Commonplace 132 George & His Contemporaries - Paul Gauguin.
When appraising their contribution to whatever it is that we call their endeavours, writers are usually compared to other writers; George called writing 'Art', and so it is. In a time of such creative ferment as was the late nineteenth century, when all manner of forms of self-expression and creativity were being extended, painters often offer an interesting insight to the prevailing ideas and attitudes of the time. Paul Gauguin, who died in the same year as George, and probably from the same cause, is possibly the most obvious of his contemporaries from the visual Arts to explore. The two had a great deal in common, and maybe both have left behind a similar quality of artistic legacy: not quite top tier, but on the way to it. Just as our man is no George Eliot, and Gauguin is no Vincent van Gogh, for both lacked what might be termed 'true genius', both our George and Paul Gauguin offer much to learn about how artists involve themselves in the noble struggle to make a living from Art, whilst delivery the very best they can do with the talents they have.
Everyone knows Gauguin's style: his luscious Tahitian girls with their inscrutable faces and exploited nudity, their skimpy sarongs and unselfconscious sexuality, are always popular. We have the idea Gauguin loved the islands he painted; that he was some sort of artistic David Attenborough visiting remote places for inspiration and to bring back visual truths for our edification; we, who will never visit these remote places might learn something of the ethnography of the place, and maybe even something spiritual from the work. Utter tosh, of course. Remember the Slumming in Commonplace 128. George enjoyed and the use he made of his anthropological excursions? Gauguin travelled to Polynesia to pursue subjects for his painting, but was not totally happy there. The Eden-like beauty he expected to find had been adulterated by the intrusion of western capitalism, disease, and resource exploitation click. However, he was galvanized by the women and the simplicity of their sexuality. He returned to France, and worked for a few years increasingly at odds with his peers. By 1893, he had no choice but to return to Polynesia, and spend the last years of his life as something of a local attraction, but impoverished. Money was so tight he had to work as a clerk to make ends meet, and relied on donations from friends to maintain his existence.
There was a Tate Gallery exhibition of Gauguin's work entitled 'Gauguin: Man and Myth' in 2010-11. Its rationale was to suggest Gauguin developed a legend of being a 'noble savage' with innate, primal talents for painting, and he did this so he would be taken as a savant of modernism, and therefore sell a shed-load of paintings. Whereas, in reality, Gauguin was an errant bourgeois capitalist who had abandoned his family to live life of an Artist and who made the most of his talent by mystifying everyone about his early life and an over-valued idea of his own importance. (Sound familiar?) By claiming to have an appreciation of the pagan and primitive of Tahitian society, he could easily be mistaken for a man in touch with spiritual truths about the exotic lives lived there. Many who have admired his work would be surprised to learn he did some of the famous paintings in his Paris studio, between trips to Polynesia.
In the UK, the dominance of the formal, staged 'Academy' picture was stifling creativity - fame and payment depended on being approved of in the market place of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Secretly, all Artists who reckon they have as much ability and talent as Turner, or Moore, or Hepworth - even the 'New Brits' who are now really 'Old Brits': immensely rich and irrelevant - want to be accepted into the Summer Show. It's like winning an Oscar. But, the real cutting edge Art is never suitable for a Summer Show unless it reduces itself down to something in a picture frame. Just imagine the struggle Marina Abramovic has fitting her thing into a frame.
It would both naive and wrong to think painters such as van Gogh were not also business people. The letters we have from van Gogh's correspondence with his art dealer brother Theo are full of ideas about marketing the works, and prices and costs of materials. As van Gogh had himself starting out trading in Art, he knew how fashion and financial considerations fuel the Art market. The knock-on effect of this is that dealers often play it safe and stick to what is middle of the road, which makes it difficult for new and unknown Artists to break through, especially if they are attempting something avant garde or challenging. Both van Gogh and Gauguin were up against this sort of brick wall. If we think of the difficulty George experienced in getting his first work published, eventually having to fund publication himself, it's clear that there are correlations between visual Arts and literary Arts, where the work has to pass through an agent as intermediary. It is the same in all the Arts, with safe work much easier to sell and even display, than cutting edge work. Event the Tate having a Gauguin exhibition is a nod to this, being as it was a very safe money-spinning show, and has very little to do with what is going on in Art, now.
Gauguin shared George's fondness for redacting his diaries and jotting journals. Both wanted to build a reputation they chose, rather than let posterity discover their inner workings authentically, from an original source. Gauguin had a keen eye on his legacy, and made many jokes and references to it in his diaries. In around 1886, when he took up pottery, he thought his work was exceptional, but would be too 'artistic' to be understood or sold. Shades of George, here, who was convinced of something similar when his own work didn't sell.
These two share a sensibility that seems contemptuous of women: here is Gauguin:
I work and live more or less alone. That's to say, for a model I have a young girl... aged 14 - weight about 150lbs - who is very good at making a fire, doing the washing and smoking cigarettes. (It's pointless asking any more of a Tahitian woman.) George would have thought pretty much the same thing about any 'home-grown exotic' working class girl.
Marriage was a kind of Hell for both men. Both rationalised their motives for rejecting and abandoning bourgeois normality, but both was deeply conservative at heart. For all his time spent living in basic conditions, Gauguin was happy to return to Paris and live a conventional life there. George's brush with bohemianism lasted a couple of college terms. In this way both were very like the sorts of young men George criticised as being pointless, but both turned to the Arts to make themselves appear to not be superfluous or banal, adopting intellectual personae to camouflage their inadequacies. Both were reasonably successful at this.
Gauguin dabbled in writing and publishing, taking after his own father, who was for a time, a journalist. His illustrated books and jottings perform the function of his Commonplace Book - the sort of thing George made use of. As do all discerning sorts who can read and write. These include revelations of the tricks he used to attract interest, even controversy, in his work, by making the titles intentionally mysterious or paradoxical, and very little to do with what he was painting or sculpting - which tended to be much more 'painterly' and not fixed by subject. There is a sense he is taking the piss here, and relishing the confusion or effort people will have to waste to understand the title of the piece by looking for clues in the painting. A prototype Surrealist or Dadaist? George always thought up odd names (after an earlier trend much over-used by Charles Dickens) and this is similar territory - making fun of readers he thinks are dumber than they are, by making them wonder about choices and meanings, or undercutting their own ideas about characters and their story arcs, or sharing in jokes with the educated who get his Classical references in a way a typical Mudie's library reader might not.
What George might have lacked was someone he could bounce ideas off - that is, someone he saw as an equal, but there is no-one of that ilk ever mentioned in the written accounts of his doings. Imagine how Gauguin and van Gogh debated Art, and the sort of topics they covered. Or, go and watch this click.
When appraising their contribution to whatever it is that we call their endeavours, writers are usually compared to other writers; George called writing 'Art', and so it is. In a time of such creative ferment as was the late nineteenth century, when all manner of forms of self-expression and creativity were being extended, painters often offer an interesting insight to the prevailing ideas and attitudes of the time. Paul Gauguin, who died in the same year as George, and probably from the same cause, is possibly the most obvious of his contemporaries from the visual Arts to explore. The two had a great deal in common, and maybe both have left behind a similar quality of artistic legacy: not quite top tier, but on the way to it. Just as our man is no George Eliot, and Gauguin is no Vincent van Gogh, for both lacked what might be termed 'true genius', both our George and Paul Gauguin offer much to learn about how artists involve themselves in the noble struggle to make a living from Art, whilst delivery the very best they can do with the talents they have.
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| Self Portrait 1893 |
Everyone knows Gauguin's style: his luscious Tahitian girls with their inscrutable faces and exploited nudity, their skimpy sarongs and unselfconscious sexuality, are always popular. We have the idea Gauguin loved the islands he painted; that he was some sort of artistic David Attenborough visiting remote places for inspiration and to bring back visual truths for our edification; we, who will never visit these remote places might learn something of the ethnography of the place, and maybe even something spiritual from the work. Utter tosh, of course. Remember the Slumming in Commonplace 128. George enjoyed and the use he made of his anthropological excursions? Gauguin travelled to Polynesia to pursue subjects for his painting, but was not totally happy there. The Eden-like beauty he expected to find had been adulterated by the intrusion of western capitalism, disease, and resource exploitation click. However, he was galvanized by the women and the simplicity of their sexuality. He returned to France, and worked for a few years increasingly at odds with his peers. By 1893, he had no choice but to return to Polynesia, and spend the last years of his life as something of a local attraction, but impoverished. Money was so tight he had to work as a clerk to make ends meet, and relied on donations from friends to maintain his existence.
There was a Tate Gallery exhibition of Gauguin's work entitled 'Gauguin: Man and Myth' in 2010-11. Its rationale was to suggest Gauguin developed a legend of being a 'noble savage' with innate, primal talents for painting, and he did this so he would be taken as a savant of modernism, and therefore sell a shed-load of paintings. Whereas, in reality, Gauguin was an errant bourgeois capitalist who had abandoned his family to live life of an Artist and who made the most of his talent by mystifying everyone about his early life and an over-valued idea of his own importance. (Sound familiar?) By claiming to have an appreciation of the pagan and primitive of Tahitian society, he could easily be mistaken for a man in touch with spiritual truths about the exotic lives lived there. Many who have admired his work would be surprised to learn he did some of the famous paintings in his Paris studio, between trips to Polynesia.
 |
| 1889 (and see more at click) |
It would both naive and wrong to think painters such as van Gogh were not also business people. The letters we have from van Gogh's correspondence with his art dealer brother Theo are full of ideas about marketing the works, and prices and costs of materials. As van Gogh had himself starting out trading in Art, he knew how fashion and financial considerations fuel the Art market. The knock-on effect of this is that dealers often play it safe and stick to what is middle of the road, which makes it difficult for new and unknown Artists to break through, especially if they are attempting something avant garde or challenging. Both van Gogh and Gauguin were up against this sort of brick wall. If we think of the difficulty George experienced in getting his first work published, eventually having to fund publication himself, it's clear that there are correlations between visual Arts and literary Arts, where the work has to pass through an agent as intermediary. It is the same in all the Arts, with safe work much easier to sell and even display, than cutting edge work. Event the Tate having a Gauguin exhibition is a nod to this, being as it was a very safe money-spinning show, and has very little to do with what is going on in Art, now.
 |
| PG in 1891 taken by click |
These two share a sensibility that seems contemptuous of women: here is Gauguin:
I work and live more or less alone. That's to say, for a model I have a young girl... aged 14 - weight about 150lbs - who is very good at making a fire, doing the washing and smoking cigarettes. (It's pointless asking any more of a Tahitian woman.) George would have thought pretty much the same thing about any 'home-grown exotic' working class girl.
Marriage was a kind of Hell for both men. Both rationalised their motives for rejecting and abandoning bourgeois normality, but both was deeply conservative at heart. For all his time spent living in basic conditions, Gauguin was happy to return to Paris and live a conventional life there. George's brush with bohemianism lasted a couple of college terms. In this way both were very like the sorts of young men George criticised as being pointless, but both turned to the Arts to make themselves appear to not be superfluous or banal, adopting intellectual personae to camouflage their inadequacies. Both were reasonably successful at this.
 |
| Vincent van Gogh Painting Sunflowers by Paul Gauguin 1888 |
What George might have lacked was someone he could bounce ideas off - that is, someone he saw as an equal, but there is no-one of that ilk ever mentioned in the written accounts of his doings. Imagine how Gauguin and van Gogh debated Art, and the sort of topics they covered. Or, go and watch this click.
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