but translated emotion and dream into visual symbols more in line with Bernard's formulation.
He loaded his art with literary allusions, illustrating Flaubert, Poe, and Huysmans.
He worked closer to Gauguin's plastic invention than to Puvis's mythologies or Moreau's archaeology.
Younger Symbolist writers considered Redon the Symbolist artist par excellence.
Redon: "in placing the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible."
He explored the depths of the soul, inventing a mysterious world inspired by microscopic biological life.
He felt plastic invention began where literature ended.
His Cyclops: Embodied a human yearning for the unattainable.
His monstrous creatures seemed to embody visual analogues for the alienated artist.
Redon matched his fantasy with liberated plastic expression.
He worked for 25 years exclusively in black, using charcoal, etching, or lithography to achieve textures.

Fernand Khnopff

Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) provided an example of tormented visions explored by literary Symbolist painters.
His painting I Lock My Door upon Myself was inspired by Christina Rossetti's poetry.
The female subject represented his dead sister and Medusa.
The classical cast suggested death and lost antiquity.
The window opened onto a vacant de Chirico piazza.
Khnopff had been a pupil of Gustave Moreau and was infatuated by the Pre-Raphaelites.

Rosicrucian Salons

The six Rosicrucian salons organized by Joséphin Péladan attracted visionary Symbolists.
Péladan was an eccentric literary figure with bogus spiritualism and a picturesque style.
Khnopff was hailed by Péladan as the equal of Moreau, Burne-Jones and Chavannes.
The religious mysticism of the Rose + Croix group, Moreau's imagery, and Puvis de Chavannes's Arcadia characterized Romantic decadence.
Compared to Gauguin and Van Gogh, the work of Khnopff provided minor accents in a moment where affirmations and decadence competed.

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) did not uncritically follow the Symbolist literary program.
He paid homage to Symbolist poets, befriended Mallarmé, and attended literary gatherings.
He distinguished between literary content and plastic invention.
The Impressionists' palette and brushstroke continued to influence his art, as did their respect for material medium.
Gauguin: Art was an abstraction dreamed in nature, impeded by modern European life.

Impressionists vs. Post-Impressionists

Impressionists: Vigorous, healthy, and translated middle-class life into rapturous imagery.
Post-Impressionists: (Gauguin, van Gogh, and Lautrec) inhabited an ambiguous atmosphere and didn't form a sustaining Bohemian community.
They either raged at European society or invented ideal communities in the South Seas or Christian brotherhood.

Gauguin's Early Life

Gauguin began painting in 1873 while pursuing a business career.
He met the Impressionists through Pissarro and collected their paintings.
In 1876, his landscape was accepted by the Salon.
In 1883, he resigned to devote himself to art.
He moved to Rouen and then Copenhagen, but the experiments failed.
He returned to Paris and separated from his family as his commitment to painting grew.

Style Development

In Brittany in 1888, he arrived at his original style after working in an Impressionist manner.
Self Portrait: "Les Misérables": Showed Gauguin as martyred Christ with the ferocity of character against purity.
He was attracted to Brittany by its primitiveness and simple, pious people.
He wrote about it to Schuffenecker: "When my wooden shoes ring on this granite, I hear the muffled, dull, powerful tone I seek in my painting."

Synthetism

At Pont-Aven, he began to paint with strong outlines and bright colors.
Synthetism: Defined a less imitative approach to nature and a technique of reducing forms to their essential outlines and arranging them with simplicity in colored patterns.

Gauguin and Bernard

By 1889, Gauguin had abandoned Impressionism for crisp definition based on his theories.
He and Émile Bernard aimed to "paint like children."
Gauguin's art resembled naïve children's art, with gay colors, dramatic patterns, and distorted shapes.
He wished to recover the fundamentals of existence and sought expression for aspects of aesthetic experience.
His art: Suffused with imaginative shadings and enigmatic subject matter.

Gauguin's Aesthetic Philosophy

He would've agreed with Mallarmé that the artist must proceed obliquely.
Gauguin on the Impressionists: "They look for what is near the eye, and not at the mysterious centers of thought. They are the official painters of tomorrow."
He told Schuffenecker: "Don't copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation which will result."
Style conflict between an uneducated approach vs romantic escapism.

New Myth Creation

Through plastic means
He dreamed of a precivilized, mystical unity made real through artworks
He focused on mural characters to have potential for monumental decoration.

Revolutionary Paintings

*Two of the most influential examples of Gauguin's revolutionary outlook were paintings the artist made upon his second and third trips to Brittany, in the years 1888 and 1889: *The Vision After the Sermon* and The Yellow Christ:

The Vision was directly influenced by Gauguin's encounter with Bernard's works. The important attributes: heavily outlined, simplified figures, with flat ground (Fig. 46). Bernard, claiming to have invented the style, called it Cloisonism

The Vision After the Sermon represents the first widely noted and dramatic departure from Naturalism

Jacob wrestling with an angel, which is the spectator's fantasy, and the actual group of credulous peasants, huddled in the foreground, the first of its kind. The abstract and flat colour shapes is one of the most startling/novel aspects
Gauguin tried to reach a "great and rustic superstitious simplicity" when creating The Yellow Christ to liberate himself from oversophisticated aesthetics.

Diabolism

The main goal was to enforce his revision of painting's syntax with it's inclusion.
Gauguin Attempted to establish himself as a messiah figure/prophet of a new art, challenging systems of good and evil.

Nirvana

*In Nirvana he created an almost naïvely didactic, symbolist portrait of his friend, Jacob Meyer de Haan (Fig. 47)

Sinister, transformed into an idol. Prototype of the enigmatic "dark gods" that Gauguin admired openly as a life-giving force.
Two disconsolate, guilt-ridden civilized Easts contrasted with the sensual pagan women from his letter to August Strindberg

Paul Sérusier

Gauguin undertook to demonstrate his method for his benefit
The resulting picture (Fig. 48), a tiny work painted on a cigar-box lid and so radical in form that its flat color shapes verge on pure abstraction
The Talisman and themselves the Nabis, a Hebrew word meaning the Prophets as a result of this method.
Gauguin tired of the movement after a short period

Medieval Conventions

Decorative conventions of medieval stained glass influenced Gauguin and Bernard because of the romantic hope to restore the artist role of craftsman during the medieval period.
Believed in a new and primitive artistic community.

Gauguin and Western Society

His style was molded on non western cultures, drawing connections to traditions such as, Indian, Indonesian, and Egyptian.
He would provide the advice to avoid the Greek and instead focus on Persian influences
The desire to find a new primitive base was partly for socio-economic gain

Tahiti

Moved to Tahiti because of a atavism feeling where a fellow artist can fleed decadent civilization
Gauguin lived on "ecstasy, quiet, and art" in "amorous harmony with the mysterious beings around me."

Style After Tahiti

His paintings acquired far more luminosity, power, and complexity.
Chromatic technique grew more expressive.
Rich palette composed largely of secondary hues.
Anticipated the daring colours of Matisse
Slow arabesque lines traced around large floral patches
More modelled, edges less heavy than before.

Post-Tahiti

Exhibition In Paris
It impressed Mallarmé and excited the public's curiosity

Hiva-Hoa

Moved once again to the pacific paradise out of a desire to be isolated more.
There he grew depressed due to his increasing struggles with health and economic problems.

Where Do We Come From?

Enormous canvas painted before his suicide attempt (Fig. 50.)
A flowing composition divided into three main figure groupings, the major components are set in a jungle.
There's no allegory, however some can relate:
- Allegories of life

Death

Died in his little hut in Hiva-Hoa, embittered by economic struggles and isolation.
He left his achievements in painting to be relative contributions due to only being relatively good with liberties to create.

Vincent van Gogh

A painter of the Post-Impressionist generation profoundly inspired by Gauguin for his works.
He had joined the other artists in Paris after many attempts as differing roles to become a painter.
He had a very tough time, which included many disappointments and a string of rough mental conditions.