Paul Gauguin
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Peter Campbell @ London Review of Books on the space between the paintings and the myths of Paul Gauguin.
For Sweeney, Gauguin’s women represent the crudest version of the myth of island bliss. But you don’t have to look long at Gauguin’s work (a retrospective is at Tate Modern until 16 January) to realise that bliss is not the subject of his Tahitian pictures. Idols in the shadows announce a world explained by tales of frightening gods, spirits and ghosts. The translations of the Tahitian titles Gauguin wrote on the canvases – Brooding Woman, The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch, Why Are You Angry?, What! Are You Jealous? – speak of island lives that are as troubled as any. Gauguin maids, the solemn, solid, bare-breasted, brown girls surrounded by flowers, fruit, trees and the sea, may have entered the popular imagination as images of blissful indolence but a closer look tells you that the pictures are sad. (In a letter to his wife, Mette, he once described the ‘harmony’ of his colours as ‘sombre, sad, frightening’.)
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Although his pursuit of primitive art, life and mythology – Breton or Polynesian, Christian or pagan – was integral to his notion of what he was doing, it illuminates the pictures only fitfully. His power as a painter and his influence on his contemporaries and later generations had more to do with colour and drawing than with the myths. Tahiti, the Marquesas and Brittany matter of course; his strength and imaginative reach cannot be separated from his subject-matter. But of the Symbolists, it is those like Gauguin and Munch, whose myth is personal, whose pictures resist explicit interpretation or baffle those in search of it, that have worn well. No body of work in the period that saw the transformation of art from a commentary on what we see to the creation of imagined or transmuted worlds is so full of hints about what could and did follow. That the idea of a Gauguin maid spread easily beyond the world of high art was an early sign that modern art can become popular art.
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