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Paul Gauguin ( 1848-1903) was temperamentally a rebel, with an exotic taste which was due, no doubt, to his admixture of Peruvian blood and to an early childhood in Peru. His color style was based on the brilliant linear beauty of the Japanese print (as that of Whistler and Degas and numbers of other artists had been, more or less, after the opening of a little Oriental shop in Paris in the sixties) and from what he learned of Byzantine art, Persian art, and the medieval art of stained-glass windows. His pictures are flat patterns of superbly decorative color, with the subject completely subordinated to the broadly rhythmic unity of the design, as in the case of Two Girls in Tahiti or given an austere human implication as in the case of The Yellow Christ or the Figures of a Young Girl and Death.
Vincent Van Gogh ( 1853-1890) began life as a preacher and ended it as a madman and a suicide. Two years before his death, when he was thirty-five, he went to Arles with Gauguin, the stockbroker turned Romantic escapist and painter, and though the clashing unstable temperaments of the two acted and reacted on each other, the one remained an emotional and subjective seer whose powerful creations flowed into form under the drive of a furious vision, and the other a brilliant and abandoned hedonist. Van Gogh has been classed as an Impressionist; but his landscapes are often twisted as if by some malevolent passion in nature which has laid hold not only on the scene, but on the painting and the painter.
And the sunflowers have a dynamic and mobile life which thrusts them forward with an impact upon the consciousness of the beholder more forceful than that made by any field-grown flowers. He knew the work of Cézanne and, like most of the artists of his time who worked in or sometimes went to Paris, he had made capital of the bright direct juxtapositions of color in Japanese prints. He intuitively organized his maturer canvases into compact unities, however, which show little influence from other art but rather represent a vision-driven rebellion, in a wholly new direction, against the static scientific exercises of Impressionism. The movement of German Expressionism directly or indirectly derived outstanding characteristics from his work and passed them on to young men of America and other countries.
A retrospective exhibition of Van Gogh's work organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the mid-thirties and shown in a group of American cities attracted long queues of spectators like those outside a motion-picture house for a première and was attended by a total of 900,000 people. A season's vogue in women's clothes and accessories was built on the madman's masterpieces through the zeal of department store show-window planners during the exhibition; and a subsequent season's styles in the slower-operating market of "interior decoration" made a feature of accessory furniture with facsimile reproductions of some of the masterpieces used as insets. A thoughtful public recalling the scorn and derision that greeted the earlier showings of this artist's work in American cities may ponder the way of fame.
The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh, like that of Cézanne, was little recognized till the late nineties, when Van Gogh was dead, Gauguin dying horribly and by slow degrees in the South Seas, and Cézanne nearing the end of his long life. Paul Sérusier formulated, and Maurice Denis publicized, a theory making the contributions of the great rebels intelligible and passing them on in usable form under the name of Symbolism. "The Symbolists," says Clive Bell, "disseminated a taste for primitive art--especially for the Christian Primitives . . . they learnt to admire the Egyptians and the early Greeks; Gauguin had told them about the savages and the images d'Épinal." Cézanne's now famous phrase, "I have not tried to reproduce nature, I have represented her," was restated as the central doctrine of Symbolism in these words: "It is not the business of the artist to copy nature but to find a plastic equivalent for his experience of nature." It can thus be seen that much of the basis of contemporary painting, insofar as it is a revolt against all accepted ideas of art since the fifteenth century, and a movement towards a new mode of aesthetic expression, was already being established in the nineties.
"The aim of five centuries is openly abandoned. The actual appearance of the visible world is no longer of primary importance. The artist seeks something underneath appearances, some plastic symbol which shall be more significant of reality than any exact reproduction can be," says Herbert Read, writing about Symbolism in Art Now. "His aim is sanctioned by Oriental art in general, and unless you are to prescribe one art for the East and one for the West, this evidence cannot be avoided. It is the mere commonplace, not only of Oriental decorative art, but even of such reproductive arts as figure sculpture, landscape and portrait painting, that no attempt whatever is made to reproduce the illusion of the visible appearance of the actual object."
Cézanne was dead and the new century was well launched before experiments made on the basis of his cryptic utterances that all nature could be reduced to cubes, cones, and cylinders carried art further away from the object and away from nature. Cézanne abstracted the salient geometrical planes of the actual scene or subject before him and recognized and revised them to give them a heightened emotional meaning, an intensified reality and an independent aesthetic identity in the two-dimensional limitations of a canvas. Neither he nor Hildebrand nor Sérusier anticipated an art that was to be other than a revaluation, or a transcription, of the visual world as it appears to the mind or the imagination of the artist.
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