Gauguin Paul

The odds against Paul Gauguin were economic as well as esthetic. Because they were self-created odds, he even more than his peers in painting, became a symbol. He was the idealist who gave up financial security, forsook the comforts of home, wife, and children, left friends and a familiar countryside behind, in order to pursue an artistic vision capable of realization only through suffering. He was also, however (reverse of the romantic coin), the epicurean, the voluptuary, thinking only of himself, who had accepted Baudelaire's Invitation to the Voyage, and had gone to live in an exotic and luxuriant Isle of Cythera in the South Seas. There is, as we shall see, some truth to both these views. Gauguin was heir to a self-conscious romantic tradition, and he had a highly dramatic sense of the role he played for what he fondly hoped was a watching world. On the other hand there is no doubt that he made sacrifices for his art, that both spiritually and physically he suffered in order to go on painting. The difficulty indeed is to get at the nature of that alternation between external play-acting and internal anguish, and to perceive that the artist underlay both.

Because the events of Paul Gauguin's life are so much easier to relate than the story of his art - and of his relation to his art - they have been dramatized until it seems as if his existence was nothing but a swift succession of explosive incidents, with no time left for painting. Those incidents of course occurred, and it is a fascinating study to try to apportion their origin: how many were due to external circumstance, and therefore unavoidable: how many were the result of his true nature, and consequently inevitable; how many did he, in a capricious and ironic way, bring down upon his own head, watching himself as he did so (for Paul Gauguin was possessed of a comic, as well as a tragic spirit).

The reality of his life was quite otherwise than constantly dramatic. There was daily effort, there was boredom, there was hesitation. Each of Paul Gauguin's decisions was long and difficult, into each went pondering and doubt, and even fear, until at last the combined pressure of character and accident, of economic circumstance and the absolute necessity to go on painting, forced him to action. At each turning point - from the slow transformation of the collecting amateur into the professional artist (the decision of January, 1883 had years of built up pressure behind it) until the final move in 1901 to the Marquesas (a change that had been contemplated almost from the beginning of his South Sea stay), and above all in the reluctant separation from his family - one senses the holding back, the desire to hold on to what he has, until the accumulation of immediate difficulties has forced the creation of a mirage that carries him forward into the future.

When he moves to Rouen with his family because life will be cheaper there, he at the same time convinces himself (as Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien) that the wealthy Rouennais will easily be induced to buy his pictures. When in Paris, in 1886, with his son Clovis sick, he is forced to paste up bill-posters at five francs a day, he is sure that he will soon be named director of the company's Spanish branch (not yet founded!) and will grandually gather his other children around him.

Upon his return he again decides he can live on his ceramics, which his friends and a collector or two have praised. And so it goes from scheme to scheme, with complete confidence up to the moment when each one collapses, whereupon he exclaims, "One more thing that has slipped out of my hands." With Pissarro, one is forced to conclude that Paul Gauguin is naive, but that given his constantly desperate situation his naivete and the recurring growth of optimism it nourished was a necessity. And one suspects that Paul Gauguin, living a hand to mouth existence which could hardly get any worse, was not entirely unaware of the self-delusion.