Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought [1 ed.] 9781780234083, 9781780233680

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Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Paul Gauguin

Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

For Arno, Elias and Mila: ‘childhood recaptured at will’

Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

PAUL GAUGUIN The Mysterious Centre of Thought Dario Gamboni

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Translated by Chris Miller

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Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published in French as Paul Gauguin au ‘centre mystérieux de la pensée’ Copyright © 2013 by Dario Gamboni / Les presses du réel All rights reserved

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First published in English 2014 Translated by Chris Miller English-language translation © Reaktion Books 2014 Book design by Simon McFadden All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 368 0

Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Contents

Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables 7 one

Seeing Double 29 two

Dreams and Visions 83 three

You Are What You See 122 four

Matter and Material 176 five

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From Puppet to Idol 253 six

Natura Naturans 293 Epilogue: The Eye of the Sunflower 349 References 373 List of Illustrations 429 Bibliography 442 Acknowledgements 450 Index 452

Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved. Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables

During his second stay in Tahiti, Gauguin, expanding the manuscript of Noa Noa with his notes on ‘miscellaneous things’, gave some thought to the way in which painting had developed over the course of the century then coming to an end. The most prominent feature of that century seemed to him the dominion exercised by drawing, even in an artist like Delacroix, whereas the study of colour, which had begun with the Impressionists, had been reined in by the ‘shackles of verisimilitude’.1 In his view, ‘the Impressionists focused their efforts around the eye, not in the mysterious centre of thought, and from there they slipped into scientific reasons.’ This is a striking observation and worth dwelling on. The final part alludes to the scientism of the Neo-Impressionists, and Gauguin goes on to say: ‘There is physics and metaphysics.’ But the first part is the more significant since he there defines his own proceeding by describing the goal that the Impressionists had missed. He conceives of art as a form of research and suggests that it should reverse its course, turning away from the world perceived by the senses (‘around the eye’) towards the perceiving subject and the ‘mysterious centre of thought’. What exactly did he mean? Some part of an answer to this question can be found in Diverses choses (Miscellaneous Things) and other writings of his. In 1891, Gauguin set down for the journalist Jules Huret the reasons why he was leaving France for Tahiti. He needed, he said, to see no one but savages, to live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid 7

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of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.2 In the preface to the catalogue of an exhibition by his disciple Armand Seguin, written in early 1895, he warned visitors to the exhibition that

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Seguin is above all cerebral – by which I definitely do not mean ‘literary’: he expresses not what he sees but what he thinks, and does so through an original harmony of lines and a draughtsmanship curiously comprised in the arabesque.3

Thus, in the wake of Leonardo da Vinci and antedating Marcel Duchamp, Gauguin conceived art as a cosa mentale. Those who were close to him understood this clearly. The critic Jean Dolent contrasted Gauguin with the ‘scientists who decompose light, these artists whose studio is a laboratory. Ah, the scholars of that department of knowledge! Physicists, chemists! Gauguin’s crucible is his brain.’4 They understood the ‘mysterious’ aspect too. After painting his Memory of the Garden at Etten (see illus. 88), Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother: ‘Gauguin gives me courage to imagine, and the things of the imagination do indeed take on a more mysterious character.’5 Gauguin would later quote with satisfaction an observation made by Stéphane Mallarmé when viewing his Tahiti pictures: ‘It’s extraordinary that so much mystery can be put into such brilliance.’6 ‘Mystery’ was a key notion for Mallarmé and for the artists associated with the Symbolist movement. In 1902, the year before Gauguin’s death, Odilon Redon defined ‘the sense of mystery’ that he considered indispensable in an artist and did so by implicating a further brain, that of the spectator: The sense of mystery means confining oneself always to the equivocal, to double or triple aspects, to suggestions of aspects (images within images), forms coming into being or that will come into being according to the onlooker’s state of mind.7 8

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables I have shown in an earlier book that Redon thus defined not only the principle of his own art but that of a general transformation in the mode of aesthetic communication; one that promoted ambiguity to the rank of an essential property of the work of art and made of the spectator an active partner in the work of the artist.8 The ‘aspects’ of which Redon spoke are ways of seeing and understanding his works simultaneously. Ludwig Wittgenstein, using the same term in his Philosophical Investigations, wrote about the different ways of perceiving an ambiguous image: ‘So we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it.’9 I have suggested the term ‘potential images’ for these aspects; present in potentia in works, they become actual through the active participation of those whom Redon, anticipating Duchamp, called regardeurs, or ‘onlookers’.10 It was in the context of this large-scale inquiry that I approached the work of Gauguin and the influence that he exerted. I discovered in it aspects not previously remarked on by the critics but long since recognized by the artists, who had already taken sustenance from them. Thus the picture previously considered a landscape, Above the Abyss (see illus. 58), turned out to contain a self-portrait and to function as a manifesto on epistemological, poietic and communicational levels, dealing with the relations between the artist and the world, artistic creation and the reception of works of art.11 The significance of these aspects and the new access to the works of Gauguin that they afforded seemed to me to require a new study of his art and thought in general. The results are presented in this book (some case studies have already appeared); I hope it will allow the reader to approach what Gauguin, referring not only to the origin and destination but also to the very object of his research, called ‘the mysterious centre of thought’.12 This study is also a contribution to the collective effort of art historians to do justice to visual ambiguity and understand its usages, sources and effects. I am thinking, for example, of the works of Felix Thürlemann on ‘double mimesis’ in Albrecht Dürer and those of Michel Weemans on the anthropomorphic landscapes of Herri met de Bles, which he has compared with the biblical exegesis by which Erasmus hoped to advance the reader from a state of blindness to one of discernment.13 I am also thinking of the morphogenetic analysis 9

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of Marquesan art undertaken in the early twentieth century by Karl von den Steinen, whose heuristic potential has since been demonstrated by Alfred Gell, and of the interpretation recently proposed by Jürgen Golte of the semantic role played by three-dimensionality in the pre-Hispanic ceramics of the north coast of Peru.14 The connections made here with anthropology are fully justified because Gauguin, in his quest for ‘the primitive means of art’, gave to non-European cultures an attention both remarkably open-minded and profoundly interested, in either sense. Over and beyond his quest for identity, it was his sense of visual polysemy that transpired in the traditions that he chose to prioritize, notably those of Moche and the Marquesas. At a time of ‘globalization’, it is by no means the least interesting aspect of Gauguin’s oeuvre that it obliges us to expand our field of investigation in space and in time and to scrutinize the ecology of cultures during the colonial period. Gauguin’s universal primitivism by no means excluded aspects of his Western heritage, such as the Renaissance, to which I have just alluded; he continues to pose questions of longue durée that art history, without subscribing to Henri Focillon’s suggestion that Gauguin ‘resurrects the eternal in modern man’, simply cannot avoid.15 Though it puts forward a new approach, this study relies on the specialized works that have accumulated over more than a century and has particularly benefited from exchanges with the colleagues cited in the Acknowledgements. The literature on Gauguin has not ignored the importance of visual ambiguity in his oeuvre and this is especially true of the last few decades. Richard Field and Richard Brettell have shown how the artist’s choices and technical inventions, in particular in his engravings, sought to render them difficult if not indeed impossible to decipher; according to Field, ‘Gauguin understood full well that what was withheld or obscured inevitably provoked interpretation.’16 A re-evaluation of the artist’s early works, previously thought of as Impressionist, has also begun and authors such as Charles Stuckey have shown that Gauguin’s interest in the internal world of the imagination, made explicit in and after The Vision of the Sermon (see illus. 43), had been present since the early 1880s in his images of children and in the backgrounds of certain of his pictures.17 In the published part of the new catalogue raisonné 10

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables of the paintings, Sylvie Crussard noted the artist’s ‘search for an effect at once decorative and suggestive’ as early as 1879 and meditated on the nature and meaning of this ‘suggestion’.18 Many other authors and publications would deserve mention here; I will refer to them as often as possible in the references. On the other hand, efforts to go further in the interpretation of Gauguin and assign a central place to ambiguity in his work have remained few and far between and have not elicited much sympathy. On this subject, let me cite two little-noted but stimulating articles. In the first of these, Alan C. Birnholz pointed out Gauguin’s interest in double images on the basis of an analysis of the Yellow Christ (1888, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), in which, Birnholz believes, the outlines of Christ’s loincloth delineate a fox, and related this interest to the Symbolist movement and the Breton taste for metamorphoses.19 In the second, Bernard Demont perceived in Gauguin ‘a twofold register of ambiguity: the register of the ambiguity of plastic space and that of symbolic or allusive ambiguity’, going on to state that ‘the most complete ambivalence is realized where the two registers coincide’ thanks to the ‘visual projection of the spectator’.20 Why have these proposals remained marginal? One reason is no doubt that they explicitly appeal to the subjectivity of the spectator and interpreter. Art history, making its claim to scientific objectivity and professional competence in relation to objects that nevertheless address the common man, has generally treated this subjective dimension with suspicion, even though, from an epistemological perspective, it could hardly do other than acknowledge its inevitability. Birnholz gives a different explanation when he observes that the discovery of double images, that is, of a supplementary level of representation, can seem critical of commentators who have not spotted them, suggesting that they contented themselves with a superficial examination.21 It is true that many art historians are more at ease among texts than faced with images and objects but this psychological explanation, for all that it contains its share of truth, also takes us further, to the persistence of an illusion: the illusion of natural and immediate visual perception. By contrast, potential images highlight facts that the neurosciences are still studying in experimental fashion today but which the philosophers, psychologists and physiopsychologists of 11

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Gauguin’s own day were already stating: that is, that vision is inseparable from cognition and unfolds over time. A further explanation must be added, one related to the history of criticism and the theory of art. The militant aniconism of Modernism retrospectively appropriated the critique of naturalism, to which Gauguin had contributed, and confused the notion of ‘abstraction’ that he employed with the ideal of ‘non-objectivity’. The diametrical opposition between abstraction and representation that resulted sealed off access to turn-of-the-century ‘suggestion’ and allowed the ambiguous elements in Gauguin’s oeuvre to be dismissed as ‘decorative’ or ‘abstract’ (in the sense of ‘nonobjective’); this effectively placed them at the margins of the process of production of meaning and relegated them to the domain of the ineffable. By contrast, however belatedly, the scrambling of categories and the reclamation of ambiguity by the artists of postmodernism have made the acknowledgement of these aspects somewhat easier. Moreover, contemporary art has endowed with a new and undeniable currency works that multiply levels of perception and defer, complicate or even suspend comprehension. Approaching these levels nevertheless presents particular difficulties and requires numerous precautions, without which the relevance of any observation is in danger of being limited to those of individual onlookers and their momentary ‘states of mind’.22 It is first and foremost indispensable to base these observations on an examination of the original works or at very least to verify them in the presence of these works and to take account of these latter’s state of conservation, since ageing, restoration and above all reproduction are quite likely to make accidental aspects appear. We shall also see that the material, tactile and three-dimensional nature of Gauguin’s works is an essential part of them. This can pose problems of access, for example when his ceramics, objects made to be seen close up, touched and even handled, can for the most part be examined today (for understandable reasons) only through a glass display case. I am therefore very grateful for the understanding and trust of the owners and curators who allowed me to develop the intimate relationship with these works that is required; I strove to cultivate the ‘intelligent hands’ that Gauguin demanded of the ceramicist when he rejected the use of the potter’s wheel.23 My research therefore required a great 12

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables deal of travel, especially since it seemed to me necessary to extend my inquiry to the places where the artist lived and worked. We know that Gauguin, for all his insistence on the superiority of memory and imagination, was an assiduous observer, and I owe part of my understanding of the works that emerged from his observation to what I myself saw when, following in his footsteps, certain sites and objects that had attracted and absorbed him came under my eye.24 In order to approach ambiguity, one has to develop a mode of attention at once alert and unencumbered, informed by all that the work offers to the senses but open-minded in relation to what the explicit iconography seems to assert or exclude. One must be sensitive to what art historians of German expression frequently call ‘irritation’, to anomalies and dynamics, for example to the fact that in Above the Abyss (see illus. 58), the negative space defined by the outline of the rocks tends to ‘flip’ into positive form because of its central position and its values, colour and texture. One must also bring to mind the associations invoked in ourselves by plastic elements, associations that are the more important because the ‘abstraction’ practised by Gauguin tended to extend rather than confine the range of referents. This phenomenon is analogous to the one described by Roman Jakobson when he wrote about Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’: ‘In poetry, any conspicuous similarity in sound is evaluated in respect to similarity and/or dissimilarity in meaning.’25 These associations, multiple and sometimes numerous, are nevertheless not infinite in number; selection is assisted by the recurrences and echoes that appear within any given work and between one work and the next. The way in which Gauguin repeats, varies and combines figures and motifs has often been noted; Crussard speaks of the ‘letters of a personal alphabet’ and June Hargrove of a ‘porous matrix that allows constellations of associations to coalesce, dynamic alliances instead of a fixed set of signs’.26 This constantly evolving combinatory function is not limited to the iconic level but also affects plastic elements. We are faced with an enlarged ‘intericonicity’ extended to the entire corpus of the artist and the visual universe that sustained him. Gauguin wrote in 1890 that there were no such things as masterpieces unless in ‘the entire body of work’ 13

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and wrote in Diverses choses: ‘I believe that the line of thought which has guided my work, or part of it, is very mysteriously linked to a thousand others, either my own or heard from other people.’27 Thus we see him bring together, in a collage that anticipates Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, works by Daumier, Forain, Giotto and Hokusai and then explain: ‘because they appear to be different, I want to show how they are related.’28 The identification and exploration of these links takes time – an extent of time that can be modestly compared with that required for their elaboration. Interviewed by Eugène Tardieu in 1895, Gauguin said about his non-mimetic use of colour, ‘Everything in my work is calculated, mulled over at great length.’29 A declaration of this kind can be misleading if it suggests a sort of programme distinct from and preceding ‘execution’ but it does justice to a temporality of creation that both prepares and necessitates the temporality of perception. Concerning the latter, Gauguin used a fine phrase, ‘the listening eye’, a phrase that arose in relation to ‘colour alone’ and oriental rugs, which were, he felt, ‘marvellously eloquent’.30 There are also tools for verification, which are particularly important in this area. The exploration of inter-iconicity is one of these, since it frequently happens that something implicit in one work is explicit in another. The latter may have been a study for the former, whose creation may therefore have involved some dissimulation. Or it may supply a commentary on contemporary or later works. This second hypothesis probably best fits the relationship between the picture Les Meules jaunes (La Moisson blonde), Yellow Haystacks (The Golden Harvest) (illus. 1), and the drawing Bretonnerie (Breton Matters) (illus. 2). The painting suggests an analogy between the grain stack and a human head by means of certain details: a slight protrusion with a wavy outline reminiscent of a fringe casts a shadow suggestive of a gaze and combines with the oblique lines lower down that can be read as the base of a nose. But these details are nevertheless so discreet and ambiguous that no firm conclusion can be drawn solely on this basis. The drawing, however, takes the motif of the Breton women at work out of its realistic context, divides the stack into two and, by lending them an independent support, reveals the facial features whose lineaments we recognize.31 We shall return to these two works, whose motif is inscribed in a network of equivalences 14

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1 Paul Gauguin, Yellow Haystacks (The Golden Harvest), 1889.

2 Paul Gauguin, Breton Matters, c. 1889.

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that supplies further elements of verification for this interpretation. It sometimes happens that one can chart the development of such networks over quite long periods, transcending Gauguin’s changes of residence and the chronological divisions of his work, as in the case of a child’s head that, becoming a rock motif, leads to the neoMarquesan image of the divinity (see illus. 39, 153–59, 163). Another instrument of verification is supplied by the study of the reception of works, both as Wirkungsgeschichte, that is, in their effect on other visual works, and in the form of the verbal comments that they elicited from poets, critics and historians. Pictures by artists close to Gauguin show that the ambiguity of Above the Abyss was recognized and probably discussed by them (illus. 82, 83). The ‘verbal transpositions’ of three Tahitian pictures that the young Alfred Jarry composed during his stay with Gauguin in June 1894 at the Hôtel Gloanec also bear witness to the ‘suggestive’ level of the works in question, something that we shall observe in relation to Manaò tupapaú (see illus. 50).32 In speaking of potential images, we can but confirm Charles Baudelaire’s observation that ‘the best account of a picture may be a sonnet or an elegy.’33 This is because of the proximity that can be engendered by a homology of ‘poetic’ functioning (in Jakobson’s sense of ‘poetic’) and the fact that both belong to the domain of fiction. Moreover, the irreducibility of ‘media’ affirmed by artists who, like Gauguin, maintained ambivalent relations with men of letters, is a relative matter.34 While composing poems on the basis of the engravings from the series Noa Noa on which Gauguin was working, Jarry was himself making wood engravings for his first book, Les Minutes de sable mémorial (The Minutes of Memorial Sand).35 The overtly literary character and verbal inventiveness of turnof-the-century art criticism are therefore of real assistance. These critics paid close attention to the specificity of the visual arts and, by not reducing works to the ‘subject’ represented, articulate the semantic potential of form. In 1888, Félix Fénéon noted the biomorphism of one of Gauguin’s Breton landscapes and in a single sentence related it to the artist’s ceramics: ‘The habitual qualities of the sculptor were put to work in the moulding of its breast-like configurations.’36 Gauguin paid attention to these commentaries and adopted for his 16

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables own use the oxymoron ‘hunchback geometry’ invented in the same article by Fénéon to describe his vases.37 Texts of this kind bear witness not only to the reception of the works but also to the interaction between artists and writers, which is particularly notable at the level of aesthetic theory. Gauguin several times copied out an article in which Achille Delaroche defined ‘suggestion’ in relation to his work:

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The artist will interest us less, therefore, by a vision tyrannically imposed and circumscribed, however harmonious it may be, than by a power of suggestion that is capable of aiding the flight of the imagination or of serving as the decorator of our own dreams, opening a new door onto the infinite and the mystery of things.38

There can be no doubt that in certain cases it was their mutual contact that allowed Gauguin and the writers to formulate their poetics and even their poietics. The fact that Jarry frequented Gauguin must therefore have played a role in the theory of polysemy with which the former opened Les Minutes de sable mémorial: ‘To suggest instead of saying, to make a crossroad of every word in the sentencestreet’.39 Gauguin himself wrote a great deal and one might therefore expect to find in his own texts explanations about the ‘mystery’ that he evoked. In fact, there are relatively few explanations about individual works, which he left it to others to comment on. Manaò tupapaú constitutes an exception in this regard and we will see that Gauguin’s explanations of its genesis, inspired by those of Poe about the composition of ‘The Raven’, primarily illuminate his aesthetic theory and his position on the subject of the relationships between art, literature and criticism. This position makes the relative absence of verbalization accompanying his works entirely logical. The titles give only indirect indications, contributing to the mystery rather than attempting to reduce it. The titles in the Tahitian language dating from his first stay in Polynesia have irritated people ever since; Gauguin supplied translations only to his close friends, putting them in a strong position relative to the critics. In 1892 he wrote to his wife: ‘Naturally many of the pictures will be incomprehensible and you will have 17

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plenty to entertain yourself with.’40 Introducing another exceptional commentary, about Self-portrait (Les Misérables) (see illus. 12), he gave this meta-explanation to Vincent Van Gogh: ‘I feel the need to explain what I was trying to do not because you are unable to work it out for yourself but because I don’t think that in this work I managed to do what I wanted.’41 Gauguin criticized the very notions of explanation and comprehension as these affected both representation – that is, the artist’s relation to nature – and communication, the spectator’s relation to the work of art. Like other artists and certain writers, he rejected the ‘literary’ model of ‘description’ in favour of the musical model and Symbolist ‘suggestion’. Thus in Diverses choses he asserts that ‘there is no need to understand, any more than there is in hearing music’ and criticized Puvis de Chavannes for ‘explaining his idea’ instead of painting it. In 1901 he wrote to Georges-Daniel de Monfreid:

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In short, you need to look for suggestion rather than description; this is what music does. I am sometimes criticized for being incomprehensible precisely because people look for an explanatory aspect in my pictures when there is no such thing.42

We might perhaps see an image of the relationship that he sought between his works and their audience in the Still-life with Laval’s Profile (illus. 3), which presents his friend and disciple leaning over a vase and fruit arranged on a table. The main role is played by the vase, whose current whereabouts are unknown but which is known to us through a sketch; its biomorphic character is clear.43 Compared to this at once fantastical and concrete presence, the ontological status of the human face – which Gauguin may have added at a later stage – seems ambiguous: the tablecloth in front of Laval’s bust tends to relegate it to the condition of ‘an image within an image’. But the important thing here is that, though Laval’s head is turned towards the vase, his eyes are closed and he seems to meditate rather than gaze. Between the man and the object, a vertical band darker than the rest of the background is animated by inchoate forms that indistinctly repeat and vary elements of the two protagonists’ outlines. 18

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables A copy of this picture painted for the Paul Gauguin Cultural Centre at Atuona (illus. 4) constitutes a further form of reception and has a sort of experimental value: confronted with a degree of indeterminacy that made their task almost impossible, its authors were forced to reduce the ambiguities of their model, selecting and rendering explicit certain of its potentialities. Gaston Bachelard wrote that images of ‘aerial imagination’ ‘either evaporate or crystallize’ and have to be caught ‘between the two poles of this constantly active ambivalence’.44 Viera and Claude-Charles Farina have ‘crystallized’ forms that seemed to be reflections of Laval and the vase, perhaps interpreting the background as a reflective surface. In the original picture, echoes might be a better description than reflections, but the copyists have noted and exaggerated the transfer that takes place in this intermediary zone: the extended upper part of the vase has gained an ocular cavity and thus become more animated, while the corresponding part of Laval is dissolved into inorganic rhymes of his hair and eyebrows. The vase emerges triumphant from this confrontation but an exchange has nevertheless taken place, mixing and transposing subject and object in the mental space that brings them together. Immediately before contrasting suggestion and description, Gauguin had written: ‘I have always said, or if not said, at least thought, that a painter’s literary poetry is special, and not the illustration or translation, through shapes, of something written.’45 It is clear that, while defending the specificity of the visual arts, he conceived of them as a language on a par with verbal language and that he made use of verbal language as a meta-language among other things. His writings are not very illuminating in relation to his individual artworks but very revealing at the theoretical level. Gauguin enjoyed the materiality of verbal language and its sonorous and visual dimensions. Undertaking a schematic analysis of the spine of a cow in his sketchbook, he wittily writes ‘os le + O’ (‘the highest bone’, a pun on the French word os, bone, whose pronunciation is identical with that of the letter ‘o’; the adjective haut, meaning high or tall; and plus and the definite article, which make the adjective superlative), emphasizing the protuberance to the point where it seems to crave the status of a circle.46 Crussard attributes such phonetic shortcuts to the influence of Volapük, a language with aspirations to universality invented in 19

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3 Paul Gauguin, Still-life with Laval’s Profile, 1886.

1879; the principal example is the monogram ‘P Go’ that Gauguin used from 1886 in his ceramics and from 1888 in painting.47 In 1884 Gauguin developed a passion for Abbé Jean-Hippolyte Michon’s Système de graphologie, furiously studying ‘character through handwriting’ and recognizing, for example, ‘the desire to envelop others’ in a ‘lasso-style signature’.48 A letter to Émile Schuffenecker of 14 January 1885 shows that his interest in this pseudoscience rested on the hypothesis that there existed ‘translations of thought into something completely different from literature’ and that it was directly 20

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables

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4 Viera and Claude-Charles Farina, copy of Gauguin’s Stilllife with Laval’s Profile, 2001, detail.

connected to the visual arts: ‘There are noble lines, fibbing lines etc . . . There are noble colours and vulgar ones; there are peaceful and consoling harmonies and others that are exciting because they are so bold.’49 Gauguin no doubt knew Baudelaire’s texts on Delacroix, the speculations of Charles Henry and the older ones of Humbert de Superville on ‘unconditional signs in art’. Transmitted by Charles Blanc’s Grammaire des arts du dessin (Grammar of the Art of Drawing), they were soon to find a further echo in the writings of Albert Aurier, who spoke in 1891 of ‘directly significant characters (forms, lines, colours, etc.)’.50 Gauguin’s thought was therefore inscribed into a context of research into natural and universal languages and had as its goal a general semiotics in which plastic signs were no longer subordinate to linguistic ones. This background justifies his experiments with intermediality and transmediality thanks to which a form can be both icon and symbol (in Peirce’s sense), image and letter – for example when the arabesque serpent that winds around the hand of Meijer de Haan in Nirvana (illus. 5) is also the initial letter of the artist’s signature. The same project explains the fascination exerted over Gauguin by pictograms and glyphs, such as those on the Easter Island tablets. It is significant 21

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that the two non-European visual traditions that most directly inspired him, those of the pre-Inca cultures of the north coast of Peru (and more generally of pre-Hispanic Peru) and those of the Marquesas Islands (and more generally of pre-colonial Oceania), belonged to societies generally considered to lack writing and in which images played an essential role in communication. Over and above the opposition between image and text, the pansemiotism developed by Gauguin casts doubt on the distinction between nature and culture, identifying natural signs that evoke what Novalis, in his essay The Novices of Sais, called the ‘great cipher [that] we discern written everywhere’.51 Thus in Noa Noa, the description of the scene represented in the picture L’Homme à la hache (Man with an Axe) (illus. 6) leads from an ornamental interpretation of vegetation to a declaration of universalist pantheism:

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On the [purple ground], long, serpentine leaves of a metallic yellow, a whole Oriental vocabulary, letters (it seemed to me) of a mysterious unknown language. I seemed to see that word, of Oceanian origin: Atua, God. As Taäta or Takata, it reached India and is to be found everywhere [and] in everything – (Religion of Buddha).52

The fact that the ‘letters’ made by the dried leaves of the pandanus were separated one from another must have played a role in this ‘reading’, since Gauguin, adopting the psychology of peoples that he found in Michon, contrasted the separated writing of the ‘mystic and sensual’ Orient with the joined-up writing of the ‘deductive, logical, reasoning’ West.53 In 1885 Gauguin had identified the ‘essentially mystical nature of the Orient’ in Cézanne; ‘Like Virgil who has several meanings and whom one can interpret as one wishes, the literature of his pictures has a dual-purpose parabolic meaning; his backgrounds are as imaginative as they are real.’54 We cannot overstate the importance of this observation, which illuminates both the direction adopted by Gauguin and his awareness of it. It justifies the observation, made at the time by Charles Morice and recently approved by Richard Shiff, that Gauguin had ‘accomplished’ what Cézanne had ‘indicated’.55 22

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables Novalis concluded his evocation of the book of nature thus: ‘we suspect a key to the magic writing, even a grammar, but our surmise takes on no definite forms and seems unwilling to become a higher key.’ The specificity of the ‘mysterious unknown language’ that Gauguin was in search of, both as a receiver and as sender, seems to consist in placing itself at one remove from immediate comprehension, to fall silent as it speaks and to hide as it designates. In Diverses choses, Gauguin wrote about colour that since it was ‘enigmatic in itself, as to the sensations that it gives us, then, to be logical, we cannot use it any other way than enigmatically’ and that it ‘reaches what is most general and therefore most undefinable in nature: its inner power’. 56 He was aware of the importance of this communicational paradox and created a seeming dialogue on the subject:

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But why symbol, why parable? I might equally reply: and why not, but this would be an indirect answer. Yes, symbol, parable: the Gospel of St Luke. Jesus said to his disciples ‘to you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God but for everyone else it is offered only in parables, so that, seeing, they do not see and hearing, they do not understand’.57

Returning to the biblical reference in 1902 in L’Esprit moderne et le catholicisme (Catholicism and the Modern Mind), he stated that Jesus ‘designated in this way those that he judged unworthy because of their corrupt and hostile dispositions, at whom he again takes aim when he says elsewhere: “Do not throw your pearls before swine”’.58 Gauguin was alluding to the hostility and incomprehension encountered by his art. The notion of parable, used for the first time in relation to the background of Cézanne’s pictures, increasingly served him to contrast two levels of message and two circles of addressees, just as the young Mallarmé had done when he appealed for the protection of the ‘inviolate spell books’ by the use of ‘hieroglyphs’; in the same way, in 1894, August Strindberg was to distinguish in relation to his own pictures ‘an exoteric aspect that everyone can make out with a little effort, and an esoteric aspect for the painter and the chosen few’.59 This notion of two-level communication therefore has 23

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5 Paul Gauguin, Nirvana (Portrait of Meyer de Haan), 1889–90.

a sociological and political dimension and can be related to the marginal situation of the creators of the ‘avant-garde’, compensating for their feeling of exclusion with an initiatory solidarity. In this spirit, Gauguin wrote to the Danish painter Jens Ferdinand Willumsen: ‘We shall acquire the strength to accomplish our work over time, if we learn to recognize one another and group together like the disciples of a new religion and if we fortify one another in our faith by mutual affection.’60 At the end of his life, he related the biblical use of parable with the ideal of a ‘society directed by an intellectual aristocracy animated by the sentiment of justice and based on Reason and Science’. This ideal was, he said, shared by Plato, Confucius and the Gospels, and he contrasted a ‘literal meaning’ of the parable against a ‘rational meaning’.61 His principal target had become the Catholic Church, which he accused of having perverted the message of the Gospels; its illegitimacy was revealed by its incomprehension. A characteristic anecdote tells us that the many phalluses sculpted by 24

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6 Paul Gauguin, Man with an Axe, 1891.

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Gauguin around his Maison du Jouir at Atuona were mistaken for hammers by Bishop Martin, to the delight of the artist and his friends.62 But the ‘dual-purpose parabolic meaning’ primarily concerned representation.63 The ‘real’ aspect of the backgrounds in Cézanne’s painting was thus enhanced by an ‘imaginative’ aspect and the ‘onlooker’ – to take up Redon’s expression – was to be distinguished from the mere spectator. A distinction of this kind allowed Gauguin to lay claim to the defeats he had suffered. In 1888 he wrote to Schuffenecker: ‘For the masses I shall be a puzzle for some I shall be a poet and sooner or later the good find their place.’ In 1889 he wrote to Emile Bernard: ‘I haven’t been overly indulged by others and indeed I expect to become more and more incomprehensible.’64 ‘Most young painters’, he wrote in Diverses choses, ‘remain blind to the pictures that indicate the doctrine . . . “They cannot read, the book is sealed,” as Jesus says’.65 The article in which Dolent stated that Gauguin’s ‘crucible’ was his brain echoed this metaphor, which was no doubt adduced rather often: ‘The artist with sealed lips does not easily reveal his secret!’66 In Brittany the so-called Pont-Aven School had provided him with a ‘few elect’ capable of discernment. In Polynesia, this close inner circle was not available to him and his works, though made with the Paris public in mind, became bottles thrown into the sea. Gauguin was aware of this and wrote in Diverses choses: ‘Someone yells at me: “Why do you paint, whom are you painting for (– for yourself alone –)?” / I am stumped; trembling, I beat a retreat.’67 His works present a challenge to everyone, the challenge to ‘see’ if one is able to. I have attempted to meet this challenge. To present my results, I have chosen a thematic structure that roughly corresponds to the chronology but allows me to raise questions that are not limited to any given period. The first chapter deals with Gauguin’s ideas on perception and spotlights his interest in images thought of as natural or accidental, while examining the sources and implications of his biomorphism. The second chapter approaches his treatment of mental images in their relation to beliefs and language and compares his declarations on the creative process to the theories about dreams and the functioning of thought that were current in his own time. The 26

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables

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third chapter analyses works in which Gauguin has thematized his understanding of the phenomena of perception and cognition and the consequences these implied for artistic creation. The fourth is devoted to the role of materials and making, especially in relation to ceramics, engravings, dessins-empreintes and sculptures in wood; it relates Gauguin’s treatment of matter and of technique, along with his use of three-dimensionality, to his quest for ambiguity. In the fifth chapter, Gauguin’s ‘primitivism’ is related to his valorization of the imaginary, from the fairy tales and dolls of childhood to the myths and ‘idols’ of pre-modern societies; the meaning of his anthropomorphism is scrutinized through an exemplary case of morphogenesis. The sixth chapter examines the way in which Gauguin envisaged the relations between nature and artistic creation, considering the impact of the natural sciences and analysing the themes of androgyny, metamorphosis, sexuality and generation. Starting from a posthumous evocation of Gauguin by Victor Segalen, the Epilogue finally approaches the heuristic and even maieutic function of his art before analysing the still-lifes with sunflowers with which, late in his life, he paid homage to his great contemporaries and reaffirmed the primacy of the ‘mysterious centre of thought’. This inquiry cannot claim to be either exhaustive or definitive. The further it progressed, on the contrary, the clearer it became that it would merely constitute an addendum to all previous research and pave the way for future research. I wanted to take the risk of interpretation and submit that interpretation to criticism so that the collective debate might bestow on Gauguin’s works the time that they require. Gauguin, who devoted his life to them, had this to say on the subject: ‘The plastic arts do not easily give away their secrets; in order to guess them you must scrutinize those arts unceasingly while inwardly scrutinizing yourself.’ 68

27

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7 Paul Gauguin, Matamoe, 1892.

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one

Seeing Double

With Half-closed Eyes In his letter to Schuffenecker of 14 August 1888, Gauguin wrote:

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A piece of advice: don’t copy too closely from nature – Art is an abstraction; bring it forth from nature by dreaming before her and think rather about creation than the result it’s the only way of rising towards God by doing what our Divine Master did create.1

Artistic production is thus conceived as creation in the highest – the theological – sense and defined as a process of reduction; though nature remains the starting point, a particular attitude is required, which Gauguin calls ‘dreaming before her’. The expression is somewhat paradoxical insofar as dreaming is a mental activity for the most part independent of external and in particular of direct visual stimuli. We have seen that in the 1886 picture (illus. 3) Charles Laval, though facing Gauguin’s ceramic work, has his eyes closed: he might be described as ‘dreaming before it’. In fact, the limited sensory contact between the artist and ‘life’ (here ‘still-life’) is compensated by increased imaginative interaction, as represented by the background, while the animation of the ceramic sculpture means that the relation between subject and object is reversible. Gauguin’s criticism of mimetic naturalism established an ambivalent relationship with the natural prototype – a relationship forged in equal parts of presence and absence, of proximity and distance. One model of this relationship occurs in the Cahier pour Aline (Notebook for Aline) written in late 1892. The second of the two extracts from Edgar Allan Poe’s Marginalia that stand at the head of 29

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the manuscript is a definition of art. Poe, too, contrasts art with mere imitation; for him it is ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul’. Transcribed into the Cahier, Poe continues: ‘We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little – but then always they see too much.’2 The aesthetic value of a spectacle is thus inversely proportional to the input of sense data and this reduction affords a simplified version of the process of abstraction that Gauguin describes. The ‘veil of the soul’ acts as a filter between the self and the world and can also be interpreted as an instrument of distillation. The image of the veil is akin to the metaphors of perceptive subjectivity employed by the realist tradition, such as coloured glasses or Zola’s definition of a work of art as ‘a corner of creation seen through a temperament’.3 But it also has a metaphysical dimension; in Gauguin’s case, this was reinforced by Sartor Resartus (1836), in which Thomas Carlyle sets out a ‘philosophy of clothes’, describing the world of phenomena as a fabric through which ‘a celestial Essence [is] rendered visible’.4 Like ‘coded writing’ and parable, the veil simultaneously conjoins and separates, offers and refuses access, and thus plays a role analogous to that of the symbol in Carlyle’s sense: ‘In a Symbol, there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.’5 Carlyle also defined ‘Fantasy and Heart’ as the ‘deep infinite faculties of man’; ‘the Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it, but Fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina, healthy or diseased’.6 In Gauguin we find similar formulations concerning the perception of the world and its representation. Writing in November 1889 to Theo Van Gogh, he describes how he meditated at the window in Le Pouldu with his ‘disciple’ Meyer de Haan – who had first introduced him to Sartor Resartus – and contrasts the ‘visions thus evoked’ with the ‘grey, lugubrious sea’, adding: ‘does one not feel an instinctive modesty for the visions thus evoked in allowing them to be seen only behind their veils’.7 In Noa Noa he speaks of Vahine no te tiare (1891, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen), which he painted, he says, in the presence of the model: ‘It was a portrait resembling what my eyes veiled by my heart perceived’.8 30

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Seeing Double Carlyle was profoundly influenced by German idealist philosophy and the anti-mimetic advice given by Gauguin to Schuffenecker reminds us of the words of Caspar David Friedrich: ‘Close your bodily eyes in order that you may first see your painting with your spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day what you have seen in the darkness so that it can affect others, penetrating inwards from without.’ 9 But the eye half-closed is not the same thing as a fully closed eye and may also allude to the physical technique of abstraction mentioned by Charles Blanc in relation to the Japanese, who were, he says, ‘not nature’s copyists but distillers of quintessence’: ‘it is clear that the draughtsmen of the Far East learned to draw nature by intermittently closing their eyes.’10 What Blanc said of Japanese artists, that they were both ‘in love with nature and proficient at managing without her’, might also be said of Gauguin. Maxime Maufra remarked that Gauguin was ‘of all the great artists, the one who is closest to the Primitives, those imaginative naturalists’.11 His ambivalent relationship to the model of nature was more a synthesis than an opposition – what Delaroche defined as ‘the connecting link between the conscious and the unconscious . . . resolving the antinomy between the sensible and the intellectual worlds’.12 Writing to Vincent Van Gogh in 1889, Gauguin configured the relationship as an addition rather than a subtraction: ‘What the hell I want to consult nature too but I don’t want to dismiss what I see in her or what comes to my mind.’13 Visual perception was, in his opinion, close kin to desire and therefore a source of pleasure, a point on which he congratulated himself in a letter to Schuffenecker: ‘Musicians take pleasure through hearing but we artists with our rutting and insatiable eyes enjoy endless pleasures.’14 That jouissance, with all its sexual connotations, is particularly clear in the landscapes of his first Tahitian stay, such as Matamoe (illus. 7). The title of this picture constitutes an enigma that bears on Gauguin’s relationship to nature. In Tahitian, mata means both ‘face’ and ‘eye’ and, as a verb, ‘begin’, while moe means ‘sleep, dream’ and as a verb ‘sleep, go to bed, lie down’; mata moe is a compound translated as ‘to be falling asleep, to be sleepy’.15 It is possible that Gauguin, who took pleasure in the polysemic nature of language, was making play with the various senses of mata and associating this somnolence 31

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with the eye in particular. Charles Stuckey has translated the title as ‘sleeping eyes’ and suggests an explanation based on a passage in Noa Noa about Mataiea, where the picture was probably painted: ‘Everything in the landscape blinded, dazzled me.’16 Richard Field prefers to assimilate the title to Gauguin’s advice to ‘dream before’ nature.17 Are the eyes thus closed those of the body or the mind? Field notes that this is one of the ‘few’ pictures in which Gauguin ‘has completely fused the study of his natural surroundings with his inner visions of a mysterious land. That the foreground is occupied by the woodcutter who, in the narrative of Noa Noa, struck to the heart of Gauguin’s own primitive being, only completes the transition from exterior to interior reality.’18 The passage in Noa Noa to which Field refers also alludes to the picture Man with an Axe (illus. 6) and contains a series of comparisons and comments whose culmination is the interpretation of pandanus leaves as the letters of a ‘unknown, mysterious language’; the coconut palm seems to Gauguin ‘an immense parrot letting its golden tail hang down and holding in its claws a huge cluster of coconuts’ and the dead tree lying on the ground will live again for ‘an instant of flame – age-old heat, daily accumulated’.19 In Matamoe, the eyes of the ‘almost naked man’ are closed

8 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, 1893.

32

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Seeing Double or indiscernible, unlike those of the Man with an Axe. But his gaze is, as it were, relayed through his torso by virtue of a displacement or duplication that Gauguin illustrated in the manuscript of Noa Noa (illus. 8), where he related it to the Tahitian anatomy and to God’s will: ‘the sculptural form of the inhabitants. / Two columns of a temple, straight and simple – / Two eyes of the chest / . . .’. The ‘eyes of the chest’ are at one and the same time those of the body and those of the mind ‘veiled by the heart’.

From Persia to Redon It was in 1888 and more particularly in 1889 that Gauguin began to specify and give verbal form to ideas that were already in some measure present in his work as a painter and sculptor. In his first published writing, ‘Notes sur l’art à l’Exposition Universelle’ (‘Notes on Art at the Universal Exhibition’), which appeared in July 1889, he defended the value of decoration, ‘a far more abstract art than the servile imitation of nature’:

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In the Dieulafoy Gallery at the Louvre, have a close look at the bas-reliefs of the lions. I maintain that enormous genius was required to imagine flowers that are the muscles of animals or muscles that are flowers. All of the dreaming, mystical Orient is to be found there.20

Gauguin is referring to fragments of the palace of Darius i – excavated at Susa by Jane and Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy under the auspices of the Louvre and presented in the galleries open to the public on 6 June 1888 (illus. 9) – and specifically to the Lion Frieze, a decoration in enamel brick from the first courtyard of the palace (illus. 10). Fereshteh Daftari assumes that the muscles of which Gauguin speaks of are those of the animals’ heads.21 But the term ‘muscle’ does not immediately bring facial muscles to mind and it is also possible to perceive a plant-like aspect in the treatment of the shoulders and paws of the lions. The stylization of muscles and tendons, combined with a profound knowledge of anatomy, is characteristic of Achaemenid Persian 33

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art; Gauguin’s interpretation may, moreover, have been facilitated by the plant elements – lotuses and rosettes – placed above and below the lions. But it is also true that the motif of the swollen muscles around the eye, which match the snarling mouth and contribute to the menacing posture of the lions, is particularly striking. Daftari backs up her hypotheses by reference to Self-portrait (Les Misérables) (illus. 11) and above all to the drawing of it that Gauguin sent to Schuffenecker (illus. 12) with this remark: ‘The eyes the mouth the nose are like flowers in Persian carpets thus personifying the symbolic aspect.’22 In this drawing in particular, the droplet-shaped eyelids surrounding the painter’s right eye do indeed resemble the facial muscles of the Lion Frieze. This analogy emphasizes the importance of the eye motif, which stands at the head of the list in the letter to Schuffenecker, and broadens Gauguin’s thoughts about the decorative arts to Persian art and textiles. To these, Gauguin several years later made a last and more generic reference: ‘What the Orientals, Persians and others did, first of all, was to print a complete dictionary, so to speak, of this language of the listening eye; they made their rugs marvellously eloquent.’23 Daftari, seeking to pin down the comparison made with Self-portrait (Les Misérables), has put forward two examples of Persian carpets in French collections that had been reproduced in 1883–4.24 In the first, which dates from the sixteenth century, a flower motif repeated on the border and in the field presents a well-defined centre and petals whose curved form is reminiscent of the muscles surrounding the eye of the Susa lion.25 A drawing (illus. 13) whose subject had not previously been identified completes this dossier because it represents part of the capital of a column from the audience chamber of the Palace of Darius (illus. 14), which was also exhibited in the Dieulafoy rooms.26 The sketch focuses on the facial features of the bull and enlarges the detail of the eye; a note specifies that the iris is convex whereas the rest is flat. The sketch works through analysis and abstraction of the model, a logical procedure given the different technique it employs, but one that also corresponds both to Gauguin’s anti-illusionist aesthetic and to the stylization of Achaemenid sculpture. This is particularly noticeable in the ear, which is entirely detached from the nape, and in the vein that descends from the brow to the nostril and could be interpreted 34

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9 Tilly, The New Dieulafoy Collection Rooms in the Musée du Louvre, n.d. (1888).

10 Lion Frieze, east court of the palace of Darius 1 at Susa, c. 510 bc.

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11 Paul Gauguin, Self-portrait (Les Misérables), 1888.

12 Letter to Émile Schuffenecker of 8 October 1888 with drawing after Self-portrait (Les Misérables).

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13 Paul Gauguin, untitled drawing of a capital from a column in the audience chamber (Apadana) of the palace of Darius i.

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14 Capital of a column in the audience chamber of the palace of Darius i, c. 510 bc.

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as the stalk of a flower. This process of decomposition is, as it were, the mirror image of a mode of composition by the montage of distinct elements, a mode exemplified by Gauguin in the drawing after his self-portrait. Merete Bodelsen sees in this second mode a transposition of the way in which Gauguin composed his pictures (with the aid of ‘individual pictorial elements such as figures, trees, animals, etc.’) to the internal composition of the figure itself (and in this case, the face).27 Daftari, for her part, relates Gauguin’s interest in the Lion Frieze to his increasing predilection for polychrome relief sculpture and points to a literal application of his principle of ambiguity in the relief Martiniquaises (Women of Martinique, 1889, whereabouts unknown), in which the head of a child appears above flowers that form its belly and chest.28 From the perspectives of perception and representation that concern us here, several remarks should be added. In the first place, Gauguin’s attraction to Achaemenid stylization is entirely consistent with his reading of Michon’s Système de graphologie. As we have seen, Michon held that oriental mysticism found expression in noncursive writing; Gauguin explained to Pissarro that the latter had not joined up the letters of the word ‘mystery’ because ‘mystery is in thought the meaning of mystic and the writings of the mystics are s e p a r a t e d’.29 The attribution of the Lion Frieze to the ‘dreaming, mystical Orient’ and the comparison of Persian carpets to a dictionary indicate that these remarks form part of the same reflection about a general semiotics. This included the ideal of two-level communication, of which Gauguin had, in 1885, found a model: the pictures of Cézanne, about whom he wrote ‘Separated mystical w r i t i n g, similarly drawing’.30 By placing a significant element within the figure, Gauguin introduced a level intermediary between ‘noble lines, fibbing lines etc.’ and iconography. This level was comparable to that of the pictographic or ideographic writings that probably caught his eye in the exhibition History of Writing that formed part of the Exposition Universelle of 1889.31 Second, the ‘abstraction’ of which Gauguin speaks is contrasted not with representation but only with the ‘servile imitation of nature’. By relaxing – through reduction, simplification, ‘synthesis’ or ‘stylization’ – the bond uniting the iconic sign to a natural referent, abstraction 38

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Seeing Double in this sense makes the sign available for other associations, for both artist and spectator alike. This abstraction therefore permits the polysemy and multistability of the image. 32 There is an evident homology with the literary theory that Jarry was to set out in 1894, proposing to ‘make a crossroad of every word in the sentence-street’.33 But whereas Jarry’s ideal was a ‘unique work’ in which ‘the relationship of the sentence to any sense that can be found in it is constant’, Gauguin prioritizes ambiguity (in the etymological sense of double meaning) or bistability. In the passage on visual perception from Philosophical Investigations that I quoted earlier, Wittgenstein gives an example of this with the anonymous drawing of a duck/rabbit (which had originally appeared in a German satirical magazine in 1892); this allowed him to distinguish between the ‘continuous seeing of an aspect’ and the ‘dawning’ (Aufleuchten) of this aspect, in the manner of a light being switched on.34 We shall see that Gauguin was interested in the surprise produced by an apparition of this kind but was also interested by the oscillation and reversibility characteristic of the double image, as we clearly see from the expression ‘flowers that are . . . muscles or muscles that are flowers’. Third, the order in which Gauguin introduced these aspects is worthy of note: he begins with the flowers, which do not semantically belong to the ‘lion’ ensemble and therefore provoke surprise in the reader. The constellation of texts and images that we have examined allows us (hypothetically) to retrace their phenomenological origin. We may suppose that Gauguin was, and perhaps had been for a long time, sensitive to the effect of physiognomy and gaze produced by certain flower motifs in Persian carpets. Around 1888, his reflections on ornamentation and abstraction and the observation of an analogous motif forming the eye of the lions in the Achaemenid frieze allowed him to follow the same path in the opposite direction – top-down, in the language of the neurosciences – as an artist, that is, by going from the ‘flowers that are eyes’ to ‘eyes that are flowers’. The perceptive attitude (bottom-up) that underpins this operation – for reasons of convenience, I call it ‘imaginative perception’ – is simultaneously characterized by a relative distance from the immediate identification of the sense data and by a tendency to form other identifications that are either alternative or complementary.35 This 39

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attitude, which merely accentuates certain features of any perceptive act, can be encouraged by a wide variety of characteristics in the subject, object and conditions of perception. It can also be encouraged by the culture in which the subject is immersed; we should remember the popularity in the last third of the nineteenth century of ‘picture puzzles’ such as the duck/rabbit of 1892, images that require and reinforce precisely this kind of perception. It is revealing that Gauguin, rather than pointing to a resemblance between flowers and the muscles of the lion, assumed that the authors of the frieze had deliberately created a double image. Any such intention is unlikely in the Achaemenid period but in Gauguin’s time was openly displayed in the field of ludic imagery and in certain artists hostile to the realist tradition. First and foremost among these was Odilon Redon, who in 1883 included in his lithographic album Les Origines a plate situating the origin of vision, in the form of an ocular globe, at the centre of a flower suggestive of a face (illus. 15). A second text written by Gauguin in 1889 considers the work of Redon in relation to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Certains (Certain Ones).36 Gauguin notably criticizes two of the pieces of art criticism in this collection, ‘Bianchi’ and ‘Le Monstre’. Concerning the former, which is about an Italian Renaissance altar panel in the collection of the Louvre (at that time attributed to Francesco Bianchi), he accuses Huysmans of a double positivist error. Huysmans had identified in the St Quentin represented in the picture the portrait of an androgynous sodomite. Gauguin observes: ‘Like all painters in the old days, Bianchi found around him, in nature, a particular type in which he depicted himself. I would even say: a type that he must have made in his own image.’ He notes that the three figures represented resemble one another and concludes: ‘All three convey the same mood, which is that of the painter. Huysmans, criticizing this painting, was creating a Huysmans.’ In ‘Le Monstre’, Huysmans suggested including Redon in the history of artistic teratology in the wake of the medieval imagemakers, while attributing the modernity of his contribution to the influence of microbiology. Gauguin rejects the very notion of ‘monster’ and retorts: ‘Nature has mysterious infinites, and imaginative power . . . She is always varying the productions that she offers us. The artist himself is one of nature’s means, and, in my opinion, Odilon Redon 40

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Seeing Double

15 Odilon Redon, There Was Perhaps a FIRST Attempted in the Flower, 1883.

VISION

is one of those she has elected for this continuation of creation.’ We will come back to this integration of artistic activity into natura naturans. What matters here is Gauguin’s description of a Redon work, which he cites by way of example: Amid a black atmosphere, we finally make out one tree trunk, now two; one of them is surmounted by something, probably a man’s head. With utmost logic he leaves us in 41

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doubt as to that existence. Is it truly a man, or rather a vague resemblance? However that may be, they both live on this page and, inseparable one from the other, they weather the same storms.

A Redon work close to this description is the lithograph L’Homme fut solitaire dans un paysage de nuit (The Man Was Alone in A Night Landscape) (illus. 16); it appeared in 1886 in the album La Nuit and Gauguin may well have known it. The ‘human’ aspect of the figure on the left is more emphatic than the text suggests and André Mellerio, in his catalogue of 1913, speaks of a human being upright ‘like a rigid idol’; however, the analogy linking it to the tree is accentuated by a cavity opening in the body like a similar one in the tree trunk. 37 Gauguin recognizes the role of chiaroscuro in the production of ambiguity and his use of the word ‘logic’ shows that he fully understood Redon’s desire to ‘[confine] oneself constantly to the equivocal’.38 It is clear that these two essays from Certains were complementary as far as he was concerned. ‘Bianchi’ allowed him to show that Huysmans was unaware both of the painter’s share in the image of the world that he presents and of the critic’s share in his perception of the picture. ‘Le Monstre’, by contrast, allows him to show Redon as an artist aware both of the subjective component of perception – am I looking at a man or a tree that resembles a man? – and of the role that the artist must ‘logically’ ascribe to the spectator if the forms are to come into being ‘in accordance with the onlooker’s state of mind’ (or not). Gauguin’s first meeting with Redon, who was eight years older than him, is generally dated to the last Impressionist Exhibition, in which they both participated. This took place in 1886; the presence of Redon was generally interpreted as one more sign of the crisis that Impressionism was experiencing. But Gauguin had been paying attention to Redon’s art well before then. His attention may even have dated back to Redon’s public debut, the appearance of the album Dans le rêve (In Dream) in 1879 and the two solo exhibitions held in 1881 and 1882. The extracts from Poe’s Marginalia that he copied into the Cahiers pour Aline came from the French edition of the Contes Grotesques (Tales of the Grotesque) published in 1882 by 42

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16 Odilon Redon, The Man Was Alone in a Night Landscape, 1886.

Émile Hennequin with a cover by Redon representing the Raven from Poe’s poem of that name. Victor Merlhès has shown that by 1888 at the latest, Gauguin had read the ‘Life of Edgar Poe’ written by Hennequin and included in that volume.39 A strange picture by Gauguin generally dated to 1885 (illus. 17) carries at the bottom the inscription L’inintelligible au profil dur (The Unintelligible with Harsh Profile), which directly refers to Au réveil j’aperçus la Déesse de l’intelligible au profil sévère et dur (On Awakening, I Saw the goddess of the intelligible with her Severe and Harsh Profile) (illus. 18), the last plate of the lithographic album Hommage à Goya, which had appeared on 1 February 1885 and immediately had fame bestowed on it by one of Huysmans’ ‘literary transpositions’.40 The transformation of the ‘Goddess of the Intelligible’ into a figure of ‘The Unintelligible’ gives an accurate idea of the enigmatic character of the album as a whole. And we recognize in Gauguin’s figure, lit in 43

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17 Paul Gauguin, The Unintelligible with Harsh Profile, n.d. (1885?).

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18 Odilon Redon, On Awakening, I Saw the goddess of the intelligible with her Severe and Harsh Profile, 1885.

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Seeing Double more naturalistic fashion by a window, the coiffure and faceted treatment of the face in Redon’s lithograph, particularly around the eye. This reference is the more notable because the same album contained La Fleur du Marécage, une tête humaine et triste (The Marsh Flower, a Sad Human Head), which prefigures the plant with its own face moulded by Gauguin at the bottom of his ceramic piece Vénus noire (Black Venus, 1889, Nassau County Museum, Port Washington). We have already seen that the motif of the flower/eye, which was included in the Self-portrait (Les Misérables), had already appeared in the album Les Origines in 1883 (illus. 15). We should add that, by 1889 at the latest, the exchange between the two artists was reciprocal and that the motif of Yeux clos (Closed Eyes), which helped Redon to broaden his public, may have been partly inspired by Gauguin’s Pot céphalomorphe-autoportrait (Cephalomorphic-Selfportrait Pot). (illus. 65).

Stealing Nature

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In June 1892, Gauguin wrote from Tahiti to Daniel de Monfreid to tell him that he had ‘struck it rich’ and was painting fluently: I have just finished a beheaded Kanak head nicely arranged on a white cushion in a palace of my own invention and guarded by women also of my own invention. I think it is a pretty piece of painting. It is not entirely mine since I stole it from a pine plank. I should keep quiet about that but there you are, one does what one can, and when marble or wood draws you a head it’s jolly tempting to steal it.41 The painting in question is Arii matamoe (illus. 19), in the title of which we again find the composite word mata moe; its sense of ‘going to sleep’ seems the most relevant here, where it is associated with ar‘i, ‘head chief’ or prince and, since the nineteenth century, ‘king’. It will be remembered that mata also means ‘face’ or ‘eye’; the eye of the head, which one supposes to have been recently cut off, is indeed 45

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half closed. We will return to the question of the picture’s theme but here we must first dwell on Gauguin’s remarks about its genesis. The allusion to marble and wood clearly refers to so-called natural or accidental images, that is, iconic aspects perceived in configurations where no intention of representation is present, such as those in the veins of stone or the grain of wood. Gauguin seems to be thinking more specifically of flat surfaces such as polished marble and planks of wood, surfaces crafted and thus comparable, for the eye, to drawing and painting. The expression ‘draws you a head’ jocularly attributes artistic intentions to matter and expresses the feeling that the image, once seen, is addressed to the onlooker; in other words, if there is a receiver, there is also a message and a sender. The expression also indicates what part of Arii matamoe Gauguin ‘stole from a pine plank’: it was the detached head, the centre of the composition and principal subject of the picture. One imagines that this borrowing concerned the outline rather than the modelling of the head but it is impossible to be more specific without further evidence on the morphogenesis of the painting; no study drawings are known today. Gauguin’s explanation may seem anecdotal and has not been much noticed, unlike the ‘Genesis of a Picture’ that he wrote about Manaò tupapaú (illus. 50), to which we shall come in due course. It is nevertheless significant in several different respects. By speaking of stealing, Gauguin makes the artist a competitor rather than a continuer of nature, while again placing them on the same level. The jocular tone does little to conceal the importance of a ‘confession’ that he was by no means obliged to make, especially since he knew that his ideas were disseminated by Monfreid. The mention of marble, used in the plural in French, further indicates that this was not an exceptional case and that other motifs or even compositions by Gauguin owe some part of their inspiration to a ‘theft’ of this kind. But he seems to have had no desire for this ‘natural’ origin to remain visible in the completed work and without the explanation given to Monfreid, we could hardly have guessed at Gauguin’s theft. At least, this seems to hold true of Gauguin’s painting. In his works on paper, which are perhaps closer to their sources, certain images do indeed seem to offer evidence of an accidental origin. One example is the inchoate forms that occupy the right-hand side of the 46

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engraving L’Univers est créé (The Universe is Created) (illus. 166); they are easier to make out in an illustration to the manuscript Ancien culte mahorie (Ancient Maori Religion) (illus. 20). In the relevant passage, the text speaks of the ti‘i, which Gauguin, following in the footsteps of Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout’s Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan (Voyages in the Islands of the Great Ocean, 1837), defined as ‘spirits inferior to gods’ that served as an ‘intermediary and demarcation line between organic and inorganic beings’.42 This threshold status of being is the reason why, in their genesis and appearance, the ti‘i drawn by Gauguin move from the mineral (the wavy lines ending in a sort of mask, which one imagines was based on a rock or shell) to the animal (the fish) and the human (the schematic head). Moreover, the part of the enumeration of the ti‘i immediately below the drawing mentions specifically the ‘Tii of sands and banks and shifting ground’. We shall see later that in his sculptures Gauguin did not hesitate to refer discreetly but clearly to

19 Paul Gauguin, Arii matamoe, 1892.

47

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20 Paul Gauguin, Ancient Maori Religion, 1892–3, f. 11 r [p. 21].

the phenomenon of natural images, probably encouraged in this by the example of Peruvian pre-Hispanic ceramics. Finally we should note that the ‘stolen’ motif of Arii matamoe is the head, and that the eye is central to it. We remember that it was the lineaments of the face and more particularly the eyes that Gauguin seems to have perceived in the flowers of Persian carpets and that it was in the facial muscles around the lions’ eyes that he perceived flowers. From a percepto-cognitive point of view, whether the visual stimuli leading to the identification of an aspect are supplied by an object natural, crafted or artificial, and whether or not they derive from an intention to represent this aspect, are relatively insignificant questions. ‘Imaginative perception’ can operate as well on marble or timber as on a carpet or a relief. True, these varying origins have an effect on the tendency to accept the aspects and to make of them a point of departure for intentional images, just as they affect the interpretation given them by the ‘receiver’ and the authorship that the latter 48

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Seeing Double ascribes to them. But we have seen that by saying ‘marble or wood draws you a head’, Gauguin tended to blur the most important of these distinctions. Up- or downstream of the historical and cultural context that we shall examine, the primacy granted to the head and eyes in these accidental and double images concords with an anthropological invariable for which contemporary science proposes evolutionary and neurological explanations. The equivalence between face and gaze, which finds expression in many languages, including the Polynesian ones, by precisely such kinships as that of ‘vision’ and ‘visage’, is also attested to by an infinite number of images and artefacts. Recognizing eyes or a head in the ‘veins’ – the analogy is revealing – of a stone or the flower motifs of a carpet, we bestow life on this object and make of it a being whose eyes are on us. Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark has rightly spoken of ‘found objects’ in relation to several sculptures into which Gauguin, from the early 1880s on, incorporated natural or artificial elements and thus endowed these elements with a new identity and meaning.43 This capacity for appropriation is also linked to imaginative perception, as we see in the glazed terracotta drinks dispenser (fontaine de table) for which Gauguin carved a wooden cover and stand (illus. 21). His interest in this popular ceramic design must have been triggered by the large schematic motif of a plant that appears on the front of the vessel. The design allows for two different anthrozoomorphic readings: that of a long slender body with two widely stretched arms, to which the strangely inclined leaf at the top forms a head; and that of a face featuring broad eye sockets, in which the lateral leaves serve as eyes, the tap as nose and mouth, and the handles as ears. This interpretation is suggested by the two heads that Gauguin sculpted among plant motifs and that he located at either end of the central axis of the body of the dispenser: a relief face surrounded by long hair placed directly beneath the tap and a bald head that proudly surmounts the lid and replaces the original ceramic lid, which certainly did not comprise any such element. A further clue is supplied by the resemblance of this motif to various animated plants that Gauguin drew, painted or sculpted, among others one in the manuscript Ancien culte mahorie (illus. 184). It is clear, too, that his introduction of popular ceramics into still-life 49

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paintings tends to reveal an anthropomorphic dimension. The faience jug seen in profile at the centre of La nappe blanche (White Tablecloth, 1886, private collection) can look like a little head with a snub nose. It is in fact, as Sylvie Crussard has shown, a children’s feeding bottle for use with a flexible tube attached to the spout.44 The kinship of such traditional objects with the human body is not only written into their functions and forms but even into their nomenclature: for example, the bowl that appears beside the feeding bottle is known as a bowl ‘with ears’ because of its flat, solid lateral handles. In another picture probably also painted in 1886 at Pont-Aven, Vase aux capucines et faïence de Quimper (Vase of Nasturtiums and Quimper Faience, private collection), the same feeding bottle is shown from the back with its blue handle, unrecognizable when seen from the front, surrounded by two flower motifs that suggest two eyes.45 Fonsmark compares Gauguin’s incorporation of existing elements into his works to the twentieth-century practice of the ‘found object’ so dear to the Dadaists and Surrealists. This comparison can be extended to the extreme form of such practices, the readymade. The drinks dispenser completed by Gauguin does indeed display certain not entirely accidental resemblances to Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917 (‘original’ lost). The differences are many and there is no need to set them all out here; but both are ceramic, respectively of craft and industrial manufacture, and their function – thanks to Duchamp’s placing the urinal on its back – is to disgorge a liquid. Gauguin’s appropriation seems primarily motivated by an iconic interpretation of the object but it should be remembered that those close to Duchamp compared Fountain to a Madonna or a Buddha and defended the artist’s gesture as a demonstration of the role of the onlooker and an affirmation of the ‘rights of the imagination’.46

The Veracity of Misperception The ideas that I have highlighted in Gauguin may seem at odds with those that dominated thinking about art early in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as he himself took care to point out by retrospectively contrasting his quest for the ‘mysterious centre of thought’ 50

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Seeing Double

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21 Drinks dispenser (anonymous) with wooden base and cover carved by Paul Gauguin, c. 1889.

with that of the Impressionists, ‘focused around the eye’. They were, on the other hand, entirely consonant with the understanding of the functioning of the human mind developed by philosophy and psychology; these put forward an active rather than a passive definition of perception, connected with memory and imagination, and conceived the relationship of the self with the external world in terms of correspondences rather than transparency.47 In his book on the hero cult, Carlyle had already criticized the distinction between ‘faculties’ such as ‘imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth’; in his view, these were merely metaphors of ‘man’s spiritual nature’, of the ‘seeing eye . . . which enables him to discern the inner heart 51

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of things, and the harmony that dwells there’.48 In France, which in the 1870s felt the influence of British Associationism and the revival in German idealist philosophy, experimental psychology was arguing for comparable positions, and the author of a study on ocular movement stated in 1881 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts: ‘it is not the eye that sees but the intelligence.’49 Aesthetic thinkers drew on this research and that same year the philosopher Paul Souriau published a Théorie de l’invention (Theory of Invention) in which invention – in art as in science – was said to consist in ‘coincidences of the objective series with the subjective series’, that is, on the meeting of ‘images of perception’ with ‘images of conception’; the power of this encounter was multiplied by the fact that one ‘spiritualizes’ things ‘by lending them the ideas that they suggest to us’.50 In his Essai sur le génie dans l’art (Essay on Genius in Art), which appeared two years later, Gabriel Séailles, speaking of the relations between representation and suggestion, adduced an example very like the description given by Gauguin of Redon’s ambiguous image (illus. 16): ‘The motionless, battered rock, sitting in solitude, brings to mind some old man, tired of living and seeing people die, frozen in some grave and monotonous thought.’51 The human predicates of the rock undermine the separation maintained by the expression ‘brings to mind’. Séailles also considered the subject of illusion, a ‘hallucination grafted on to some true perception’, of which he found examples in the images seen in clouds and in childish games, ‘which give us a charming example of this power of metamorphosis’.52 In his treatise De l’intelligence (On Intelligence), published in 1870 and frequently reprinted, Hippolyte Taine had gone one step further by proposing to turn our understanding of the relationship between perception and imagination upside down: ‘Thus, external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and, instead of calling hallucination a false external perception, we must call external perception a true hallucination.’53 Many authors, psychiatrists among them, hypothesized the continuity between ‘normal’ perception and daydream, dream and hallucination. Particular interest was shown in misperceptions, since they highlighted the cognitive aspects of perception. Alfred Maury, the most authoritative of French researchers on dreams, spoke in this regard of ‘a double 52

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Seeing Double error: error of sense, mental error’, pointing to the role of cultural and emotional factors in such phenomena:

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When, by night, under the influence of superstition and fear, we transform some tree or ruinous moonlit wall of unexpected shape into ghosts, spectres, or brigands, our fearful imagination adds something of its own conception to the incomplete perception given by our uncertain vision amid the shadows.54

This enumeration might include the description given by Gauguin of the ‘black atmosphere’ of Redon’s work and his man/tree figure – with the difference that Gauguin speaks of ‘doubt’ and attributes that doubt to an artistic intention. An even more explicit valorization of mistaken perception and its aesthetic virtues was put forward by the Swedish playwright and painter August Strindberg in an article that appeared in Paris (where he was then living) in November 1894, shortly before Gauguin invited him to write a preface for the catalogue of his sale by auction of 17 February 1895.55 In this essay, entitled ‘Du hasard dans la création artistique’ (‘The Role of Chance in Artistic Production’), Strindberg described the ‘rapidly changing impressions’ produced in him by an object perceived at the edge of a forest, in which he had first thought he recognized a cow, then two peasants embracing, then a tree trunk, before observing that it was in truth a coat and a knapsack thrown over a plough. When these successive misperceptions had been replaced by the correct identification, he noted: ‘There is no more to say! Nothing to be seen! The pleasure is over!’ And he compared this pleasure to that afforded by ‘the modernist paintings that philistines find so incomprehensible’ in which the spectator, at first confronted with a ‘chaos of colour’, gradually sees the picture emerge: ‘And the image presents itself to the viewer, who has assisted at the birth of the picture.’ He finally compared it to the realization of one of his own works, whose subject revealed itself to him only in the course of its making and despite his initial intentions. Gauguin liked to provoke this kind of oscillation of ‘rapidly changing impressions’ and to delay, complicate and even prevent the identification of objects represented in his works, as we shall 53

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see in many examples. In Meules de foin en Bretagne (Haystacks in Brittany, 1890, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc), the blackand-white coat of the cows, the ‘synthetic’ treatment of the background across which they are passing and the arbitrary framing that fragments them all conspire to camouflage the animals in a literal and metaphorical puzzle. We find contemporary witness of this effect on spectators, for example when Fénéon describes the deciphering of the picture simultaneous with that of its elements: ‘Glimpsed bricks indicate a nearby house; coats lying down, muzzles pushing through the coppice, – cows’.56 In 1903 Gauguin himself included in Avant et après (Before and After) an anecdote about the same motif on the same phenomenon:

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Old Corot at Ville-d’Avray. Well, Père Mathieu, what do you think, do you like this picture? Ooh, yessir, how true to life those rocks are. The rocks were cows. In populo veritas.57

The peasant in this story is by no means an ideal spectator and the conclusion suggests a further contributory factor to misperception by adapting Pliny’s in vino veritas. But the irony does not disguise the positive connotation bestowed by Gauguin on ‘the people’ as on all the forms assumed by the primitive. The role of imaginative perception in the most ancient forms of representation had been recognized since the earliest inquiries into prehistory in relation to three-dimensional objects and subsequently rock paintings. In his Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (Celtic and Antedeluvian Antiquities, 1847), Jacques Boucher de Perthes had introduced zoomorphic and anthropomorphic ‘figure-stones’ which were to remain controversial until the First World War; certain prehistorians allowed that they carried the trace of human intervention, while others saw in them no more than lusi naturæ or freaks of nature – that is, accidents mistakenly taken to be images – or simply denounced them as the product of fraudulent manipulation.58 One of the issues in these debates was how far back the ‘need for figurative representation’ could be traced; those who defended the thesis of ‘retouched stones’ argued in favour of this need with the help of comparisons borrowed from antiquity 54

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Seeing Double (Baetylian cults) and anthropology (notably American and Oceanian ‘fetishes’). Louis Capitan summed up the theoretical aspect of the question in 1901: ‘ancient or contemporary ethnography and archaeology offer exceedingly ample evidence of the accuracy of the fact itself: attribution to a natural object, such as a stone, of a figurative form or a quality often inferred from its aspect, sometimes accompanied by artificial improvement of this form in order to render the figuration more exact’.59 The most ambitious effort to bring together the data of anthropology, prehistory, psychology and evolutionary biology was that of Tito Vignoli, the director of the natural history museum of Milan. In an essay entitled Mito e scienza (Myth and Science) he proposed to reduce ‘the primitive origin of myth, of dreams, of all illusions, of normal and abnormal hallucinations to one unique fact and genesis, to a fundamental principle; that is, to the primitive and innate entification of the phenomenon, to whatever sensation it refers’. 60 By ‘entification’ Vignoli meant the attribution of vital, conscious and intentional ontological properties to objects of perception. He also spoke of animation, ‘vivification’ and projection and connected to his notion the existing concepts of personification, animism and anthropomorphism. The author of a work on intelligence in animals, Vignoli further claimed that hominids had done no more than develop a faculty already integral to the conditions of animal perception, that is, to extend the animation of objects of perception to that of their memory-images and to the types of these objects and images.61 The result on his account was the worship of images and it was his view that the sense of an active presence (numen) never entirely vanished from artistic creations, even when this sense was liberated from its ‘mythical connections’.62 The source of myth was therefore to be found in perception itself, which he described as the ‘primordial mythical faculty’, whereas imagination, to which it was generally ascribed, was of course close kin to this faculty but did no more than elaborate in some further degree the spontaneous forms of perception.63 Mito e scienza was translated into German in 1880 and into English two years later but it was never translated into French and Gauguin never referred to it. Therefore the affinity of Vignoli’s theses 55

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with certain of his ideas, a subject to which I will return, should probably be attributed to common sources and preoccupations rather than direct causality. Indeed, the question of Gauguin’s intellectual ‘sources’ is a complex one and must be approached with care. He had received a good education – at a boarding school in Orléans, the Petit Séminaire de la Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, and for his last year of school, 1864, at the Orléans secondary school. He read a great deal in various fields but ideas also reached him through conversations, particularly with the often very cultivated young people by whom he was surrounded. In Polynesia, where his circle was more confined, he had access to a Dictionnaire des sciences in 50 parts and subscribed to the Mercure de France, which he read intently. There, for example, between 1895 and 1897, he read the French translation in instalments of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a book to which he had been introduced in conversation by Meyer de Haan in 1889.64 Philippe Verdier, who has attempted to reconstitute the vast range of sources used in L’Esprit moderne et le catholicisme, describes that work as the ‘De Natura Rerum of an improvised philosopher’, and Victor Merlhès speaks of ‘the relative intellectual confusion that many of his contemporaries observed in Gauguin, whose visual intuition was infinitely more . . . supple, effective and fertile than his discursive thought’.65 In 1899 Gauguin explained to André Fontainas, the art critic of the Mercure de France, that he read the magazine in order to be ‘in communion with others without becoming mingled with the crowd’ and because he loved ‘beautiful literature’. He did not do so in order to become well-read – ‘my brain is resistant to instruction’ – and in 1903 he spoke of philosophy as ‘an arm that we savages cobble together unaided’.66 And it is true that contradiction and obscurity are not lacking in his texts. The present study is primarily concerned with his ‘visual intuition’ or what one might call the ‘thinking in form’ constituted by his works. But this form of plastic thinking was nevertheless affected by verbalizations and can be illuminated by them. The 1903 text on philosophy continues by stating that philosophy ‘manifests itself not as a reality but as an image’. Gauguin’s reflections, whatever their origins, had a single centre and purpose: artistic creation. Thus in 1890 he wrote: 56

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Seeing Double

I have harnessed myself to a job that I had been vaguely formulating in my mind for a long time. Art and everything connected with it. As I advance in this work . . . I discover in life an entire relationship linking Everything with art, which includes almost Everything.67

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At the Origins Well before the development of the psychological sciences of the nineteenth century, artistic theory and practice had accumulated a wealth of observations and interpretations bearing on the active character of perception and its role in the creation and the reception of works of art. A connection was often established between imaginative perception, manifested notably in phenomena of mistaken perception, and the origin of images in the historic, poietic and aetiological senses. Christianity had condemned as ‘idols’ and ‘fetishes’ the images of the gods, including those of the Americas and subsequently of Oceania, in which Gauguin took a particular interest. In doing this, Christianity took over the aniconism of Judaism, which denounced the idols of the Gentiles as ‘works of man’s hand’ and denied any life to them in terms repeated by Jesus in his explanation of the parables: ‘They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes have they, but they see not; They have ears, but they hear not . . . They that make them shall be like unto them; Yea, everyone that trusteth in them’ (Psalms 115:5–6, 8). But Christianity had also multiplied and justified its own images of the divine, according an original status and particular prestige to those reputed to be acheiropoieta – that is, not made by human hand. Most of these were anonymously made but certain of them were ‘recognized’ in natural or crafted objects such as branches, bodily wounds, cavities in trees or the veins in polished stones. Psychological explanations of the effects of imaginative perception had also appeared since antiquity, when Aristotle discussed the errors of the senses produced by passion or fever, which he compared to the persistence of sensory impressions in dreams (On Dreams, ii.12), and above all in Philostratus in the third century ad. In his Life 57

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of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus has the neo-Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius say that forms seen in clouds are not caused by God drawing them ‘as children make figures in the sand’ but by men, who are ‘by nature prone to imitation’ and capable of creating likenesses ‘with the mind alone’ without recourse to the hand. 68 Philostratus moreover declared the superiority of the imagination (phantasia) over imitation (mimesis) and the rediscovery of his book during the Renaissance probably contributed to the representation of anthropomorphic clouds and rocks, a phenomenon particularly notable in the work of Andrea Mantegna. In 1462 (and possibly as early as the 1430s), Leon Battista Alberti hypothesized in his treatise De Statua that the first sculptors ‘occasionally observed in a treetrunk or clod of earth and other similar inanimate objects certain outlines in which, with slight alterations, something very similar to the real faces of Nature was represented’ and attempted to ‘supply whatever seemed lacking to effect and complete the likeness’.69 Around 1500, Leonardo advised painters to look at ‘old and smeared walls’ or ‘stones and veined marble’ in order to find in them the analogy (similitudine) of landscapes, battles and human figures.70 During the sixteenth century, hypotheses comparable to those of Alberti on the birth of sculpture were suggested concerning grottesche, the images inspired by the decor of Nero’s Domus Aurea, which function by hybridization and metamorphosis, oscillating between ground and figure and between ornament and representation, and bring together distinct categories by means of monsters and ‘intermediate things’.71 Giovanni Battista Armenini opined that they were ‘born of the holes and stains that one finds on walls which were at one time entirely white: if one examines them attentively, one makes out various fantasies and new forms of extravagant things which do not exist as such but are the fruit of our mind’.72 We have seen that in 1891 Gauguin was explaining his decision to go and live in Tahiti by his aspiration to render ‘the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true’. Already in the summer of 1888 Vincent Van Gogh was telling his brother: ‘Gauguin and Bernard are now talking about doing “children’s painting”.’73 This primitivism included in its pantheon 58

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Seeing Double the European ‘primitives’ of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and non-academic genres and traditions of ornament, caricature and popular arts. It obeyed the ‘recapitulation law’ proclaimed in 1874 by the German physiologist Ernst Haeckel in his ‘evolutionary history of man’ entitled Anthropogenie (Anthropogeny), according to which ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’.74 The stage of childhood must therefore correspond in the individual to that of the ‘childhood of peoples’ in the species, historically represented by prehistoric (or ‘fossil’) men and ethnologically by ‘primitives’. Like the ‘savage’, the child could guide the genius, in accordance with Baudelaire’s definition of genius as ‘childhood recaptured at will’.75 What can we say about Gauguin’s childhood? In spite of his references to childhood, his own has been little examined, no doubt because of the absence of documentary sources for the period that he spent in Peru between the ages of one and six, from November 1849 to the second half of 1854, in the company of his mother Aline and his elder sister Marie; his father Clovis, a Republican journalist, died of a ruptured aneurysm at the end of the outward voyage, which was probably undertaken in response to the election of Napoleon iii to the presidency of the Second French Republic.76 At most we know that the Gauguin family was welcomed in Lima by the maternal family of Aline, who was the daughter of Flora Tristán, in the residence of her great uncle Pío de Tristán y Moscoso. Gauguin himself spoke of his memories of Lima in 1903 in Avant et après, stating that he had ‘a remarkable visual memory’ and mentioning, among various anecdotes, the patrician house, the presidential monument and a church.77 His claim to be a man of ‘two races’ and, in particular, ‘Inca’, has been put down to his primitivism, and little attention has been given to the visual experiences by which his early childhood may have been marked other than in relation to his adult interest in pre-Hispanic ceramics (a point to which we shall return) – despite the importance that modern psychology tirelessly attributes to this early phase of development. In that context, we can scarcely exaggerate the place that the Catholic Church continued to occupy in the visual culture of Republican Peru, with its cult of images using statues of painted wood whose realism was enhanced by real clothes and hair, like the Spanish 59

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statues to which Huysmans was to compare the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, exhibited by Degas at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881.78 Renaissance and above all baroque art was a strong presence in Peru, not least in the form of grottesche, for instance in the azulejos of the cloister of Santo Domingo in Lima. Baroque ornament was also widely employed in the facades of the churches and the more magnificent private houses of the colonial period; it constituted a paradigmatic medium for the ‘hybridization’ with preHispanic visual traditions that is one characteristic of the colonial art of the Andean region.79 Among the notable features of this decoration is the treatment of surfaces in flat relief, close to the sculptural form that Gauguin particularly favoured (illus. 33, 96), and ‘phytomorphism’, meaning the representation of figures and graphic signs in plant form, one aspect of a tendency towards metamorphosis and the permeability of the biological realms. The greatest achievements of this ‘hybrid baroque’ are to be found in Arequipa, the second largest town in Peru, where Flora Tristán had stayed in 1833–4 in the residence of Don Pío, one of the more noticeable houses thanks to the framing of its doors and windows and to the puma-shaped gargoyles in the courtyard.80 The pediment of this building (illus. 22) is a fine example of phytomorphism: integrated into its sinuous vegetation are the letters of the monograms of the Holy Family and the figure of a little cherubim, which surround a symmetrical Jesse Tree or Tree of Life. The resemblance of this motif to the decoration of the drinks dispenser chosen and complemented by Gauguin (illus. 21) and with his own anthropomorphic plant in Ancien culte mahorie (illus. 184) is probably the result of complex affinities, analogies and mediations. But it is reasonable to wonder if, during the four years that they spent in Peru, the Gauguin family did not visit the Tristán family’s native city, of which Don Pío had once been mayor. In the next chapter we shall see that Gauguin often associated the representation of children – particularly his own children – with dreams and oneiric images. A little-known watercolour probably dating from 1888 or 1889 (illus. 23) shows a child undergoing an experience of imaginative perception.81 Their figures emerging from behind a hillock, a little Breton boy and a woman that one imagines to be his mother stand motionless, facing the landscape that opens 60

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22 Casa Tristán del Pozo, 1738, detail of sculpted pediment, Arequipa, Peru.

out before them across the picture space like stage scenery. On the right, a section of the landscape is framed by a tall tree and a curtain of undifferentiated trees. The elements composing this curtain seem to come together so as to suggest a face, the lighter leafage of two trees on the dark background of the forest marking the eyes while a tree and its shadow mark the nose and mouth. A cow (or goat) grazing at the foot of this tree supplies the element of animal life that may have attracted the attention of the child and triggered the animation of this corner of nature. The disproportion between this grotesque face and the little onlooker, the strange shadow that stretches in his direction from the scenery, the fascination that seems to have stopped him in his tracks – all these things have something menacing about them, perhaps related to the almost hallucinatory character of this mistaken perception. It seems unlikely that this schematic scene derives from direct observation; rather it resembles the narratives and ‘mythical’ images by which other artists have represented the origin of their vocation. Around ten years after this watercolour was painted, Redon began an autobiographical text with the following anecdote: ‘My father 61

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23 Paul Gauguin, untitled drawing (Woman and Child before a Landscape), n.d. (c. 1888–9).

often said to me: “Look at those clouds; do you not see in them, as I do, changing forms?” And there, in the mutable sky, he showed me the appearance of bizarre, chimerical and marvellous beings.’82 In 1906 Lyonel Feininger devoted a strip cartoon to the world of ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ – a child who ‘always has a battle with sleep before he’ll close an eye’ – and showed him pointing out to the artist anthropomorphic cliffs and clouds.83 In 1942 Salvador Dalí included in the chapter ‘False Childhood Memories’ of his autobiography a drawing representing a ‘“false memory” of a cloud of smoke resembling a human face perceived during a walk in the country with my father’.84 The way in which such anecdotes recur in verbal and figurative form suggests that they go beyond the individual context in which they appear and express a collective conception of artistic identity and activity, ascribing a founding role to childhood and imaginative perception.85 In Dalí’s drawing the father indicates the anthropomorphic smoke to the child by pointing, just as Redon’s father showed the images in the clouds to his son. In Feininger, whose story is not autobiographical, this initiatory relationship is reversed in accordance with the primitivist programme, in which the child is paradigmatic. 62

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Seeing Double Gauguin’s watercolour is located in Brittany where he painted and not in Peru where he grew up, but it perhaps contains an indirect autobiographical component: the boy depicted is not accompanied by a father – Gauguin’s father having died when the artist was sixteen months old – but by a mother figure. She leans towards the child but her attention is, like his, turned towards the landscape; we cannot know whether she is supposed to be sharing his vision since there is no pointed finger to indicate inter-subjective communication.

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Mistaken Perception, Motif and Theme Early in his life as a painter, Gauguin’s attention was focused ‘around the eye’ and more particularly on outdoor painting, in this following the models that he found first in the Barbizon school landscapes and subsequently, after 1879 at least, in those of the Impressionists, especially in the work of Camille Pissarro, with whom he had a friendly and competitive relationship.86 But he seems to have been sensitive to the latent anthropomorphism derived from Romanticism that one finds in Corot, Millet and Pissarro himself, especially in the treatment of trees. A Pissarro landscape of 1878 (illus. 24) acquired by Gauguin for his own collection may have interested him for this reason: the peasant woman with a red headdress who animates the landscape in Corotesque fashion is not walking along the path that winds through the trees but stands motionless, stationary amid the plant life like the trees that surround her, and more particularly like the one on the left that rises up in front of and leans towards her. In 1881 Gauguin echoed the essential aspects of this unspoken dialogue in a little nocturnal scene entitled Un coin du mur (effet de nuit) (Wall by Night) (illus. 25), probably set in the garden of the house that he occupied with his family: 8 rue Carcel in Vaugirard.87 The human figure is confronted with a single tree whose trunk separates into two more or less equivalent branches like two arms. The light filtering through the trees in the Pissarro has here become a lunar penumbra, creating strange shadows and making it difficult to identify anything. This ‘nocturnal effect’, emphasized by the subtitle chosen by Gauguin for the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 63

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24 Camille Pissarro, Woodland Scene, Spring, 1878.

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1882, is comparable to the ‘black atmosphere’ that he pointed out in 1889 in the work of Redon (illus. 16): it places in doubt the nature and very existence of the objects of perception and representation.88 We remember that Maury, in his work on dream of 1861, also mentioned darkness, along with fear and superstition, among the factors that might lead one to transform ‘some tree or ruinous moonlit wall of unexpected shape into ghosts, spectres, or brigands’.89 Gauguin seems to have been inspired by analogous observations and perhaps, indeed, by Maury, whose research was widely disseminated; in 1878, his book was already in its fourth edition.90 In 1883 Gauguin again echoed the general composition of Pissarro’s woodland scene in a landscape painted at Osny, a village in the Île de France, northwest of Paris, where the older painter was living (illus. 26). The path that leads sinuously into the picture space; the bank by which it is bordered on the right; the tall, outlined forms of the trees – here poplars – against the sky; and the forest that encloses the horizon are identical. By contrast, the two main figures of the Pissarro painting, the big tree on the left and the woman on the right, have no equivalent, unless their role is assumed by a strange detail (illus. 27). If we examine the wall that borders the path and masks its

25 Paul Gauguin,Wall by Night, 1881.

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26 Paul Gauguin, Path with Poplars, Osny, 1883.

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Seeing Double continuation we perceive that, at its top, in front of the tight group of poplars, is a convex form whose features clearly demarcate the upper portion of a head turned towards the left, with a wide-open eye. This presence is so incongruous that one at first doubts the evidence before one’s eyes – or simply fails to see it altogether. A close examination of the surface of the canvas nevertheless confirms this observation, while the small size and unexpected character of the double image have allowed it to pass unobserved or remain in doubt. Now it is precisely this capacity to leave the spectator in doubt that Gauguin later described as ‘logical’ in his description of Redon: ‘Is it truly a man or, rather, a vague resemblance?’ The proximity of this motif to the ‘ruinous . . . wall of unexpected shape’ evoked by Maury may also be no coincidence and the fact that Gauguin chose to represent his wall/head under the strong rays of summer sun rather than as another ‘nocturnal effect’ may indicate that he sought to show the ‘mystery’ that fascinated him in broad daylight. Finally we should note the similarity of form and colour that links this protuberance to the large haystack visible in the field to its right, since we have already noted that later Gauguin was to associate the motifs of stack and head (illus. 1, 2). The motifs that Gauguin selected as a landscape painter thus give early evidence of his sense of nature being animated and frequently contain the kind of confused mass of earth, stone and vegetation in which the painters of the Renaissance and the baroque perceived images created by ‘nature the artist’. Talus hivernal (Riverbank in Winter), painted in the Pontoise region (c. 1881–2, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen), allows the branches of an invisible spinney to emerge like so many horns.91 In a painting of 1885 (illus. 28) a grassy bank, suspended over the water in which it is reflected, looks like a bearded profile, presenting a remarkable analogy with one in a drawing by Jacob de Gheyn the Younger (illus. 29). This may be the picture included the following year in the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition under the title Un coin de mare (Corner of a Pond); like Wall by Night (illus. 25) (whose French title is literally translated as ‘A Corner of the Wall’), the title evokes Zola’s definition of art by emphasizing the role of ‘temperament’. This ‘corner of creation’ again reminds us that Creation is unfinished and also that Alberti imagined 67

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27 Detail of Path with Poplars, Osny.

sculpture born of the observation of ‘a tree-trunk or clod of earth or other similar inanimate objects’. The ambiguous natural objects in Gauguin are indeed very sculptural in kind and we shall go on to see that they appear in his ceramics. A final pictorial example emphasizes this link between ambiguity and spatiality, while pointing to the role played by Cézanne, whom Gauguin met in 1881 at Pontoise and about whom he wrote to Pissarro: ‘If he should find the recipe for concentrating the exaggerated expression of all these sensations into a single, unique procedure, I beg of you, try and make him talk in his sleep.’92 One of the views of the region’s quarries painted by Gauguin (illus. 30) is evocative of Cézanne in its ‘distorted and almost artificial space’, as Crussard has noted, but goes beyond this in the troubling use that it makes of the reversibility between ground and figure, a common proceeding in non-Western ornamentation and arts and one of the constituent devices of ‘picture puzzles’.93 The wall of the quarry, which lies behind the steep bank, seems to move in front of it when the green of the grass cover at midheight in the picture makes an unexpected turn towards the left. Below this wall, a dark, approximately square form is no doubt a tunnel – perhaps the one entirely visible in Pissarro’s La Carrière de l’hermitage 68

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Seeing Double à Pontoise (The Hermitage Quarry at Pointoise, 1878, private collection) – but its primary effect is to make us uncertain whether we should see it as convex or concave, especially as its beak-like ending on the left echoes, while inverting it, the right-hand outline of the top of the quarry face. One might perhaps be tempted to put this oscillation of ‘rapidly changing impressions’ down to Gauguin’s clumsiness had he not systematically experimented with the effect of such manipulations of space and had the dialectic of solid and hollow not been essential to his ‘ceramic sculptures’. One of these, which Merete Bodelsen has dated to the winter of 1887–8, after Gauguin’s return from Martinique, gives an explicit form to the natural images that the pictures only suggested. This vase, in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay (illus. 31), seems at first sight to represent the fragment of a tree trunk – a log, or more precisely a hollow tree stump. Its upper part is marked by two cavities corresponding to fallen branches, its centre by a slight vertical protrusion, perhaps a gnarl, and at the bottom by the double arc of the collar (where the tree meets the root).94 The surface is vermiculated like bark eaten away by woodworm and presents other incised motifs representing a naked young girl holding a mirror, along with peacocks and fishes. On the opposite side (illus. 32), a double branch or shoot emerges from halfway up the column, rises sinuously and terminates above the opening of the vase in two young female heads, each crowned with a star, leaning slightly to one side and facing forward. An onlooker, if not already aware of the fact, will, alerted by the fantastical character of these two heads and by the additional iconic level of the sgraffito figures, realize that the features of the stump also compose a face: the cavities are eyes, the protuberance is a nose and the double arc is a mouth (or thick moustache). The suspect symmetry of the whole indicates that this new aspect is intentional, a fact confirmed by the pupils painted into the depths of the cavities. Bodelsen describes the apparition of this face as a veritable metamorphosis; she finds it frightening, adding that another ‘terrifying face’ is visible in the mirror held by the girl.95 The same description might be extended to the young girls whose heads are raised like those of cobras and whose faces reduplicate the gaze of the trunk without 69

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28 Paul Gauguin, Red Roof by the Water, 1885.

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29 Jacob de Gheyn the Younger, Rocks Invaded by Plants, Configuring Grotesque Heads, first half of the 17th century, detail.

30 Paul Gauguin, Chou Quarry, Hole in Cliff, 1882.

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its emptiness. We might speak in this regard of the ‘uncanny’, the type of fear that in 1919 Freud explained as a return of the repressed. Freud suggests that the Unheimlich arises in particular when one ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate’ and links it with animism, ‘the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings’.96 As his text about Redon shows, Gauguin himself must have experienced this doubt – accompanied perhaps by fear and almost certainly by fascination – and he recognized both its ‘primitive’ quality (that of Alberti’s early sculptors observing ‘a trunk’) and its poietic virtue. Moreover, trees belong to the biological domain and we will see that Gauguin emphasized the continuity

31 Paul Gauguin, Stump-shaped Vase, c. 1887–8.

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of the various realms within what he was later to call ‘general life’. A polychrome wooden relief entitled Martinique (illus. 33) makes this clear. Two human heads lacking bodies – adult heads in this case – emerge from a tentacle-like trunk that forms the framework of the scene and seems integral with the very material of the work. The very visible neck of the right-hand head is at the same time a branch, while the trunk is regularly studded with cavities figuring other branches, branches cut off or having fallen off through selfpruning, which are analogous to the two ocular cavities of the Musée d’Orsay vase. These cavities also appear at the extremities of the branches and twigs, evocative of cupules in the botanical sense, and Gauguin has gilded them, like the fruit gathered by the two mon-

32 Stump-shaped Vase, side view.

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keys and the woman seated at the centre of the composition. Laurence Madeline has made the parallel between the scene and a letter written by Gauguin to his wife from Martinique, in which the artist complacently described the temptations to which he was exposed: Yesterday a young negress of 16 (and pretty, my word) came to offer me a guava that had been split and pressed flat at one end. I was going to eat it once the girl had left when a yellowskinned lawyer who was there at the time took the fruit from my hands and threw it away: You are European, Monsieur, and do not know the country, he told me. You mustn’t eat fruit without knowing where it comes from. This fruit has a spell on it; the negress has crushed it against her breast and you would surely be at her beck and call afterwards.97

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The formal analogy established in the relief between the fruits, which do indeed resemble guavas, and the breasts of the woman thus corresponds to a magical practice observed by Gauguin, one itself founded on an identification between body and plant, between sources of erotic and gustatory attraction.

33 Paul Gauguin, Martinique, 1888–9.

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Seeing Double The parallel with this relief indicates that the Musée d’Orsay Vase also bears witness to Gauguin’s Martinique experiences, his encounters with tropical nature and with techniques of enchantment belonging to what Lucien Lévy-Bruhl later called ‘mystic participation’ and ‘prelogical thought’.98 The Martinique relief and Gauguin’s letter to Mette also help us to understand the articulation of the various elements and iconic levels of the vase, which seem at first glance unrelated. Like the half-naked woman of the relief, the young girl with the mirror surrounded by peacocks is an object of temptation and the big head/stump is rather masculine. The position of the girl on the nose of the latter is thus rich in sexual and even olfactory implications. The heads that rise above the opening, for all that they have something childish about them, seem no younger than that of the young girl, so that all three perhaps represent temptresses obsessing a sort of hermit made one with his tree, as in the passage from Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Anthony in which the saint encounters a Hindu ascetic who was living in the trunk of a giant fig tree. 99 This interpretation can be supported by a resemblance between the head/stump and a selfportrait of Gauguin on the relief Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses (Be in Love and You Will Be Happy) (illus. 34), in which he plays the role of tempter by taking the hand of a naked woman seated in the same position as the young girl with the mirror. Seen from the back and above all from the side (illus. 32), the Stumpshaped Vase might suggest the contrary interpretation, one that is centrifugal rather than centripetal, in accordance with the metaphorical fields of the word souche (stump) and the terms associated with it. The French rester comme une souche means to remain motionless, like the hermit during his temptation; but the stump is also the stem or person from which a generation descends and the shoots are the new progeny produced by a stump, trunk or branch as well as the descendants of a family; the genealogical tree is the most evident visualization of this use of plant ontogenesis as a model of human phylogenesis.100 It is therefore also possible to see the girls as offspring of the head/stump; Gauguin, already the father of Mette’s five children, went on to produce several more offspring with his tropical lovers. 75

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The literary references that I have invoked, passing from Baudelaire to Flaubert – and they could easily be multiplied – suggest that the direct experience of natural images must have been enriched in Gauguin’s case by verbal elaborations of analogous experiences. And the same is true of the visual level. Haruko Hirota sees in the Musée d’Orsay Vase ‘the most representative work of Gauguin’s grotesque [style]’ and of his affinities with medieval popular art, comparing the raised heads to rooftop finials and to French pottery of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries such as a little bottle and a child’s whistle, both head-shaped, that were deposited in the Musée de Sèvres in 1863 and 1881 respectively.101 The French national museum of ceramics, established in 1876 in the new buildings at Sèvres, was directed by Champfleury, a specialist not only in faience but in popular imagery and caricature. In 1900 he acquired the body of an eighteenthcentury drink dispenser (illus. 35) that belongs to the type that Gauguin had appropriated (illus. 21) and shows the popular persistence of these motifs: faces proliferate on the recipient like buds on the surface of a tree trunk. This is a useful hint that the Vase, though it may appear frightening, is also comical, a combination typical of the grotesque genre and the carnivalesque tradition studied by Mikhail Bakhtin, to whom Hirota refers. The link with childhood, ontogenetic origin and the repertory of ‘prelogical thought’ is also relevant; the Vase, made after Gauguin had declared his admiration for the colour albums of the English illustrator Randolph Caldecott, might evoke tales such as Snow White or Cinderella.102 The Japanese prints that Gauguin introduced into his pictures as of 1888 (Crussard believes that he consulted these before leaving for Martinique), also draw inspiration from the metamorphoses that are so frequent in popular legends. The girls in the Vase could thus be compared to the rokurokubi, demons (or humans transformed into spirits) whose necks extended by night and that are known above all through a famous image by Hokusai and from his sketchbooks (manga).103 Non-European models played an obvious role in a slightly later vase (illus. 36) that is closely related on the thematic level. The overall shape is again that of a tree trunk, this time dividing into three branches; the first of these, leaning forward, frames a woman’s face (illus. 93). The two higher branches present four little excrescences 76

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34 Paul Gauguin, Be in Love and You Will Be Happy, 1889.

in the form of triangular animal heads, irregularly arranged. Two of these appear at the summit of the vase, like the heads of the girls on the Musée d’Orsay vase. Another excrescence, zigzag in shape, is applied on one side, to the left of the face, above one of the two E-shaped handles fixed on either side and inclining towards the face at 45 degrees. The thick yellow, brown and red glaze, whose flameshaped motifs are underlined in gold, sets the face apart: it is the only part not covered by them. This vase again represents a natural image, that of a trunk with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic aspects. The heads probably represent either the kind of shoot known as epicormic (growing out of the surface of the trunk) or thorns, whose points may evoke the ears or horns and muzzle of an animal. The face occupies the position of a scar left by a branch cut off at the base and the absence of glaze corresponds to the absence of bark. The naturalism of its features, 77

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35 Drinks dispenser, Normandy (?), 18th century.

unlike those of the head/stump, give little reason for thinking that it derives from an image perceived in the form of a tree, but I believe that Gauguin’s intention was to allude to this phenomenon, which has been documented both in Europe and in pre-Hispanic America.104 It is therefore incorrect to describe it as a ‘mask’ set into the trunk; it is a living face born of the tree or a human presence revealed in it. The face is European and might be that of a Breton woman, something suggested by the kind of coif formed by the folds of the bark that surround it, but the structure of the vase is inspired by preColumbian ceramics. Referring to Gauguin’s travels through Central America before he reached Martinique, Bodelsen has compared it to the Huastec pottery of Mexico.105 To me it seems closer to Peruvian 78

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ceramics, with which, as we have seen, Gauguin personally identified. The face strikingly resembles those of the Moche female ‘portrait vases’ framed by a veil (illus. 37). The animal heads, on the other hand, resemble the small feline heads placed on the front of Inca urpu (amphoras) at the point where the body of the container meets the neck. Unlike the Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot of 1889 (illus. 65), which more closely resembles masculine Moche vase-portraits, the structure of the Vase en forme de tronc avec visage féminin (Trunkshaped Vase with Female Face) has no antecedent in Peruvian ceramics. It is nevertheless reasonable to think that the Peruvian tradition inspired the principle of the work and encouraged Gauguin specifically

36 Paul Gauguin, Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face, 1887–8.

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to represent natural images. Another important motif of Moche ceramics is supplied by the imaginative perception of the tubers of food plants such as potatoes, manioc and, more rarely, marrow (illus. 38). In these recipients, the form of the plant remains clearly recognizable but the hollows and protuberances of their many swellings are interpreted as the heads, limbs and bodies of animals, humans and divinities, often engaged in violent or erotic interaction. These objects, sometimes described as ‘surrealist’, have recently been integrated into an overall interpretation of Moche ceramics by Jürgen Golte, who emphasizes their ambivalence: their iconic proliferation was an expression of cosmic fecundity, on which the survival of the human community depended, but their inchoate and monstrous forms connected them to the underground darkness and humidity of the ‘world below’, where their growth took place.106 We might add that the nodal points of the tubers’ animation, which are sometimes the only parts interpreted in anthrozoomorphic fashion, are what modern

37 Female portraitvase with stirrupshaped spout-handle, Moche culture, 1st–8th century ad.

80

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38 Potato-shaped vase with human face and stirrupshaped spouthandle, Moche culture, 1st–8th century ad.

languages even today call the ‘eyes’ of the root, that is, the places where a sprout will come through. Thus the ‘animist’ human eye perceived the life of the plant in those points where the plant’s morphology expressed the internal energy of its growth rather than projecting it onto them.107 The face in Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face nevertheless has nothing inchoate or grotesque about it, unlike that of the Stumpshaped Vase. Gauguin has bestowed a kind of interiority on it and thus emphasized a further ambivalence, one constituted by the relations of otherness and continuity connecting it with the trunk. Should we see in this face the provisional endpoint of an evolutionary shortcut, comparable to that in Il y eut peut-être une vision première essayée dans la fleur (There was Perhaps a first vision Attempted in the Flower) (illus. 15), a ‘first thought attempted in the tree’? Or should we rather see our fellow human at the heart of a ‘general life’ combining plant and animal life? Or, again, should we see in it evidence of humanity’s imprisonment in matter? That question must 81

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remain open. And it surely implies that the aspects suggested by Gauguin are at least as rich in questions as in answers. If, as he would have wanted us to, we see his works as parables, we should not understand by that term a coded story whose message can simply be exhausted by its decoding.

82

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Childhood, Dream and Wallpaper We have seen that Gauguin had a strong interest in the active and cognitive dimension of perception, such as it is revealed in the phenomena of mistaken perception and so-called natural or accidental images. His work also exhibits a parallel interest in mental images not caused by external stimuli, which from the early 1880s bears witness to his search for the ‘mysterious centre of thought’. Taine had stated that the ‘internal dream’ could either be in harmony with ‘external things’, in which case it was called perception, or dissonant with them, in which case it was called hallucination. And many authors, including Maury, considered ‘normal’ perception, daydreams, nocturnal dreams and hallucination as related and even continuous psychological phenomena. In the field of dream images, too, there are indications that Gauguin was acquainted with the scientific literature on the subject, which had since the 1860s been widely disseminated.1 But it would be wrong to see this as the unique and inevitable source of his reflections and thus neglect the role of personal and self-observation, which in any case had been very important for academic writers on dream; they themselves found part of their inspiration in the work of artists such as J. J. Grandville.2 Gauguin’s attention was primarily focused on his own entourage and in around 1875 he painted his young wife Mette (née Gad) stretched out asleep on a kind of sofa against the dark background of a plain, undecorated wall (Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles).3 The inward-directed attention of the sleeper finds visual expression in the grey halo outlined in black (probably a large oval cushion) that surrounds her head in profile. But the picture makes no allusion to the content of any dream that she might be having unless we choose 83

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to see such things in the turbulence of her long, pale robe or the few canvases placed on a blood-red cloth and turned towards the wall. This concentration on the subject is further emphasized in the Portrait d’enfant: Tête de Jean Gauguin (Head of Jean Gauguin) (illus. 39) of 1881, the first of a series of representations of the artist’s children either sleeping or dreaming; the latter is directly specified by the title of a picture of the same year, La petite rêve (The Little One is Dreaming) (illus. 40). The recently discovered work shows the head of a newborn baby, his eyes closed, lying back such that the top of the head is more or less horizontal and set on a rectangular base whose irregular upper surface suggests a collar (illus. 163). The autonomization of the head combined with the closed eyes implies the primacy and relative independence of the subject and his mental activity vis-à-vis sense data and the outside world. In the field of sculpture, it prefigures Constantin Brancusi’s Head of a Sleeping Child (1908), of which that artist made ever more abstract versions, increasingly tending towards an egg shape; the titles he bestowed on them were allegorical ones such as The Beginning of the World (1924).4 The

39 Paul Gauguin, Head of Jean Gauguin, 1881.

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40 Paul Gauguin, The Little One is Dreaming, 1881.

more realistic character of the Head of Jean Gauguin can give a fantastical or even macabre aspect to its bodily fragmentation – compare Redon’s Head of a Martyr (1877, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo) – and a trace of red matter left by Gauguin on the back of the head has led Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark to relate this work to the Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot of 1889 (illus. 65), in which the downward trails of red glaze suggest decapitation.5 But its solipsistic dimension seems to me more important and we shall see that this head of a newborn can be placed at the start of a series of metamorphoses leading through a natural image to an effigy of the divine (illus. 39, 153–59, 163). 85

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Between 1874 and 1883, a mere nine years, Gauguin had five children with Mette and lived with them until his financial disasters and decision to pursue an artistic career led him to live a life apart in 1885.6 The many representations that he made of his children testify to his close observation of them; works like The Little One is Dreaming or Clovis endormi (Clovis Asleep) (illus. 41) are not simply the products of an impoverished painter for whom the availability of an unpaid and motionless model is advantageous. There is a coherence between these two paintings, dated 1881 and 1884 respectively, that clearly suggests how Gauguin connected childhood with dream as a state of consciousness and a mode of thought. In this he was at one with the onirologists: it was Maury’s view that human ontogenesis led progressively from the deep ‘sleep’ of the foetus (which the Head of Jean Gauguin still resembles) to the full waking awareness of the adult. 7 One of the two pictures represents Aline, who was then nearly four, and the other Clovis at around five years old; the apparent gender inversion as it strikes today’s spectator is explained by Aline’s capillary problems and Clovis’s long hair, which was cut only when he left his early childhood behind.8 One is not tempted to speak of portraits, given that Aline has her back turned and her face towards the wall, but Gauguin seems to observe the sleep rituals of his children: his daughter with a blanket between her feet and his son keeping by his side a familiar white-swaddled object. Perhaps the musical bar above Aline’s head also alludes to this. The position of her head directs the spectator’s attention towards the part of the wall above the dado rail, whose light green is enlivened by silhouettes of birds and leaves. In the realistic context of this representation of one corner of a flat, it seems to be a depiction of the kind of wallpaper that became widespread in the last third of the nineteenth century in the bedrooms that the middle classes were then beginning to create for children. Thus an English author, who devotes a few pages to wallpaper in a work dated 1881 on the decoration of townhouses, recommends birds and flowers alongside ‘illustrations of fairy lore’ as among the subjects liable to ‘incline the thoughts of our little ones to all that is graceful and beautiful in the imaginative faculties’.9 Yet the motifs in the painting do not repeat as they would on wallpaper and we must infer that Gauguin was representing a 86

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mural (presumably his own) or else admit that, under the auspices of representing a part of the bedroom’s decor, he represented something else, namely the mental activity of his little daughter. This hypothesis is confirmed by Clovis Asleep, in which Gauguin has not troubled to place the sleep in a realistic context and has laid out just above the head of the sleeper a similar decorative area, whose white motifs stand out on a blue background. The idea that the background of these two pictures evokes dream images appearing in the sleep of the children has been gradually adopted by the critics but its importance cannot be overstated, since The Little One is Dreaming antedates by seven years La Vision du

41 Paul Gauguin, Clovis Asleep, 1884.

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sermon (The Vision of the Sermon) (illus. 43) in which, Gauguin said, the background scene exists ‘only in the imagination of the people praying’.10 In the same years in which he was painting Wall by Night and Path with Poplars, Osny (illus. 25–27), in which I have suggested that we see allusions to imaginative perception, Gauguin was thus painting plants and animals that existed ‘only in the imagination’ of the children whose sleep is depicted. The means that he used to do this and the discretion that he showed are significant in themselves. In the context of perception, the wallpaper was recommended for children’s rooms because of the psychological impact attributed to it and the literature of the time contains numerous references to its value as a stimulus to daydream (for adults as well as children) and in particular to its influence on the liminal states between sleep and waking. In her novella The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) the American feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman attributed psychopathogenic influence to wallpaper; an obsessive motif drives the heroine to madness and she declares: ‘I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before.’11 The ontological ambiguity of the dreamlike wallpaper of The Little One is Dreaming and Clovis Asleep fits well with the virtues of abstraction that Gauguin ascribed in 1888 and 1889 to decoration, when he compared the flowers of a Persian rug to the features of his own face (illus. 11) appearing ‘on a pure chrome yellow ground studded with childish bouquets – a pure young girl’s bedroom’.12 This ambiguity is also connected to the context in which the notion of the parable first appears in Gauguin: the very perspicacious observation (which we have already noted) that the backgrounds in Cézanne’s pictures ‘are as imaginative as they are real’.13 Why plants and birds? These are motifs frequently employed in decoration, particularly decoration for children. Moreover, we should remember that Maury compared the development of humanity not only to the gradual passage from ‘complete sleep to the state of complete wakefulness’ but also to biological evolution going from ‘simple vegetation’ to humanity, passing ‘through all the stages of animal life’.14 The elements chosen by Gauguin therefore evoke this ‘primitive’ biological state in consonance with the psychological state of dream and the ontogenetic state of early childhood. Furthermore, the painted 88

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Dreams and Visions motifs are ambiguous: the ‘leaves’ of The Little One is Dreaming might also be seen as small birds and the ‘plant’ forms of Clovis Asleep are not easily identifiable. This ambiguity matches the properties of the mental images identified by the onirologists, in particular the images that Maury described as ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’, which are associated with the intermediary states between waking and sleeping at the points of transition between the two.15 Insisting on the continuity between these hallucinations and oneiric images as such, the sinologist and neurologist the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys described them as ‘very embryonic visions’ that were nevertheless endowed with the ‘characteristic of transition via the abstraction of sensible forms’ that he considered typical of dream.16 The frontispiece of his book (illus. 42), which appeared in 1867, juxtaposes a mimetic representation of a narrative dream with a series of abstract images of these ‘visions’; he described them as luminous and dynamic apparitions ‘rather similar to the fine arabesques that decorate the backgrounds of Byzantine pictures’, thus comparing them to the ‘decorative’ parts of a form of painting then regarded as ‘primitive’.17 An allegorical and biographical interpretation of the wallpaper in The Little One is Dreaming has been put forward by Mikael Wivel, who suggests that we see an image of Gauguin as paterfamilias in the bird perched on a nest to the left and the symbol of his dreams of escape in the bird flying at the centre of the picture.18 Henri Dorra interprets the birds and the puppet (a subject to which we shall return) as ‘metaphors for a father’s hopes and fears about his child’s future’.19 We might cite in support of this identification the letter in which Gauguin wrote that he was ‘made only for the storm appearing like Satan’s birds [storm petrels] on the crests of the waves and laughing at calamity’. 20 But allusions of this kind could be multiplied at will and are bound to remain hypothetical. The wall is not so much a place of ‘parabolic’ expression for Gauguin as an evocation of the internal space of the child. Birds, associated in the ‘hybrid’ Catholicism of Peru with angels and in Oceanian cultures considered a ‘shadow’ of the divine, are an almost universal image of the mind soaring free. Finally, we should attend to the central role played in both pictures by objects: the bearded puppet wearing a jester’s costume and 89

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42 Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denys, frontispiece to Dreams and How to Guide Them, 1867.

a pointed bonnet hanging from Aline’s bed, and what is perhaps a swaddled doll placed beside Clovis, along with the wooden beer mug that hides his left hand. The puppet and the ‘doll’ are the children’s companions and form part of both ‘objective’ physical reality and their subjective imaginary world. Following the analysis of the paediatrician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, these are ‘transitional objects’ situated in ‘an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute’; as first external possessions, they assist the child in its progress towards objectivity.21 The very specific appearance of the red puppet is perhaps laden with 90

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Dreams and Visions allusions; it is reminiscent of the narrative world of fairy tale and introduces an element of affective ambivalence that can be connected with the dark bird, especially if we associate that bird with the motif of the storm petrel. The fact that Clovis’ ‘doll’ is both portrayed in detail and difficult to identify indicates that it is either a common object knowingly represented from an unexpected point of view or, more probably, an ad hoc object made for the child; the parts visible above the cloth look strangely like a plant and present a series of ‘eyes’ analogous to those of Moche tuber-shaped ceramics (illus. 38).22 The large pot, meanwhile, represents a tine (Norwegian wooden beer mug) dating from the eighteenth century. It stood 22 cm tall and was brought to Paris by Mette; Gauguin included it in three other pictures.23 We know, then, that Gauguin was attracted by this object but he nevertheless chose not to detail its carved lion decoration (one such lion forms the top of the handle). This allows the tine to turn towards the sleeping Clovis an ambiguous aspect, slightly threatening and vaguely zoomorphic or even teratomorphic. The picture insinuates that the tine acts on the child’s dreams and anticipates turn-of-the-century reflections on the psychological impact of interior decoration. Thus André Fontainas wrote in 1895 that ‘the decorative work of art is a perpetual provocation to unexpected meditation, to a continuous enhancement, indeed a maturation of the thinking being in us.’24 This invisible influence, exerted on an unconscious subject, is not unlike hypnosis or ‘suggestion’ as Hippolyte Bernheim had just defined it: the ‘act by which an idea is introduced into the brain and accepted by it’.25 The fact that the author of this action is here an object rather than a person emphasizes the agentival quality that Gauguin attributed to the products of art and craft. Clovis Asleep, moreover, prefigures Still-life with Laval’s Profile (illus. 3) in its confrontation between a ceramic piece and a person with closed eyes. The tine is not one of Gauguin’s sculptures but a popular object that he appropriated by representing it, as he was later to appropriate the drinks dispenser (illus. 21). The influence over Clovis’s imagination that the picture ascribes to the tine may be based on a fascination that Gauguin observed in his child. But it may also indirectly testify to the impact on Gauguin himself of the objects to which he was exposed during his own early childhood in Peru. 91

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The Vision of the Sermon The novelty that The Vision of the Sermon (illus. 43) introduced into Gauguin’s work was therefore a relative one; it was more a case of making things explicit. Its public impact was nevertheless considerable, since it allowed the critic Albert Aurier to proclaim Gauguin a representative of ‘Symbolism in painting’ and make of him the hero – the status was contested but had to be taken into account – of a new artistic paradigm.26 The title The Little One is Dreaming, used in 1882 at the Seventh Exhibition of the Independent Artists, placed the spotlight firmly on the sleeping subject, whose dream-visions could be passed off as wallpaper. The title The Vision of the Sermon, used in 1889 at the sixth exhibition of Les XX (Les Vingt) in Brussels, made of the mental image the subject of the picture, and the same is true of the title that Gauguin first thought of: Apparition.27 In addition, the formal and more particularly the colour treatment of the background unequivocally suggests that, as Gauguin wrote in September 1888 to Van Gogh, ‘the landscape and the struggle [of Jacob with the Angel] exist only in the imagination of the people praying after the sermon that is why there is a contrast between the natural-looking people and the struggle in its disproportionate and unnatural-looking landscape.’28 The presence of the priest in the lower-right corner – probably a late addition, in which some see the features of the artist – is consistent with this, since the title also indicates that the vision was induced by the sermon.29 This is therefore a situation involving suggestion (in the sense defined by Bernheim) and it is characteristic of such a situation that there are no men among the congregation; the psychologists were unanimous in attributing to women and children a greater ‘suggestibility’ and a more marked tendency towards visualization, something that Francis Galton in 1883 described as the ‘visionary tendency’. 30 Unlike what happens in The Little One is Dreaming and Clovis Asleep, the mental image here concerns adults and makes its appearance in broad daylight. Yet it does not give the impression of a hysterical hallucination, such as we find in Julien Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices (1879, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); it is presented as forming part 92

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43 Paul Gauguin, The Vision of the Sermon, 1888.

of the normal experience of popular religion. In his letter to Van Gogh, Gauguin felt that he had ‘attained a grand rustic and superstitious simplicity in the figures’, thus aiming for a congruence between style and subject, and we remember that Maury mentioned superstition as one of the causes of mistaken perception. With Alexandre Brière de Boismont, Maury was one of the first authors to propose psychopathological explanations for religious phenomena and ‘retrospective diagnosis’ received a good deal of publicity in the Third Republic thanks to its anticlerical side and to the success of the Salpêtrière School.31 But Gauguin used the word ‘superstitious’ in a positive sense and The Vision of the Sermon is by no means a rationalist critique 93

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of Catholicism; according to his own words and the testimony of Emile Bernard, he intended it for the Trémalo chapel in Nizon, near Pont-Aven.32 Gauguin’s attitude is rather that of an anthropologist and the Breton context of the scene is as important as the gender of the figures. Brittany was a favourite destination for painters in search of picturesque subjects (and of cheap accommodation and models); it was indeed ‘this wild and proud country where superstition is still pervasive’, as Maupassant wrote in 1880.33 In this peripheral region of France, strongly attached to its Celtic substrate and its pre-Revolutionary traditions, everyday life was imbued with religion and its Christianity, like that of Hispanic America, encompassed pre-Christian elements. The ‘disenchantment of the world’ – that is, according to Max Weber, the replacement of magical means of understanding the world and acting on it by an intellectualist belief in scientific and technical rationality – could seem never to have taken place there. 34 In his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (Memories of Childhood and Youth, 1883), Ernest Renan wrote that, coming from Brittany to Paris in 1836, he had seen ‘things as new’ as if he had been ‘suddenly landed in France from Tahiti or Timbuktu’ and that he had experienced nothing less than ‘the passage from one religion to another. There was as much difference between Christianity as I left it in Brittany and that which I found current in Paris, as there is between an old piece of cloth, stiff as a board, and a bit of fine cambric.’35 It was in Arles, shortly after his arrival from Brittany late in October 1888, that Gauguin bought a long roll of jute as a support for his pictures and those of Van Gogh. But very early in the year, he also found a material image to explain to Schuffenecker what he had experienced at Pont-Aven: ‘I love Brittany, there I find the wild and the primitive. When my clogs clatter on this granite soil, I hear the strong, dull, muffled sound that I am looking for in painting.’36 This synaesthetic transmutation from acoustic to chromatic tone reminds us of Gauguin’s reference, in the context of Persian carpets, to ‘the listening eye’; The Vision of the Sermon gives a further example of this in the transmutation of the sermon into vision. Is this ‘hallucination’ (in the neutral, generic sense defined by Taine) therefore 94

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Dreams and Visions unsupported by ‘external things’, as Gauguin seems to suggest in his letter to Van Gogh? The ‘landscape and the struggle’ effectively attain a status as ambiguous as the oneiric wallpaper in the The Little One is Dreaming, since the spectator has no access to ‘another’ reality surrounding the figures. They seem to experience the vision not during the sermon and inside the church but in the open air after the service has ended, a hypothesis confirmed by the position of the priest. This would also explain why the picture has often been baptized The Vision After the Sermon. Moreover the cow to the left of the tree does not belong to the biblical subject of the vision: Jacob wrestling with the angel. Noting the complex ‘counterpoint between reality and illusion’ developed in this picture, Mark Roskill sees in it ‘the suggestion . . . that the four legs and horns of a cow have been transformed by the peasant imagination into the shapes of the struggle itself’.37 The resemblance between the outline of the animal and the combined outline of the wrestlers is as undeniable as their symmetry in relation to the tree, which commentators almost all consider a kind of ontological threshold. The hypothesis of a meta morphosis is therefore convincing at the formal level and Gauguin’s professions of interest in phenomena of mistaken perception, as we have seen, make it plausible. We might further observe that in the watercolour Woman and Child before a Landscape (illus. 23), a cow is grazing at the foot of the tree central to the section of nature that the child sees as a face. I have suggested the consideration that the presence of this animal contributes to ‘animate’ the landscape. The cow in The Vision of the Sermon is visibly agitated and perhaps attached to the tree like the animal promised to the winner of the wrestling contests organised to mark Breton religious festivals; it is well contrived to suggest, kinetically and kinaesthetically, Jacob’s resistance to his supernatural adversary. Gauguin, moreover, wrote: ‘The cow is very small relative to the truth [or: ‘compared to real-life’) and is bucking.’38 The unexpected pose of Jacob and the angel has been related to sketches of wrestlers included in the Hokusai Manga (illus. 44).39 Gauguin’s interest in these two plates may well have consisted precisely in the fact that the two wrestlers are so mixed up as to sometimes give the impression of four-footed beasts. With this analogy we have 95

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44 Katsushika Hokusai, Wrestlers, 1816.

45 Paul Gauguin, preparatory sketch for The Vision of the Sermon, 1888.

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Dreams and Visions entered the terrain of ‘dual-purpose parabolic meaning’ and it seems likely that Gauguin made still further use of it in this programmatic work. The tree, which Gauguin’s letter identifies as an apple tree, deserves our close attention. In a quick sketch registering the first idea of the picture (illus. 45), Gauguin was already presenting the tree leaning to the left but otherwise symmetrical, whereas in the picture he gave it a serpentine trunk, foliage on one side only and an irregular outline, marked on the left by protuberances and on the right by two branches that meet, forming an almond shape between them. These characteristics can give it a vaguely zoomorphic aspect, anticipating the big tree placed by the side of the water in Fatata te miti (illus. 168) and Parau na te varua ino (illus. 169). During the winter of 1887–8 Gauguin had already melded tree and human in Stumpshaped Vase (illus. 31) and Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face (illus. 36). In a Breton scene usually dated 1889–90 (illus. 46) he played with the formal analogy between cow horns and the newgrowth branches of a group of trees in order to animate the trees, which resemble heads even more thanks to the ‘eyes’ made by truncated branches on one and the head-shaped outline of the right-hand one.40 They are pollarded willows – that is, trees ‘polled’ or trimmed to stimulate the production of withies for basket-making. This language (‘poll’ historically meaning ‘head’, an etymology more immediately perceptible in the French equivalents têtard and étêter) is the result of a secular or even millenarian perception and it may have supplemented the continuous effect of sensorial stimuli to encourage Gauguin to represent them in this way. The most significant aspect of the tree in The Vision of the Sermon lies in the two young branches, which are, incidentally, as supple as willow wands and meet in a way contrary to all botanical logic. The motif may have been inspired by his observation of two branches passing one in front of another, a detail that Gauguin’s ‘Synthetist’ style allowed him to omit.41 He may also have been encouraged by a Hiroshige print of a Japanese example of a tree producing natural images (illus. 47), the ‘Moon Pine’ in the precinct of the temple at Ueno. It was so called because, by looking from different points of view, one could discern the different phases of the moon in the circle made by a branch curling round on itself, which 97

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46 Paul Gauguin, Study for Cow and Peasant Woman in Sunken Lane, 1890.

Hiroshige used to frame a detail of the landscape. Such play with imagery, which exploits the high degree of abstraction inherent in prints, is close kin to Gauguin’s pan-semiotic reflections and has been compared by Focillon to the popular taste for puns and the role of polysemy in waka poetry. Focillon said about Hokusai: ‘the erudite take pleasure in grammatical ambiguities and logogryphs; they make the meaning of tanka turn on the notorious “pivot-words” [kakekotoba].’42 The joining branches of The Vision of the Sermon point in the direction of the wrestlers and echo the angel’s wings. They also form a large eye, clearly visible in a sketch (illus. 48) that Gauguin sent to Van Gogh with his letter of 25–27 September, a sketch that must have been made when the picture was already well advanced and perhaps almost finished, for the figure of the priest is 98

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Dreams and Visions absent. This is a very selective sketch, which gives a graphic indication of the elements most important to Gauguin, and includes other eye motifs and real and potential gazes: the closed eye of the woman in the lower-left corner, the puckered eye of her neighbour and the symmetrical arabesque in the centre of the coif at the base of the tree. The last of these is made up of knotted ribbons that produce two almond shapes in the picture, one open and the other closed. James Kearns pointed to the ‘faint but distinct elements of a head, part animal, part devil’ in the coif on the far right, beside the priest.43 These are constituted by slight, bluish modulations in the lower part of the coif, which give the impression of a pentimento and do indeed resemble two eyes and a nose, comparable to those of the Breton woman whose face appears above that of the woman in the lower-left corner. In his letter to Van Gogh, Gauguin wrote: ‘The two bonnets on the right are like monstrous helmets’ and he also gave them the appearance of masks. One year later, he was describing to Van Gogh the medieval character of Breton peasants: ‘Here everything is as crude as the Breton language, closed tight (forever, it would seem) – The costumes are almost symbolic, influenced by the superstitions of Catholicism. See the back of the bodice a cross, the head wrapped in a black headscarf like nuns’.44 The sketch accompanying this observation is on the page of a sketchbook and on the opposite page is a schematic drawing (illus. 49) that explicates the physiognomic quality of a Breton coif seen from the back.45 Gauguin was not the only one to perceive the suggestive qualities of these coifs, whose local variations were a proud expression of identity; Maurice Barrès, discussing the ‘thousands of ingenious and simple coifs’ worn by Breton women, had written in more erotic fashion, two years before, ‘At Quimper, strange and mystical costume, young women wear in their hair a slender ivory phallus. This the sages once required of them for who knows what ritual.’46 James Kearns has proposed interpreting the positions and attitudes of the Breton women in The Vision of the Sermon in terms of spiritual distance relative to the vision. Progress towards illumination would thus lead from the kneeling women in the distance to the one who raises her head and opens her eyes, via the monstrous coifs and the woman with closed eyes.47 One difficulty with this reading is its 99

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47 Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige, Moon Pine, Ueno, 1857.

48 Paul Gauguin, sketch after The Vision of the Sermon, 1888.

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49 Paul Gauguin, sketch of Breton costumes and coif-face, c. 1888.

suggestion that the closed eye denotes blindness and the open eye discernment, whereas we have already seen the reverse not only in the representation of dreamers but also in Still-life with Laval’s Profile (illus. 3). In The Vision of the Sermon too, the closing of the physical eye is a prelude to and condition of the opening of the eyes of the spirit. The eyes of the priest are also downcast. The ontological divide separating the audience from the combatants means that the former can only perceive the latter internally and it is very unlikely that access to the vision is represented by the gaze of the woman whose profile head is raised; visual access is in any case interrupted by the trunk. Vision, on the contrary, requires a submission expressed both in the posture of Jacob, overmastered by the supernatural messenger, and in that of the woman with joined hands, of whom one might reasonably say that she too is ‘dreaming before’ nature. As in Dürer’s engravings, nature thus takes part in the sacred action, on the one hand by supplying the materials for a mistaken perception that awakens the internal eye and on the other by imitating the form of the organ of ‘vision’ in the double sense of perception and mental representation.48

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Manaò tupapaú The work that Gauguin considered the most important of his first stay in Tahiti, Manaò tupapaú (illus. 50), also deals with dream and vision and takes up many elements from the works that we have just examined. According to the explanations that Gauguin gave – in this case there are a great many – it represents his mistress Teha‘amana, lying in the dark on the bed of their hut at Mataiea, terrified by the ut ¯ pa¯pa‘u (ghost) seen in profile on the left.49 The scene is nocturnal and the principal figure is represented in bed like Aline in The Little One is Dreaming (illus. 40); though her gaze is not directed towards the ut ¯ pa¯pa‘u, her eyes are open. It might therefore be thought that the ghost exists ‘only in the imagination’ of the woman, like the struggle between Jacob and the angel for the Breton women in The Vision of the Sermon (illus. 43). The upper part of the canvas moreover shows ambiguous motifs that resemble those in the background of The Little One is Dreaming and Clovis Asleep (illus. 41). However, Gauguin did not specify, by terms such as ‘dream’ or ‘vision’, the ontological status of this half of the picture and confined himself to giving this translation of its Tahitian title: ‘Manao Think believe / Think about or believe in the ghost / tupapau Spirit of the Dead or Ghost / watches over her’.50 Mana‘o does indeed – as a verb – mean ‘think’ and ‘believe’ and, as a noun, ‘thought, idea, conception’. Its use designates a mental representation without specifying whether it corresponds to an external reality, in the manner of the generic sense of ‘hallucination’ proposed by Taine. In his letter to Mette, Gauguin nevertheless indicated ‘For the Kanaks, night phosphorescence is the spirit of the dead they believe in it and are frightened’.51 Here again we find the factors that, according to Maury, facilitate non-pathological hallucination: darkness, superstition and fear. Maury gave another example of the tendency towards hallucination, one that might be compared with Manaò tupapaú: ‘I knew an old servant, very liable to hypnagogic hallucinations, and who was so frightened by the ugly figures she saw that she would always keep a lighted lamp by her bed.’52 Gauguin described the effect of the tu¯pa¯pa‘u as follows: ‘For the Kanaks it is constant fear – By night a lamp is always lit. Nobody 102

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50 Paul Gauguin, Manaò tupapaú, 1892.

goes by road when there is no moon unless they have a lantern and even then they go about with several others.’53 Though the subject of Manaò tupapaú is presented as a singular event happening to an individual, it thus refers to a collective belief, like that of The Vision of the Sermon, continuing at the colonial outer edge of the Western world the anthropological thinking begun by Gauguin at the outer edge of France. The scene of Manaò tupapaú is also linked to the phenomenon of dream, as is clear from its kinship with the images of Gauguin’s sleeping children. The background of the picture, which in the context of Mataiea cannot be thought to represent wallpaper, nevertheless 103

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presents analogous motifs that are ornamental without regular repetition. From right to left, we distinguish a white flower on the end of a stalk, which seems to come from the hand of the tu¯pa¯pa‘u; a long, serpentine stalk ending on the left in a leaf and on the right, after another white flower, in a tail; at the very top a large white flower, whose centrifugal outline resembles that of a bird in flight; further to the right, a dark-blue flower can only just be made out; and, to the far right, another elongated form, whose clearly outlined form is reminiscent of a peacock and whose head – like that of the snake held by Gauguin in his Self-portrait with Halo (1889, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc) – also resembles a stalk. The abstraction and ambiguity of these motifs, which combine plant and animal aspects, connect to the ornamental domain praised by Gauguin in relation to the Lion Frieze (illus. 10). The fact that they constitute a further example of the representations of dream made in 1881 and 1884 is shown by the long central stalk, which develops the motif placed just above the head of the sleeper in Clovis Asleep (illus. 41): a shorter but similarly serpentine stalk with two leaves or petals to the left and ending to the right in a sort of tuft of feathers anticipating the white flowers of Manaò tupapaú.54 These flowers are the only element of the decor mentioned by Gauguin in his letters to Mette (‘There are some flowers in the background but they mustn’t be real because they’re imaginary, I make them look like sparks’) and to Monfreid: ‘These flowers are at the same time like phosphorescence in the dark (in her mind).’ Some authors have suggested identifying them as the flowers of the hutu or hotu (Barringtonia asiatica), a tree whose fruit is used to catch fish by intoxicating them. It has flowers that do indeed open during the night, shine by moonlight and fall by morning. 55 But they also represent oneiric images and more precisely ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’ such as Hervey de Saint-Denys verbally and visually described (illus. 42) when emphasizing their dynamic character: he spoke of ‘little luminous wheels, little suns spinning rapidly on themselves, little bubbles of various colours that rise and fall, or again fine threads of gold, silver, or emerald green that seemed to intersect or roll themselves up symmetrically in a multitude of different ways, constantly atremble’.56 104

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Dreams and Visions Maury attributed the ‘ugly faces’ that frightened his old servant woman to hypnagogic hallucinations and thought that these also caused the visions of anchorites and mystics.57 Vignoli, who thought that the ‘entification’ of objects of perception had been extended by humans to memory images of these objects and thence to their types, argued that the belief in the apparition of dead people or of their ghosts came from visions that one had had of them in dream.58 It is also worth noting that in ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’ (‘The Afternoon of a Faun’), the poem that, around 1892, inspired a sculpture of the same name by Gauguin (illus. 97, 98, 110, 111), Mallarmé had described a faun mistaking ‘a dream’ or a flight of swans on the ‘fringes of a placid mere in Sicily . . . Silent beneath the blooms of brilliant light [sous les fleurs d’étincelles, beneath the flowers of sparks]’ for the naiads that he desires, thus associating the unexpected image of the flower-spark with the theme of mistaken perception. 59 Another poem, belonging to the reception of Manaò tupapaú, casts precious new light on the picture since it was written by Jarry in June 1894 at the Hôtel Gloanec, where Gauguin too was staying and working on the woodcuts intended to illustrate Noa Noa, one of which offers a variant of this picture (illus. 132). This poem, entitled Manao tùpapaù, begins with a line that confirms the connection between the background picture and hypnagogic images, that is, those that appear during the transition between the waking and sleeping state: ‘The wall is already going to sleep’.60 He then evokes ‘Olympia lying / brown on the scatter / of golden arabesques’, alluding to the motifs of the pareo (the printed fabric used as clothing in Tahiti), which Gauguin said that he had used as the bed cover because it was ‘intensely connected to the existence of a Kanak woman’.61 At the first sign of the appearance of the ‘Spirit of the dead’, the text continues: ‘The arabesque is startled / and flees like a snake’. This animation of the decorative motif corresponds to a critical strategy that Jarry was later to apply to works by Charles Filiger, Félix Vallotton and Albrecht Dürer. Here it primarily responds to Gauguin’s artistic strategy. Though there is no serpentine form in the pareo of Manaò tupapaú, it does have a large flower motif presented beneath Teha‘amana’s thighs that includes three elements clearly constituting a face: ‘A flower that might be a face or a face 105

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that might be a flower’, we might say, paraphrasing the article in the Moderniste Illustré.62 The smile on this face seems malicious, unheimlich in the primary sense, and its abstraction connects it to the profile of the ut ¯ pa¯pa‘u. The ghost leans against the vertical element representing a post, part of the architecture of the hut, which remains otherwise indistinct. This post is inspired by the pillars of funerary or ceremonial houses, often sculpted in the form of tikis, which symbolically represented the ancestors of the community.63 Gauguin has represented not a sculpted but a painted pillar, whose ‘decorative’ abstract forms delineate, in the upper part, an asymmetrical motif of concentric circles producing an effect like staring eyes. This motif derives from the sculpture and tattoos of the Marquesas Islands and can be connected to a representation of the creation god Ta‘aroa in Ancien culte mahorie (illus. 179). E. S. Craighill Handy cites a song from the Society Islands in which Ta‘aroa is defined as ‘the gods’ house; his backbone was the ridge pole, his ribs were the supporters’. 64 The theomorphic aspect of the pillar in Manaò tupapaú is therefore in accordance with Polynesian symbolism and explains its visual solidarity with the tu¯pa¯pa‘u, to the extent that the cult of the dead and that of the gods formed a continuum. This very discreet aspect is confirmed in the versions of Manaò tupapaú that Gauguin engraved on wood (illus. 132) and on stone (illus. 51). In the lithograph, the corner of the composition (inverted by the process) where the pillar stands becomes overtly mythological with the inclusion of the face of a va¯rua (spirit) above the tu¯pa¯pa‘u and of the figure of Hina (goddess of the Moon) on the far right. The addition of pupils makes the potential gaze of the pillar decoration focus upward and the upward thrust of the pillar thus participates in this transcendent dimension. In the top-left corner of the engravings, the form reminiscent of a peacock has been replaced by a large undulating band. A Marquesan face motif is carved into this in the woodcut, while in the lithograph this band contains the artist’s monogram and a symmetrical ornamental motif that also gives the effect of looking upwards. These continuations of the picture in engraved form reinforce the ‘abstract’ pole of the representation, which was nourished by Gauguin’s interest in Oceanian art and which he used to evoke the ancient Polynesian culture, just as he had used 106

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51 Paul Gauguin, Manao tupapau, 1894–5.

‘rustic and superstitious simplicity’ to evoke the Old Testament vision of the Breton women. Relative to the world of the ancestral notions that thus return in the nocturnal hut, the body of Teha‘amana, though treated in a ‘synthetic’ manner remote from the naturalism then dominant in Paris painting, is stylistically and ontologically antithetical. The Cahier pour Aline (illus. 52) specifies the nature of this relationship by commenting on the title of the picture: The title Manao Tupapau has two Senses – Thought Ghost Belief Either she thinks of the ghost Or the ghost thinks of her The use of a double verbal meaning is linked to the ‘parabolic’ model of communication adopted by Gauguin. The Tahitian titles given to 107

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the pictures of his first Polynesian stay and generally written on the pictures themselves were a priori incomprehensible to the public. When he supplied Mette with translations, in his letter of 8 December 1892, he enjoined her not to communicate them in writing and prefaced them with a linguistic observation: ‘This language is bizarre and gives many meanings.’ 65 Hiriata Millaud has shown that he was indeed exploiting the Tahitian language’s potential for ambiguity and polysemy.66 This potential was in turn the object of a process of reflection that should be considered continuous with Gauguin’s pan-semiotic notions about writing and ornament. We see this in the letter of 5 February 1895, in which he replied to Strindberg’s refusal to write a preface for the exhibition of his Polynesian works. Strindberg had declared that he liked neither the paradise created by the artist nor his Eve. Gauguin defended his ‘wild drawing’, stating that it was both suited to his new models and at one with their language:

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In the languages of Oceania, with their essential elements preserved in their all ruggedness, isolated or welded with absolutely no thought of polish, everything is bare and primordial. Whereas in the inflected languages, the roots from which they, like every other language, began, disappear in the daily commerce that has worn down their relief and outline. It is a perfected mosaic in which one ceases to see the joints of the stones more or less clumsily brought one next to the other, so as simply to admire a beautiful lapidary painting. Only the expert eye can unmask the process of construction.67

The critique of mimetic illusionism contained in the comparison between mosaic and ‘lapidary painting’ underlines the connection between this ‘philological digression’, as Gauguin called it, his praise of ‘abstract’ ornament and his fascination with the non-cursive writing of oriental cultures. In the same letter, Gauguin moreover spoke of the ‘Maori or Turanian language’, using a term of Persian origin employed by the tenants of a now abandoned hypothesis concerning the joint origins of the Altaic and Uralic languages; he therefore associated Persia with Oceania. 108

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The title Manaò tupapaú is an example of this verbal mosaic. The Polynesian languages have neither conjugation nor declension, so we do not know whether the tu¯pa¯pa‘u is subject or object of mana‘o, which can itself be understood as a noun or a verb. Manaò tupapaú can consequently be translated in two ways directly contrary to each other, as Gauguin said: either by ‘[Teha’amana] thinks of/believes in the ghost’ or by ‘The ghost thinks of/believes in [Teha’amana]’. In his letter to Mette, Gauguin suggests the version ‘The Spirit of the Dead or Ghost / watches over her’, thus attributing to the tu¯pa¯pa‘u a status like that of the ancestor, which is reflected in the picture by its position at the foot of the bed, leaning against the pillar-tikiTa‘aroa. 68 Manaò tupapaú is a syntactical palindrome that bestows the same reality on the world of the living as on that of the dead and associates them in a relation of ontological reversibility, the philosophical equivalent of ‘flowers that are . . . muscles and muscles that

52 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline, 1892–3, double page on Manaò tupapaú.

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are flowers’. From this point of view, the picture goes further than The Vision of the Sermon, in which the sacred scene exists ‘only in the imagination of the people at prayer’. This ontological oscillation evokes the oriental texts of Taoist, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, in particular the ‘dream of the butterfly’ in the collection Zhuangzi attributed to Zhuang Zhou: the sage dreams that he is a butterfly; then, on awakening, wonders whether he is not a butterfly dreaming that he is Zhuang Zhou.69 This Taoist parable found an echo in 1871 in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Alice discovers the Red King asleep and is told that she forms part of his dream and would cease to exist if he should wake; at the end of the book she wonders which, of the King (who was dreaming her) or herself (who dreamed him), dreamed her adventure, a question that the narrative does not answer but leaves to the reader to decide. This philosophical dimension of Manaò tupapaú was also perceived and pondered on by Jarry. His poem of the same name has two alternating narrators, Olympia and the Spirit of the Dead. In 1897 Jarry published a novel entitled Les Jours et les nuits (Days and Nights), whose hero cannot distinguish ‘his thoughts from his acts nor his dreams from his waking state’ and in whom ontological oscillation is programmatic: And, above all, he thought that there are only hallucinations, or only perceptions, and that there are neither nights nor days (despite the title of this book, which is why it was chosen) and that life is continuous; but that one would never so much as perceive that it is continuous, nor even that it exists, without the movement of the clock’.70

Here we recognize the formula of Hippolyte Taine; Jarry had come across it during Henri Bergson’s philosophy class, which he had attended in 1892–3 at the Lycée Henri-iv.71 But the pairing of the concepts day/night comes from Gauguin who, in his Cahier pour Aline (illus. 52), concluded his analysis of Manaò tupapaú thus: ‘The spirit of a living woman connected to the spirit of the Dead. Night and day.’ The two parts of the picture are thus associated with the two poles of the Polynesian opposition between ao and po¯, between the diurnal 110

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Dreams and Visions part of the day – the domain of humans and material things – and its nocturnal part, the domain of spirits, gods and the souls of the dead.72 This opposition itself forms part of the transcendence of dualism that, for Gauguin, summarized the Polynesian cosmogony, cosmology and conception of the world. He wrote in Ancien culte mahori: It follows from the way in which they have depicted their main God that he formed the two great causes previously mentioned, one active, the other passive, that is, the soul and the body; the one spiritual and hidden, the other material and visible; in a word, matter and what animates matter; and from this idea of the coexistence of the two principles that are God, and of which all the objects constituting the ensemble of the universe are composed, they made two distinct beings.73

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Genesis of a Picture The importance of Manaò tupapaú is further underlined by the fact that it inspired in Gauguin a set of reflections that constitute his principal contribution to what Paul Valéry subsequently called ‘poietics’, that is, the study of poetic and artistic ‘making’ and the analysis of the ‘generation’ of works.74 This text is included in Cahier pour Aline and entitled La Genèse d’un tableau (The Genesis of a Picture); it is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846), translated by Baudelaire as ‘La Genèse d’un poëme’, in which Poe claimed to reconstitute the way in which he had written The Raven. 75 As Poe’s original title suggests, his explanation was intended to suggest a general conception of creation and this ambition was implicitly shared by Gauguin. Poe claimed to have composed his poem in reverse, in a series of stages as logical as the resolution of a mathematical problem, in order to obtain a predetermined effect. In Gauguin’s explanation, the origin of Manaò tupapaú lay in the desire elicited by a body – ‘seduced by a form in movement I paint them with no other preoccupation than to do a bit of nude’. But this 111

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desire is countered and enriched by his ambition to make a ‘chaste picture that also gives the Kanak spirit, its character and its tradition’.76 This ambition in turn leads him to choose certain accessories (the pareo) and certain colours (yellow and violet) and to invent a theme capable of justifying the motif. The only way of avoiding an indecent interpretation of the position of the young woman is to ascribe it to the fear she experienced at night and therefore, in the Polynesian context, to fear of the tu¯pa¯pa‘u. The artist’s ‘decorative sense’ then leads him to ‘strew the background with flowers’ that represent ‘phosphorescence, a sign that the ghost is looking after you’. The causal chain forged by Gauguin thus alternates elements from an affective and formal series with those of a semantic and narrative series; these are distinguished when he summarizes the genesis of the picture in a ‘musical part’ (primarily chromatic) and a ‘literary part’ already cited: ‘the spirit of a living woman connected to the spirit of the Dead. Night and day.’ In this pas de deux, Gauguin takes care to give the initiative to the first series, which the second then renders acceptable or plausible. The priority given to the first matches both his interest in the semiotics of plastic signs and his fight against the domination of art by ‘men of letters’.77 This polemical dimension undermines without entirely cancelling out the heuristic value of Genesis of a Picture. Particularly significant here is the role attributed to sexual desire, to which other documents also refer. In his letter to Mette, Gauguin explained: ‘I made a nude of a young girl. In this position, the slightest thing makes her indecent. But this is how I want her, the lines and movement interest me.’ Even in this context, the expression ‘this is how I want her’ is ambiguous. In Cahier pour Aline, Gauguin’s explanation is followed by a watercolour vignette representing Manaò tupapaú in synthetic and even caricatural form (illus. 52). A strange line in pink circles the buttocks of the naked body and continues on to her side; knowing as we do Gauguin’s taste for trans-medial games, we may justifiably read in it the letter Q (in French, a homophone with cul, arse or ass), in reference to the bottom that occupies the centre of the composition and constitutes what is indecent about the position; we should perhaps note that this image forms the culde-lampe or tailpiece of Genesis of a Picture. The decorative motif 112

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Dreams and Visions on the pareo, simplified as it is here, also suggests a head but presents that head in profile, set vertically below the horizontal of the ‘Q’, flesh-coloured and equipped with a nasal projection that one might describe as phallic. The tu¯pa¯pa‘u, meanwhile, seems more masculine and casts over the young woman a gaze more cupidinous than protective. Gauguin further developed and personalized this dimension in Noa Noa, where Manaò tupapaú appears as a scene from life; having had to leave Teha‘amana at Mataiea for the day, the narrator returns late and finds her stretched out on the bed in the dark; the lamp having gone out, she is preyed on by fear of the tu¯pa¯pa‘u .78 In the version completed by Morice, the woman’s beauty is made more ‘moving’ by her terror; the narrator wonders if she does not mistake him for a demon or a spectre and the story concludes with a night ‘soft and ardent, a tropical night’.79 Eroticism is also present in Jarry’s transposition of the picture into poetry. There the ‘prone Olympia’ first dreams of incubuses – ‘on solitary nights / the souls of the sleeping dead / came back to life as lovers’ – before the tu¯pa¯pa‘u arrives to chase away ‘the swarm of impure dreams / to the gates of oblivion’. Jarry was alluding to two works which must have played a role in the genesis of Manaò tupapaú, Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781, Detroit Institute of Arts) and Manet’s Olympia (1865, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Gauguin greatly admired Olympia, which he had copied in 1891. According to another anecdote related in Noa Noa, a Tahitian woman is said to have believed that a photograph of Olympia represented Gauguin’s wife and the painter failed to disabuse her of this notion.80 Gauguin’s appropriation of this icon of modern painting may have been encouraged by the version painted by Cézanne, Une moderne Olympia (A Modern Olympia, 1874, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), in which the courtesan appears in the background like a dream or vision to the client, who is present in the picture and bears a strong resemblance to Cézanne. At all events, we can describe the passage from Olympia to Manaò tupapaú as a series of transformations including removal from Paris to Tahiti, the replacement of the calico shawl by a pareo, the flipping of the model from her front to her back, the metamorphosis of the servant and black cat into the tu¯pa¯pa‘u, and the explosion of the bouquet into ‘flowers of sparks’. Another source, suggested in 113

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1971 by Marcel Giry, also has a sexual connection: this is the Allégorie de l’onanisme (Allegory of Onanism) of 1801 engraved by Humbert de Superville, whose theory of ‘unconditional signs in art’ was, as we have seen, of interest to Gauguin. The picture shows a naked boy lying on his front, his clenched fist held against his face, frightened by a skeleton whose oversize skull, covered with a star-spangled cloth, appears above him through a trapezoidal opening.81 Without adopting the model of ‘mathematical’ logic set out by Poe, Genesis of a Picture presents Manaò tupapaú as the result of a largely rational process, at least in the aftermath of the initial impulse. One might expect this deliberation to increase with the complexity of his works but Gauguin made no such comment in relation to his most ambitious picture D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?) (illus. 53). One of the reactions elicited by his exhibition of late 1898 at the Vollard gallery led Gauguin to describe the genesis of this work. In January 1899 André Fontainas, writing in the Mercure de France, praised Gauguin’s ‘decorative’ sense while criticizing the ‘unwelcome forms of a clumsily metaphysical imagination’ in relation to Where Do We Come From?, which he described as an allegory that would be incomprehensible but for its title, comparing it unfavourably to the groups of figures created by Puvis de Chavannes, ‘whose attitudes were capable of imposing a dream analogous to his own’.82 The remark was like a red rag to Gauguin, who replied directly to the critic. In a letter of March 1899 he rejected the notion of an allegory and, with a glance at Mallarmé, defined his picture as a ‘musical poem without libretto’, saying that the essential of any work consisted in what ‘was not expressed’ but ‘resulted implicitly from the lines’ though not ‘materially constituted’ by them.83 He then spoke of the idol in the upper part of Where Do We Come From? as an ‘imaginary consolation for the suffering that we feel . . . at the mystery of our origin and our future’. He went on to describe the making of the painting and the appearance of its title: And all this sings painfully in my soul and my surroundings, while [I am] at once painting and dreaming, without any 114

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53 Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897–8.

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palpable allegory within my reach – lack of literary education perhaps. On waking, my work finished, I say to myself, I say: where do we come from, what are we? Where are we going? A reflection that no longer forms part of the picture, one that is then put into spoken language quite separately on the wall that frames it; not a title but a signature.84

The creation of a picture is thus compared to a dream, separated by his awakening from any verbalization. The theme of dreaming is indeed present in the picture, with the poppy that precedes the inscription and the sleeping newborn baby lying down near the lower-right corner. In the opposite corner, an old woman is sitting in the same position as the Peruvian mummy that had so struck Gauguin in the Ethnographical Museum of the Trocadéro in 1878.85 The position is as much like that of a foetus as it is the pose of a corpse, so that the opposition of these two extremes suggests a cycle. But the unfolding of the cycle is made complex and even contradictory by the spatial distribution of the elements and by the clues given in relation to the lateral movement that the scale and format of the picture impose on the viewer’s perception. There seems to be a temporal axis running from the newborn on the right, above whose head are 115

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shifting waters described by Gauguin as a ‘source’ or spring, to the ‘mummy’ on the left, which stands out against a background of still water. But neither the age of the other protagonists nor the distribution of tones and colours between the pale yellowish skin of the baby and the dark greenish skin of the old woman could be said to follow a linear order. A left-to-right axis, matching the reading habits generated in particular by Western writing, is set in motion by the inscription and confirmed by the figures represented as in movement. But this in its turn is contradicted by the direction of the bodies, gazes and gestures given to the figures represented as motionless, including the standing man who, in a pose borrowed from Rembrandt, plucks a fruit and divides the panel in half by his vertical élan. The dynamism of the whole picture is therefore not that of an orientated freeze but more like a palindrome, as in the title Manaò tupapaú. If we take account of the way the elements are layered into the depths of the painting and note the plant background of trunks and serpentine branches, we could also compare it to the dynamism of a meander, an abstract motif whose name derives from the Phrygian river that Ovid described: ‘as soft Maeander’s wanton current plays, / Now floating to the sea with downward course, / Now pointing upward to its ancient source . . .’.86 The motif of the sleeping child, associated with the freshwater spring, distantly relates Where Do We Come From? to Head of Jean Gauguin (illus. 39). One point of connection between the two is the picture Te reroia (illus. 54), painted a few months before Where Do We Come From? Its title, more correctly transcribed as Te rereioa in a letter to Monfreid of 12 March 1897, means ‘dream’ in the sense of ‘vagabondage of the mind during sleep’.87 A baby lies in the lower-left corner on his front, his hand close to his mouth and his eyes closed, in a sculpted wooden cradle. Bronwen Nicholson has compared this strange object with a Maori kumete (bowl, illus. 55) carved in the 1870s by Patorumu Tamatea for the Governor-General of New Zealand, Sir George Grey; Gauguin undoubtedly saw this in the ethnographical annex of Auckland Museum when he stayed in Auckland in August 1895.88 The anthropomorphic figures on this bowl are to be found in a different arrangement on the part of the cradle at the baby’s feet. The blanket that covers the child forms the 116

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Dreams and Visions potential image of a face observing his sleep, and Nicholson notes that the cradle forms the head of this profile, with ‘hair which, on closer inspection, turns out to contain a number of figures’.89 The relation between the cradle and its occupant is reciprocal: the carved figures can be seen as materializations of the dream of the child, like the wall paper in The Little One is Dreaming and Clovis Asleep (illus. 40, 41). But the cradle is animated, both by the proliferation of figures and the potential image of the blanket/profile, such that it seems to exert an influence over the mental activity of the dreaming child, like the tine in Clovis Asleep. Talking about the painting in his letter to Monfreid, Gauguin spread these uncertainties still further: ‘Everything in this canvas is dream; is it the child, is it the mother, is it the horseman in the path or is it the dream of the painter!!! All that is beside the point of the painting, it will be said. Perhaps not . . .’.90 The question that Gauguin asks here without quite formulating it is precisely the question asked by Alice at the end of Through the Looking-Glass: ‘. . . who . . . dreamed it all?’ Like Carroll’s young heroine, he is careful not to answer and refers the issue to the onlooker/reader. With its two women and one animal, physically close but devoid of interaction, its plinth decorated with grotesques and its walls decorated with paintings or flat reliefs showing a human couple, an anthropomorphic plant, a divinity and a couple of animals copulating and finally with the ‘image within the image’ of the horseman riding off into the Tahitian landscape, the hut in Te rerioa is an ontological gallery of mirrors in which the eyes and the mind are invited to ‘wander’ as in sleep. The considerations adduced up to this point are sufficient to show that the Genesis of Where Do We Come From?, like that of Te reroia, cannot be literally assimilated to a dream. Various documents, including a squared up sketch of the picture, and many other analyses have demonstrated how polemical and oversimplifying was the explanation given by Gauguin to Fontainas. Making use of the accumulated empirical evidence of Gauguin’s creative process constituted by engravings and monotypes, Richard Field has defined the artist’s methods of work as ‘a mixture of rational and irrational’.91 We remember that Fontainas himself spoke of the work of art as a contagious ‘dream’ and that in 1894, Achille Delaroche had defined 117

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54 Paul Gauguin, Te reroia (The Dream), 1897.

Gauguin’s painting as a ‘the connecting link between the conscious and the unconscious’. The equivalence between artistic creation and dream put forward by Gauguin in the texts that we have cited and, indeed, in many others, thus belongs to a widely held conception. It was indeed a commonplace of Romanticism taken up and reinterpreted in the light of the advances made by psychology in the late nineteenth century. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle summarized the question posed by his ‘philosopher of clothing’, Teufelsdröckh, in the formula ‘Whence? How? Whereto?’, before defining waking life as dream and ‘somnambulism’.92 In 1881 Paul Souriau had stated in his Théorie de l’invention that ‘the work and the idea are sketched, developed and completed at the same time’, adding that the work often ‘anticipates and drags thought along in its wake’.93 In 1897, the year in which Gauguin painted Te reroia and Where Do We Come From? and in which Jarry’s Les Jours et les nuits was published, a doctor of medicine, Paul Chabaneix, published the results of his 118

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research in a work entitled Le Subconscient chez les artistes, les savants et les écrivains (The Subconscious in Artists, Scholars and Writers). He concluded that what we call ‘inspiration’ in art and science belongs to the psychic phenomena in which the ‘subconscious’ mingles with the waking state.94 The explanation given by Gauguin to Fontainas was in part intended to reject the suggestion of a verbal programme that had preceded the work itself, a hypothesis implicit in the notion of allegory. In 1898 Redon even attempted to convince André Mellerio to give up the idea of any ‘concept previous’ to the work, telling him that it was often simply a matter of ‘a starting enterprise that one abandoned en route in order to follow the charming and unpredictable paths of fantasy’, fantasy being ‘the messenger of “the unconscious”, that lofty and mysterious personage’.95 This image of truanting from the original intention is close kin to the ‘vagabondage’ of meander and dream that I have described. Redon puts the unconscious between quote marks and Druick and Zegers have suggested that he refers to his reading of Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious of 1869, which was translated into French in 1877. It was a book

55 Patorumu Tamatea, kumete (bowl) with cover and two anthromorphic supports, before 1890 (probably 1870s).

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that would undoubtedly have pleased Gauguin, since von Hartmann gave the term ‘absolute unconscious’ to the very substance of the universe, from which, in his view, were derived the ‘physiological unconscious’ and the ‘psychological unconscious’ that lay at the origins of conscious mental life.96 But use of the term was common in the 1890s and Gauguin’s oeuvre testifies to his knowledge of the work of the French onirologists, who asserted the continuity of psychic life between waking and dreaming states and considered art one of the manifestations of this continuity. It is, however, very unlikely that Redon and more particularly Gauguin, who died in 1903, could have had wind of the works of Freud. The chronological and methodological parallel between their conception of artistic creation and the ‘free association’ theorized as a therapeutic method by Freud is nevertheless striking. What is more, starting with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, Freud made of his analysis of ‘dreamwork’ – which took up some of the observations of the French onirologists while situating them in a meta-psychological context closer to the notions of Taine – a model of interpretation generalizable to all psychic productions, including literary and artistic works.97 Genesis of a Picture resembles this model in several respects. Though Gauguin uses euphemisms, the initial impulsion identified by this text is clearly erotic. But it encounters a form of censorship relating to the rules of decorum and only finds a communicable form by means of ‘displacements’ (from the lover to the tu¯pa¯pa‘u) and ‘condensations’ (double and multiple images) completed by the ‘secondary revision’ of the ‘literary part’. We know that Freud, having at first envied writers and artists their ‘endogenous’ knowledge of the psyche, began to consider them neurotic and to treat their works as symptoms.98 Gauguin’s creative ‘vagabondage’ was always accompanied by critical reflection and his mixture of control and abandon is closer to daydreaming or what Hervey de Saint-Denys called ‘lucid dreaming’: dreaming that is accompanied by an awareness that one is dreaming and that can be orientated. But perhaps the most precise use of the term ‘dream’ to describe Gauguin’s works was provided in 1885 by Charles Morice, his future critic and collaborator, in relation to Redon’s album of lithographs Hommage à Goya 120

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Dreams and Visions (illus. 18). The caption to the first plate began with the words ‘In my dream’:

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Monsieur Redon’s dream . . . Let us be clear! The meaning to be attributed to the word Dream is not the vulgar or prose meaning (the fatal visions of sleep), nor the rarer meaning of poetry (voluntary visions in the waking state); it is both this and that, waking and sleeping, it is strictly speaking the dream of a dream: the wilful ordering of fatal visions.99

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three

You Are What You See

Ils parlent de la mort Comme tu parles d’un fruit Ils regardent la mer Comme tu regardes un puits.

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Jacques Brel, ‘Les Marquises’

Among the works that we have discussed, a particular importance attaches to Woman and Child before a Landscape (illus. 23). This watercolour stages a scene of imaginative perception – the form of perception that, as we have seen, underpins the selection and treatment of the natural motifs favoured by Gauguin – and bestows an original, foundational value on this experience by ascribing it to a child. The reflexive dimension of the work is characteristic of a certain number of works made by Gauguin in the late 1880s. These demonstrate an increasingly clear perception of his means and goals and are also marked by intense discussion with those artistically close to him, including Émile Bernard, Vincent Van Gogh and the members of what has subsequently been called the Pont-Aven School. We might describe these works as meta-artistic; they offer a commentary on artistic activity and its physio-psychological foundations. They are also plastic contributions to both the theory of art and the theory of perception, indeed of cognition. Their theoretical status is confirmed by Gauguin’s own observations on these questions. We remember that in 1889, writing about Huysman’s ‘Bianchi’, he stated that the old painters found a ‘type’ in nature in which to embody themselves or that they ‘made’ in their own image.1 This formulation does not make it clear whether such ‘types’ are immanent in nature, 122

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56 Paul Gauguin, Avant et après, p. 43, detail, ‘Au Café, au grand 9’, 1903.

constitute an ideal model or result from rational abstraction or a ‘subjective’ projection. But it was a subjective projection of which Gauguin indicted Huysmans when he suggested that the critic, mistaking the role played by the painter in the appearance of his figures, had ‘made a Huysmans’ when perceiving an androgynous sodomite in Bianchi’s St Quentin. By taking the picture to be a transparent window onto the world, Huysmans had unconsciously used it as a mirror. Was Gauguin criticizing the projection or the lack of awareness – or both? The mirror motif appears belatedly but with a retrospective application in a passage of Avant et après accompanied by a drawing (illus. 56): To the Café, to the Big 9, on the boulevard, I go: everyone goes there, the beautiful Aryan race circulates. At the café, at the Big 9, on the boulevard, I draw, I look, I listen without enthusiasm. At the café, the marble tables invite the pencil, the mirrors enlarge the crowd; the world is there willy-nilly. Willy-nilly I draw: everything is beautiful, everything is ugly. 123

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Look!!! There’s a face I know: where the devil have I seen it? Angular profile: I try and work out who it can be. Ah! Got it, it’s me. I submit to my fate without sadness. I thought I was better-looking. The Truth!!2

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The androgynous head, of which the drawing seems to give two views, full-face and in profile, resembles The Unintelligible with Her Harsh Profile (illus. 17) and the head of Puvis de Chavannes’s L’Enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Son, 1879, Bührle Collection, Zurich).3 The text is difficult to interpret and one wonders whether the head has been ‘stolen’ from veins of marble as the head in Arii matamoe (illus. 19) was from the grain of a pine plank. The letter confessing that theft mentioned both materials: ‘When marble or wood draws you a head, it’s jolly tempting to steal it.’ 4 But the reference may also be to a head perceived in the mirrors of the cafe, in which case elements of the decoration of the ‘Big 9’ would also be reflected. Whether seen in the table or the mirrors, the head turns out to be that of the artist, disappointed by his own appearance. This anecdote told in 1903 recalls a crucial passage in Monstres (Monsters), a book published in 1896 by Jean Dolent, which included the article in which he had noted in 1891: ‘Gauguin’s crucible is his brain’. The hero of the book, the sculptor Chantonelle, in the last chapter finishes and contemplates his masterpiece, The Pig Killer: Out of these borrowings from all those other monsters, he has made a Monster, and this Monster stands before him! Chantonelle, trembling, gazes, in the intoxication of triumph, at the beautiful, the revelatory work that he has made. And then . . . with a painful sentiment in which there yet persists a trace of the joy he was feeling, he recognizes: himself . . .5

Both work and revelation may have been inspired in Dolent by the ceramic sculpture Oviri (illus. 107), made by Gauguin in Paris during the winter of 1894. He himself described it as a ‘monster’ and in a letter to Vollard entitled it La Tueuse (Killer-Woman). The figure, a woman crushing wolves underfoot and in her arms, was for him a kind of self-representation, as is demonstrated by the inscription of 124

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the word oviri (‘wild’) on a contemporary relief showing his head in profile (illus. 57).6 Whereas the Woman and Child before a Landscape shows a child perceiving a face in nature, these narratives and works show artists recognizing themselves in their own creation, that is, in nature recreated or enhanced in their own image. This is a logical progression and corresponds to the awareness of exteriorization attributed by Gauguin to ‘old painters’; it is summarized by Renaissance Italian art theory in the proverb ogni pittore dipinge se (‘all painters depict themselves’).7 Going beyond the artistic sphere, the motif of the artist recognizing himself in his own work possesses an epistemological

57 Paul Gauguin, Self-portrait ‘Oviri’, 1894–5.

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dimension and affords an image of the interdependence between the subject and object of knowledge. That interdependence is clearly demonstrated by a major picture painted shortly before or shortly after The Vision of the Sermon. To date, however, the theoretical purport of the picture has not been widely perceived.

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Above the Abyss Au dessus du gouffre (Above the Abyss) was the title that Gauguin gave this picture (illus. 58) for his public sale on 23 February 1891 at the Hôtel Drouot; the sale also functioned as an exhibition at which the work was bought by Vicomte Guy de Cholet.8 The title evokes a situation matching the point of view adopted by the artist to contemplate and paint this landscape and, consequently, the point of view of the spectator in front of the picture. The components of the representation fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. At the bottom of the painting is a green meadow in which we see a black cow mottled with white, seen from above; its muzzle extends in front of an orange hillock which, like a similar mass running along the side of the picture, presumably indicates a haystack. To the left and right are two cliffs in brown tones modulated with red, violet and green. At the top is the sea or more exactly the ocean, on which a boat with dark-red sails, emerging from behind the right-hand cliff, heads out into the deep. In the middle, finally, there is foaming water: very white in places but also veined with yellow, red, brown, blue and above all green. With the exception of the cow and the boat, these elements are not easily recognizable, so that the perceptive stage of identifying the objects depicted, one that we usually pass through rapidly and unwittingly, is here extended in a way that renders it both conscious and problematic. Moreover the space itself seems fragmented or composed from several overlapping points of view, ranging from that which looks down on the cow and its meadow, perhaps from some higher point of the slope or from a hillock, to that which, less elevated, includes the boat without reaching the horizon. This discontinuity reaches its maximum extent in the middle part of the picture: lacking either shaping or tonal gradient to indicate degrees of recession, the 126

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58 Paul Gauguin, Above the Abyss, 1888.

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rocks are as if seen face-on from the same plane, while the foaming waters are as if seen vertically by a spectator floating above them. This spatial incoherence has been interpreted as highlighting the flatness of the support and compared with Japanese prints treating similar motifs, such as Hiroshige’s The Kiso Mountains in Snow. 9 But, as its title indicates, Above the Abyss is not confined to the literal two dimensions of the canvas; on the contrary, it evokes the kind of subjective physio-psychological phenomenon elicited by a particular spatial and geographical environment, while the figurative senses of the word ‘abyss’ denote the fact that it may refer as much to a moral status as to a physical position. In the centre of the picture, the diametrical opposition of the points of view creates an effect of disjunction: the spectator oscillates between the horizontal perception of the cliffs and the vertical perception of the ocean, unable to reconcile the two. This effect reaches its height on the right, where a rugged outline separates the two domains of the liquid and the solid, whose mutual exclusion is emphasized by the disparate colours and more particularly the disparate values. This configuration produces a perceptive situation of bistability, what is called in German a Kippfigur, a ‘flip-flop figure’, like the aforementioned image of the duck/rabbit or, on a more conceptual plane, the reversible ontology of Manaò tupapaú (illus. 50). But the reversibility of Above the Abyss is that of figure and ground: either (in conformity with our experience of nature) the rocks stand out against the background of the sea or (the experience produced by the picture) the sea stands out on the background of the rocks. In fact, background and figure change places in an oscillation that prevents our perception of the picture from stabilizing. The reversibility of figure and ground had been used since the late eighteenth century in popular imagery to debar the uninitiated from hidden (notably political or erotic) aspects. The conflicts of the Revolution, Empire and Restoration had fuelled the need for cryptoimages and produced, for example, engravings concealing the profiles of members of the royal family or that of the fallen emperor in the negative space formed by the outline of an urn, a tree or a flower.10 The cult dimension of these militant images is also present in a Romantic lithograph (illus. 59) in which, with the aid of a few judiciously 128

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59 H. Burn, The Spirit of Byron in the Isles of Greece, c. 1830.

placed leaves, the profile of Lord Byron is evoked in the portion of sea and sky comprised between the rocks. A small, melancholic figure gazes towards the horizon while directing his thoughts towards the great poet, who had died during the Greek War of Independence. The enlargement of the hidden image of the poet to the scale of the landscape reflects his identification with the philhellenic cause and constitutes both homage and apotheosis. The ‘picture puzzles’ of the last third of the nineteenth century exploited this same mechanism for less serious purposes. In a humorous drawing published in 1878 by a Paris journal specializing in puzzles, the profiles of two men facing each other create the outline of the faces of their wives, one the right way up, the other upside down (illus. 60). In another puzzle, children in a cave seek to escape two ogres whose faces are formed by the overhanging rock and the sky against which the rock is cut out; rather than threatening the children, these two ogres seem busy trying to swallow each other.11 Finally, we should bear in mind the interest that psychologists and physio-psychologists found in images that accentuated visual properties such as the reversibility 129

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60 Anonymous picture puzzle, 1878.

61 Figure demonstrating the reversibility of figure and ground in Ernst Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, first published 1886.

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|ou Are What |ou See of figure and ground. In his Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, 1886), Ernst Mach demonstrated this phenomenon by referring the reader to ‘“puzzle pictures” [Vexierbilder] in which, for example, an apparition makes its appearance between tree-trunks as soon as the dark trees are taken as the background, and the bright sky as the object’.12 Rather than reproduce an image of this kind, Mach illustrated his views with an ornamental motif in which the positive and negative forms are identical (illus. 61). This motif, borrowed from Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament, came from Hawaiian fabric and was an example of the Oceanian predilection for reversibility, which, as we shall see, inspired passionate attention on Gauguin’s part.13 This detour through imagery and the study of perception has prepared us to approach the crypto-iconic dimension of Above the Abyss. If the portion of the sea delimited by the outline of the rocks flips into a figure, what figure emerges? There is no easy answer and I spent a long time searching, irritated by the ‘oscillation’ of the motif before finding some assistance in two images. The first is an anonymous photographic portrait of Gauguin taken in Brittany, probably in Pont-Aven, during the summer of 1888. Gauguin included a print of it in the letter he sent to Schuffenecker on 14 August, adding a postscript, ‘Enclosed a photo taken gratis by an amateur’, and he dedicated ‘to his artist friend’ a second print cut into the form of an oval medallion such that all that remains of the bust is the head and the upper torso (illus. 62).14 Gauguin therefore considered this portrait an ‘official’ image of his features at the crucial point when he was affirming that ‘Art is an abstraction’ and advising artists to ‘dream before’ nature. His attitude, moreover, stresses confidence and determination. The posture is not natural and combines, as in Egyptian art, a (near-) frontal torso with the head in medallion profile, a formula frequently adopted by Gauguin for his portraits of himself (illus. 57) and of his friends. The outline of the face presents striking analogies with the outline of the right-hand rock in Above the Abyss and allows us to recognize in negative outline (from the bottom): a very elongated neck, a pointed chin matching his little beard, the aquiline nose that Gauguin associated with his Peruvian origins and his forehead ending in the point of the beret. 131

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62 Anonymous portrait of Paul Gauguin, Brittany, 1888.

This resemblance is confirmed by another portrait of Gauguin, painted by Van Gogh in Arles around 1 December 1888 (illus. 63). Druick and Zegers, who were able to establish this date by reconstituting the use of the roll of jute from which both artists cut their canvases, suggest that this portrait derives from a combination of elements observed from life, such as the red beret, with the other elements borrowed from the anonymous photograph.15 It seems that we cannot add Above the Abyss to these two sources, as Gauguin had probably left it in Pont-Aven on 21 October with his other Breton pictures so that Bernard or the latter’s mother could take them back to Paris to Theo Van Gogh and the Boussod and Valadon gallery.16 But he must have given a fairly precise visual or verbal description of it to Vincent, since the resemblance between Gauguin’s profile and the form cut out against the sea by the outline of the right-hand cliff is reinforced in Van Gogh’s picture by the tilt of the beret and by the curious treatment of the nose, painted in light blue and as if detached from the face; it exactly matches the concentration of foam in the ‘nose’ portion of the sea. 132

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63 Vincent Van Gogh, Portrait of Gauguin, 1888.

The formal parallel between Above the Abyss and these two images, which stand chronologically on either side of it, show that the Kippfigur at the heart of the picture is a portrait – as in The Spirit of Byron in the Islands of Greece (illus. 59) – and indeed a self-portrait. It is therefore a double image and the most remarkable of the implicit or latent aspects that we have hitherto detected in Gauguin’s work. Before considering its genesis and meaning, we should observe that the explicit questioning of the iconic level engendered by this discovery is not confined to that of the background becoming figure. The two cliffs in their turn also suggest heads, one animal and one monstrous. On the left, brushstrokes belonging to the final level of 133

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the picture allow us to identify an eye in the upper parts and a snout towards the bottom, engendering a parallel between the rocky mass and the head of the cow in the foreground; both point in the same direction. On the right, the outline of the cliff (from the top down) suggests a low forehead, a battered nose, and an open mouth whose upper lip is marked in red and whose chin is covered by one of the haystacks. These stacks surround the head with an abundance of red hair. Gauguin’s profile is squeezed between these two gigantic heads and seems to be in an antagonistic relationship with the one on the right, both visually, because they serve as backgrounds for one another, and semantically, because the monster seems to want to swallow the artist as in Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–23, Museo del Prado, Madrid). How did Gauguin reach this result? What degree of premeditation did he bring to the painting and what was the role played by the natural setting observed on the Breton coast? Given what we know about his art and thought at this point and considering the degree of coincidence between the outline of that portion of sea and the artist’s profile, the hypothesis of a chance resemblance can be eliminated. But it is possible to imagine that he chose to keep and emphasize an aspect accidentally arrived at during the execution of the painting or that he was inspired by a perceptual error experienced while working in situ. Meticulous observation and a scientific examination confirm that the central part of the picture, which was initially left open by Gauguin, shows no sign of hesitations or pentimenti.17 Two modifications are visible on the X-ray (illus. 64): they concern the haystacks, which were added on top of the meadow and rock, and the left-hand cliff, whose outline was initially curved inward, leaving a broader band of sea visible at the bottom. With the massive neck thus formed before Gauguin’s revision, the oceanic head resembles certain head-shaped pre-Columbian vases and visibly anticipates the Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot made by Gauguin in early 1889 (illus. 65). We will return to this link but it is worth noting at this stage that Gauguin’s activity as a potter had made him sensitive to the dialectics of fullness and emptiness and to the analogies between the human head and a recipient such as that formed here by the walls of rock that ‘contain’ the sea. 134

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|ou Are What |ou See The place represented in Above the Abyss is at Le Pouldu, a coastal village in Finistère that Gauguin visited occasionally over the course of the summers of 1886 and 1888 before spending several months there in 1889–90. Sylvie Crussard identifies it as the Porsac’h creek, around 3 kilometres to the west of the port of Le Pouldu, while the local itinerary for a ‘painter’s path’ places it slightly to the east of the port and the mouth of the Laïta.18 The appearance of the picture is in fact compatible with several points on the coast; it is clear that, even if Gauguin based his picture on observation and sketches or studies made in situ (none are known at the time of writing), he must have painted it in the studio. The capacity of rock to suggest something living is attested in many traditions, in particular by toponymy which, as Vignoli pointed out, bears witness to the trans-subjective dimension of these suggestions and contributes to their perpetuation. 19 In Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea, 1866), the novel inspired by his exile on the Channel Islands, Victor Hugo describes how cliffs seem to change even as he stares at them: ‘This rock is now a trivet, then a lion, then it becomes an angel and opens its wings; now it is a seated figure reading a book. Only rocks can change form like a cloud.’20 The ephemeral character of what Hugo too called ‘aspects’ is emphasized on the coastline by the ocean’s incessant sculptural labour. The resemblance between the products of human activity and those of ‘nature the artist’ is, moreover, enhanced in Brittany by the identity of the material (granite), the limited human intervention in the case of pre-Christian monuments such as menhirs and dolmens or the ‘synthetic’ style of Christian monuments, notably crosses and calvaries, and by exposure to the same climatic conditions. Gauguin seems to have been sensitive to this comparison, as we see from his picture Le Calvaire breton ou le Christ vert (The Breton Calvary or the Green Christ) (illus. 157), in which the calvary from Nizon (near PontAven) is transplanted to the midst of the Le Pouldu dunes; a comment accompanying a schematic sketch of this composition, drawn on the back of a visiting card, defines the calvary as ‘cold stone of the soil’, reminding us of the ‘granite soil’ that, in early 1888, made under the impact of clogs the ‘sound’ [ton] that he was looking for in painting. The Le Pouldu coast seems to have particularly stimulated Gauguin’s imaginative perception. Armand Seguin, who spent several months 135

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64 X-ray of Above the Abyss (illus. 58).

there in 1894, described in 1903 the way in which nature there ‘spoke’ to Gauguin and his companions: ‘The pollarded oak recalls strange animals, the rock under the continuous sculpting of the wave takes on the form of unknown monsters that it perhaps once sheltered, the rim of a wave forms a white arabesque on the blue of the sea.’21 In La Côte rocheuse (The Rocky Coast) of 1886 (illus. 66), one can make out several human or animal profiles in the rocks facing the ocean; in the upper-right corner, the cliff takes on the outline of a nose and cheek and makes play with the reversibility of 136

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65 Paul Gauguin, Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot, 1889.

figure and ground, as if to alert and confirm the suspicions of the attentive viewer. La Vague (The Wave) of 1888 (illus. 67) shows the rocks of the Portguerrec creek emerging from the water like two giant heads, their faces turned upward towards the sky, and wittily suggests the fear caused by this apparition in the two women bathers.22 We also see in this picture the ‘white ruff’ that Gauguin, again according to Seguin, perceived in the sea foam, no doubt encouraged by the example of Japanese painting and prints, from Ogata Ko¯rin to Hokusai.23 Following in the footsteps of the Impressionists but with different goals in mind, Gauguin carefully observed the reflections and movements of water.24 The upper part of Les Laveuses à Arles (Washerwomen at Arles, 1888, Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao) is occupied by a stretch of water seen from above and animated by strange reflections between a squatting woman at work on the washboard on the left and another standing on the right; level with the face of the standing woman, a symmetrical form inscribes in the water a sort of gaze responding to 137

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66 Paul Gauguin, The Rocky Coast, 1886.

67 Paul Gauguin, The Wave, 1888.

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68 Paul Gauguin, Washerwomen, 1889.

or replacing hers. The version of this composition included in the ‘Volpini Suite’ (illus. 68) develops this detail, which becomes a frightening mask directly above the washerwoman at work on her washboard. Thereafter it becomes a motif of some stability: we see it reappear in engravings of Tahitian subjects made by Gauguin in France between 1893 in 1895, particularly in Auti te pape (illus. 69), where it divides into an animal head in profile and an embryonic, full-face head.25 The title of this plate affords a comment on the relationship between movement and animation in the water. Ha‘uti as a verb means ‘play’ and ‘move’; as an adjective, it means ‘turbulent’. Pape, meanwhile, means ‘fresh water’ and ‘river’. Danielsson notes that, in the absence of a linking particle (other than the article te), it is ‘impossible to know with certitude which word is the subject and which the direct object’. The meaning is therefore either ‘the fresh water is in motion’, or ‘playing in the fresh water’.26 We understand that for Gauguin, as with mana‘o tu¯pa¯pa‘u, this very uncertainty is the ‘subject’ of Auti te pape, connected to the phenomenon of imaginative perception and 139

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69 Paul Gauguin, Auti te pape, 1893–4.

perhaps, via another sense of pape when it is associated with ta¯ne (man), ‘sperm’, to the implicit erotic dimension of the composition.27 The disturbing tonality of liquid aspects is also evident in the treatment of waves and foam, in particular in Les Drames de la mer (Dramas of the Sea) (illus. 70), whose Japanese inspiration is made explicit by its fan shape: the ocean threatens to engulf the boat in a sort of funnel as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström’: a giant hand reaches out towards its occupant. Though related to these facial suggestions, the profile of Above the Abyss is nevertheless differentiated, first by its self-representative nature and second by the fact that it extends to the whole of the liquid surface bordered by the rocks. Comparing the picture with the sites that may have been its model, I found that the hypothesis of inspiration in situ, in the form of perceptual error, is very unlikely, though I acknowledge the limitations of a survey necessarily limited in time and perhaps, given the variations of the tide and the changes wrought by erosion, futile in the first place. 28 The complicated relief of the 140

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rocks and their layering in space are at odds with any possible unified perception of the area that they circumscribe, unless this area reflects the sun throughout, an effect not at all suggested by the treatment in the picture. We are therefore bound to suppose, as the picture’s making suggests, that Above the Abyss was deliberately constructed around a preconceived double image, and wonder whether, in the absence of any preparatory studies, we can find traces of the research that led to it. Raymond Cogniat has indirectly pointed to a trace of this kind in his comments on a page of a sketchbook (illus. 71) that Gauguin used from 1884 to 1886 in Brittany and that he probably took with him during his further stay in 1888. According to Cogniat, the sketch represents a cliff projecting a shadow over a stretch of water, in which one sees from above a boat that also represents an eye, around which the features of a face have been rapidly sketched in.29 He compares this

70 Paul Gauguin, Dramas of the Sea, 1889.

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71 Paul Gauguin, untitled sketch (Face-Landscape), c. 1888.

drawing to two pictures of 1888, La Rivière blanche (The White River) (illus. 72) and Pêcheur et baigneurs sur l’Aven (Fisherman and Bathers on the Aven) (illus. 73), which show several boats seen from above on the river Aven. In the first of these, a little Breton boy observes from a hilltop the two bathers in a boat while, to the left, a pollarded willow rises up like a scarecrow. The spatial construction of the second picture is more complex and prefigures that of Above the Abyss; as one descends towards the lower part of the picture, the point of view becomes ever higher and is punctuated by three boats, the last of which is seen from a point of view vertically above it. The bathers are entirely naked, the pollarded willow leans over them; the bank has vaguely organic aspects and the little Breton boy has disappeared, replaced in the lower-left corner by a plant that Sylvie Crussard identifies as a ‘plumed fern’, describing it as possessing ‘something very like an eye’ and seeming ‘almost alive’.30 Gauguin could have 142

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72 Paul Gauguin, White River, or Breton Boy by the Aven, 1888.

73 Paul Gauguin, Fisherman and Bathers on the Aven, 1888.

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found models in Japanese art for this bird’s-eye view, a technique of which he made considerable use at Pont-Aven. In the two paintings, it is associated not only with a distant view but also with a degree of voyeurism, with the desire and power of one who sees without being seen. 31 We see the same phenomenon of animation in Woman and Child before a Landscape (illus. 23), whose young protagonist with his felt hat is quite close to that of the White River. These animated elements return the gaze which is fixed on them by both the child and subsequently the viewer. We therefore suppose that on the road leading from the sketch Face-Landscape to Above the Abyss, Gauguin gave up the double image of the boat/eye, which more resembles the riddling drawings of Agostino Carracci or the ‘pivot-words’ described by Focillon in relation to Hokusai than it does a real pictorial solution.32 He thus arrived at a ‘condensation’ superior from the points of view of both visual efficacy and semantic implication, by identifying the entire stretch of sea, the ‘abyss’, with the subject of perception and representation, the artist himself.

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Portrait of the Artist as a Landscape To understand the genesis and meanings of Above the Abyss, we therefore have to broaden the enquiry beyond the impressions made on Gauguin by Brittany. Associating the image of the ocean with his own image, Gauguin followed, as it were, in the wake of many artists and writers, inscribing his own picture in a vast network of echoes and correspondences. The most direct of these connections runs from Above the Abyss to Courbet’s Le Bord de la mer à Palavas (The Seaside at Palavas, 1854, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), which Gauguin could have seen in 1884 during his first visit to the museum; he returned there in December 1888 with Van Gogh.33 With its seventeen portraits of Alfred Bruyas, the Musée Fabre was very apt to stimulate thoughts about how an individual should or could be represented. Courbet’s painting of a man perched on a rock on the beach and raising his hat to the sea in a theatrical gesture could only fuel such reflections.34 It has been suggested that Courbet was replying to Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the 144

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Sea, 1809, Nationalgalerie, Berlin), though no documentation can be adduced for this connection, and the hypothesis of a similar relationship for Above the Abyss is the more tempting in that its double image is not unprecedented in Romantic imagery (illus. 59).35 The most interesting of Friedrich’s works in this respect is Kreidefelsen auf Rügen (Chalk Cliffs on Rügen) (illus. 74), which similarly places the spectator on the edge of the abyss; it depicts the reactions of three protagonists while using the jagged profile of the rocks to cut out a sort of inverted Gothic cathedral against the sky.36 Romantic literature often used the liquid element as an image of human nature. In his ‘Gesang der Geister über den Wassern’ (‘Song of the Spirits above the Water’), inspired by a visit to the Staubbach waterfall in Switzerland, Goethe wrote in 1779: ‘The spirit of man / Resembles water’, contrasting the shimmer of water falling uninterruptedly with the way in which ‘When the sheer rocks / Hinder its fall, / It foams angrily / Flowing stepwise / Into the void’ and describing

74 Caspar David Friedrich, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, 1818–19.

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the action of the wind on water as an amorous embrace before concluding: ‘Spirit of man, / How like water you are! / Man’s fate, oh / How like the wind!’37 In 1854, by the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau reflected on the place of a lake in its landscape and wrote, in a formula that anticipates Gauguin’s Face-Landscape, ‘It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.’38 But it was Baudelaire who gave the most memorable formulation of this equivalence – and the one most easily accessible to Gauguin – when he justified the comparison by the unfathomability of both ‘L’Homme et la mer’ (‘Man and the Sea’). The poem appeared in 1852 and was included five years later in Les Fleurs du mal: Free man, you’ll love the ocean endlessly! It is your mirror, you observe your soul In how its billows endlessly unroll – Your spirit’s bitter depths are there to see. You plunge in joy to your reflection’s core, With eyes and heart seizing it all along; Your heart sometimes neglects its proper song Distracted by the ocean’s savage roar.

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The two of you are subtle, shadowy: Man, none has sounded your profound recess; O sea, none knows the richness of your depths Since you protect your secrets jealously!39

A former sailor and excellent swimmer, Gauguin had many reasons for loving this poem. The choice of the title Above the Abyss, though no reference is necessarily intended to Baudelaire’s ‘gouffre . . . amer’ (‘bitter depths’), makes clear this affinity of thought, as does the title of The Unintelligible with the Harsh Profile (illus. 17), especially if the latter picture also comprises an element of self-portrayal. Gauguin may also have been able to read the notes by Baudelaire published for the first time in the Œuvres posthumes (Posthumous Works) of 1887, in which the term ‘abyss’ (gouffre) refers to both 146

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|ou Are What |ou See the ‘misunderstanding’ of love – ‘The impassable abyss, the cause of the incommunicability, is never crossed’ – and the inner disintegration of the poet who falls victim to ‘vertigo’: ‘In moral and physical terms, I have always had a feeling of the abyss, not only the abyss of sleep, but the abyss of action, dream, memory, desire, regret, remorse, beauty, number, etc.’ 40 There Baudelaire returns to the reasons why humans find the spectacle of the sea so fascinating. They lie, Baudelaire believes, in its capacity to ‘suggest the idea of total infinity’: ‘Six or seven leagues represent for humanity the radius of the infinite.’41 The idea of suggestion was already present in ‘Man and the Sea’, in which the specular relation between the two protagonists comes not only from their unfathomability but also from their opacity and their capacity to hide their secrets, properties that we might describe as essential to Above the Abyss and its mode of communication or ‘incommunicability’. The capacity for generalization specific to verbal language helps us to understand that, in Above the Abyss too, the identity of the hidden figure is both collective and individual. At the collective level, it concerns humanity in general, as we have seen in Goethe, Thoreau and Baudelaire, particularly in its relationship to the world and the human quality of being a perceiving subject. By revealing an image of its author at the heart of an image of the external world, the picture proposes an epistemological parable that can be summarized by the title of a drawing by Markus Raetz, Was Du siehst, bist Du selbst (1974, property of the artist): You Are What You See, or again What You See Is Yourself or What You See Is What You Are.42 This interdependence between the subject and object of perception necessarily affects the representation of the world and the subject as painter. The parable here touches on the theory of art and renews the proverb cited above, ‘All painters paint themselves.’ Above the Abyss exemplifies ‘pure art according to the modern idea’ outlined by Baudelaire: ‘The creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.’43 Gauguin probably also had in mind Zola’s formulation: ‘A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament’; we have seen that several of his titles may allude to this but Above the Abyss radicalizes that formula by hypothesizing 147

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the identity of object and subject and turns it (literally) inside out, since it is the ‘temperament’ that is ‘seen’ through ‘a corner of nature’. The picture expresses neither triumphant idealism nor solipsism: the subject appears there only thanks to its limits. These are contingent – negatively determined by the meadow and the outline of the rocks – and, at the top, porous, where the yellow and the green (indicating a sandy bottom) give way to the blue of deep water and the foam is diffused over the sea as it is through the air in Goethe’s waterfall. In Goethe, wind and wave form a couple; here it is ocean and cliff face. But their dynamic is more complex: the rocks impose their form on the ground of the sea and contain it like the walls of a recipient but the oceanic head, turning to face the cliff, reminds us that water sculpts stone. By associating his own image with this amorphous power, Gauguin adopted a point of view that, like the ontological ambivalence of Manaò tupupaú, evokes oriental forms of thought such as Taoism, for which the void and ‘non-action’ are more important than action and ‘fullness’.44 He had also learned from his activity as a ceramicist and was working through his thoughts on the head-shaped recipient, probably under the stimulus of Peruvian examples of this type. The Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot (illus. 65) is suggestive of decapitation with its runs of red glaze accumulated around the base. It echoes Van Gogh cutting off his own ear and the guillotining of the criminal Prado in Paris; Gauguin experienced these two events within a single week, on 23 and 28 December 1888.45 But Above the Abyss pre-dates this violence and the Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot cannot in any case be reduced to an expression of such events: in Still-life with Japanese Print (illus. 75), the Pot contains flowers that lean out in all directions, suggesting that the artist’s head, even after death, remains a source of thought – pensée designates in French both a thought and a flower, the pansy – and of creativity. Before painting Above the Abyss, during the winter of 1887–8, Gauguin had made another pot, which Fénéon described as the ‘head of a royal Macrobius, some Atahuallpa [sic] being dispossessed, his mouth torn into an open abyss’ (illus. 76).46 Fénéon’s Atahualpa reference correctly pointed to one of the cultural sources of this strange object: among Peruvian Inca and pre-Inca ceramics, notably in the Churajon culture in the Arequipa region (c. 1200) and the Cajamarca 148

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75 Paul Gauguin, Still-life with Japanese Print, 1889.

culture on the north coast, one finds head-shaped goblets and jars whose wide opening occurs just above the eyebrows (but not just above the upper lip) (illus. 77). We cannot, however, be sure that Fénéon was relying on a title supplied by Gauguin, as Druick and Zegers assume.47 He may have seen in the tragic end of the last Inca emperor one possible explanation for the violence with which the top of the head is cut open. But an attentive examination of the vase, particularly its side and back, and a comparison with the pot represented in the Still-life with Laval’s Profile (illus. 3) suggest a different interpretation, with the opening not inflicted from without but originating within the form.48 The decoration of the pot’s Japanese-style garment gives further evidence for this view, since it is made up of butterflies: one of them, on the back, evokes the transition from caterpillar to chrysalis while two others on the sleeves are cut through by the lateral openings, just as the head is cut through by the central opening. This repetition 149

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76 Paul Gauguin, Bust-Vase with Exploded Head, 1887–8.

and the allusion to the phases of the butterfly’s life, used in many cultures to symbolize death and rebirth, bring what Fénéon calls the ‘abyss’ – and indirectly, the abyss of the painting – closer to ideas of metamorphosis and metempsychosis than to those of execution.49 The unstable and porous frontier that, in Above the Abyss, separates the image of the artist from the rest of the sea thus corresponds to a conception of the individual as a provisional step in a supra-individual process. In L’Église catholique et les temps modernes (The Catholic Church and Modern Times, 1897), Gauguin defined the organism as ‘a transitory living form of the soul’; after the dissolution of the organism, the soul is ‘able to climb, through metamorphosis after metamorphosis, in a general life, all the increasingly elevated grades comprising animic life to an endpoint of definitive blossoming; this is indeed the law of every living being in its particular species’.50 Later in this text Gauguin cited ‘the idea of metempsychosis accepted in the religion of the Hindus’ and by Pythagoras as proving the 150

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antiquity of this notion. He attributed the advent of life to a ‘divine, fertilizing breath [that] occurred over the abyss’ upon which, according to Moses, ‘God swam . . . before creation’, and he described the rebirth of the soul after the death of the individual as ‘an expansion of the vital energy previously acquired from the human chrysalis’. The soul then rises ‘into the ethereal regions of the sky, ready to move at its own pleasure, in all places, everywhere, in the immense space, the general womb, the primitive and definitive sphere of the universal life of beings’.51 This trajectory of change, going from the original abyss to the infinite ether, also illuminates the confusion between sea and sky made possible by the bird’s-eye view adopted in Above the Abyss and in other paintings from Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. Among the many sources on which Gauguin drew for these reflections, we recognize Haeckel’s ‘recapitulation theory’, which was subsequently transposed by Freud from biology to psychology. It is

77 Cup representing a human head with geometrical facial decorations and circular ear pendants, Cajamarca culture, 1st–8th century ad.

151

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worth pointing out the parallels that exist at 40 years’ distance between the way in which Above the Abyss stages the relationships between the self and the world with the treatment given to this question by Freud early in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Where Freud explained the phenomenon of religion as an illusion, Romain Rolland saw a feeling of belonging to the external world, which he called ‘oceanic feeling’ and considered the source of religion. Denying that he felt any such thing himself, Freud acknowledged that the ego ‘is continued inwards, without any sharp delimitation, into an unconscious mental entity which we designate as the id’; ‘but towards the outside . . . The ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation’, except under the influence of love and pathological states. But Freud went on to say that this firm sensation of individual existence came as the endpoint of an ontogenetic evolution whose origin was the undifferentiated state of the newborn. In his view, the obstacles and resistance encountered by the ‘pleasure principle’ gradually led the breastfeeding child towards the capacity for objectification and the acquisition of the ‘reality principle’. Rolland’s ‘oceanic feeling’ was therefore a sort of counterpart to this shrinking; it bore witness to the way in which ‘what is primitive is . . . commonly preserved alongside . . . the transformed version which has arisen from it’ and had some claim to be the ‘source of religious needs’.52 In his works on dream, Freud had observed a recurrent association between the motif of water and the idea of birth, from which he concluded that for the dreamer, as for the hero in the myths studied by Otto Rank, to throw oneself into water or be rescued from water signified being born.53 In Above the Abyss the oceanic head oscillates between appearance and disappearance, as a figuration of both a process of individuation and one of deindividuation or ‘disembodiment’ (in the terminology of L’Église catholique et les temps modernes). From this perspective, it is significant that the liminal zone constituting the passage between shallow water and high seas is formed of foam and makes a kind of horn for the top of the head. The self-portrait included by Gauguin on a page of caricatural sketches made in July 1890 towards the end of a meal with the Danish artist Jens Ferdinand Willumsen at Pont-Aven (illus. 78) shows a little horn growing on his 152

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forehead and another one formed by the lock of hair at the summit of his profile. In addition to this component of self-representation, the motif of the horned head was one that he connected with masculine sexuality, as we know from Tête avec cornes (Head with Horns, 1895–7, Getty Museum, Los Angeles) that he carved or acquired in Tahiti, the use of this head in an engraving and two monotypes, and the sculpted caricature of Bishop Martin entitled Père paillard (Father Lechery) (illus. 100).54 The phallic aspect of the foamy horn in Above the Abyss therefore corresponds to generation as an act transcending individuality; Freud referred to this when he noted that ‘At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away.’55 It also accords with the equivalence between foaming water and sperm acknowledged in many cultures, from the myth of the birth of Aphrodite as described by Hesiod and the conceptions of the desert coast of Peru described by Susan Bergh in relation to ceramics taking the form of genital organs (illus. 79) (probably associated with rites of fecundation and fertility), to the Tahitian expression pape ta¯ne mentioned above.56 At the same time as alluding to self-transcendence through sexuality and death, the horn of foam is directed towards the boat that advances under sail power towards the high seas – that is,

78 Paul Gauguin, Caricatural Motifs Including Portraits of Roderic O’Conor, Meyer de Haan and the Artist, 1890.

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79 Vase with double phallic spout joined by stirrup-shaded handle, Vicús culture, 12th century bc–2nd century ad.

towards the top of the picture. The progress of the boat completes a zigzag movement that, beginning from the cow that looks towards the bottom of the painting, rises through the middle part of the canvas. The sails of the boat and the hooves of the cow are interrupted by the limits of the subjectile, which emphasizes the topological and kinetic opposition between the two elements. As the elongation of its neck and horn make clear, the oceanic head is located in a tension between these two poles and is affected by their semantic value. We do not need to invoke the entire Romantic flotilla to understand that the boat setting off towards the high seas represents the quest for adventure and liberty. That symbolism was enhanced by personal connections in the case of Gauguin who, from 1865 to 1871, had been a cadet in the merchant navy and had then completed his military service as a sailor; subsequent to his stay in Martinique in 1887, his desire for distant horizons had been steadily growing.57 Charles 154

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Morice recorded Gauguin’s emotional reaction on reading Mallarmé’s poem ‘Brise marine’ (‘Sea Breeze’, 1865), in which the poet expressed his desire to be to be among ‘the unknown spray and skies’ and challenged ‘the steamer with [its] rocking helm’ to ‘raise anchor for some more exotic realm’. 58 The cow, as a generally placid herbivore, lends itself to representation of exactly the opposite values, those of stability and security, and the motif was sometimes used to represent artists devoted to the ‘objective’ imitation of nature. In a passage from the Salon of 1859 devoted to landscape, Baudelaire regretted the disappearance of romantic ruins and wrote: ‘Surely our landscape-painters are far too herbivorous in their diet.’59 The metaphor must have been common in the studios since André Lhote made use of it in 1919 to contrast ‘the necessity of theories’ with the ‘exhortations towards stupidity’ lavished on artists: ‘The cow ruminating its nirvanâ will again be put forward as a model. Only the artist capable of “grazing” a landscape, neck stretched down to the ground . . . will enjoy the approval of the level-headed art-lover.’60 We might therefore paraphrase Gauguin by saying that the cow grazes ‘around the eye’ while the boat sails towards ‘the mysterious centre of thought’. Baudelaire’s Salon of 1859 must have caught Gauguin’s attention. There the poet contrasts two kinds of artists, the ‘realist’ and the ‘imaginative’, basing his critique of the realist on an epistemological argument: There are those who call themselves ‘realists’ – a word with a double meaning, whose sense has not been properly defined, and so, in order the better to characterize their error, I propose to call them ‘positivists’; and they say, ‘I want to represent things as they are, or rather as they would be, supposing that I did not exist’. In other words, universe without man. The others however – the ‘imaginatives’ – say, ‘I want to illuminate things with my mind, and to project their reflection upon other minds’.61

The relevance of this contrast for Above the Abyss is confirmed by a letter to Schuffenecker dating from the second half of August 1888, in which Gauguin wrote: ‘How alone they are on land, these pompiers 155

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with their trompe-l’oeil nature. We alone sail on the phantom vessel with all our fantastical imperfection.’62 In Adieu à Gauguin (Farewell to Gauguin) (illus. 80) from 1906, the year of Gauguin’s posthumous exhibition at the Salon d’Automne, Paul Sérusier represented Gauguin as Meliboeus and himself as Tityrus, evoking the two shepherds of Virgil’s first Eclogue. The dialogue has been transposed to Brittany, where Sérusier had been living since 1893. Sérusier-Tityrus sits under a beech tree in front of two cows grazing on a bank; Gauguin-Meliboeus faces him, standing on the path, carrying traveller’s sack and staff and pointing imperiously away towards the sea and the sky. Whereas, in Virgil, Tityrus is the happy shepherd allowed to remain on his property, here he seems melancholy while Meliboeus seems to be going voluntarily into exile; their attitudes and respective positions suggest Sérusier’s acknowledgement that Gauguin has, in every sense of the expression, ‘gone further’. The consonance of this scene with one of the parabolic senses of Above the Abyss and the quotation of Gauguin’s profile with beret make it possible that Sérusier was paying tribute to this picture. The oceanic head also lies within another polar tension, this one lateral and more difficult to interpret. The elements flanking the

80 Paul Sérusier, Farewell to Gauguin, or Tityrus and Meliboeus, 1906.

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|ou Are What |ou See head to left and right are clearly contrasted, both as cliffs and in their zoomorphic and teratomorphic aspects. This contrast partly maps on to that between the lower and upper parts of the picture. The rock on the left transposes into the mineral domain the passive principle of the cow, whose direction it accentuates and whose calm it amplifies. The outline of the rock on the right is agitated and the boat springs from it like an emanation at the level of the eye and forehead. The head ‘turns its back’ on the former and ‘embraces’ the latter. The left-hand cliff also resembles rhytons, drinking vases that Gauguin had undoubtedly studied for his ceramics and that often, notably in Greece and Achaemenid Persia, took the form of an animal head. We might also compare it with the cast of the head of Selene’s horse from the east pediment of the Parthenon that Gauguin included in 1886 in his Nature morte à la tête de cheval (Still-life with the Head of a Horse) (illus. 81). 63 There the cast was set beside Japanese fans and an East Asian doll or puppet.64 A similar aesthetic contrast is perhaps suggested in Above the Abyss, where the grotesque or monstrous profile of the right-hand cliff might make one think of a ‘barbarian idol’ – it is not unlike that of the faun in L’Après-midi d’un faune (illus. 97) – in which case it would represent the ‘primitive’ forms towards which Gauguin was now turning his attention, beginning a voyage that was to take him (as he said towards the end of his life) ‘further [back] than the horses on the Parthenon . . . to the dear old wooden hobbyhorse of [his] childhood’.65 But the ‘kiss’ of the head and the cliff brings together mutually exclusive partners and resembles a reciprocal attempted cannibalism – a symbol of barbarity that Gauguin took care not to condemn in relation to Marquesan culture.66 The violence contained within the outline at which the profile appears and disappears emphasizes the fact that its epiphany is no more triumphal at the aesthetic, emotional and biographical levels than from a philosophical perspective. The strange and the distant are not merely attractive but also unknown and threatening and the sensation of vertigo felt ‘above the abyss’ expresses this ambivalence in physio-psychological terms. It is evocative of Rimbaud’s poem ‘Le Bateau ivre’ (‘The Drunken Boat’) of 1871, which personifies the eponymous boat: after a triumphant 157

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81 Paul Gauguin, Still-life with Horse’s Head, c. 1886.

departure with ‘peninsulas sliding by’, it expresses the desire ‘O let my keel break’ and regrets the puddle in Europe on which ‘A child squatting full of sadness launches / A boat as frail as a May butterfly’.67 Contemplation of the ocean on the coast of Finistère – finis terræ, ‘the end of the earth’ – was also used by Gauguin as a metaphor in the context of his bitter reflections on his situation. Responding in November 1889 to Emile Bernard, who complained about the reception of his works, Gauguin compared this lack of understanding 158

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|ou Are What |ou See to a ‘tunic of Nessus that sticks to you and that you cannot be rid of’; he himself was so discouraged that he spent his time walking ‘in the northern gale on the shores of Le Pouldu’ and could not concentrate on his painting: ‘the soul is absent and sadly contemplates the gaping hole in front of it – a hole in which I see my family desolate in the absence of paternal help and no heart into which I could pour out my suffering!’68 The theoretical proposition of Above the Abyss is more radical than that of The Vision of the Sermon (illus. 43), since it bears on the relations between perception and cognition, between the self and the world in a way wholly independent of faith or ‘superstition’. But Gauguin seems to have intended it for his peers rather than the wider public that his ‘religious’ picture had succeeded in reaching, thanks to a higher degree of explicitness and to Aurier’s intervention. Above the Abyss is a ‘painting for painters’ and its reception justifies Gauguin’s comparison between his art and the parables spoken by Jesus. There is no trace of the picture’s ‘dual-purpose parabolic meaning’ in art criticism and art history whereas we recognize certain echoes of it in works by artists close to Gauguin – those who were soon enough described as his ‘disciples’. These echoes suggest that the polyiconicity of Above the Abyss was recognized within the circle of initiates and its programmatic value understood. The communication may have occurred exclusively through observation of the picture, which could have been seen in the artist’s studio, then at the Boussod and Valadon gallery, at the Hôtel Drouot during the exhibition of 22 February 1891 and the sale on the following day, and finally, perhaps, at the house of Vicomte Guy de Cholet – or it may have been facilitated by Gauguin’s own words.69 Farewell to Gauguin (illus. 80) represents a late example of such echoes and has a certain retrospective value. Sérusier joined the ‘gang’ of young ‘revolutionary’ painters around Gauguin at Pont-Aven in the summer of 1888; in October, ‘under the dictation’ of the master, he painted the little work L’Aven au Bois d’Amour (The River Aven at the Bois d’Amour), dubbed Le Talisman (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which helped to spread the ‘Synthetist’ doctrine among his friends from the Académie Julian in Paris and contributed to the formation of the Nabis (‘prophets’ in Hebrew).70 Sérusier had been able to see 159

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Above the Abyss from the day it was painted and this must have left a profound mark on him, since as late as 1916 he quoted elements from it in Mer grise (Grey Sea) (illus. 82), which depicts a section of Breton coast comparable to that of Le Pouldu, where he stayed with Gauguin in 1889 and 1890. The outline of the huge central outcrop of rock, on which the cavity bestows a blank gaze, is emphasized by the dark colour of the spurs and tends to invert itself, drawing a human profile (or perhaps several such profiles) on the background of the sea. Though the main profile faces left, it resembles that of Above the Abyss and includes the beret.71 Immediately below this, the waves form a grotesque or animal profile, evoking Gauguin’s cliffs and his way of making foam look like clouds in the sky, as for example in La Plage du Pouldu (Le Pouldu Beach) (1889, Buenos Aires, private collection).72 Another lineage deriving from Above the Abyss can be found in the pictures painted from 1893 onwards in the Camaret – on the Crozon peninsula, northwest of Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu – by Georges Lacombe, a disciple of Sérusier and a member of the Nabis, who had met Gauguin during the winter of that year. Vorhor, vague grise (Vorhor, Grey Wave) (illus. 83) faithfully represents a breach opened in the cliff between the megalithic alignments of Lagatjar and Pen-Hir Point, all within the compositional framework of Above the Abyss. The anthropomorphic aspects of the cliffs are more explicit and one can make out three heads, one to the left with faintly delineated nose and forehead covered with hair or a bandanna and two to the right, with lowered eyes and clearly marked noses; more inchoate faces appear in the orange zone below the nose of the left face closest to the frame. The sheer scale and the hieratic nature of these figures are reminiscent of the mo‘ai of Easter Island, known in France since the 1870s; Lacombe perhaps sought to make a parallel with the menhirs of Lagatjar. The profiles are face to face, linked by clouds at forehead level and by foam at the mouth level, thus suggesting a silent conversation and an exchange between the elements. The section of sea visible between the rocks does not become a figure despite a visual salience comparable to that of the oceanic head in Above the Abyss, but if the picture is turned 90 degrees to the right, the apparently abstract motif of the foam reveals a grotesque head with open mouth, analogous to that of the right-hand cliff in Gauguin’s picture.73 160

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82 Paul Sérusier, Grey Sea, 1916.

Other grotesque heads can be found in the outlines of Breton cliffs by Maxime Maufra and Charles Filiger during these same years; Filiger also introduced heads in plant life and frequently made play with the uncertain boundaries of sea and sky.74 But these compositions do not refer to Above the Abyss and testify only to the more general influence exerted by Gauguin, particularly in relation to polyiconicity. The fact that Emile Bernard’s work seems largely unaffected by polyiconicity, despite his high degree of abstraction and his exploitation of the ornamental possibilities of Breton costume, is a measure of his independence but also emphasizes the limits of his contribution to Gauguin’s development. By contrast, the admiring 161

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83 Georges Lacombe, Vorhor, Grey Wave, 1893–4.

attention of Degas to the art of his younger colleague no doubt played a role in the anthropomorphism of his pastel landscapes of the early 1890s, showing that the impact of the ‘parables’ was not confined to the younger generation.75 But the most immediate echo of Above the Abyss occurs in Van Gogh’s portrait of Gauguin (illus. 63), which forms part of a particularly dense network of exchanges about the questions raised by the picture.

Dialogue with Vincent Van Gogh was no doubt ready to perceive Above the Abyss ‘doubly’. He knew that ‘oceanic sentiment’ from experience, having written to Bernard on 29 July 1888 on the subject of Dutch painting and 162

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|ou Are What |ou See Rembrandt in particular, saying that ‘something complete – perfection – renders the infinite tangible. And to enjoy such a thing is like coitus, a moment of the infinite.’76 This comparison with the sexual act applied, in his view, to the kind of perception required by painters; on 21 August he wrote to the same correspondent about the network of friendship and alliance that he was hoping to consolidate: ‘Ah, my dear pals, we crazy ones [nous autres toqués], let’s anyway enjoy with our eyes, shall we?’77 Gauguin was among the toqués to whom Van Gogh referred and picked up this expression when consulting the letters brought to Pont-Aven by Bernard, as we know from his own letter to Schuffenecker speaking of ‘our rutting and insatiable eyes’.78 Druick and Zegers emphasize the importance of the contribution made by Van Gogh to Gauguin’s thinking, at first indirectly, by letter; they cite the notion of abstraction, the parallel between art and reverie, reference to God as the supreme artist and the reading of Carlyle.79 We might add that in Van Gogh, realism did not exclude polyiconicity, as is clear from landscapes such as Le Martin-pêcheur (The Kingfisher) (illus. 84) of 1884. More or less contemporary with Red Roof by the Water (illus. 28) and several years earlier than Study of Cow and Peasant Woman in a Sunken Lane (illus. 46), this drawing also describes a pond bordered by pollarded willows. The tree on the extreme right, with its branch extended like hands in prayer and an eye clearly indicated by a cavity, resembles the stump on which, in a painting by a follower of Joachim Patinir, St Jerome Praying in a Landscape, the saint has placed his cardinal’s robes; the stump imitates the form and attitude of the saint.80 These affinities were however combined with profound differences, which contributed to the tension that characterized their relationship even before Gauguin came to Arles on 23 October and were exacerbated during his stay there, which came to a tragic end two months later. During the second half of November, Gauguin summarized the divide in a letter to Bernard: ‘He’s romantic and I incline rather to a primitive state.’81 In early August, explaining to his brother that he ‘always had to struggle against the mistral which absolutely prevents one being in control of one’s touch’, Van Gogh imagined that Gauguin would advise him to ‘look for a more sheltered place’ to attain a ‘more spiritual touch’.82 The alternative of painting 163

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84 Vincent Van Gogh, The Kingfisher, 1884.

outdoors sur le motif or in the studio was connected to their debate on the mutual relations and respective artistic merits of observation and imitation on the one hand, and memory and imagination on the other.83 Imagination particularly preoccupied them and each attributed to the other the ‘southern imagination’ symbolized by Tartarin de Tarascon.84 In a letter to Theo written two days before Gauguin’s arrival, Van Gogh was somewhat ambivalent about the effect that he expected: ‘I nevertheless pressed ahead as far as I could with what I had on the go, in a strong desire to be able to show him something new. And not to fall under his influence (because, of course, he’ll have an influence over me, I hope) before being able to show him beyond any doubt my own originality.’85 In the Portrait of Gauguin painted by Van Gogh (illus. 63) around 1 December (according to the chronology of Druick and Zegers), the oceanic head of Above the Abyss is rendered as if in three dimensions, crowned by a red beret and completed by shoulders seen from the back and very slightly from the side; the figure is set in an interior with a green wall bearing a small picture in a mount or a yellow passepartout frame. Also yellow is the area on which the profile stands 164

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|ou Are What |ou See out, which seems – because of the inclined edge and the orange form visible towards the bottom of it – to represent a picture on an easel, probably the Nature morte au potiron (Still-life with Pumpkin) painted by Gauguin in late October, whose whereabouts are today unknown.86 With its ‘image within the image’, the picture is reminiscent of the self-portraits painted in the second part of September by Gauguin (illus. 11) and Bernard in response to Van Gogh’s request that they portray each other; the portraits appeared in their selfportraits in the guise of drawings hung on the background wall.87 The representation of the artist at work moreover matches the portrait of Van Gogh painted at the same time by Gauguin, Le Peintre de tournesols (The Painter of Sunflowers) (illus. 85).88 The exchange desired by Van Gogh was realized in this set of reciprocal representations but the reticence that led Gauguin and Bernard to propose self-portraits remains clearly visible in the asymmetry of the two pictures. Instead of painting from the model, according to the method for which he argued, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Gauguin probably derives from the photographic portrait of the artist and perhaps from Above the Abyss, whose latent aspect it makes manifest. By contrast, The Painter of Sunflowers, based in part on direct observation, passes comment on Van Gogh’s pictorial practice and the relationship between artist and reality in general. The background landscape of Gauguin’s painting, more Breton than Provençal, occupies almost the full length of the landscape format; it cannot represent the view through a window and therefore constitutes another ‘image within the image’. The bouquet of sunflowers placed on a straw-bottomed chair would have been out of season at that date and can therefore only have been painted by the use of memory, imagination or representations.89 Unlike Portrait of Gauguin, the easel is visible whereas one can only see the irregular edge of the canvas that it carries. The palette exhibits a rather formless world of colours but the brush is reduced to a line, the line being an artistic device whose importance Gauguin defended against Van Gogh’s arguments; it touches the canvas at the point at which the latter becomes one with the corolla of the upper sunflower. Thus the artist, with an instrument in the shape of a magician’s baton, does not merely represent a piece of nature but genuinely brings it into being.90 Moreover, 165

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the sunflower emerging from the brush stands in a symmetrical relationship with the head of the painter, reversing the inclination of the head and imitating with its petals the crest of the hair and beard. The animation of the sunflower becomes all but explicit in the form of the eye placed at the centre of the flower-head. 91 As in Above the Abyss, the ‘painter of sunflowers’ thus paints himself. Is he aware of the fact? Those who have commented on Gauguin’s portrait of Van Gogh have generally deemed the image less than flattering of its model and even frankly pejorative: the point of view adopted by Gauguin has been thought condescending, Van Gogh’s features have been judged simian and therefore supposed to refer to the definition of the artist as ‘aping nature’. The half-closed eyes have even been seen as a sign of blindness.92 Gauguin noted in 1903 that when Van Gogh saw the finished work, he said ‘It’s me all right but me gone mad.’93 Nevertheless the downward perspective, looking downward but sliding towards the horizontal, is analogous with that of Above the Abyss; the half-closed eyes are those of one who ‘dreams before’ nature and, if the above interpretation is correct, The Painter

85 Paul Gauguin, The Painter of Sunflowers, 1888.

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86 Vincent Van Gogh, Sunflowers in a Vase, 1888.

of Sunflowers makes Van Gogh one of nature’s ‘elect’ for her ‘continuation of creation’. Moreover, Gauguin’s ‘mental’ model was not sunflowers as such but their appearance in Van Gogh’s oeuvre: the sunflower pictures that Vincent had painted in late August and for which Gauguin had expressed great admiration – so much so in the case of the yellow-on-yellow-background version (illus. 86) that he asked to be given it in January 1889 as ‘a perfect page in an essentially Vincent style’.94 The motif of the flower-eye, used by Redon in 1883 in the album The Origins (illus. 15), was clearly present in the centre of Tournesols dans un vase (Sunflowers in a Vase) and Van Gogh seems to have painted – precisely during the early days of December – a new version in which the iris of this eye is red. 95 Van Gogh did not conceal the metaphorical dimension of his series of sunflower pictures; they were conceived as a decoration analogous to stained glass for the Yellow House, which he wanted to transform into an ‘artist’s house’, and were at one time intended for Gauguin’s room.96 167

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In the letter to Theo in which he told his brother about Gauguin’s desire to possess this work, Van Gogh explained the series in these terms: It’s a type of painting that changes its aspect a little, which grows in richness the more you look at it. Besides, you know that Gauguin likes them extraordinarily. He said to me about them, among other things: ‘That – . . . that’s . . . the flower.’ You know that Jeannin has the peony, Quost has the hollyhock, but I have the sunflower, in a way.97

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Van Gogh’s identification with the sunflower inspired the Dutch symbolist Richard Roland Holst to create an anthropomorphic flower, cut down but sanctified by a halo, for the cover of the posthumous exhibition of the works of Van Gogh held in December 1892 in Amsterdam.98 As to Gauguin’s compliment, it perhaps indicates that he saw in the sunflower pictures a pictorial realization of the poetic ideal expressed by Mallarmé in his foreword to René Ghil’s Traité du verbe (Treatise of the Word), which appeared in August 1886 shortly before Jean Moréas’ ‘Manifeste du symbolisme’ (‘Manifesto of Symbolism’). 99 Distinguishing the ‘double state of the word, raw or immediate here, essential there’, Mallarmé defined poetry as ‘the marvel of transposing a fact of nature in its vibratory near disappearance’ so that the ‘pure notion’ could emanate from it, and chose a floral example of this transposition: I say: a flower! And out of the oblivion whence my voice relegates each contour, as something other than the calices till then known, musically there arises, pure idea and soft to the touch, the absent from all bouquets.

Metaphorism and anthropomorphism were then very pronounced in Van Gogh. For the Yellow House, in which he hoped to gather a community analogous to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and that of the early Christians, he had bought twelve chairs. He similarly thought of painting twelve pictures of sunflowers, and in late November had 168

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|ou Are What |ou See painted La Chaise de Van Gogh (Van Gogh’s Chair, National Gallery, London) and La Chaise de Gauguin (Gauguin’s Chair, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) as symbolic portraits of their occupants, who do not appear in the pictures.100 The same phenomenon was more discreetly present in the theme eventually chosen for the decoration of Gauguin’s room, the ‘poet’s garden’: a series of representations of the public gardens located opposite the Yellow House on place Lamartine (illus. 87). Inspired in part by an article on Boccaccio published in La Revue des deux mondes, Van Gogh had made a parallel between the Provençal renaissance of the fourteenth century and the one that he hoped to stimulate by means of his ‘south of France studio’ (Atelier du Midi), identifying himself as an introverted Boccaccio and entrusting the role of Petrarch to Gauguin, the older of the two.101 This fantasy, at once historical, artistic and emotional, had found its own particular locus in the public gardens and in the motif, set down in early July, of ‘a corner of garden with round bushes and a weeping tree and, in the background, clumps of oleanders’. 102 These plants had, in his view, their own lives and in late December he described the oleanders as ‘raving mad’: ‘These bloody plants flower in such a way that they could surely catch locomotor ataxia.’103 The contrast between the spherical bush and the ‘weeping’ tree visible in The Poet’s Garden was intended by him to describe the contrast between his own personality and that of Gauguin, so the two plants allowed him indirectly to represent the two men. This interpretation, physiognomic no less than anthropomorphic, might have been encouraged by the fact that the ‘bushes’ were cedars or cypresses pruned into shape and by a passage in Sartor Resartus in which Carlyle had employed a plant metaphor on the subject of the ‘all-but omnipotence of early culture and nurture: hereby we have either a doddered dwarf bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree; either a sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one’.104 The ‘corner of creation’ chosen by Van Gogh was itself a product of art and possessed in his eyes ‘a funny sort of style’ that meant that you could ‘very well imagine the Renaissance poets . . . strolling among these bushes on the flowery grass’. 105 Van Gogh’s mode of painting the garden was analogous with the gardeners and designers even as he reacted against them: ‘Now it’s true that I’ve left out some 169

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trees, but what I’ve kept in the composition is really like that. Only they’ve overcrowded it with a number of bushes that aren’t in character, and so to find this truer and more fundamental character, this is the third time that I’m painting the same spot.’ 106 While insisting on fidelity to his prototype, Van Gogh did indeed operate a ‘transposition’, and by aiming for ‘character’, assigned himself a goal that was not incompatible with that defined by Mallarmé. Direct contact with the model nevertheless remained a psychological and aesthetic necessity for Van Gogh.107 In early October, informing Bernard that he had destroyed two pictures including a Christ at Gethsemane, he spoke about his ‘curiosity for what’s possible and what really exists’; this justified his refusal to paint ‘from memory’ or to ‘search for the ideal, in so far as it could result from my abstract studies’.108 In mid-November he nevertheless attempted to adopt Gauguin’s method when painting Souvenir du jardin à Etten (Memory of the Garden at Etten) (illus. 88), an evocation of the gardens surrounding the presbyteries where his parents lived at Etten and subsequently at Nuenen in the Netherlands, with the figures of

87 Vincent Van Gogh, The Poet’s Garden, 1888.

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88 Vincent Van Gogh, Memory of the Garden at Etten, 1888.

his sister, his mother and a servant woman. His memories, activated and reinforced by a photo of his mother that he had received shortly before, are fused in the picture with recent impressions of the public garden in place Lamartine, while the face of his sister Willemien is mixed with the lineaments of the Arlésienne, Marie Ginoux, whose portrait he had painted earlier that month. 109 In a letter to Williemien containing a sketch of the picture, Van Gogh justified the lack of a ‘vulgar resemblance’ in terms borrowed from Gauguin: colours, like poetry and music capable of ‘saying comforting things’, should ‘suggest the personality’ of the figures and the garden should be ‘as if seen in a dream, in character and yet at the same time stranger than reality’. 110 He attributed these particularities to his new companion and wrote to Theo: ‘Gauguin gives me courage to imagine, and the things of the imagination do indeed take on a more mysterious character.’111 171

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In his letter to Willemien, Van Gogh mentioned the dahlias that ‘explode’ against the dark figure of his mother and the ‘cedar or cypress bushes’ immediately behind the women but not the three sunflowers placed between his mother and the servant. Around 1 December, while he was painting the Portrait of Gauguin (illus. 63) and Gauguin was working on The Painter of Sunflowers (illus. 85), he told his brother about the advantages of working in the studio when the weather was cold but confessed: ‘Only I’ve spoilt that thing I did of the garden at Nuenen and I feel that habit is also necessary for works of imagination.’112 Memory of the Garden at Etten was intended for his bedroom as The Poet’s Garden (illus. 87) was for Gauguin’s. In mid-December Gauguin responded to these two pictures with Arlésiennes, Mistral (illus. 89). As in Above the Abyss (illus. 58), the point of view changes within the picture, juxtaposing a frontal view of the women in the background with a bird’s-eye view of the barely recognizable public bench at the top of the painting. On the right the reflections on the pond create an abstract and vaguely biomorphic phantasmagoria, anchored by a dark form which may represent a fountain and it s jets or a pollarded stump and its withies. On either side of this, two very elongated yellow cones that end in a fan shape hold up the top of the canvas like caryatids: these are probably straw mats protecting young plants as the season required. Their twin nature is reflected in the two couples of women visible one behind the other, both wearing the costume of Arles. This repetition and the slight advance of one of the two nearer women suggests that they are moving from the depths of the garden towards the spectator and will then leave the park through an opening in the red gate that bars access to the path on the right. But instead of approaching the viewer’s space, they are separated from it by a large hemispherical bush which bizarrely occupies the lower-left corner of the picture. It is as if one of the bushes from Memory of the Garden at Etten had overtaken the pair of women and the women had acquired their double; the effect is to give Arlésiennes, Mistral a character that is both kinetic and dream-like. Descending from the mysterious pond towards our world, which they pass without giving it a glance, these women seem like shades from the past if not indeed from the 172

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89 Paul Gauguin, Arlésiennes, Mistral, 1888.

underworld. The picture thus comes to represent the process of remembering initiated by Van Gogh, the absence of communication that he had staged and the mediation of the here and now to which he had resorted. The form of the bush, a polygon with curved sides, echoes that of the umbrella held by Willemien in Van Gogh’s picture; but this plant-‘umbrella’ is directed less against the mistral, from which the Arlésiennes are sheltering behind their shawls, than against the spectator. It is also reminiscent of the bush in The Poet’s Garden (illus. 87), whose ‘weeping tree’ is here discreetly represented in the upper-left corner by a serpentine trunk and slender, graceful branches. The quotation of Van Gogh’s bush is very precise and includes two arcs symmetrically placed around a central protuberance. In Arlésiennes, Mistral, this protuberance suggests a nose while two eyes surmounted by eyebrows are discreetly but clearly visible above them, the one on the right slightly higher and tinted red.113 This 173

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resemblance to the bush in The Poet’s Garden indicates that Gauguin had perceived in its form the suggestion of animation, which was perhaps confirmed by the position, in front of the first bush of Memory of the Garden at Etten, of two sunflowers featuring eyes. At all events, Gauguin had understood Van Gogh’s identification with the plant and, in Arlésiennes, Mistral, handed him a magic mirror whose oracular verdict was: ‘The bush is you!’ This message continued and extended that of Above the Abyss and The Painter of Sunflowers and, as we have seen, was subsequently addressed to Huysmans in Gauguin’s article of 1889. The message also bears on the questions of theory and method that Gauguin and Van Gogh were continually debating. Van Gogh blamed his inability to ‘master his touch’ when painting outdoors on the mistral. In the letter to Bernard in which he explained his inability to paint ‘from memory’ but hoped that he would later be able to overcome it, he had described himself as the ‘herbivore painter’ mocked by Baudelaire:

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but in the meanwhile I’m still living off nature [ literally, ‘eating’: Je mange toujours de la nature]. I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but still I don’t invent the whole of the painting; on the contrary I find it ready-made – but to be untangled – in nature.114

Gauguin’s reply, formulated in The Painter of Sunflowers and Arlésiennes, Mistral, might be verbalized in the form of a quotation from Delacroix that he subsequently copied into Diverses choses: ‘Oh young artist, are you waiting for a subject? Everything is subject-matter: the subject is yourself; it is your impressions, your emotions before nature. You need to look into and not around yourself.’115 One might think that this reflection – in the physical as well as the psychological sense – was intended to increase awareness and to that extent carried a critical dimension. Did it contribute to the crisis that followed and did it bear fruit on the other side of that crisis? These questions relate more to Van Gogh than to Gauguin and therefore fall outside the framework of this study.116 The dialogical meaning of the bush in Arlésiennes, Mistral would seem to be confirmed by the fact that when Gauguin varied the composition in a zincography 174

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90 Vincent Van Gogh, Landscape near Saint-Rémy, 1889.

from the ‘Volpini Suite’ in 1889, he did not include any suggestion of the face.117 As to Van Gogh, the works that he made at Saint-Rémy contain many anthropomorphic aspects, for example in L’Entrée d’une carrière (Entrance to a Quarry near Saint-Rémy, 1899, private collection) and Ravin (Ravine, 1889, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), in which the cavities dug into the rock form the eye sockets of a skull, or in the views of the wheat field behind the asylum at Saint-Paul de Mausole (illus. 90), which is bordered at the horizon by a chain of mountains whose outline on the right suggests a face in profile, in the manner of the cliff in The Rocky Coast (illus. 66).

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four

Matter and Material

Gauguin’s interest in mental images and his quest for ‘the mysterious centre of thought’ did not imply any disqualification of sensation. In his ‘Notes synthétiques’ (‘Synthetic Notes’), probably drafted in the mid-1880s, he attacked the idealist, logocentric justification for the superiority attributed to literature relative to painting and music:

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And to hear it said that thought is spirit, whereas instincts, muscles, and the heart form part of matter. What an irony! The vaguest, most indefinable, most varied thing is precisely matter – Thought is the slave of sensations.1

But he too sometimes made use of spiritualist language, for example in October 1888, writing to Madeleine Bernard: ‘The soul the heart in short everything divine must not be the slave of matter, that is, of the body.’ Similarly, in June 1890 he wrote to Madeleine’s elder brother Emile: ‘We are destined (we artists, researchers and thinkers) to perish under the blows of the world but to perish as matter.’ 2 It would be easy to spotlight the contradictions and changes in his thought and one should remember that towards the end of his life Gauguin defined philosophy as ‘an arm that we savages cobble together unaided’.3 The dualisms to which he resorted were in any case far from static but supplied him with conceptual poles that entered a dialectical relationship. The mythologies, cosmologies and visions of the world of ‘the savage’ had become increasingly accessible thanks to scholarly, cultivated and popular interest and contributed to Gauguin’s thought no less than contemporary science and philosophy. Thus he copied 176

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into his manuscript Ancien culte mahorie the elements of Polynesian cosmogony that the draughtsman, diplomat and ethnologist JacquesAntoine Moerenhout had gathered from an old Tahitian priest. Gauguin included Moerenhout’s comment: ‘We see from this fragment that matter and everything that makes up the universe formed part of the divinity.’4 The legend that Moerenhout entitled ‘Eternity of Matter’, a dialogue between Te Fatou and Hina, ‘the spirit of the moon’, caught Gauguin’s attention; he illustrated it by emphasizing the symmetry of the opposed male and female principles while contriving a dynamic element of asymmetry.5 At the end of this dialogue the domain of Te Fatou, comprising earth, plant life and humanity, is set to die while Hina’s domain will live again. Chapter Eight of Noa Noa, written by Charles Morice according to Gauguin’s instructions, compares the aforementioned mortality of the earth and humanity with the Western theory of evolution and concludes from the rebirth of the moon that ‘matter does not die, meaning that it does not stop having its sensible qualities.’6 The text attributes to the ancient Polynesians a fundamental dualism subordinated to the dialectical principle of ‘the unity of substance’: It is evident that the Oceanian theology had two terms in view in the actions of the god who created the world and conserves it: the generative cause and matter which has become fecund, the motive force and the object acted upon, spirit and matter . . . But when once the phenomenon for which the two universal currents came together has been accomplished – the generative cause and fertilized matter combining in the fruit, the motive force and the object that it displaced combining in movement – spirit and matter unite and mingle in life, and the universe is no sooner created than it is no more than Taaroa’s shell!7

Noa Noa describes this conception as a ‘philosophical presentiment’ and states that the ‘poetic imaginings’ that the text attributes to Tehura – that is, Teha‘amana, Gauguin’s mistress, who represents ‘the memory of the women’ in which the ‘old gods’ are said to have taken refuge – cannot ‘impede the progress of the most positive science’.8 177

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Gauguin therefore found in accounts of the ancient Polynesian vision of the world – as in Spinozism, a point to which we shall return – a confirmation of science and indeed of positivism. Taine, in his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (History of English Literature), had similarly said on the subject of John Stuart Mill that ‘the product is equivalent to the factors, both are but the same thing under different aspects; the cause does not differ in nature from the effect.’9 The manuscripts The Catholic Church and Modern Times (1897) and L’Esprit moderne et le catholicisme (Catholicism and the Modern Mind, 1902) articulate the position that Gauguin had gradually come to adopt. In the first, he argues that the political and economic progress accomplished even by ‘communists and nihilists’ remains limited to ‘material fodder’ and is of no profit to the philosopher, scholar, poet or ‘the artist defenceless against commercial cunning’. He sums up this historical situation in the formula ‘Matter rises, Thought descends.’10 The second text, in a passage that Philippe Verdier has compared to Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1888) and Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory, 1890), attacks the ‘belated materialists of endlessly progressing modern science’ while insisting on the limits of ‘purely philosophical modern spiritualism’. 11 In this later version of his thought, matter is not ‘a being, a substance, but a collective form, a multitude, a soluble aggregate, adventitious, temporary, perishable like any other effective form, phenomenal, emanating from the substantial virtuality of being, which is, in principle, imperishable’. The anatomical and physical emphasis placed on the role of nerve centres and their convergence in a ‘vital node’ (identified as the rachidian bulb) in his view confirmed ‘the doctrine of the animists who consider the soul as the generating principle of the organism’.12

The Aesthetic of Materials Gauguin’s philosophical positions on the subject of matter illuminate those that, in the more restricted domain of art theory, he held about 178

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materials – views that can at first glance seem contradictory or at least ambivalent. On the one hand, Gauguin argued the need to subordinate the material to ‘thought’ or ‘the soul’. This hierarchy matched his view of the evolution of art, both as it was and as it was to be desired: in Diverses choses, having criticized the Impressionists for seeking ‘around the eye’, he predicted that the ‘official painters of tomorrow’ – products of Impressionism – would produce ‘an entirely superficial art, nothing but affectation and materialism: the intellect [will have] no place in it’.13 This hierarchy implied choices and preferences of practical kind. Describing to Bernard the gap between himself and Van Gogh, Gauguin explained in 1888: ‘From the point of view of colour, he sees the accidents of impasto as in Monticelli and I hate the jiggerypokery of treatment [facture] etc.’14 Gauguin himself avoided impasto and relied for variation in texture on the support itself, rough forms of canvas (as of 1888, often made of jute) that he incompletely covered with thin, sparse pictorial layers. 15 The choice of absorbent preparation (generally white), the replacement of glaze with a waxbased coating and his habit of degreasing the finished painting by washing it were all intended to result in a matt texture, which he associated with the sound of clogs on granite.16 After he had settled in Polynesia, the experimental character of these processes (of preparation in particular) and the requirement to roll his canvases for transport turned out to be harmful to the stability of his pictures and led Monfreid to criticize him for not ‘taking care with [pictorial] matter’.17 While attempting to correct these failings, Gauguin significantly replied by contrasting the material aspects of art with art itself: The thing that principally occupies me is always to know whether I am on the right road, making progress, whether I am making art errors. Because questions of matter, of pains in execution and even in the preparation of the canvas come last of all in importance – You can always find a remedy for that, can’t you? Whereas art, oh, art is really a delicate matter and fearful to go into in any depth.18 179

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Van Gogh imagined in 1888 that his ‘more spiritual touch’ was something that he owed to Gauguin, while Gauguin himself, some years later, suggested that his disciple Armand Seguin should aim for ‘a rather more distinguished’ pictorial texture, publicly advising him: ‘Less devil-may-care, more craft, and the artist will surely triumph over matter.’19 But in Seguin’s etching, he found his disciple’s craft too self-evident and demanded ‘greater innocence’. ‘Craft’, in the sense of technical ability, should in his view be subordinated in the same way as the material. Discussing the respective merits of Rembrandt and Hals with Willumsen, he said he admired Rembrandt’s ‘great intelligence’ and ‘mysticism, which attains the highest pinnacles of the human imagination’ while criticizing Hals’s virtuosity in manifesting the life of his models through ‘external things’: ‘The noble is simple and all the supplest gestures of the brush merely take away from an imaginative work by reminding us of the matter of which it is made.’ 20 In the field of ceramics, he criticized in the same perspective ‘the nimble fingers’ of the modern sculptors collaborating with Ernest Chaplet and distanced himself from the productions of Art Nouveau, particularly those of Auguste Delaherche.21 Referring to myths in which man was created from earth – present notably in the Polynesian cosmogony and the Old Testament – Albert Aurier wrote that Gauguin, in his ceramics, had kneaded ‘more soul than clay’.22 Gauguin’s open letter to the Soir quoted this expression with the remark: ‘I accepted that praise for my intention, if not for my work.’ Modesty is uncharacteristic in Gauguin, as is the contrast between intention and result, so the reservation perhaps indicates his refusal to adopt the idealist point of view from which Aurier had approached his art. The relation of materials to the artist was, for Gauguin, no doubt analogous with that of ‘fertilized matter’ to the ‘generative cause’ or the object displaced to the motive force; when ‘once the phenomenon . . . has been accomplished’, both had to unite and merge. In his letter to the Soir Gauguin proposed replacing ‘the potter at his wheel by intelligent hands which could impart the life of a figure to a vase and yet remain true to the character of the material’. The expression ‘intelligent hands’ anticipates Henri Focillon’s Éloge de la main (In Praise of Hands, 1934) and tells us that the meeting of the contrasting terms had, in his view, to take place not just in 180

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Matter and Material intellectual intimacy but in physical intimacy too and that it was reciprocal rather than unilateral. The contribution of the material lay primarily in what Gauguin called its ‘character’, which determined what the material was able to have ‘imparted’ to it, and, therefore, at an earlier stage, what material was chosen. At the beginning of Cahier pour Aline, in the ‘Notes from Edgar Poe’, the aphorism concerning the senses that ‘always perceive too much’ is followed by another: ‘Matter is the slave of the artist. It belongs to him. His genius, to be sure, is manifested . . . in the choice of the clay.’23 In his Marginalia Poe criticizes Novalis’s apothegm ‘The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist’ and compares the theme of a work to a mass of clay. But Poe’s translator Emile Hennequin made the comparison less specific by speaking of a ‘mass of matter’.24 Gauguin, perhaps guessing that the implied ductility referred to the material of ceramics, made the metaphor more literal by speaking not of the theme of the work but only of its ‘matter’. The notion of slavery, which Gauguin uses about the relations between thought and sensation and those between the body and the soul or heart, expresses still more emphatically the imperative to subordinate matter. Yet in attributing the choice of matter to the genius of the artist, Gauguin acknowledged that this choice was anything but indifferent and that the material or matter had a collaborative role to play in the making of the work. In his Histoire de la céramique (History of the Ceramic Art), a monumental work that appeared in 1873, Albert Jacquemart had expressed himself in terms close to those used by Gauguin when speaking of Moche vases and asserting the aesthetic dimension of ancient Peruvian art: ‘Did these earthen works have no other purpose than meeting customary needs? Has the artist not at times let the clay come to life under his fingers in order to obey the inspiration of genius?’25 It is not surprising that this idea of the animation of clay was expressed by the historian and collector in relation to Moche ceramics; we have seen that these sometimes stage their own morphogenesis (illus. 38). Jürgen Golte has more recently written that the relief figures inscribed on them bear witness to the idea that the mud of the vases forms part of the living earth and takes its form from it.26 In his account of the Exposition Universelle of 1889, in which he 181

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asserted the value of decoration, Gauguin also defended the importance of ceramics both for its antiquity ‘among the American Indians’ and – anticipating Aurier in this respect – for its presence in the myths of anthropogeny: ‘God made man out of a little clay.’27 Gauguin’s acknowledgement of the active role of materials hinges on the notion of ‘the character of matter’, a notion related to his reflections on semiotics. In his observations about the architectural, industrial and artistic productions of the 1889 exposition, which appeared in July in Le Moderniste Illustré, this notion is central. Talking about metallic architecture and the Eiffel Tower in particular, Gauguin demanded a surface treatment that would evoke the process of manufacture: ‘Iron, iron and more iron! Colours weighty as the matter and you will have an imposing construction suggestive of molten metal’. Decoration should, in general, be ‘appropriate to the material and the place where that material is to be used’. Far from being merely a ‘slave’, material thus played a part in deciding the appearance, decoration and even the form of the work. In a letter to Theo Van Gogh sent in November, Gauguin summed up the aesthetic dimension of his relief Be In Love and You Will Be Happy (illus. 34) in terms of the ‘forms and colours in the character of the material’.28 His article in Le Moderniste Illustré also formulated the aesthetic principle underpinning these requirements by stating that ‘the vital element of beauty is harmony’, setting out the consequences for ceramics in particular: In ceramics, both the shaping and the drawing must be adapted ‘harmoniously to the material used’. I will ask sculptors to give careful thought to this question of adaptation. Plaster, wood, marble, bronze and fired clay must not all be modelled in the same way, since each of these materials has a different type of solidity, of hardness, of aspect.29

The ‘character’ of the material thus came to subsume the artistic potential inscribed in its properties, including those dependent on a process such as firing. Gauguin condemned not only ceramics fired at low temperature ‘because a brief firing is more stylish [coquette] and easier to do’ but the superposition of glazes kilned ‘in different 182

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Matter and Material firings’ and, a fortiori, decoration painted on with no firing; he stated as an axiom that ‘any ceramic decoration must be done in a character analogous to its firing’. The oven realized the propensity of clay to metamorphism and Gauguin extended his reference to the creation of humanity by describing this operation as a veritable transubstantiation. He pointed out that the ‘character’ of the material worked its effects both in the domain of the imagination and in that of chemistry and physics: ‘God made man out of a little clay. With a little clay, you can make metal, precious stones – with a little clay, and also a little genius!’ It is worth noting that ‘genius’, in this description, has become an ingredient and the equivalent of a material. The importance of the anthropogenetic myth for Gauguin’s ceramics – and for the degree of fusion between material, process and ‘thinking’ that he sought – takes tangible shape in the Potautoportrait au pouce sur la lèvre (Self-portrait Pot with Thumb on Lip) (illus. 91), which he wanted to present to Madeleine Bernard.30 Madeleine having rejected this tribute, Gauguin explained to her brother Emile:

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You know that, as I wrote in the Moderniste, for a long time now I’ve been looking for character in every material. Now the character of stoneware is the feeling of great heat and this figure burned in that hell expresses its character rather strongly in my view – like an artist glimpsed by Dante in his visit to the Inferno.31

Gauguin was not alone in admiring this material. The Japanese stoneware pottery used for the tea ceremony, introduced in France at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, proved inspirational to Chaplet and Jean Carriès, among others. The editor-in-chief of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Louis Gonse, wrote in 1898 that the Japanese conceived of ceramics as ‘a natural chemistry, whose principal agent is fire’.32 The requirement for harmony between material, process, form and decoration was inscribed into a general aesthetic development leading to a new set of norms and practices called in French logique du matériau, in German Materialgerechtigkeit and in English ‘truth to materials’.33 This aesthetic was widely prevalent during the first 183

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91 Paul Gauguin, Self-portrait Pot with Thumb on Lip, 1889.

half of the twentieth century but had not yet become established when Gauguin was contributing to it by his writings and works. It was not therefore through the application of precepts, even those of their author, that Gauguin’s works came into being; it was through experiment and reflection simultaneously undertaken, each at once questioning and fuelling the other.

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Matter, Process and Genesis Focillon’s In Praise of Hands evokes Gauguin’s primitivism in these terms: ‘his right hand forgets all its skill, to learn from the left hand an innocence which never outstrips form.’34 His formulation acknowledges the rejection of technical skill that we have highlighted in Gauguin’s critical writings. But no doubt his right hand also learned from materials and processes and in the uses to which he put them they transparently attain a status of agency. When Chaplet invited Gauguin to make vases in his studio in 1886, he probably expected him to concentrate on decorative work in accordance with the division of labour prevailing at the time. Instead of which, Gauguin very soon began moulding pottery, rejecting the potter’s wheel in favour of an old technique known as ‘coiling’ because the coils are rolled between the hands, placed one on top of another, and smoothed to form the walls of the vase. By rejecting the mechanical effect of centrifugal force, Gauguin replaced geometrical perfection by what in 1895 he called ‘gobine geometry’, borrowing the rare word gobin or ‘hunchback’ from a remark about his ceramics by Fénéon. 35 And his ceramic works are indeed irregular in structure and present an infinitely varied surface; they move incessantly from concavity to convexity and show traces of the action of Gauguin’s fingers – those ‘intelligent hands’ whose responsibility it was to impart life to matter while respecting its character. The very spontaneous aspect of the forms, particularly in the first series of ceramics made during the winter of 1886–7, is confirmed by detailed examination, which reveals a partly improvised process.36 In the Pot double avec Bretonne et agneau (Double Vase Decorated with Breton Figure and Lamb) (illus. 92), the main vessel is diverted into a spout expanded to the size of a second chamber; the result is not unlike a pitcher but seems not to have been so conceived from the start, since the base has been extended forward to carry the loop or handle on which the second vessel rests. The coil – a sort of chrysalis through which the clay passes before unfurling into the form of recipients – can still be seen in this loop, as it can in the double upper handle held by the shepherdess and in the stems that emerge from either side of the spout; this is also true of the many, often rather 185

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92 Paul Gauguin, Double Vase Decorated with Breton Figure and Lamb, 1886–7.

unserviceable handles and other decorative elements that connect the various parts of these vases or wind over their surfaces. The role of fire becomes more visible with the use of glazes; this began with the first series but took on greater importance in the second, which was made during the winter of 1887–8. Gauguin used his paintbrush to accentuate the accidental forms created by the firing, introducing a thin gold outline (illus. 93), which he sometimes also used to add descriptive details to moulded figures. This non-iconic use of the gold outline seems to be unique to him, though it relates to the vogue for things Japanese which was then at its height and to which Chaplet’s studio was no exception.37 It can be compared to the traditional Japanese way of restoring ceramics by underlining cracks and missing parts with lacquer and gold rather than attempting to render them invisible. This form of restoration belongs to a conception of nature and art that values the accidents an object is subject to both during and after its making. In Diverses choses and subsequently in Avant et après, Gauguin told the story of the creation of a cloisonné vase in a ‘Nipponese family who are peasants for nine months of the year and artists for the three months of winter’, 186

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culminating in the moment of firing, a ‘simulacrum of the Sabbath’ and of the creation of the philosopher’s stone, during which ‘innocent amusements’ occur that involve the participants taking their clothes off.38 The Self-portrait Pot with Thumb on Lip (illus. 91) showed that the very high temperatures required by stoneware could also evoke Hell in Gauguin’s mind and this association formed an integral part of the work. In the Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot (illus. 65), the runs of red glaze also help to suggest suffering and death. This iconic and narrative dimension does not exhaust the expressive burden of glazes; in the third series of ceramics, of which this pot forms part, glaze alone takes on the task of animating the surfaces, to the exclusion of moulded or incised elements. These runs

93 Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face (illus. 36), side view.

187

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give visual form to gravity but can also be interpreted in ascendant fashion as flames through an inversion of the relationship between figure and ground of the kind that Gauguin facilitated with a threadlike line of gold in the Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face (illus. 36, 93). The ceramics made by Chaplet, Carriès and a growing number of other French potters from the turn of the century onwards, in which the varying tones of glaze play a role like that of veins in marble or grain in wood, are known as ‘flamed’ stoneware.39 Wood was, moreover, the first material that Gauguin used for sculpture; he owed his invitation to Chaplet’s studio to wooden works such as the relief La Toilette (The Toilet, 1882, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg) and it remained his preferred material. In Avant et après he traced his debut as a sculptor to the second half of the 1850s in Orléans, after his return from Peru, significantly associating this activity with childhood, dream and private expression: ‘A little later I was whittling . . . with a knife, carving dagger-handles without the dagger, all sorts of little

94 Camille Pissarro, Gauguin Carving ‘Woman out Walking’, c. 1880.

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95 Paul Gauguin, Woman out Walking, c. 1880.

fancies incomprehensible to grown people.’ 40 Many witnesses describe Gauguin as having tirelessly active hands and it is very probable that, like many sailors, he continued to carve wood during the years he spent at sea between 1865 and 1871. A Pissarro drawing (illus. 94) shows Gauguin carving the statuette presented under the title Dame en promenade (Woman out Walking) at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881 (illus. 95). Gauguin rests the base of the object that he is shaping against his chest, holds the upper part in his left hand and applies the knife or chisel with his right hand, very close to his face as he bends over in concentration. One can scarcely imagine greater intimacy between material, tool and artist; it makes one think less of sculptors – who made little use of wood at the time – than of children, sailors or even shepherds. That was the verdict of one critic writing in 1881, for whom this comparison was distinctly unfavourable to Gauguin: ‘In my own region, I have 189

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known more than one little shepherd or goatherd able to carve into the end of a crook figurines much more interesting than this.’41 A remark by Bracquemond about his ceramics, quoted by Pissarro, shows that his entourage was well aware of the connection between Gauguin’s maritime past and his sculptural activity: ‘He seemed to be telling me that it was the art of the sailor, picked up here and there.’42 This carping observation clearly refers to the non-European sources of Gauguin sculpture, to which we will return, but it also associates it with the kind of objects made by sailors to pass the time and round up their wages, that is, a form of nonprofessional popular craftsmanship tinged with exoticism. The materials used by these casual sculptors and engravers – pieces of flotsam wood, shells, fruit peel and whale teeth – are partly preconstrained or, as Claude Lévi-Strauss has said of the handyman’s means, ‘specialized up to a point’: ‘they each represent a set of actual and possible relations’ but do not on that account have ‘one definite and determinate use’.43 The bricoleur perceives these possible relations and makes use of them, relying on sense data – according to the logic of ‘the savage mind’ – rather than on a preconceived project and in some measure allows the product to emerge from the process. The stoneware water jar acquired and completed by Gauguin around 1889 (illus. 21) has already illustrated this way of doing things, even though the original object was sufficiently pre-constrained for us to be able to speak of a ‘found object’. Wood, being organic matter from a plant, is not homogeneous but structured by the history of its growth, something that the sculptor and artisan alike must bear in mind if their work is to be of satisfactory construction and durability. The term ‘vein’, used to refer to the patterns formed in wood and the nervures of leaves, makes it clear that the anthropomorphism highlighted by Gauguin in his Stumpshaped Vase (illus. 32) and Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face (illus. 36) is already latent in our relationship with the material itself. Gauguin went further in allowing the structure of the material to help determine the form and even the subject of wooden sculptures and by conserving traces or suggestions of their plant origins. We remember that the motif of Arii matamoe (illus. 19) was ‘stolen from a pine plank’ and that a work like Martinique (illus. 33) presents 190

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within its very substance the metamorphosis of the tree into heads and that of wood into image.44 I have also pointed out that Gauguin’s predilection for bas-relief coincided with the techniques in which certain aspects of the ancient art of Peru remained true to its traditions even after the Spanish conquest; it should be added that his taste in this respect also coincided with other non-European traditions that he selected as models, in particular wooden sculpture on the Marquesas (illus. 105). His ‘U¯mete (domestic container carved out of wood) in the Musée d’Orsay (illus. 96) is freely inspired by Marquesan and more generally Oceanian elements; it shows a plant endowed with arms, crowned as if by an apparition with a face bearing on its forehead the motif of the etua or deified ancestor.45 We have seen that phytomorphism was a major feature of Peruvian art (illus. 22, 38), alongside the continuity between iconic and verbal sign, which is manifested here in the monogram ‘P G O’. The petal forms radiating symmetrically below the monogram, like the hands or waves directed towards the foot of the plant and the sides of the face, gradually emerge from the bottom of the recipient, giving the impression that the images arise directly from the medium or belong to it, like the veins in a piece of bark or a carapace. The way in which Gauguin coloured his wooden works, particularly by the use of stains, also tended to leave the substance of them apparent and identify it with the image. Richard Field notes

96 Paul Gauguin, ‘U¯mete, c. 1891.

191

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concerning Woman out Walking that ‘the stained grain hints at the sensuality of the model’s breasts.’46 It is indeed very tempting to touch the polished wood and the portrait of Gauguin at work shows that the size of the statuette allowed tactile relationships propitious both for carving and for reception. The museal context in which most of these works find themselves today tends to make one forget the fact that Gauguin sculpted in wood many objects expressly made to be held in the hands, such as dagger and cane handles.47 There is much nudity in their iconography and one walking stick was destroyed after his death because the pommel was decorated with an erect penis.48 Given their functionality, their tactile dimension and their subjects, these relatively little-known productions are liable to be consigned to the decorative arts and erotic iconography, in other words, domains generally considered marginal relative to sculpture as such. But this is to underestimate the erotic dimension of the statuette in general. David Getsy has shown that in the late nineteenth century the protagonists of British ‘New Sculpture’ such as Alfred Gilbert explicitly encouraged collectors to touch, rub and caress their patinated bronze statuettes.49 Gauguin’s wooden sculptures are obviously very different from such works both in their primitivist style and in their material. The artists who were inspired by them belong to later generations and include Matisse, Derain and Picasso in France and Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in England. Around 1914, GaudierBrzeska made some ten or so little objects for his friends that were intended to be held in the hand and comprised an abstract treatment of sexual motifs.50 The versions of Woman out Walking moulded in terracotta and bronze show that it originally included a barely roughed-out pedestal.51 It thus anticipated the cylindrical sculptures carved by Gauguin from the late 1880s onwards, in which the nature and general form of the material – a section of trunk or branch – remains visible. This ostentation of the material was necessarily visible to spectators who had until then been accustomed to its elision. Camille Mauclair, a critic particularly unsympathetic to Gauguin, remembered visiting Stéphane Mallarmé: ‘On a dresser, there was a Rodin plaster representing a nymph seized by a faun and a log of orange timber in which Paul Gauguin had sculpted a Maori profile; Mallarmé teasingly claimed 192

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Matter and Material that it looked like me.’52 This ‘log’ (illus. 97) had been given to the poet by the artist and was entitled L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) after Mallarmé’s eclogue: the Maori profile was that of the rustic deity. The impression that the sculpture respects the form of the trunk (or more probably that of a large branch) is confirmed by investigation of its base, which has been cut perpendicular to the growth rings. The circumference is widest at the base, which is integral to the composition but not itself crafted. The cylindrical form leans slightly to one side higher up, in the direction suggested by the faun’s movement, and is complicated by hollows and projections. The main protuberances are the salient points from both iconographic and sensual perspectives: the head of the nymph, her uncovered breast and the buttocks of the faun (illus. 98). The midpoint of the left buttock carries a tail that ends in leaves. This branch/ tail both accentuates the hybrid nature of the faun and connects it with the plant origin of the material; it is born of a knot in the wood, that is, from the wood of a lateral branch growing out of the wood of the trunk. This coincidence between the morphogenetic structure of the material and its artistic use, on both formal and iconic planes, suggests that the former inspired the latter and that L’Après-midi d’un faune results in part from a tactile and visual examination and interpretation of the piece of tree from which it was carved.53 This way of working is what we might expect from Gauguin’s thinking on the subject.54 In a letter written to Monfreid from Tahiti on 31 March 1893 he wrote: ‘At the moment I am carving things like savage ornaments [bibelots] on tree trunks. I have a piece of ironwood to send back; it wore out my fingers but I’m happy with it.’55 One might have expected ‘I have been carving or sculpting in wood.’ But, writing to Schuffenecker from Pont-Aven where he had been laid up by a broken ankle, Gauguin expressed his desire to return to Oceania in terms that even more clearly blur the distinction between art and nature: ‘I dare not tell you to abandon painting since I myself am thinking of giving it up to live in the woods sculpting imaginary beings on trees . . .’.56 The idea of intervention practised on the living wood is reminiscent of prehistoric, popular or ethnological objects in which the form of the support inspired its sometimes 193

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minimal transformation. I have already spoken of the ‘figure-stones’ of Boucher de Perthes and Gauguin could have seen wooden equivalents such as the ithyphallic figure crudely carved into the branch joint of an oak and found in Denmark in 1880, four years before the stay during which he became interested in Bronze Age burials.57 These discoveries confirmed Alberti’s speculation on the origins of sculpture and it is easy to imagine that Gauguin wanted the ontogeny of his works to match this phylogeny of an art. His plan to sculpt ‘imaginary beings’ on trees also concords with the identification of animism as the most primitive form of religion. In this conception, the figure applied to or rather drawn out of the tree makes the tree’s personification visible: an ‘entification’ in Vignoli’s term. The Hieronymite Ramón Pané, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage of 1494, noted that, according to the Tainos of the Antilles, certain trees summoned sorcerers and informed them how to carve idols from their trunks.58 In Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (Gestures and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician, 1898), Jarry redefined in similar fashion the Michelangelesque concept of the statue hidden within the stone by defining sculpture in wood as a sort of sacred arboriculture: the king of the Fragrant Isle, who represents Gauguin in the book, ‘prunes with an axe from the images of living wood the growths that would disfigure their likeness to the gods’.59 Gauguin was undoubtedly encouraged in this religious and mythological approach to wood by the fact that, in the ancient Oceanian concept of the world, trees were sacred and bore meanings that colonization had not entirely consigned to oblivion. The ta¯manu (or ‘ati, Calophylum inophylum), from which L’Après-midi d’un faune was made, is a big tree that was planted around the principal marae, or places of worship; its timber was used only to make to‘o (bodies of the image of divinity). As in the Americas several centuries before, Christianization had brought about the elimination of idols with the sole exception of specimens kept by the missionaries, at first as proofs of their success and, subsequently, given the scale and speed of conversion, for documentary purposes.60 An engraving showing the auto-da-fé organized in 1819 on Mo‘orea by the great priest Pati‘i, recently converted by missionaries from the London 194

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97, 98 Paul Gauguin, L’Après-midi d’un faune, c. 1892.

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99 Destruction of the Idols at Otaheite . . ., 1819.

Missionary Society, demonstrates the power that this very act attributed to the statues, since the one being thrown into the fire is represented as a demon with wide-open eyes and raised hands (illus. 99). By adopting in some degree the forms and materials of ancient Oceanian statuary and representing the divinities of the Polynesian ‘pantheon’, Gauguin thus reversed on his own scale a process of acculturation whose destructive character was all too clear to him. An important aspect of the insult inflicted on Bishop Martin by erecting the statue Father Lechery (illus. 100) in front of the Maison du Jouir (House of Pleasure) consisted in the fact that the statue represented the bishop not only as a devil and a hypocrite but also as an idol in respect of both style and material – it was made of miro, rosewood, a tree planted around marae of secondary rank.61 The hieratic appearance of the statue, emphasized from the front by its double axial symmetry – the praying hands duplicating the legs closed over the penis – the gilded eyes, two busts of women lower down on the sides, a standing lily and a stalk winding up from the base to disappear at the skull, all mean that Father Lechery cannot be reduced to the caricature of a libidinous prelate. The horns make of him an infernal creature but also a self-representation of the artist (illus. 78), whose own sexual exploits played a central role 196

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100 Paul Gauguin, Father Lechery, 1902.

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in his conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities. Above the Abyss (illus. 58) showed that the horn motif could be associated with the phallus. The relevance of this connection with Father Lechery is confirmed by its companion piece, entitled Thérèse, which represented the bishop’s mistress (illus. 101).62 The particularly regular cylinder from which the woman emerges, with her hemispherical coiffure crowning it, strongly resembles the Indian lingam, the ‘mark’ of the presence of Shiva that represents in abstract fashion both the axis of the world and the phallus of the god. Carved in various materials or ‘discovered’ in the natural form of an oval pebble, the lingam could also include a face emerging from the stone (illus. 102), corresponding to the process of visible manifestation of the god in human form and expressing the yogic ascension of the semen from the organ of generation to the crown of the head – that is, its passage

101 Paul Gauguin, Thérèse, 1902. 102 Lingam with face of the god Shiva. (Ekamukha Shiva linga), Afghanistan, 9th century ad.

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103 Tiki, n.d. (probably 18th century), me‘ae of Utukua, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands.

from procreative function to creative thought.63 They were originally venerated in the open air on raised platforms shaded by trees that can be compared to the Polynesian marae. Their resemblance to certain Oceanian tiki (statues of deified ancestors), for instance to that of the me‘ae (Marquesan for marae) of Utukua on Hiva Oa (illus. 103), is undeniable and Karl von den Steinen wrote in his great study of Marquesan art that ‘the sculptural type par excellence’ of the ancient tiki was the cylinder, which ‘emerges from the block of stone, wooden post or long piece of bone’.64 This resemblance was bound to seem significant to Gauguin, who subscribed to the theory of a historical connection between Vedic India and the ancient Oceanian culture. In this perspective of comparative religion and ethnology, we should note that the Breton monoliths were then associated with 199

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fertility rites said to originate in prehistory, as Flaubert noted in his travelogue of 1847, Par les champs et les grèves (By Field and Strand), published posthumously in 1886: ‘As for the menhirs, people have been so good as to find that they resemble phalluses! From which it has been deduced that an ithyphallic cult reigned throughout Lower Brittany.’65 The tiki, for their part, as images of ancestors, express precisely the relation of consanguinity to which the anthropomorphic stump represented by Gauguin in his Stump-shaped Vase (illus. 31) perhaps alludes. The process of generation is made directly visible in the most celebrated of the statues brought back to Europe as trophies by the missionaries, that of the creator god A‘a from Rurutu (Austral Islands), reproduced in the 1820s (illus. 104) and exhibited at the museum of the London Missionary Society and the International Exposition of 1867 in Paris.66 The statue, which is 117 cm long and it is thought by Steven Hooper to have originally contained the skull and bones of a deified ancestor, includes 30 figurines that perhaps served to hold in place the ritual cloths and string in which it was wrapped.67 These statuettes are not stuck to the body of A‘a but emerge from it like the epicormic buds of a tree and simultaneously

104 ‘Idols Worshipped by the Inhabitants of the South Sea Islands’, frontispiece from William Ellis, Polynesian Researches . . ., 1829.

200

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105 Head of a Marquesan war club (‘u‘u).

represent its descendants (divine or human) and parts of the body such as eyes, nose, mouth, ears, chest, perhaps a beard, tattoos and a penis, which was subsequently mutilated.68 This principle of bistability, akin to the ‘flowers that are . . . muscles or muscles that are flowers’ admired by Gauguin in the Achamaenid relief (illus. 10), extends to the entire figure; seen in profile, it clearly suggests a phallus, whose testicles are represented by its buttocks and whose glans by its head.69 The statue thus endows with a genetic sense the proliferation of double images, especially of faces, which have generally been given an apotropaic interpretation in the case of ‘u‘u (illus. 105), Marquesan 201

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106 Paul Gauguin, Cylinder with Christ on the Cross, 1891–2.

clubs that had been among the objects most prized by sailors and collectors since the early nineteenth century.70 The studious attention that Gauguin paid to this Oceanian model of ‘parabolism’ is visible in his Cylindre avec le Christ en croix (Cylinder with Christ on the Cross) (illus. 106), on which we find a face whose eyes contain two little heads between the crucified Christ and a ‘tiki star’, a motif common on uhikana (shell diadems) and some late ‘u‘u.71 Moreover, he expressed his admiration for this aspect of Marquesan art – in terms close to those of his reflections on ornament – in Avant et après, written in 1903 at Hiva Oa: ‘In the Marquesan especially there is an unparalleled sense of decoration . . . The basis is the human body or the face, especially the face. 202

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Matter and Material One is astonished to find a face where one thought there was nothing but a strange geometric figure.’72 This observation is a quite remarkable anticipation of the conclusions of Karl von den Steinen’s morphogenetic analysis of the art of the Marquesas, a study completed during his expedition of 1897–8 but only published in 1925. But what interested Gauguin even more than it did the German ethnologist was not merely the origin of Marquesan abstraction but its effect: the face that is its ‘basis’ surprises the spectator who has not immediately perceived it. The phallic dimension of Father Lechery and Thérèse (and of the statue of A‘a) no doubt applies to the full set of cylindrical sculptures by Gauguin, including L’Après-midi d’un faune and Cylinder with Christ on the Cross. Gauguin had read Mallarmé’s poem carefully; one of its subjects is the illusion brought about by the combination of desire and imagination. The faun wonders whether the nymphs that he believes himself to have loved ‘represent desires of your own fabulous / senses’, remembers an incident of erroneous perception – ‘this flight of swans – no! naiads – fled away / or dived’ – and promises to satisfy his desires in the imaginary: ‘I’ll lift more of the drapery / up from their shadows with idolatrous displays’.73 More discreetly, Mallarmé compared the faun to the phallus – ‘erect, alone, beneath an age-old light, / lilies! And one among you, a simple neophyte’ – and to the volcano: ‘Etna! Across your very slopes, then, Venus goes, / and on your laval ground she rests her artless tones, / when sad slumbers are sounding and the flame has ceased’. This double metaphor must have pleased Gauguin all the more because, having frequented the potter’s kiln – whose temperature, as we have seen, inspired him with ideas of sensuality too – it encouraged him to associate creativity, heat and fluidity. In the letter to Willumsen of late 1890 cited above, he contrasted the sketch and the ‘entire body of work’ with the supposed ‘masterpieces’ admired by the mob: ‘The emotion suddenly disappears. On such occasions, you let the lava grow cool and turn boiling blood into a stone. Though it were it a ruby, fling it far from you.’74 Eight years later, declaring himself exhausted by the painting of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (illus. 53), he set down for Monfreid these musings about the creative process: 203

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107 Paul Gauguin, Oviri, 1894.

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108 Paul Gauguin, Oviri, back.

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Where does the execution of a picture begin and where does it end? At the time when extreme feelings are fused in the depths of one’s being, at the point where they explode and thought emerges like lava from a volcano, is there not in this the unfolding of the work suddenly created, brutal if you like, but great and apparently superhuman? Cold calculations of reason did not preside over this blossoming forth, but who knows when the work was begun in the depths of one’s being, perhaps unconsciously.75

The comparison between eruption and ejaculation is not articulated but is implicit in the parallel established by Gauguin’s works between volcano and phallus and in the further comparison, to which we will return, between artistic creation and generation. The work that most clearly manifests this condensation is also the one which Gauguin saw as the culmination of his ‘ceramic sculpture’ and that he wished to have placed on his tomb (illus. 107). Gauguin inscribed it Oviri (savage, untamed) and also referred to it as Killer-Woman; it represents a woman standing with knees bent and big round eyes like those of a tiki (illus. 103, 139, 160), who crushes a wolf with her legs and a wolf cub in her hands. The composition and the ambiguity of this gesture have been compared with the great relief of a Hero Overpowering a Lion from the Assyrian palace of Sargon ii at Dur-Sharrukin (today Khorsabad) dating from the eighth century bc, which Gauguin could have seen in the galleries that he frequented in the Louvre (illus. 9).76 In a later drawing that takes up this motif, Gauguin added a commentary which links it to the theme of androgyny in Balzac’s Swedenborgian novel Séraphita: ‘And the Monster, grasping his creature, fertilizes those generous flanks with its seed to engender Seraphitus Seraphita.’77 This allusion to seed becomes more comprehensible if one looks at the back of Oviri, since the body of the woman disappears beneath a mass of hair, formless as the dressing gown in Rodin’s Balzac and similarly phallic (illus. 108).78 At the top, an opening gapes like a dilated meatus or the crater of an erupting volcano, making the hair seem like a flow of seminal liquid or the lava to which Gauguin compared creative thought. 206

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Three-dimensionality and Polyiconicity In less primitivist form, this inchoate quality is quite as emphatic in the ceramic sculpture Ève (Eve) of 1890, which Suzanne Lindsay has compared to Daphne changing into the laurel tree.79 Although Eve is indeed accompanied by a hollow tree, the metamorphosis is from plant to human, as in the Stump-shaped Vase, rather than the other way round. Seen from the side and above all from the back (illus. 109), the figure is transformed into a flux of liquid matter, made glossy and iridescent by the glaze, for which the hair motif seems the merest pretext. Gauguin here contrived to prevent the cooling of the creative emotion and draw the spectator into a kind of perpetual movement of matter. This effect is produced not only by the ductility and metamorphism of stoneware after its passage through fire but by a radical use of three-dimensionality. Unlike Adolf von Hildebrand in his Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (The Problem of Form in the Visual Arts, 1893), Gauguin’s taste for relief did not lead him to defend flatness and the single point of view; on the contrary. The choice of cylindrical form is characteristic in this respect, since the angles of vision are now infinite in number and there is no possibility of an instantaneous overall vision. The temporal nature of perception, highlighted by the three-dimensional object, is thus intensified; it can take on a cyclical dimension, each rotation of the object or of the spectator around the object revealing new aspects – the sense of that word here including those given to it by Redon and Wittgenstein. Such is the case with L’Après-midi d’un faune, where one makes discoveries by exploring the cylinder over and beyond the principal figures of faun and nymph (illus. 97, 98). To the left of the nymph, a stem rises out of the base – that is, as we have seen, out of the trunk from which the sculpture emerged – giving birth to three twigs each ending in a ball framed by two ovals (illus. 110). These motifs, directed respectively towards the bottom, left and top, no doubt represent buds and leaves, but they also suggest three faces, particularly to those familiar with Marquesan art (illus. 105, 188, 191). The stalk then continues on its way and, without loss of continuity, comes to form part of the nymph’s hair. This detail, which could be considered 207

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109 Paul Gauguin, Eve, 1890.

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an element of transition, thus represents the transformation of the ta¯manu into ‘imaginary beings’ while affording a further example of phytomorphism or the humanized tree. To the right of the nymph are three figures, about which little is ever said. There is a little dancer or apsara (Hindu celestial nymph) at the top, a crouching figurine at the bottom and, nearer the faun and of the same size, a figure generally passed over in silence (illus. 111). The faun is right up against the back of this third figure, with his face behind its ear, and passes his left hand under its armpit to place it in a sort of pocket in the shape of a crescent moon. This position derives from the kind of tiki that Von den Steinen calls ‘astraddle’, in the belief that their origin lies in the motif of a child fastened to the back of an adult.80 But the treatment bestowed on this position in L’Après-midi d’un faune gives it a clear sexual signification.81 Unlike the faun, with its grotesque face and animal legs, this protagonist is entirely human, even if there are indications of plant origin in its lack of feet and the motifs on its leg. Its face, like that of the nymph, is Polynesian, with the bifid almond eyes typical of Marquesan statuary. It has long hair but there is no sexual indication at the breast, as with the nymph, nor at the genitals, as in the faun, whose testicles can be seen between his legs. One might see in this figure a ma¯hu¯, a kind of effeminate man living among women; Stephen Eisenman has shown the importance of the ma¯hu¯ for Gauguin who, when he disembarked in Papeete in 1891 with a Buffalo Bill haircut, was greeted by the Tahitians with the nickname ta‘ata vahine (manwoman).82 This sexualization of the Marquesan motif of the tiki placed one behind another brings to mind the celebrated passage in Noa Noa in which the narrator, guided on the mountain in search a rosewood tree by a ‘natural friend’, begins to desire the ‘lithe animal body’ of the guide walking ahead of him ‘sexless’ and approaches him, ‘temples throbbing’, at the precise moment when the companion turns round and, ‘his chest . . . towards me’, dissipates the illusion of androgyny.83 In a curious inverted echo of the propitiatory rites that, in ancient Polynesia, accompanied violence done to a tree, the narrator then cuts the miro ‘with the pleasure of sating one’s brutality’ and sees in this act the eradication of the ‘forest . . . of desires’; their eradication makes ‘a Maori’ of him.84 The third figure in L’Après-midi 209

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110 L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune, looking towards the tree/hair (see illus. 97, 98).

d’un faune is perhaps a substitute for the inaccessible nymph and incarnates the ‘commonplace illusion / of some pure loin or rear’ of Mallarmé’s poem. The generally modest dimensions of Gauguin’s sculptures and their proximity to the so-called decorative arts also contribute to this iconic and semantic use of three-dimensionality by making them easy to handle – or would do, if their material value and concerns for their conservation did not stand in the way, which they increasingly do. The same phenomenon can be found in the history of sculpture in general and the culminating points of three-dimensional ambiguity occur in Europe in the Auricular style, invented around 1600 by the Van Vianen family of goldsmiths in Utrecht and in Rococo silverware 210

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111 L’Après-midi d’un faune, looking towards the third figure.

by Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier; it was emulated around 1900 by Alfred Gilbert and certain representatives of Art Nouveau.85 For the figure, the principal genre is the statuette, from Mannerism to Romanticism and the ‘New Sculpture’ in Britain already cited. The ideal of the multiple viewpoint (Mehransichtigkeit or Vielansichtigkeit in German, pluralité de points de vue in French), which developed from the Italian Renaissance onwards, has been studied by Lars Olaf Larsson up to the period of Neoclassicism, where he finds a major representative in Canova. But later transformations of the ideal still await a thoroughgoing study. 86 Like Rodin in certain of his assemblages and in the sculptures that result, Gauguin carried this ideal (or method) to a level at which it acquires a different meaning, closer to the sense 211

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that it has in non-European traditions – notably American and Oceanian – and in later modern sculpture, for example that of GaudierBrzeska. In Gauguin’s ceramics and cylindrical wooden sculptures, the aspects that become visible through relative movement do more than complete and enrich by partial views a relatively stable image; they are capable of completely transforming this image and of making it change (to quote Gauguin) from flower to muscle and from muscle to flower. This can result in the perceptive oscillation of a threedimensional Kippfigur or the multistability of a continuous series of successive identifications. Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark rightly notes that when one revolves one of Gauguin’s pots in one’s hands, ‘new works appear, in an interminable metamorphosis’. 87 A watercolour drawing (illus. 112) shows how clearly Gauguin was aware of his polyiconic use of three-dimensionality. At first glance, it seems to represent three pots or sculptural vases placed one beside the other on a single surface, of increasing height from left to right. The one on the left and the one in the middle are moulded in the form of a youthful head, with short hair and shoulders visible; each has a curved handle partly coloured in white. Despite the slight difference of size, they so closely resemble each other that one is tempted to see in the middle vase a view of the first after it has been rotated 30 degrees to the left. This hypothesis is confirmed by the Vase Léda (Leda Vase), which matches the two views exactly. In the latter, Leda’s face – largely devoid of gender indications – is recognizable but the only sign of the swan is its neck, which serves as a handle. It should be added that this bird has none of the majesty generally bestowed on the avatar of Zeus in representations of the myth; it bears the features of a gander (illus. 113), scarcely less caricatural than the schematic figures of geese incised on the blue background of the vase. In the watercolour its spread wings resemble leaves and its neck, which turns into its body without greatly widening, resembles a snake. This is not a fortuitous likeness, as the third pot tells us. The upper two-thirds of this pot represent the head and torso of a woman whose arm is broken off at mid-height. This image again matches one of the ceramics of the second series, made, according to Bodelsen, during the winter of 1887–8 (illus. 114). The point of view adopted by Gauguin in the sketch allows us to see not only the face of the woman in 212

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three-quarter profile but also a belt in the form of a serpent biting its tail, which separates the torso from the lower part of the vase. This motif, which Barbara Braun has compared with the attributes of the main Moche divinity, Ai-Aipec, and to those of Mexican goddesses, was clearly important for Gauguin. We must therefore suppose that he chose the three points of view brought together on this page so as to highlight the figure of the snake, suggested in the neck of the swan /gander of the Leda Vase and made explicit in the belt of Vase-femme avec ceinture-serpent (Woman-vase with Snake-belt).88 Perhaps we should further note that the word jars, gander, means both the male goose and, on the basis of the word jargon, a secret language or specialist slang.89 In other terms, the drawing represents metamorphosis in and through ceramics. By representing in distinct and simultaneous fashion two different points of view of the same vase, Gauguin shows that the vase can only be apprehended in time and space and that, for

112 Paul Gauguin, Stoneware Pots, Chaplet, c. 1887–9.

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113 Paul Gauguin, Leda Vase, 1887–8.

perception, there are as many objects as points of view. The emphasis placed on the bird’s neck further shows that, thanks to three-dimensionality, a swan can change into a snake – just as a god or a gander can change into a swan. It is no coincidence that this vase transposes into the Breton countryside one of the amorous metamorphoses of Zeus mentioned by Ovid, who describes Leda as ‘lying beneath the wings of a swan’ (vi, 109). This position matches the version of the theme drawn by Gauguin for his ‘Volpini Suite’ in 1889 (illus. 115), 214

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114 Paul Gauguin, Woman-vase with Snake-belt, 1887–8.

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115 Paul Gauguin, Design for a Plate – Leda, 1889.

in which the serpent appears explicitly above the couple and in which the form of two small geese comes close to that of the forbidden fruit, if we are to believe the inscription homis [sic] soit qui mal y pense, ‘shame on any who thinks evil of it’. On the vase the head of the gander points in the opposite direction from the face of the young woman and also, thanks to the cylindrical character of the pot, in the same direction. Druick and Zegers have noted that Leda does not explicitly recognize the presence of the animal but seems to have some intuition of it; we should add that one wing rests on the nape of her neck. 90 The same authors find the presence of this ‘long-necked swan’ not only serpentine but phallic and this sexual allusion, logical enough in respect of the myth and often exploited by artists, is surely confirmed in the drawing by the resemblance between it and the handle of the Woman-vase with Snake-belt, which seems to be an extension of the belt; as in the vase itself (illus. 116), it continues in ascending fashion, like the tail of an animal, beyond the point at which it joins the figure’s hair. 216

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116 Woman-vase with Snake-belt, profile view (see illus. 114).

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The reciprocal echoes between Leda Vase and Woman-vase with Snake-belt are so numerous in the watercolour that one may legitimately wonder, knowing that the first is represented twice, whether it does not figure a third time, this time revolved slightly more than 180 degrees, or whether one pot has not been transformed into another in which an implicit aspect of the first has become explicit; this is a process that we have already encountered (illus. 1, 2). The suggestion fits well with the circulation of forms and motifs in Gauguin’s art, which might easily serve to illustrate the notion, argued by Alfred Gell, that an artist’s corpus is an ‘object distributed’ through space and time.91 It is particularly coherent in relation to the objects in question here and may contribute to their interpretation. The young woman or young girl desired by the gander-swan is an avatar of the one that we see cautiously approaching the water in Deux baigneuses (Two Bathers, 1887, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires) and in the zincography Baigneuses en Bretagne (Bathers in Brittany) from the Volpini Suite; in each case she is contrasted with an older companion of more womanly forms who is not afraid of the water.92 A number of authors see in this contrast an image of woman before and after the discovery of sexuality and the Fall – to which the serpent and fruit of the Projet d’assiette – Léda (Design for a Plate – Leda) allude.93 Braun says, in reference to the belt, that in pre-Columbian art the serpent denotes fertility and not evil or temptation.94 Whether or not Gauguin was aware of this distinction, the two meanings are not incompatible here. The swelling of the lower part of Woman-vase with Snake-belt, in which the figure is completely identified with the recipient, does indeed evoke fertility, whether or not one ascribes fertility (from a Christian point of view) to temptation. This figure is therefore to be compared with the mature woman with the thick hair in Two Bathers. Thus the progression from left to right in the watercolour represents a further metamorphosis, one that we might call, borrowing a title bestowed by Duchamp at a key moment of his career, Le Passage de la vierge à la mariée (The Passage from Virgin to Bride, 1912, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Like most Gauguin ceramics, the Leda Vase and Woman-Vase with Snake-Belt owe much to the study of pre-Columbian art; we 218

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Matter and Material have already seen that this was important to the artist, perhaps from childhood onward. Among the memories gathered in Avant et après is one about his mother Aline, who died in 1867: he said that she ‘had kept some Peruvian vases and especially quite a number of figurines in [solid] silver’. On his account these were destroyed in 1871, when the house where Aline had been living in Saint-Cloud burned down. He also spoke of the ‘very beautiful collection of vases (pottery of the Incas) and jewels set in unalloyed gold by the Indians’ brought together by a personage he calls ‘old Maury’, who had made his fortune in Lima and whom Gauguin claimed to have met up with again in Paris.95 Aline’s posthumous inventory makes no mention of any American object and the Maury collection seems to have vanished without trace.96 The fact remains that ceramics from pre-Hispanic cultures – the term ‘Inca’ was used for ceramics from the entire Andean zone, a usage to which Gauguin conforms – could be seen and appreciated from the early nineteenth century onwards, notably in Republican Peru after its accession to independence in 1822. Foreign and particularly French travellers contributed to this interest. After visiting the National Museum in Lima in 1834, Gauguin’s grandmother, Flora Tristán, singled out four mummies but delivered a very severe verdict on the paintings exhibited; her praise was reserved for the ‘ancient Inca pots’: ‘The Incas made their pots in forms as varied as they were grotesque and decorated them with emblematic figures.’97 The writer and draughtsman Max Radiguet, who was secretary to Admiral Dupetit-Thouars in a trip to South America and the Marquesas from 1841–5, also felt that the only interest of the National Museum consisted in objects found in pre-Hispanic tombs; he noted their strange forms and ‘enigmatic’ uses, observing that ‘a grotesque and indecent figure is sometimes applied to a jug’ and that the introduction of liquid into these recipients generally caused noises that varied according to their forms, imitating for example laughter or weeping.98 Grotesque, symbolic, mysterious, indecent and surprising: these notions are clearly relevant to the way in which the adult Gauguin viewed American antiquities. By now we can only speculate about the objects to which he was exposed during his early childhood; it is easier to find out about those that were accessible to him after 219

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his return to France, where there were considerable public and private collections. Thus the businessman and art lover Gustave Arosa, guardian to Gauguin and his sister after the death of their mother, possessed a vast collection of ceramics which must have included pre-Columbian pieces.99 He also produced collections of photomechanical reproductions of works of art, one of which was the Histoire de la céramique en planches phototypiques inaltérables (History of Ceramics in Permanent Phototypic Plates). It appeared in 1875 with an explanatory text by Auguste Demmin and included Mexican (illus. 117) and Peruvian examples. Two years earlier, in his landmark work, Albert Jacquemart had labelled as ‘a masterpiece of American arts’ a Moche vase-portrait of the kind that Gauguin imitated in his Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot (illus. 65).100 The man who shaped this portrait, he wrote, ‘had before him one of those primitive and powerful organizations which constitute the stock of the old families of the human race’. Jacquemart felt himself to be in the presence

117 ‘American Ceramics’, plate from Augustin Demmin, Histoire de la céramique . . ., 1875.

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118 Francisco Laso, Inhabitant of the Cordillera of Peru, 1855.

of an ancestor of humanity and spontaneously reached for the image of the root stock, to which Gauguin had given visual form in his Stump-shaped Vase (illus. 31). A more specific genealogical connection had been claimed by the Peruvian painter Francisco Laso in a picture presented at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 in Paris under the title L’Habitant de la cordillère du Pérou (The Inhabitant of the Cordillera of Peru) (illus. 118). Noticed, reproduced and even caricatured, it had nevertheless been largely misunderstood according to Natalia Majluf’s analysis of the work: French critics had not observed that the pot was an antiquity representing a prisoner with hands tied behind his back and a rope around his neck, and they had taken the Indian in his poncho for a potter, thus transforming a critique of colonial oppression into an inoffensive genre painting.101 They had also expressed their disappointment at the European style of the picture, expecting greater exoticism from a South American painter. For Laso, a cosmopolitan Creole, the easel painting that he learned in Paris in the studio of Charles Gleyre was not incompatible with his claim to roots in the pre-colonial past. The hieratic character of this symmetrical composition helps us to identify the man with the 221

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anthropomorphic pot, from which he seems to emanate like some dark genie emerging from his lamp. The Stump-shaped Vase (illus. 31) and Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face (illus. 36) have already afforded us the opportunity to note the kinship between Gauguin’s work and American pottery not only at the level of motifs but also of morphogenetic principles. The same might be said about three-dimensionality, whose fundamental role in Moche ceramics has recently been highlighted by Jürgen Golte.102 In his view, objects born of this culture are images of the cosmos and the elements represented – in relief, painting, in the form of the recipient and by the combination of these means – are arranged so as to express their relations of opposition, antagonism and complementarity and to create effective encounters and unions (tinku). By looking at these objects face on or from the side but not from above or, worse again, by transposing their iconography into two-dimensional abstracts, we destroy their topological and dynamic character, for example by removing to the two sides of a drawing figures that meet around the vase like those on Gauguin’s cylindrical sculptures (illus. 97, 98, 110, 111). In Leda Vase the gander-swan seems to turn its back on the young girl but is connected by a series of medium-size silhouettes of goslings covering the distance that separates them (illus. 119); halfway between them, the symmetrical figure of a bird with four heads announces the result of this monstruous tinku and probably alludes to the two pairs of twins (Pollux and Helen, Castor and Clytemnestra) born of the union of Leda and Zeus. Similar distributions and effects can be found in other Gauguin vases, which observe the distinction between form and decoration no more than do Moche ceramics. In a vase probably later than Leda Vase a similarly ambiguous swan-neck handle separates two almost identical heads of young boys, one of which is drooping and has his eyes closed while the other looks straight ahead; we recognize models with the same combination of similarity and contrast in two pictures from 1888, Jeunes baigneurs bretons (Young Breton Bathers, Kunsthalle, Hamburg) and Les Jeunes lutteurs (Young Wrestlers, private collection). 103 The Vase en forme de fontaine (Vase in the Shape of a Fountain, 1886–7, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) has a square base 222

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and four figures on its sides: a Breton man wearing a hat, carrying a stick or staff and leaning forward; a Breton woman, arms spread, leaning against a wall or fence and turned towards the preceding figure; a drake waddling forward, head down; and a female duck with spread wings.104 The parallel positions and the similarity of their attitudes shows that the two couples are engaged in the same activity and that the male is courting the female in the fields and farmyard; there may be two implicit puns: on courtship (faire la cour) and farmyard

119 Leda Vase, looking away from the bird (see illus. 113).

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120 Paul Gauguin, Vase Decorated with Woman’s Bust, 1886–7, front.

(basse-cour), and on female duck (cane) and stick (canne). A sun motif decorates the circular basin that crowns the vessel, emphasizing the symbolic dimension of what we may call, remembering that the French for drinks dispenser is fontaine, a fountain of life. In a light and jocular mode, close to the illustrations of Caldecott (in which Gauguin perceived ‘the very spirit of drawing’), this vase organizes under the sign of fertility a microcosm comparable – mutatis mutandis – to that of Moche ceramics. Certain vases with rectangular or square bases make clear distinctions between the statuses of their sides: front, back and side. In the Vase décoré d’un buste de femme (Vase Decorated with Woman’s Bust), the contrast between the front and back makes one think of architecture or monument. From the courtyard facade (illus. 120) emerges the bust of a woman reminiscent of a Degas or Gauguin’s 224

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121 Vase Decorated with Woman’s Bust, back.

relief La Chanteuse (The Singer, 1880, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen). From the garden facade (illus. 121) two pairs of clay coils emerge from two little circular openings and make an oblique descent of the wall, connected midway by a bird in profile. On the left the coils resemble ribbons and on the right plant stems ending in corollas. In fact the openings can be seen as eyes from which emerge draperies in the manner of certain baroque ornaments (illus. 122), transforming the vase into a grotesque face whose mouth is formed by the sort of circular medallion also present, with no more evident justification, on the other side.105 Such suggestions have only exceptionally been noted in relation to Gauguin’s ceramics, which have in any case benefited from much less critical attention than his pictures. Merete Bodelsen perceived the face in Stump-shaped Vase (illus. 31) and has pointed out that a 225

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vase with two openings decorated with cat motifs (1887–8, private collection) itself makes the outline of a large cat, whose head and tail are moreover reversible.106 She has suggested a relation between these two works and the anthropomorphic bush of Arlésiennes, Mistral (illus. 89), while Barbara Braun sees in them evidence of Gauguin’s attentive study of pre-Columbian art, in which multiple images are frequent.107 This is no less true of Gauguin’s work, as we have seen, and he too developed sculptural methods for producing what he called ‘dual-purpose parabolic meaning’. In Double Pot with Breton Figure (illus. 92), for example, the functionally absurd openings from which the stalks emerge can, as in Vase Decorated with Woman’s Bust, be seen as eyes, reinforcing the kinaesthetic perception of a bust leaning forward whose head, elongated by the wide opening as if by a hat, rests heavily on the loop. A similar effect is

122 Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, detail of the portal, 1649.

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123 Paul Gauguin, Study of Ceramics and Flowers, c. 1887.

found in Woman-vase with Serpent-belt (illus. 116), in which the hair, curiously drawn up into a crest at the back, is like a brow propped on the tail-serpent-handle. This latent aspect, which may seem dubious, is in my view confirmed by the drawing of the same vase included on a page of the sketchbook used by Gauguin in Martinique (illus. 123): whereas the face of the woman is there reduced to a curve punctuated with an eye, the outline of the potential profile opposite is carefully recorded. It is significant that this page brings together several head-shaped pots inspired by Peruvian and Mexican ceramics alongside plant and bird motifs, a stalk carrying the fruit and flower of a banana tree and a cashew apple surmounted by its nut. The resemblances between naturalia and artificialia established by this juxtaposition suggest that the face is to the pot what the nut is to the fruit and that Gauguin conceived the genesis of his ceramics by analogy with the growth and reproduction of plants. Often we should speak of multistability rather than bistability, as is shown by the Vase à double goulot joint par une anse en étrier (Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrup-shaped Handle) (illus. 124) belonging to the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris.108 It has a circular base and divides symmetrically into its two large necks, inspired by Andean ceramics, while a goose motif moulded in relief tells us which 227

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124 Paul Gauguin, Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrup-shaped Handle, 1886–7.

aspect is the ‘facade’. On either side of the raised neck of the bird emerge stalks bordered with leaves that are more or less identical in colour to the goose’s feet. The central motif is thus a phytozoomorphic hybrid. It stands on a wavy line that gives an abstract definition of a minimal landscape; there is one hill on the front and another, more or less symmetrical, on the back. On either side of the goose appears a curious motif that is repeated three times on the other side, and once, slightly modified, on the ‘hill’. It comprises a sort of round-ended crescent, covered in white slip into which a dot has been scratched at each end; from the centre of the crescent rises a stalk carrying four leaves or two arcs. This motif, combining both animal and plant features, is like a ship with a mast and makes one think that 228

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125 Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrup-shaped Handle, side view.

the part of the base above the line of the hill, though identical in colour to the rest, represents the sea. The same motif is painted in gold on the external wall of the ‘spouts’, where it is by now barely visible but more resembles a face, with the arc acting as mouth. On the body of the vase, the slip brings out the white crescents or sausages, and produces an effect like a gaze, transforming the vase into a grotesque head with horns, which appears four times as one rotates the vase. This metamorphosis is particularly comical in the side view (illus. 125), where the ‘horizon’ line forms a mouth; the whole thing resembles two Mexican vases reproduced by Demmin at top right and left of Plate 140, which illustrates American ceramics (illus. 117).109 Thus in a mood again witty and light-hearted, this vase produces a proliferation of faces such as we have already seen, more or less latent, in the statue of A‘a and in the Polynesian ‘u‘u – justifiably 229

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iterative names – and in Peruvian tuberculiform ceramics (illus. 38, 104, 105). The comic character of Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrupshaped Handle is further evidence of the kinship between Gauguin’s works and popular ceramics; we have already seen that he was interested in these (illus. 21, 35).110 In addition to forms and motifs that have survived from medieval or Renaissance origins, we find in popular ceramics forms of carnivalesque humour in relation not only to the iconography of recipients but also to their form and function, for example in riddle pots challenging users to drink from them without spills, which were known in the Middle Ages and again widespread from the eighteenth century onwards. 111 Susan Bergh has written about the role that humour and surprise may have played in the ritual uses of Moche vases made in the form of sexual organs, either through their incongruity or because apparently unrelated elements turned out to form a significant whole; these vases are often perforated below the neck (illus. 79) so as to make the use of the phallic part inevitable for pouring and drinking.112 The popular ceramics of the nineteenth century also include many anthropomorphic and cephalomorphic recipients, especially those for drinking beer; sculptural pieces dealing with the current affairs of the time, such as those produced at Anna in Illinois, are rarer.113 These objects belong to the genre of ludic imagery and caricature, illustrated in sculpture by Daumier and Dantan the Younger, whose merits Gauguin defended against ‘the critics (those who classify) [and) the ignorant mob’, going on to write about Hokusai: ‘So far from nature and so close to it.’114 One of the commonest resources of caricatural humour in general is inversion and reversal. In this respect, we note that in the Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrup-shaped Handle, the combination of the handle with the conical body of the vessel allows the circular arc motif to appear again, this time facing down and in the form of a void, in the opening of the top. This inversion of the relationship between solid and void is equivalent to the exploitation of the reversibility between figure and ground that we have seen in Above the Abyss (illus. 58) and highlights the care with which Gauguin defined the negative external and internal spaces of his ceramics. Face-on, the Pot à trois poignées (Pot with Three Handles) 230

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(illus. 126) presents a moulded figurine of a Breton woman, arms extended and feet resting on a little undulating line. But the almondshaped openings created by the lateral handles and the upper part of the walls of the vessel produce an effect like a gaze, transforming the Breton woman’s skirt into a nose, her legs into nostrils and the second undulating line traversing the pot lower down into a mouth. This ‘aspect’ – which vaguely resembles the upper part of an ‘u’u or, again, Demmin’s Mexican pottery (illus. 105, 117) – may seem a little tenuous but an examination of the sides of the pot (illus. 127) shows that Gauguin did indeed see a head there: the undulating ‘mouth’ is blocked at its ends by a little line suggesting the corner of the mouth and a radiating sun/eye is incised and painted at the top of the wall. Several elements of the Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrupshaped Handle are also found in the Vase piriforme à anse-goulot en étrier (Pyriform Vase with Stirrup-shaped Handle-Spout) (illus. 128):

126, 127 Paul Gauguin, Pot with Three Handles, 1886–7.

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128 Paul Gauguin, Pyriform Vase with Stirrup-shaped Handle-spout, 1886–7.

the form of the recipient, with three openings of which one, at the back, resembles a wound; the handle inspired by Peruvian ceramics, here asymmetrical; and the curved motif repeated on a background of landscape and flowers. A feminine face emerges above two large lotus leaves with crossed stalks, suggesting that this head plays the role of the flower of the water lily, in the style of the anthropomorphic ‘marsh flowers’ of Redon. Two circular flowers, placed on either side of the stalks, create a further pair of eyes, transforming the curved motif below them into a mouth and the body of the vase into a new grotesque head. If we turn the recipient upside down, a further metamorphosis occurs: the flower-eyes are now at the top and the feminine face now appears instead of a mouth or in the mouth, with its hair now playing the part of lips.115 The implication of cannibalism reinforces the eerie power of this object but might seem to weaken the potential image. Yet the suggestiveness of this 232

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Matter and Material upside-down head is undeniable and the motif of the reversible head constitutes a veritable genre in ludic imagery, in Japan as well as in the West.116 We find a particularly abstract example in Degas, in a sketchbook from the mid-1860s that makes clear his interest in caricature, Humbert de Superville and a pictography close to the kind that later fascinated Gauguin.117 This drawing also reveals a source that may have contributed to the genesis of Pyriform Vase with Stirrup-shaped Handle-spout – as indeed it may have done, some ten years later, to the ‘veritable portrait’ of Père Ubu drawn by Jarry – that is, the caricature of Louis Philippe as a pear drawn by Charles Philipon in 1831, which was later taken up by Daumier and many others.118 One’s best chance of discovering this surprising aspect occurs if one manipulates the vase, which its long handle and intriguing decoration invite one to do. In other cases, a discovery of this kind occurs when one moves round the object or considers it from above. This downward perspective, easy to obtain with an object made to be placed on a piece of furniture, corresponds to the bird’s eye view favoured by Gauguin in his pictures with Breton subjects (illus. 58, 72, 73). This kinship is evident in the iconography of his ceramics, particularly those of the first two series, which often feature landscapes peopled with shepherdesses and animals. The Vase avec ‘La Moisson’ de Cézanne (Vase with Motifs from Cézanne’s ‘Harvest’) (illus. 129) has a shoulder on which a young woman lies, as if on a mountain shelf, resting against the neck of the vessel. The principal facet of this object, situated below her, is incised with a harvest scene borrowed from Cézanne’s painting La Moisson (c. 1877, private collection), which was then in Gauguin’s possession; at the top corners of this scene, two female heads stand out at 45 degrees from the surface like sentinels or like the sculpted heads that emerge from medieval or pre-Columbian constructions. The recumbent young woman, probably a shepherdess, raises herself on her hands and looks towards the left as if she had been surprised during a siesta; her long hair is loose and her hat is about to fall off the edge of her ‘shelf’ but is secured by the golden ribbon that she is holding. The scene suggests the presence of an invisible voyeur who, as in Fisherman and Bathers on the Aven (illus. 73), is, of course, the spectator, whose size and frame 233

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129 Paul Gauguin, Vase with Motifs from Cézanne’s ‘Harvest’, 1886–7.

of movement make it possible to observe the beautiful shepherdess at leisure, staring down into her cleavage apparently without fear of reprisal. But the victim is not entirely defenceless since, seen from above, the vase transforms into a menacing animal (illus. 130): two symmetrical openings in the shoulder become eyes while the animal’s mouth, projected forward, is formed by the neck. Now the little heads become ears and the shepherdess’s hat is perched comically on her dog – if it is indeed her dog that we should recognize in this zoomorphic aspect. 234

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The vase is thus transformed from an object of contemplation to a contemplating subject. This ontological reversal is caused by the animation of the artefact, an effect to which Gauguin’s art frequently tends, especially in sculpture. The latent aspects most commonly encountered are again bodies, and above all heads, which are motifs that the imaginative perception tends to prioritize. The ‘ceramic sculptures’ of the third and fourth period rendered this corporeal dimension more explicit (illus. 65) but by no means renounced suggestion, as we have seen from the cases of Eve and Oviri (illus. 107, 109). The equivalence between clay recipient and human body, the head in particular, is also an anthropological invariable, abundantly evidenced in forms, usages and words. Thus the French word tête comes from the Latin testa, meaning ‘terracotta object’ and particularly ‘pot’ or ‘vase’, subsequently coming to mean ‘skull’ before acquiring its current sense.119 Though widely present in history and geography, anthropomorphic and cephalomorphic ceramics had a very lowly status among ‘serious’ civilized productions. In his Grammaire des arts décoratifs (Grammar of the Decorative Arts) Charles Blanc wrote in 1881: ‘To shape a vase in the image of a human head, for example, as was current in the very ancient past of Mexico and Peru, is to trigger the repulsive idea of a hollowed-out

130 Vase with Motifs from Cézanne’s ‘Harvest’, seen from above.

235

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skull from which to drink.’120 Nothing could be closer to Gauguin’s heartland than to transgress in this way; he was later to make play with the repulsion caused by cannibalism, describing the Marquesan – ‘he likes human flesh as a Russian likes caviar’ – and denouncing condemnation as hypocritical: ‘To make up for it, you eat the heart of your neighbour every day.’121 In Diverses choses he copied the song composed before dying by Regner Lodbrog, semi-legendary king of Sweden and Denmark, in which the hero rejoices that he will soon be sitting at Odin’s table and ‘drinking from the skulls of his enemies’.122 The Inca had a similar custom, and among the cultures that especially interested Gauguin, both those of pre-Hispanic Peru and those of Oceania kept bodies and more particularly skulls in order to ensure the transformation of their dead into ancestors, while profaning the mummies of their enemies or killing these enemies to retain their heads as trophies.123 Anthropomorphic and more especially cephalomorphic artefacts were profoundly linked to this transformation of the body into relic, image and presence – a set of attributes to which the term ‘object’ does less than justice. Karl von den Steinen has suggested that the preserved skull of the ancestor, the subject of Gauguin’s Arii matamoe (illus. 19), is the original model for all tiki.124 With its runs of red glaze, the Cephalomorphic Selfportrait Pot (illus. 65) evokes the death of a hero such as Lodbrog shedding ‘torrents of blood’. In the most literal fashion, Gauguin seems to have appropriated for himself an analogy between the body and vase comparable to that expressed by societies such as those of ancient Peru, in which the human body – among others that of the sacrificial victim – was considered a container of fertilizing fluids such as blood, sperm and thought.125 It is therefore logical that, as several commentators have remarked, the convexities of his ceramics evoke anatomical curves and their openings the orifices of the skull and body.126 Merete Bodelsen proposes that we recognize the breasts of Mme Schuffenecker in the swollen base of several vases including the one that stands opposite the Head-shaped Self-portrait Pot in Still-life with Japanese Print (illus. 75).127 More recently, Carole Andréani has compared the wide open mouth of the marine monster transporting a bather in Vase with Triton and Naiad (1889, private collection) to a ‘vagina suggesting childbirth’.128 This comparison 236

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Matter and Material could be extended to the mouth of the upside-down head of Pyriform Vase with Stirrup-shaped Handle-spout (illus. 128), in which case the cannibalism would become a birthing.

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Techniques of Obfuscation In the light of what we have seen, we might have expected Gauguin to participate with Emile Bernard, Alfred Jarry, Félix Vallotton and others in the renaissance of the woodcut, a ‘primitive’ technique in which the wood is cut along the grain. Worked in this way, the grain can resist the artist’s efforts while at the same time, as in Munch, offering the suggestion of a motif. In fact Gauguin remained faithful to wood engraving, made on bits of boxwood cut across the grain and assembled into blocks (illus. 131) by professionals; reproductive engravers preferred these blocks for the docility of their dense and homogenous substance.129 On the other hand, Gauguin used this technique in an original way, asking questions of the block as of an oracle (or like the piece of ta¯manu in L’Après-midi d’un faune, illus. 97), and letting the image emerge from the process. Gauguin began by exploring the surface of the wood with fine points or even needles and allowed the drawing to emerge from the lines traced in this way, as Leonardo had done in what he called componimento inculto or ‘formless sketching’.130 Gauguin then brought out the forms with the gouge while attentively observing the network of crests formed in the cavities by the action of this instrument. For him, the ‘ground’ of the image was the surface of wood left intact and intended to receive the ink, not the white of the paper maintained by hollowing out the wood: night rather than day, as has been said about the obscure mysterious atmosphere of the Noa Noa suite.131 In 1921 the youngest of Gauguin and Mette’s children, Pola, used two ink rollers, one soft enough to reach the depths, the other hard, so as to avoid filling in superficial cuts, to print an edition of ten wood engravings which had been brought back from Tahiti.132 The result gives an exhaustive image of all Gauguin’s interventions on the block; it is as revealing as an X-ray. In the version of Manaò tupapaú included in the Noa Noa suite (illus. 132), for example, 237

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131 Paul Gauguin, matrix of the wood engraving Mahana atua, 1894–5.

we observe the shaping of the body of the woman done with a needle and subsequently strengthened by the gouge; we also note the motif of the Marquesan face incised on the undulating bands of the upper left-hand corner; and we can clearly make out the tu¯pa¯pa‘u, reduced to a sort of statuette, as well as the face of the divinity suggested in the post to the right. But this homogenous precision and the even light were not what Gauguin sought and the prints that he pulled himself are very different and indeed infinitely various. The proof of Manao tupapau (illus. 133) pulled by Gauguin is entirely made over to the darkness that encircles the woman’s body; in the picture of the same name (illus. 50), she represented the diurnal pole of the living but she is now curled up in the position of a mummy or foetus. Around the circle of light, which seems insufficient to protect her, the ‘flowers of sparks’ make a feeble appearance like phosphorescence alongside the barely discernible Marquesan head, the artist’s monogram and shifting lights. The outlines of the tu¯pa¯pa‘u and post 238

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132 Paul Gauguin, Manao tupapau, 1893–4, printed by Pola Gauguin.

133 Manao tupapau, 1893–4, printed by Gauguin.

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disappear and only luminous fragments of them remain, incomprehensible without reference to the picture but all the more frightening, set at the outskirts of perception like the anthropomorphic tree that Gauguin remarked on in Redon (illus. 16) and the hallucinations of ‘our frightened imagination’ in Maury. The polychrome prints made by Louis Roy at Gauguin’s request also hid a great deal of the information made available in Pola’s prints but, in favouring decorative flatness, additionally lost the subtlety of tone and the variety in definition of forms obtained by the artist himself. The subtlety and variety came from the very personal and artisanal way in which Gauguin pulled his prints, questioning the finished block as he had questioned it during the carving; these two moments could in any case be connected by the to and fro between an experimental proof and supplementary interventions creating a new state. The term ‘matrix’, with its original sense of ‘womb’, is the more appropriate because Gauguin conceived artistic creation in terms of generation. 133 The Hungarian József Rippl-Rónai, a member of the Nabi group, reported seeing him pull impressions using the foot of his bed as a press and his prints show the traces of other improvised instruments such as spoons.134 Instead of limiting the print to the surface of the block, as is usual and as a press necessarily does, Gauguin pressed the paper into the parts hollowed out with the gouge using his hands and thus included in the image the network of crests aforementioned. The result is like embossed work and possesses an eminently tactile character. In his account of the exhibition organized by Gauguin in January 1895 in his studio on rue Vercingétorix, Julien Leclercq rightly said about the prints: ‘Between sculpture and painting, this is an intermediary which has as much of the one as of the other.’135 A proof of Te atua from the collection of Marcel Guérin (illus. 134) takes this three-dimensional notion of the woodcut as far as possible: probably contenting himself with what remained from the inking of the previous proof, Gauguin brought into being something that was more an image of the wood than of the ink. 136 The relief aspect particularly suits this frieze of divinities, which represents Ta‘aroa sitting like the Buddha between the dialogue of Hina and Te Fatou and the figure of Hina as standing ‘idol’. The 240

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134 Paul Gauguin, Te atua, 1893–4.

proof is like a rubbing obtained from the reliefs of a temple; Gauguin must have delighted in this appearance since he sometimes used this method to capture the motifs of Oceania from objects sculpted in low relief (illus. 135).137 The indexical status it thereby acquires in relation to an absent reality lends the image an intense materiality at the same time as a metaphysical dimension, in a paradox that is characteristic of Gauguin’s relationship to materials. Thanks to the blurring and the inversion of values produced in certain parts by this proceeding, a supernatural aura seems to emerge from these figures of the divine, in the manner of acheiropoieta – icons not made by human agency – often supposed, like the Turin Shroud, to be some kind of miraculous imprint.138 The somehow numinous value of light sculpted with the gouge is particularly visible in the big tree in Maruru (illus. 180), which forms a kind of nimbus for the idol while its branches extend his mouth and gaze. The same is true of Mahna no varua ino, the ‘light [or ‘sun’, mahana] of the evil spirit’, or, according to Hiriata Millaud, 241

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135 Paul Gauguin, rubbings of Marquesan reliefs pasted on a page of the manuscript of Noa Noa, 1893–7.

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136 Paul Gauguin, Mahna no varua ino, 1893–4.

of the ‘pure’, ‘extreme’ or ‘total’ spirit (illus. 136).139 This paradoxical light, close to the darkness of Te po (whose title signifies ‘night’ and the world of the dead, of spirits and gods), is visible only thanks to the fire that a leaning tree, like that of the Vision of the Sermon (illus. 43), separates from the living.140 The dancing flames that inspire the couple on the right also outline the form of a clawed hand or foot in which one can see a potential image manifesting the presence of the va¯rua ‘ino.141 This term is generally translated by ‘devil’ or ‘malevolent ghost’ but it should be remembered that in Polynesia (as indeed elsewhere), Christianization had transformed the former gods into ‘evil spirits’.142 The abstract motif formed by the gougestrokes on the background of this intensely lit area, brought out by the printing, contribute to the animation of the flames, among which the seated figures themselves watch the appearance of their fears or desires.143 Towards the left edge of the image, one figure seems indifferent to the spectacle; a sort of cloud seems to rise from his or her head. The cloud was the result of an accident with the inking process that Gauguin decided to retain. But comparison with another wood engraving in the Noa Noa series, Te faruru (illus. 137), shows that the figure is in fact an embracing couple, the woman’s waist held 243

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between the man’s legs as she leans back in his arms. There the couple are on the beach and the man’s head stands out again the arabesque of the waves, which outline a face in profile above his head, like that of the Te Fatou or a tu¯pa¯pa‘u (illus. 50). This ‘natural’ image is close kin to the masks visible in the whirlpools or foam, for example in Auti te pape (illus. 69) and the connection with Mahna no varua ino suggests that the scene is more transcendent than idyllic.144 A further source of animation in Mahna no varua ino is the fact that Gauguin pulled two impressions from the same plate, one

137 Paul Gauguin, Te faruru, 1893–4.

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Matter and Material with olive green ink and the other in black, on a piece of Japanese paper that he had previously brushed with colour. He often used this technique; by pulling the second impression slightly off register, he obtained an effect of movement and a further level of ambiguity. Sometimes, too, printing on very thin paper, he would lay one impression over another or make two-sided impressions. These procedures, to which we should add interventions on the prints with pen or brush, transformed multiples into unique works, a goal that many artists working with original prints were pursuing. But neither dealers nor collectors showed any great interest in Gauguin’s contributions in this field at this stage and we should rather connect his methods with his taste for metamorphosis and his quest for obscurity and suggestion. The two prints of Oviri dedicated to Mallarmé in 1895 (illus. 138), black and brown, are mounted side by side like stereoscopic photos. This should be taken not as highlighting the value of variation in proofs but as evidence of Gauguin’s love of the proliferation of images and his awareness that the androgynous figure of Oviri could only exist somewhere between the two; this point is emphasized by the position of the inscription ‘This strange figure cruel enigma’.145 For this print, Gauguin added multiple accidental textural effects, which remind us of Leonardo’s ‘old and smeared walls’ and of tiki abandoned to the action of the elements and tropical plant life (illus. 139). For an artist, the use of chance means delegating part of his action and the control that he exerts to other agents and other forces, such as the material and the process.146 The deliberate character of this division of labour is never as clear as in the dessins-empreintes that he made from 1898 on. In 1902 he explained to his collector Gustave Fayet that the procedure was ‘childishly simple’: ‘You cover any piece of paper with printing ink using a roller then on another piece placed on it you draw what you like.’147 The drawing of which Gauguin speaks, generally sketched out in advance, could be very complex and it is astonishing to compare it with the image obtained on the back of the paper by the ink imprinted by the pressure; this was the goal of the operation and thus, in the last analysis, the ‘recto’ of the paper. Thus in the case of the Deux Tahitiennes récoltant des fruits (Two Tahitian Women Picking Fruit), for example, 245

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138 Paul Gauguin, Oviri, 1894.

we move from a powerful, clear and even classically harmonious drawing (illus. 140) to a sullied, confused surface, a blurred composition with enigmatic passages (illus. 141). The tiare flower (Gardenia tahitensis) worn in her ear by the woman holding a piece of fruit against her shoulder becomes a kind of indistinct ornament, while the folds of the dress worn by the woman with raised arms outlines a motif that might be shell, ear or tiki. Further ambiguity is introduced by the fact that Gauguin reused the same inked page for several consecutive monotype drawings. The lines that he drew strongly left a deep mark like the incisions in wood engraving and these appear in white in the lightly rubbed zones of the following drawings. Field tabulated these ‘ghost’ tracings in order to reconstitute the order in which the works were made and used 246

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139 Takai‘i, n.d., me‘ae of I‘ipona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands.

the term ‘palimpsest’ to refer to the simultaneous presence of these successive ‘layers’.148 When drawing, then, Gauguin was also engraving a matrix that would disturb the printing of other drawings and produce a kind of ‘noise’ intended to disrupt the transmission of their ‘messages’. This temporal overlapping is another aspect of his conception of the work undergoing continuous transformation, an idea that we encountered relative to the watercolour Stoneware Pots, Chaplet (illus. 112) and three-dimensionality. The palimpsest effect is reminiscent of the working methods of Degas, a great lover of monotypes, and of Redon, who deliberately allowed the pentimenti of the earlier stages of his works to transpire, drawing the spectator into an infinite quest for lost unity. Redon’s use of transfer paper, which he sometimes laid on an uneven 247

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140 Paul Gauguin, Two Tahitian Women Picking Fruit, 1899–1900, verso.

support in order to integrate its texture, has been compared with Max Ernst’s frottages, in which the technique of rubbing is harnessed to the imaginative perception of the artist.149 With his dessins-empreintes, Gauguin produced a suggestive surface that can be compared to that of a cave, a wall covered with stucco or a fresco damaged by the passing of time.150 His state of health probably prevented him from visiting most of the important sites on Hiva Oa (illus. 103, 139, 160, 198), but his interest in Oceanian antiquities must surely have contributed to this quest for illegibility.151 248

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141 Two Tahitian Women Picking Fruit, recto.

A gouache monotype made around 1902 in Atuona (illus. 142), which creates the effect of a cloth or tapa (cloth made from bark) whose motifs have been partly effaced, is a good example of this. The motif comes from the picture Cavaliers (Riders) (1901, Pushkin Museum, Moscow), of which Gauguin also made a monotype drawing. 152 The landscape, scrambled and fragmentary, is as if reduced to a stretch of water and a bank or shoreline, and we do not know whether to interpret the curved band that touches the rider’s forehead in terms of the tree that, in the picture and the dessin-empreinte, leans over 249

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142 Paul Gauguin, The Pony, c. 1902.

his head. Sometimes thought to draw on the principal figure in Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), this rider is close kin through his apparel to Marquisien à la cape rouge (Marquesan with Red Cape, 1902, Musée d’Art Moderne, Liège), an enigmatic figure sometimes compared to a ma¯hu¯; Danielsson and Teilhet-Fisk have suggested that he represents Ha‘apuani (illus. 193), a former Marquesan taua (chief priest) whom Gauguin frequented on Hiva Oa.153 His status is in any case superhuman and his profile head, enclosed in a hood, resembles that of a tu¯pa¯pa‘u. In the dessin-empreinte a sort of mask is outlined amid the vegetation opposite his face; nothing of the kind can be seen on the monotype but a mysterious symmetrical motif appears as if floating opposite the head of the horse. Composed of two rings one on top of another through which a vertical element emerges, triangular at the top and pointed at the bottom, this motif also appears in the picture Contes barbares (Exotic Legends, 1902, Museum Folkwang, Essen) alongside a beautiful red-haired woman inspired by the wife of Ha‘apuani, Tohotaua.154 June Hargrove has interpreted it as a ‘phallic lily’ and it resembles the motif decorating 250

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the arm of the faun on the cylinder given around 1892 to Mallarmé (illus. 97).155 We might reasonably conclude on this basis that Gauguin’s increasingly pronounced taste for indetermination and indeterminacy was not at odds with his ‘parabolic’ tendencies.

251

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143 J. J. Grandville, ‘The Statuary and the Statue of Jupiter’, illustration from Fables de La Fontaine, 1838.

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Fable and Doll One parallel between The Little One is Dreaming and Manaò tupapaú (illus. 40, 50) lies in the suggestion that the red puppet attached to Aline’s bed and the tu¯pa¯pa‘u leaning against the pillar above Teha‘amana’s bed occupy similar positions. Gauguin thus implied that the child’s toy and the Tahitian woman’s ghost played homologous roles in their respective universes and shared a common ontology. A comparison of similar kind was made by Jean de La Fontaine in a fable often quoted, paraphrased and illustrated (illus. 143) in the nineteenth century, Le Statuaire et la statue de Jupiter (The Statuary and the Statue of Jupiter, 1678):

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A sculptor said, who had just bought The finest marble ever wrought – What must my chisel here produce? A god, or cowl for common use? No, it shall be a god, I swear; His hand the thunderbolt shall bear: Mortals, fall down, or hence be hurled; Behold the sovereign of the world! The idol’s character he drew, So just, that when exposed to view, They found that speech was all the odds Between it and the king of gods. 253

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The workman, wondering at his feat, Hardly the image saw complete, When he the first a-trembling stands, Fearing the work of his own hands.1 Remembering Horace, who had placed words in the mouth of a fig trunk made into a statue of Priapus (Satires, i, 8), La Fontaine first makes a subject of the block of marble. He describes the material as theoretically passive and capable of receiving the form of any object at all, from the most noble to the most humble, but also as possessing an intrinsic quality allowing it to attract the sculptor and embody Jupiter the Thunderer. In the fourth stanza, a reversal takes place like that which Gauguin indicated in Manaò tupapaú, though attributing it there to the ambiguity of the Tahitian language: from having been the creation of the artist, the statue becomes the king of the gods and inspires in the artist the reverence due to divinity. This is a veritable metamorphosis and staged as such by J. J. Grandville (illus. 143) who, like La Fontaine, makes an analogy with the myth of Pygmalion falling in love with his own production. The rest of the fable generalizes this proposition by comparing the ‘artisan’ with the ancient poets who feared the gods that they had invented and with the contemporaries of the author who took their dreams for realities. Like Francis Bacon, who had described mental representations as ‘idols of the mind’ in his Novum Organum (1620), La Fontaine exploited the power of visual representation and the sacred image to denounce the influence of prejudices and interests over perception. This target was therefore of his own day, but he located it in an evolutionary perspective by evoking ‘the pagan error’– animist rather than polytheist – and by assimilating ancient mythography to a child: ‘For thus are children self-beguiled, / Whose cares are all, poor silly souls! / Not to offend or hurt their dolls.’ In his critique of Huysmans’ Certains, Gauguin unfolded in reverse order a similar line of argument when explaining that the characters in the Louvre’s Holy Conversation must be referred to the artist: ‘Like all painters in the old days, Bianchi found around him, in nature, a particular type in which he depicted himself or which, I would even say, he must have made in his own image. Was it God who made man 254

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in His image or man who made Him in his image? I am strongly inclined to think it was the latter.’2 This reverse ‘incarnation’, which Gauguin’s meta-artistic works performed in conscious and paradigmatic form, is very close to Vignoli’s ‘entification’, the autonomization and animation of the objects of perception extended by humanity to memory images and their types. The Little One is Dreaming, Clovis Asleep and Woman and Child before a Landscape (illus. 23, 40, 41) show that Gauguin saw childhood as the favoured and founding moment of this phenomenon at the ontogenetic level. In the drawing, the child is fully awake and aware in front of nature, in which he perceives a face. In the paintings, the children are sleeping, but their dreams are visible both on the wall, in a form that suggests their mobile and ephemeral character, and in more stable and tangible manner in Aline’s puppet and in Clovis’ ‘doll’ and tine. The Little One is Dreaming establishes a close connection between these two reifications thanks to an analogy in the outline of the bird in flight and the puppet with its spread arms; the possibility of movement invoked in this way helps to make it seem a living being. Buste de Tahitienne (Bust of a Tahitian Woman) (illus. 144), if its provenance and the associated anecdote are authentic, establishes a further equivalence between doll and statue. Gauguin is said to have given it to Jeanne, the daughter of his friend Charles-Antoine Fournier, in 1894 or 1895 instead of a doll that he had promised.3 Jeanne was then ten years old and had lost her mother shortly after her birth; she had been brought up by Fournier, the author and critic known under his nom de plume Jean Dolent. Gauguin’s own mother had died in 1867, just after the sailing ship on which he was a second lieutenant had left Chile, so he was in a position to sympathize with the orphan. The bust shares some resemblance with the posthumous portrait that he painted of Aline Gauguin in 1889 (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), notably in the full lips, the hairline and the ribbons by which the hair is tied up.4 The idea that this bust was to take the place of a doll for a child, while accounting for its unusually amiable character in the overall context of Gauguin’s sculptural production, also fits with the ‘readymade’ elements that are an integral part of it: the shell and coral necklaces are movable as perhaps are the boxwood buttons recycled as earrings, suggesting that these elements can be replaced and others, 255

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144 Paul Gauguin, Bust of a Tahitian Woman, c. 1894.

such as a hat, be added. Bust of a Tahitian Woman is therefore, both in its heterogeneous materials and the manipulation that it invites, radically opposed to the autonomy generally claimed on behalf of sculpture. On the contrary, it offers itself for interaction and identification, both of which are further facilitated by the age that it represents and a size probably close to that of the girl to whom it was given. On the back of it, two feline busts, relatives of the foxes in Be in Love and You Will Be Happy (illus. 34) and La Perte du pucelage (Loss of Virginity, 1890–91, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia), remind us that, for Gauguin, childhood was neither prior to nor outside sexuality. But the idol is not far away either. The regular features of its face and its serene expression are reminiscent of the Buddhist sculpture of Southeast Asia and the face-to-face contact allowed by the bust is also like that of an image of devotion. The convex eyes, lacking 256

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either iris or pupil, are typical of Marquesan sculpture and add an element of mystery since we do not know whether they are open or closed, while the sacred connotation of ta¯manu wood has already been mentioned.5 Something of the same kind is true of the religious statues that Gauguin could have seen during his childhood in Peru; these too were a sort of mannequin, made to be dressed and decorated, especially the statues of the Child Jesus, which were veritable dolls that each family dressed meticulously before having them blessed.6 If he did not remember these figures, Huysmans’ remarks about Degas’ Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (Little Dancer of Fourteen Years), made in 1881, were there to remind him. In other words, Bust of a Tahitian Woman combines doll, idol and Christian statue into a single image, at once familiar and distant. Unlike La Fontaine, Gauguin does not seem to have made these parallels in order to denounce the ‘belief’ in dolls, tu¯pa¯pa‘u, idols or God. In saying of Jews who refused the preaching of Christ that ‘seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand’, the Gospels describe them as the Hebrew Bible had described idols and idolaters: They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes have they, but they see not; They have ears, but they hear not; Noses have they, but they smell not; They have hands, but they handle not; Feet have they, but they walk not; Neither speak they through their throat. They that make them shall be like unto them; Yea, every one that trusteth in them.7 In the nineteenth century the analogy made by La Fontaine was used to condemn the cultural backwardness of ‘primitive’ peoples. The American naval captain David Porter, who settled in Nuku Hivu in 1813, had this to say about the Marquesans: ‘In religion, these people are mere children; their morais are their baby houses and their gods are their dolls.’8 The Christian missionaries ‘captured’ these ‘idols’ or enforced their hand-over (illus. 104); they sought to ‘deepen the 257

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horror of idolatry’ and, by exhibiting them in Europe at the behest of King Pomare (converted in 1816), to acquaint Europeans with the ‘ridiculous gods of the Tahitians’.9 Inverting this logic, Gauguin wanted to ‘re-enchant’ the world, to create objects that, while still ‘the work of men’s hands’, as the author of the Psalms declared in his hostility to idols, were nevertheless capable of speaking to the men and women able to hear them. The attitude to popular religion and Oceanian ‘superstition’ set out in works like The Vision of the Sermon and Manaò tupapaú (illus. 43, 50) thus prefigures, mutatis mutandis, the ‘participant observation’ that Bronisław Malinowski developed a quarter of a century later in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands.10 Gauguin and Morice’s Noa Noa exemplifies this in the episode of the Mara cave, which comes just after that of Manaò tupapaú.11 After observing on the walls of this cave ‘enormous serpents [that] seem to extend slowly as if to drink from the surface of the interior lake’ – they are ‘roots that have forced their way through the crevices in the rocks’– the narrator decides to bathe there. His Tahitian companions refuse to accompany him. Confronted by a stretch of water, swimming hard but unable to reach either the sides or the end of the cave, and faced with the vision of a turtle, he absurdly boasts to Teha‘amana ‘Frenchmen know no fear’. But he does so having felt precisely the fear he denies and wondering whether he had ‘gone mad or become completely Maori’, having thus ‘fallen prey to fantastical beliefs’.

Dada Fetish But Gauguin was not an ethnographer and his quest was primarily personal and artistic. Mallarmé expressed this point clearly when proposing a toast to Gauguin at the banquet over which he presided on 23 March 1891 on the occasion of the artist’s first departure for Tahiti. He asked the guests to ‘admire this superb consciousness, which, in all the splendour of its talent, takes that talent into exile, setting out towards self and the furthest distances in order to retemper itself’.12 In May 1895, before his second departure, Gauguin 258

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himself explained to Jean Tardieu: ‘In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.’13 The childhood of humanity was thought to be alive and well among the Polynesians, about whom Moerenhout had written in 1837, still in pejorative mode: ‘As regards their fine arts, the images executed there before the time of discovery would be sufficient in themselves to prove that they were still in their earliest childhood.’14 Still more than Brittany and Martinique had done, Tahiti and subsequently the Marquesas Islands constituted an oasis of ‘savagery’; for Gauguin it was to be like a fountain of youth, allowing the artist to reverse the course of ‘progress’, in which he saw nothing but decline. Gauguin thus wrote in Cahier pour Aline: ‘You will always find the true maternal milk in the primitive arts, in the arts of full civilization very likely not.’15 Gauguin’s desire to ‘make things new’ and the connections that he argued between the Polynesian vision of the world and modern philosophy and science made this positive regression compatible with the notion of progress; the individual enters into a functional association with the collective and the artist breaking with ‘civilization’ is at one with the people supposed to have been spared it. One implicit principle underpinning this means of regeneration was the ‘law of recapitulation’ stating that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. In Diverses choses, Gauguin deliberately mixed up these two levels: ‘As for myself, my art goes way back, further back than the horses on the Parthenon – all the way to the dear old wooden hobbyhorse [dada] of my childhood.’16 This brilliant formula follows an apology for ‘moments of play’ and ‘childish things’ along with an ironic description of progress in the pictorial representation of horses made with the assistance of photography. Turning away from the apogee of naturalism embodied by the pictures of Ernest Meissonnier, dada here refers to a stick or ‘any other long object on which a child rides’.17 This might be an object found by the child (a ‘found object’), an object suggested by an adult for this purpose or again an object made to that end by combining a stick with a summary representation of the head of a horse, as suggested by the German word Steckenpferd, which combines ‘stalk’ and ‘horse’. Even in the latter case, the resemblance is therefore minimal and the abstraction maximal: only through 259

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the treatment of the object and the imaginative participation of the ‘rider’ does the dada become a horse. The derived sense of the French word, ‘favourite subject, idea or occupation to which one incessantly returns’, imitated from the corresponding acceptation of the English ‘hobbyhorse’, comprises a pejorative comparison – like that of La Fontaine – between an obsessive and a child discovering a horse in a piece of wood. A board for jeu de l’oie – a game akin to Snakes and Ladders – using the motif of the dada (illus. 145) deals primarily with the metaphorical sense by showing a series of figures devoting themselves to their favourite occupations; they are accompanied by a Diogenes in search of wise men, a Punchinello promising madmen and a Minerva pointing to an architectural folly on which the artist has bestowed a resemblance to the Medusa on the goddess’s shield. Thus the logical endpoint chosen by Gauguin for his backward progress, far from being reducible to a personal memory, represents a paradigm of the creative imagination. Gabriel Séailles, in his Essai sur le génie dans l’art (Essay on Genius in Art), compared the child’s

145 Johann Benedikt Wunder, Gallop of the Wooden Horses, n.d., 19th century.

260

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imagination to a wand and wrote that ‘from an inanimate toy, he makes a living being who resembles and loves him’. In 1893 in La Suggestion dans l’art (Suggestion in Art), Paul Souriau saw in this ‘transfiguration’ the very principle of aesthetic communication: ‘To look at a drawing, is to see chimeras in the clouds.’ 18 A quarter of a century later ‘Dada’ was to become a word rallying the supporters of radical artistic renewal, but that sense comes from children’s language and primarily refers to the horse itself. The doubling of the syllable, akin to the ‘echo constructions’ typical of South Asian languages and Polynesian words such as A‘a and ‘u‘u (illus. 104, 105), suggests the movement of the horse, which is reinforced by the expression à dada (‘on horseback’); this is imitated by the rhythm of ‘Ritter vom Steckenpferd’ (‘Wooden Horse Rider’) from Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood, 1838), which Gauguin said that he was humming at the end of the passage cited above from Diverses choses. The dada is therefore at once image, statue, toy and fetish, made and not made, object and subject.19 If we except one repetition of the same phrase in Avant et après, the dada reappears only once in Gauguin’s writings, in a bizarre anecdote included in the same collection and unconnected either with what precedes or with what follows: Sheeny baby goes to the Tuileries to play; his nursemaid takes him there. Sheeny baby is fed up with playing with his red ball. Sheeny baby sees a little Christian, he too very fed up with playing with his superb wooden horse; he approaches and, looking disdainfully at the wooden horse, he says ‘What an ugly gee-gee [dada]!’, then, shouting with joy, plays with his ball. Christian baby weeps, then, sighing, says timidly: ‘Swap?’ Sheeny baby returns home in triumph with the wooden horse and his father exclaims: ‘Darling little child, he’s just like me. He’ll go far.’20

Given the insulting term youtre (‘sheeny’) for Jew, Albert Boime logically enough interprets this passage as an expression of anti-Semitism, 261

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suggesting that we should recognize a racist stereotype in the transmission of ‘base habits’ from one generation to the next.21 But this explanation takes no account of the theme of play and more particularly of the dada/gee-gee. In this context, one is driven to wonder if the anecdote about babies swapping the toys does not allude to Jewish aniconism and the Christian cult of images. Gauguin was sufficiently well-informed about theology to know that the Christian cult had been justified by the doctrine of the incarnation and the fact that God created man ‘in his own image’. The exchange of the red ball for the hobbyhorse – which might also refer to the activity of the great Jewish art collectors, particularly in Paris – might then map onto a conception of ‘religious progress’ described by the Grand dictionnaire universel du xixe siècle in 1866 as follows:

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As man becomes a reasonable being and, by the development of his faculties, separates and emancipates himself in some sense from nature, he bestows more reason and more personality on god; and as the concept of god is thus purified, the image of god comes close to that of the human form. Man-gods take over from star-gods, element-gods, and animal-gods; anthropomorphism takes over from religious naturalism or pantheism.22

The ‘idols’ documented, collected and exhibited in the nineteenth century were moreover deemed the more primitive the more remote they were from Western naturalism and the human form; this was taken to show that the cultures from which they came were ‘still in their early childhood’. Even an author such as Albert Jacquemart, who, as we have seen, admired a Moche portrait-vase as a ‘masterpiece’, was astonished that the same pre-Columbian sites had revealed ‘combinations of geometrical lines huddled together to represent the horrible forms of the most monstrous fetishes’. In 1891 Fénéon tempered his admiration for Gauguin’s sculptures by referring to their pre-Columbian models and the effect that the former might have on the evolution of taste: ‘He is more statuary than painter and his sculpture should be admired. But, making one concession after another, we should finish up admiring Zapotec funerary pots.’23 The 262

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146 The Family Idols of Pomare (with a series of to‘o in the upper row), 1818.

same held true in Polynesia of tiki, the images of deified ancestors, and a fortiori of the to‘o theoretically associated with the higher gods (illus. 146). These were long pieces of hollowed-out wood, carved or not, covered in an envelope woven of coconut palm fibre and sometimes containing feathers, hair or teeth.24 Moerenhout, who gave the same name to ‘a column or triangular block covered in cloth’ also kept in the marae, observed that, ‘as art’, ‘nothing more ridiculous and crude could be imagined’.25 According to him, however, the ‘only veritable symbols of divinity’ were the red feathers, consecrated by the priests and then conserved in or on the to‘o or worn in a belt (maro), and the ‘sorts of prophets’ who sometimes represented or personified the gods.26 Philippe Peltier has raised the question whether Gauguin wished to allude to these feathers and present an epiphany of Ta‘aroa in 263

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the yellow hill of Parahi te marae (illus. 173), a point to which we shall return.27 It is true that Gauguin criticized ‘the servile imitation of nature’ and defended ‘colour alone as the language of the eye that listens’, particularly approving of the statement made about him in 1894 by Achille Delaroche: ‘Treated in this way, colour is, like music, vibration and, like music, attains what is most general and consequently what is vaguest in nature – its inner force.’28 But there is little evidence that aniconism, in the sense bestowed on the word by certain monotheistic traditions and, in the twentieth century, by a tendency within Modernism, was ever one of Gauguin’s ideals, any more than it was for the cultures in which he was particularly interested. The opposition between to‘o and tiki is one of degree rather than nature, as is evidenced by the minimal iconic features of the woven envelopes; Moerenhout relativized the distinctions that he explained by adding that the Polynesians ‘often confused these objects’ and that the red feathers not only represented gods to them but also ‘lares’ and the spirits of the dead.29 In the view of some authors, the content of the to‘o was comparable to a relic and, according to Cooper, the same was true of A‘a (illus. 104).30 But the notion of ‘relic’ is perhaps no more adequate than those of ‘image’, ‘symbol’, ‘statue’ or ‘representation’ to describe the status of material elements in which a power could, under certain conditions or even at certain moments, ‘reside’, in the same way that the universe, according to a formula of Polynesian cosmogony reported by Moerenhout and copied out by Gauguin, ‘is no more than Taaroa’s shell’.31

Animated Objects Unfortunately, we know nothing about the stories that Gauguin told or read to his children. I have mentioned his admiration for Caldecott’s illustrated albums, pointed out the kinship between the ontological oscillation of Manaò tupapaú (illus. 50) and the passage about the Red King in Lewis Carroll’s Through the LookingGlass, and noted that the Stump-shaped Vase (illus. 31) may bring to mind fairy tales by Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, such as 264

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‘Cinderella’ or ‘Snow White’. We could say the same about many other ceramic pieces, first and foremost Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face (illus. 36); Merete Bodelsen has drawn attention to the ‘childish mischief’ manifested in their construction and compared their characters to those in English children’s books, which were much appreciated in Paris from the early 1880s onwards. 32 If we turn to the pictures, Claire Frèche-Torry has related Nature morte aux trois petits chiens (Still-life with Three Little Dogs, 1888, Museum of Modern Art, New York) to Gauguin’s ambition to ‘do children’s painting’, writing, ‘Three little dogs, three cups, three apples . . . Gauguin clearly had fun as if in a children’s story.’33 Gauguin had been married since 1873 to a Danish woman and frequented the Scandinavian colony in Paris. It would therefore be surprising if he had not read the most famous Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen, even before his unhappy stay in Copenhagen of 1884–5. Andersen, who died in 1875, had been recognized abroad before acknowledgement came in Denmark and there are many reasons why he might have interested Gauguin. His cut-outs, often improvised during discussions and offered to his interlocutors, make ingenious play of the reversibility between figure and ground and multiply hybrid figures and metamorphoses. Dancers under Trees (illus. 147), for example, transforms the two trees that lean over the dancers to bearded profiles, while the negative forms are as suggestive as the contemporary ‘klecksographies’, inkblots obtained by folding, which Hermann Rorschach made the instrument of his ‘diagnosis of perception’ in the early twentieth century.34 The Tales of Hans Christian Andersen were translated into French as early as the 1840s and, though not intended exclusively for children, defended the spirit of childhood. In ‘Dance, Dance, Doll of Mine!’, a text from 1871, the song invented by a student is understood by the young Amalie and her dolls but not by Aunt Malle, who had ‘passed over the fence of youth’.35 The motivating force of the tales is imaginative perception, the principle of ‘childhood recovered at will’ invoked by Baudelaire.36 The ‘Elder Mother’ in ‘The Elder Tree Mother’ (1844) states that ‘the strangest fairy tales come from real life’ and in ‘What the Whole Family Said’ (1872), one of Andersen’s last tales, ‘there seemed [to little Marie] to appear many pictures in the fire’.37 The Elder Mother, 265

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147 Hans Christian Andersen, Dancers under the Trees, n.d.

who appears to the eyes of a little boy on a tree born from the teapot in which his mother is infusing elder leaves, transforms into a little girl and leads the boy into a garden where they find the hobbyhorse so dear to Gauguin’s heart in the form of his father’s walking stick, a form elementary but rich in connotation:

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For the little children, there was life in that stick. When they seated themselves upon it, the polished head turned into the head of a noble neighing horse with a long, black flowing mane. Four slender, strong legs shot out; the animal was strong and spirited; and they galloped around the grass plot!38

The effect of imaginative perception is therefore an animation that, sometimes attributed as here to characters in the narrative, is always first produced by the teller, who is often introduced into the tale. This animation affects objects and, more especially, those that represent living beings, such as the porcelain shepherdess and chimney sweep in the famous tale of that name (1845), placed on a console table under the eye of a faun who, carved into the middle of an old cupboard, was always called by the children ‘General-Headquarters-HindquartersGives-Orders-Front-and-Rear-Sergeant-Billygoat-Legs’.39 266

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The resemblances between Andersen’s tales and Gauguin’s works may be due to common sources, observations and convictions rather than direct reading. The tales do in any case help us to see the extent to which Gauguin’s pictures belie the expression ‘still-life’, or more precisely its French equivalent nature morte, ‘dead nature’. Nature morte avec carafon et figurine (Still-life with Carafon and Figurine) (illus. 148) shows a porcelain figure in the Chinese-oriented taste of the eighteenth century, akin to those of ‘The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep’; Sylvie Crussard has suggested that they are products of the French Mennecy porcelain manufacture.40 Crussard also perceived the bird pecking at the garland of the hanging placed behind the porcelain; despite being identical in colour with the ornamental motif (and therefore difficult to see), it probably does not form part of it. The picture therefore includes one of those backgrounds, ‘as imaginative as real’, which Gauguin had found in Cézanne; they had inspired him to find in ‘the literature of his pictures . . . a dualpurpose parabolic meaning’.41 It may seem excessive to speak of

148 Paul Gauguin, Still-life with Carafon and Figurine, 1885.

267

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‘literature’ in relation to a still-life, but this one suggests a potential narrative, coextensive with the animation of its elements: the pecking bird sets in motion the decorative garland and its action, combined with long feathers extending towards the figurine, seem to provoke a movement of withdrawal and an expression of surprise if not indeed of fear. The same figurine can be seen in L’Intérieur, rue Carcel (Interior, rue Carcel, 1881, Nasjionalgalleriet, Oslo), reigning over the scene, bolt-upright on a chest or cupboard, above the head of a pianist and opposite the face of a man listening. The etymology of the French terms used to refer to this kind of ornament coming or imitated from East Asia, magot or poussah, bear witness to their connection with the condemnation of ‘idols’: the first comes from Magog, the medieval name for barbarian, horrible or even diabolical peoples while poussah, used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the sense of ‘idol of the Indians’ or ‘Chinese idol’, is a borrowing from the Chinese p’usa, which perhaps derives from the Sanskrit bodhisattva and means ‘image of Buddha’.42 In Gauguin, even when objects do not represent living beings they can give the impression of being animated, that is, endowed with life: the possibility of movement, consciousness and willpower. We have already seen how in Clovis Asleep (illus. 41) the wooden Norwegian tine, a sort of ambiguous guardian of the sleeping child – in the manner of the u t ¯pa¯pa‘u by the side of Teha‘amana – seems to influence his dreams, in which we find a bird close kin to that of Still-life with Carafon and Figurine. The exotic origin (Scandinavian in this case) and relative antiquity of this tankard must have contributed to the fascination that it exerted over Gauguin, who represented it for the first time in Les Deux pots (Jug and Mug, 1880, The Art Institute of Chicago), set on a white tablecloth next to a pewter pitcher. The two recipients stand side by side, both having a handle and a lid, and seem to conduct a silent dialogue expressed in the contrast of forms, materials and textures. The construction of the space further favours the tine, which was already advantaged by its superior height; it overlooks the pewter pot and seems to bear down on it. Understandably, the picture has often been baptized The Iron Pot and Clay Pot in reference to La Fontaine, even though it inverts the denouement of that fable by giving the impression that the pewter 268

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149 Paul Gauguin, At the Window (Still-life with Tine and Carafon), 1882.

pot is the one that will be crushed. In the fable the two pots set out to travel together: ‘both went hobbling on together / Laughing at accidents and weather’, but ‘jogging cheek by jowl’ proves fatal to the more fragile of the two.43 In Gauguin the iron pot has no feet while the tine levitates above its sculpted lions, which the artist did not scruple to show in recognizable form. The tine appears in two further pictures, the second of which questions both ontologies and pictorial genres. In À la fenêtre, nature morte (At the Window (Still-life with Tine and Carafon)) (illus. 149), it is stable and does not threaten the Danish glass decanter. The latter is much slenderer than the wooden tankard but almost its equal in height – taller if we include the cork. The two objects are very close together and by making play with their spatial arrangement, Gauguin has given the impression that the tine, the cylindrical body of which 269

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is slightly convex, is swelling up, the better to meet the concavity of its neighbour. Even more than in Jug and Mug, the complementarities make the two recipients seem like a couple, analogous to the couple of the fable. But here one is invited to ascribe genders to the pots: masculine for the tine, so very solid and with the lion at the top of its handle this time clearly visible; feminine for the decanter, which displays the kind of hourglass waist then contrived by the use of a corset. Given Gauguin’s increasing taste for primitive simplicity and Mette’s for expensive, elegant clothes – a source of conflict between the two after Paul had given up his financial career – one is tempted to attribute a vase to each of them and wonder if they are communicating. They are in any case surrounded by four other objects of different sizes, ranging from two small lumps of sugar and a spoon in a glass to a lemon on a plate. It only requires one further step for us to see an allusion to the couple’s children and perceive the whole composition as a family portrait. Should we take that step?44 We are encouraged to do so by the biomorphism of the ceramics that Gauguin subsequently made and a further encouragement is constituted by a sketch from the winter of 1885, in which the artist represented his whole family in the form of heads, his own at the summit, emerging from a large pot inscribed ‘molasses’ and captioned ‘ma maison – Intérieur (‘my house – Interior’). 45 This house, as we know from a sketch on the same page, was the one at 105 Gammel Kongevej, where the Gauguin family rented an apartment and where it seems likely that Gauguin painted Nature morte dans un intérieur, Copenhague (Still-life, Interior, Copenhagen) (illus. 150). There the tine is surrounded by onions, dead birds and a basket. Above it we perceive in the distance unspecified articles of furniture covered with cloth and five small figures: two women in hats, two boys (the youngest turns towards us while the older looks out of the window) and finally a woman with her head in a bun, who may represent the maid.46 The relationship between the two spaces is ambiguous – we do not know whether the second space is seen through an opening or in a mirror (in which the basket is not reflected) – and contributes to an oppressive sense of unreality. If there is a mirror, what we see in it is less like the atmosphere of Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and more like Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a 270

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Glass Darkly (1872), a collection of fantastical stories whose title is borrowed from the first Epistle to the Corinthians (13:12): ‘for now we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face’. The two visitors seem as though taking part in a funeral vigil and the children seem imprisoned. Sylvie Crussard, who compares the furniture to coffins, connects the dead birds to Gauguin’s dreams of escape and writes that ‘the tine looms over a prostrate bird like Mette over her defeated spouse’. If this interpretation and the one I proposed above for At the Window are both correct, the tine has changed human referent from one picture to the next. There is nothing impossible about this – it is one of the defects of the notion of ‘symbolism’ to suppose that a reference of this kind is stable and univocal. But the essential aspect of the work seems to me to take place in the relationship between objects and persons, between the ‘still-life’ and the ‘genre scene’. The latter shows people gradually becoming things, with the exception of the children who seek some way out; in the foreground too, the birds have become things through the intermediation of death. 47 All of life’s

150 Paul Gauguin, Still-life, Interior, Copenhagen, 1885.

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151 Paul Gauguin, Mrs Alexandre Kohler, 1889.

forces seemed to have taken refuge in the humblest objects: the onions, which echo the blonde hair of the small boy, the basket, which again forms an ill assorted couple with the tine, the tine itself, with its ruddy body crowned by a little lion, and finally the plantlike dream of the wallpaper and a little picture that is both dark and indistinct. The animated character of objects represented by Gauguin is never so obvious as when these represent his own works, as we have 272

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already seen in Still-life with Laval’s Profile or Still-life with Japanese Print (illus. 3, 75). It has been suggested that he introduced ceramics into a picture in order to keep some record of them but the lack of commercial success registered by his pottery runs counter to this argument.48 It is significant that Gauguin asked Schuffenecker to send his pot Rats à cornes (Horned Rats) from Paris to Arles. Known to us from a little sketch on a page of the ‘Briant album’, the pot may have been inspired by the myth of the ‘king of the rats’ (Rattenkönig).49 Gauguin must have expected some stimulation from this object which he subsequently portrayed in the upper-right corner of two pictures, Nature morte à l’éventail (Still-life with Fan, c. 1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Madame Alexandre Kohler (illus. 151). These two representations are almost identical but can barely be understood without previous knowledge of the ‘magnificent pot with two rat heads’ so admired by Van Gogh and recognized by Bodelsen.50 Whereas the sketch clearly shows two rodent heads emerging from the body of a probably spherical recipient, whose cover is crowned with three interwoven tails, the two pictures do their best to camouflage or disguise these anatomical elements. The tails resemble stalks or roots, the body a root-stock or the head of an animal like a boar. These phytomorphic and zoomorphic aspects are by no means coincidental, since we recognize them at the base of the trunk and in the branches of the pu‘atea (Pisonia grandis, a tentacular tree) in Te nave nave fenua (illus. 152).51 To the extent that these aspects were not perceptible in the pot itself – which is what the (admittedly perfunctory) sketch would seem to suggest – Gauguin not only made use of his ceramics to increase the strangeness of his painting but also used his painting to develop the image-suggesting virtuality of his ceramics. He did this humorously, bestowing on Madame Kohler, the wife of a cashier at the Bon Marché, who is haloed by a fan, the task of embodying beauty and youth, a subject that the painters of the Italian Renaissance liked to contrast with the more or less inchoate and monstrous productions of ‘nature the artist’.52 This similarity with the art and theories of the Quattrocento primitives is something that we have already seen relative to Alberti’s hypothesis on the origins of sculpture. In a narrower historical perspective, the status of animated being that Gauguin tended to bestow 273

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on the objects that he made and represented can be compared with the interest in anthropomorphism and animism that arose in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In this context I have already cited not only Vignoli and his notion of ‘entification’ but the ‘uncanny’, which Freud explained by the capacity of the human psyche to retain earlier aspects of its development and by the ‘regressions’ that this made possible. Well before publication of Freud’s text many artists, writers and dramatists had highlighted the interactions connecting humans and objects, notably in the context of Symbolism. The Belgian collector and critic Edmond Picard suggested in 1887 the term ‘real fantastic’ for the discovery of mystery ‘in the real seen and felt in its enigmatic accidents’, while his compatriot Xavier Mellery entitled drawings of interiors without figures The Life of Things and later The Soul of Things.53 The aesthetic theories of ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung) can be compared with the writings of Paul Souriau cited above; anticipating the ‘embodied perception’ of phenomenology, they justified the ‘tendency towards anthropomorphism’ in terms of the discovery of ‘vitality’ (Lebendigkeit) in things, acknowledging ‘the resemblance between the forms and movements that we observe in nature and those that we produce or find in ourselves’.54 The Freudian ‘return of the repressed’, moreover, had in the colonial context an intercultural, anthropological meaning that is relevant to Gauguin. His works do indeed possess unusually profound affinities with the cultures that attracted him, whatever the share in this that we attribute to his Peruvian childhood, his youthful navigations and his later voyages, his visits to museums, collections and universal exhibitions and to his readings and conversations. Seeking to describe the things that, made by Gauguin’s hand or appearing in things made by his hand, ultimately transcend the term ‘object’, we might have recourse to the notion of ‘person other than human’ proposed by the anthropologist Irving Hallowell in an ‘ethnometaphysical’ essay on the ontology of the Ojibwa people of North America.55

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152 Paul Gauguin, Te nave nave fenua, 1892.

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Natural Theogony Hallowell states that ‘the Ojibwa recognize, a priori, potentialities for animation in certain classes of objects under certain circumstances’ but do not consider all objects belonging to these classes as permanently animated. Such is the case with stones and one of the anthropologist’s informants possessed a rock whose ‘contours . . . suggested eyes and mouth’; his great-grandfather, the leader of a Midewiwin ritual society, habitually struck it with a knife, causing the opening of the ‘mouth’, from which he extracted a leather bag containing a medicinal substance. 56 We have recognized anthrozoomorphic aspects in rocks painted by Gauguin, in particular at Le Pouldu, starting with his first visit to the place in 1886 (illus. 58, 66, 67). The principal subject of another picture from the series (illus. 153) is a huge rock emerging from the ocean very close to the Bellangenet beach west of the port of Le Pouldu. Crussard, who has identified the site, reproduces a recent photograph of this rock in addition to another picture that represents it, painted by Maxime Maufra in 1891 from the same point of view.57 Comparison of these images helps us to highlight the cephalomorphic interpretation that Gauguin made of this motif. In his picture, the right-hand part of the rock does not abruptly interrupt the central part but extends it in a rounded plane suggesting a long mane of hair. The vegetation growing on the summit also suggests hair and, at the far left, a tuft places an eyebrow over the rugged outline, which goes on to suggest an eyelid before extending into a snub nose, followed by a mouth whose fold follows the stratigraphic incline of the stone. This ‘reading’ is not obligatory and has never previously been proposed, at least in public. Indeed, it is a potential image that becomes actual only with the participation of the spectator. But the comparison with other works by Gauguin leaves no doubt about its importance to the artist and allows it to be situated in a coherent morphogenetic sequence. A first context is formed by the other representations of rocks that the Le Pouldu site inspired in Gauguin. The rock/head in Rochers près de la plage de Bellangenet (Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach), with its grotesque and ‘primitive’ profile, possesses a certain resemblance 276

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153 Paul Gauguin, Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach, 1886.

with the right-hand cliff in Above the Abyss (illus. 58), the one that maintains an antagonistic relationship with the oceanic head. It is even closer to the two rocks in Wave (illus. 67), which turn their faces towards the sky and the deep sea, unaware of their effect on the Lilliputian women fleeing towards the beach. Despite this comical effect and their grotesque aspect, the rocks/heads have a certain gravitas that is still more pronounced in the one at Bellangenet; it derives from the contrast between their gigantic size and geological antiquity and the physical and temporal scale of human and animal actions. Though it is not indispensable to seek out sources for this anthropomorphization, we note that it belongs both in the longue durée of the human relationship to rocks and in the synchrony of their artistic representation. Gauguin may thus have been interested – if only through the medium of prints – in the sacred rocks of Japan and notably the two ‘Wedded Rocks’ of Futami Bay (illus. 154), lying a short distance from the coast and the Shinto sanctuary of Ise. Connected to each other by ropes that are ritually renewed, these two blocks embody Izanagi and Izanami, the primordial couple in Japanese cosmogony, responsible for the creation of the islands of the archipelago and all 277

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154 Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige, Futami Bay in Ise Province, 1858.

the kami (divinities or spirits) of the sky and the earth.58 Nearer to Gauguin, several years before Redon had twice painted a rock on a Breton beach suggesting a large head comparable to those of the mo‘ai of Easter Island (illus. 156). This latent anthropomorphic aspect is confirmed by a charcoal of 1883, about which Redon himself wrote that it was ‘the head of a sphinx emerging from the earth like a rock’, and was made manifest in 1887 in the frontispiece (illus. 155) of the collection Les Soirs (Evenings), drawn with reference to the poem L’Idole, in which Emile Verhaeren described a similar apparition: ‘One sees a mountain rise up in the guise / Of some huge nocturnal idol made of stone’.59 Brittany, as we have seen, was rich in suggestions connecting ‘natural’ images, prehistoric megaliths and Christian sculptures eroded by time. Renan, who had just given a 278

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155 Odilon Redon, The Idol, 1887.

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156 Odilon Redon, The Pink Rock, c. 1883.

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157 Paul Gauguin, The Breton Calvary, or The Green Christ, 1889.

long description of Brittany in his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (Memories of Childhood and Youth, 1883), explained the name of the place where Christ died by the phenomenon of imaginative perception in his Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus, 1863): ‘The name Golgotha signifies a skull: it corresponds with the French word Chaumont, and probably designated a bare hill or rising ground, having the form of a bald skull.’60 280

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This passage, combined with the cephalomorphic interpretation of Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach, may explain why, in 1889, Gauguin set amid the dunes of Le Pouldu an image of the Deposition originating in the Calvary of Nizon near Pont-Aven (illus. 157). In Le Christ vert (The Green Christ) one sees only a fragment of the mound – which is in any case grassy rather than ‘bald’ – on which the Cross rests, but it is a portion of the coast like those other hillocks, visible to the left, between which the ocean has excavated openings and through which walk little background figures. The kinship between these formations and the rock-head of Bellangenet is clearly demonstrated in the drawing entitled Les Saintes Images (Holy Images) (illus. 158), which Gauguin included in 1903 in the manuscript of his own collection of memories, Avant et après. There, a version of the

158 Paul Gauguin, The Holy Images, c. 1903.

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Nizon calvary rests on a mound whose base is formed by a giant head deriving from the rock of Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach, whose cephalomorphic aspect is thus retrospectively confirmed: the profile is different, the bridge of the nose is a direct extension of the forehead, but we recognize the horizontal extension of the top of the skull, which is still exaggerated, and the mane of hair divided into parallel strands descending at the back. This form had already appeared in 1889 in identical form in the print Te Atua (illus. 159), where it is placed at the top rather than at the base of the composition and finds an echo in a curious prostrate figure to whom we shall return.

159 Paul Gauguin, Te atua, 1898–9.

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160 Takai‘i, me‘ae of I‘ipona, side view (see illus. 139).

Te atua and Holy Images bring together Christian motifs (the iconography of the calvary, though complex and transformed by the artist, the Virgin and Child and the serpent), Buddhist motifs (the figure on the right and perhaps the peacock), and Polynesian ones (the giant head, whose abstraction is reminiscent of a tiki (illus. 160) and of Gauguin’s wooden sculptures inspired by Marquesan art (illus. 96, 106)). This combination is partly explained by the retrospective tendency of the artist during his final years, when he wrote Avant et après: ‘From Oceania to Brittany is not far when one takes up the pen in tranquillity.’61 The Marquesas are ‘young’ volcanic islands on the geological scale and, unlike Tahiti, do not yet have an atoll; their coasts are not dissimilar to those of Finistère. Shortly before his departure for Hiva Oa, Gauguin illustrated eleven menus, one of which (illus. 161) shows the meeting of two women and is captioned in Tahitian.62 The Tahitian woman possesses a profile comparable to 283

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161 Paul Gauguin, Illustrated Menu, 1899.

that of the giant head of Te atua whereas the Breton woman with her coif is more analogous to the upper part of its skull. Is this synthesis or syncretism? These terms are justified as long as we emphatically note the break that these works constitute in relation to what Jan Assmann has called ‘the Mosaic distinction’ in the context, still historically close, of the ‘struggle against idolatry’. 63 The ‘idols’ were supposed to ‘fall down before’ the missionaries and be replaced by the ‘holy images’ of the ‘true God’, not cohabit with these images as does the Christ with the atua in the Cylinder with Crucified Christ (illus. 106). 64 The forms that had been used for the idols were not authorized to serve as representations of these holy images. Thus in New Zealand, an extraordinary Virgin and Child (illus. 162) carved for a Catholic chapel by a Maori sculptor converted to Christianity was refused by the priest as ‘unsuitable’ in much the same way as the Vision of the Sermon (illus. 43) was rejected by the priest of the Trémalo chapel.65 284

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162 Maori sculptor, Virgin and Child, c. 1845 (?).

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The position of the giant head at the feet of Christ in Holy Images does not therefore signify that the polytheist ‘god’ (atua) has ‘fallen down before’ the monotheist ‘true God’, as its superior position in the engraving Te atua testifies. These positions may be opposite but both express primacy. Its position in Holy Images fits the cosmogonic function of a generic divinity, constituting a pedestal on which other sacred images rest, notably the Christian and Buddhist ones. In the Polynesian cosmogony published by Moerenhout and copied out by Gauguin, the elements mentioned when the creator god Ta‘aroa ‘changed into the universe’ are pivots (axes or orbits), rocks and sand. 66 The second element, te papa, designates a flat stone or stone table, a bench, a bed of coral, and the foundation of a family, while the same term employed as a verb means ‘to support from beneath’. The telluric origins of the theomorphic rock, visible in Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach, thus predisposed it to represent this founding divinity. But the theme of genesis leads us to another, ontogenetic source of this motif in Gauguin’s oeuvre, the Head of Jean Gauguin (illus. 39), which I have already compared to Brancusi’s Beginning of the World. If we look at this head in profile (illus. 163) we see that the inclined position, small, snub nose and above all the upper part of the skull, extended along the horizontal, closely fit the outlines of the Bellangenet rock. Obviously, the long hair is missing, but the irregular edge of what one imagines is the collar of a piece of clothing matches the foam that borders the rocks in Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach and Wave (illus. 67), which Seguin described as ‘a white ruff’.67 This a priori surprising resemblance cannot be a matter of chance. Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, publishing the Head of Jean Gauguin (then recently rediscovered in Denmark), noted that its backward-leaning head subsequently become characteristic of many works by Gauguin, including the Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot (illus. 65).68 The ocean was associated with the birth of life in the theory of evolution as in many cosmogeneses, including those of Polynesia, and Jules Michelet, citing Darwin in La Mer (The Sea, 1861), described the birth of life in pantheistic terms relative to a red algae that he called ‘flower of blood’: 286

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163 Head of Jean Gauguin, side view (illus. 39).

There are doubtful Creatures, the Corallines, for instance, that are claimed by all three kingdoms. They tend towards the animal, they tend towards the mineral, and are finally assigned to the vegetable. Perchance they form the real point at which life obscurely and mysteriously rises from the slumber of stone, without utterly quitting that rude starting point, as if to remind us, so high placed and so haughty, of the right of even the humble mineral to rise into animation, and of the deep and eternal aspiration that lies buried, but busy, in the bosom of Nature.69 287

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At the psychological and ontogenetic level, Maury had written that ‘the life of the embryo is a simple vegetable growth and barely more than a function of the life of the mother’, declaring:

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Thus Man, from the moment he is conceived till the moment of his maturity, re-ascends all the echelons of animal life, and his soul passes through states analogous to those traversed by a sleeper gradually brought from a complete state of sleep to a complete state of wakefulness.70

I have already compared the abstraction of the Head of Jean Gauguin (with its closed eyes) to the way in which the foetus is associated in Maury with sleep as the ‘primordial state of the soul . . . at the moment when life appears’.71 The position of the head, leaning back, can be interpreted as expressing this emergence, which Michelet attributed to the ‘right’ of the mineral to ‘ascend and exist’. Whether or not Gauguin had read these texts is of little importance insofar as they express, in eloquent and particularly explicit fashion, ideas that were widespread at a time when the artist was considering first his child and subsequently the Breton coast, prior to deciding the form in which he should represent the founding divinity. Michelet’s ‘humble mineral’ might seem ontologically located at the extreme opposite of the divine, but this ascending hierarchy was not at all the point of view adopted by Gauguin, who untiringly valued the ‘primitive’ and fundamental, even in the granitic form of the Breton soil. We should further emphasize that in Polynesia, te atua took its place in the continuity of deified ancestors and therefore of the rock (te papa) forming the ‘foundation of a family’. Craighill Handy indicates that creation took place there from the bottom up, not the reverse: people spoke of ancestral beings as ‘far below’ (i ao oa) in the Marquesas and sometimes, in Tahiti, of genealogies as ‘ancestry having grown from below’ (papa tupuna na raro). 72 The head, the seat of mana, was sacred (tapu), and particularly that of the firstborn.73 This connection between head and rock is visible in the watercolour entitled Les Roches noires (The Black Rocks) (illus. 164), which forms part of a series of works of 1889 that also took their 288

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164 Paul Gauguin, The Black Rocks, 1889.

inspiration from the Le Pouldu coast. A frontal face appears at the summit of a vertical stone, whose phallic form anticipates the ‘ceramic sculpture’ Oviri (illus. 107) and may be connected with the fertility rites with which these rocks covered in algae were supposed to be associated.74 In a variant reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Café Volpini (illus. 165), the human figure is set off against the background of the rock, in a foetal position identical to that of the livid-coloured woman in the picture La Vie et la mort (Life and Death, 1889, Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum, Cairo). We know that this posture derives from the Peruvian mummy in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, that is, from a dead body changed into an object – at once a relic and an image of itself – in the context of the ancestor cult. In At the Black Rocks and Life and Death, the figure curled up on itself is contrasted with the undine who leaps or has leaped into the water; it has its back turned to life and is changing into stone. In Black Rocks, whose ambiguity in this respect is comparable to that of Trunk-shaped Vase with Female 289

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Face (illus. 36), one rather has the feeling that the rock is coming alive and becoming human or even superhuman. Chronologically reconstituted, the morphogenetic sequence of which I speak goes from Head of Jean Gauguin to Holy Images and passes through Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach, certain heads of Breton women wearing coifs and Te atua.75 It seems very unlikely that when moulding the head of his newborn son, Gauguin had in mind any possible resemblance with a rock but it seems plausible that five years later, the memory of this wax piece was present in his mind when he interpreted the Bellangenet rock as a head. The significations of this motif and its avatars must have gradually formed, ramified and transformed, in part retrospectively and unconsciously, in interaction with the inceptions and preoccupations that I have mentioned. The key moment was no doubt at Le Pouldu, when Gauguin must have observed that the ‘rocks’ on the beach were in fact fragments of the coast detached and sculpted by the incessant action of the ocean. As a sculptor, he must have been particularly sensitive to this embodiment of natura artifex.76 From this point of view, Rocks Near

165 Paul Gauguin, At the Black Rocks, 1889.

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Bellangenet Beach forms something like a companion piece to Above the Abyss (illus. 58). The rock/head forms part of a process of individuation and differentiation, like the newborn entering life and the founding divinity giving birth to all beings, while the oceanic head belongs to a process of de-individuation and de-differentiation – of ‘disincorporation’, in Gauguin’s term. The two processes are both opposite and complementary, just as the sea receives its form from the rock whose form it sculpts.

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166 Paul Gauguin, The Universe is Created, 1893–4.

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six

Natura Naturans

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Creation Continued In 1889 Gauguin wrote that nature ‘is always varying the productions that she offers us’; the artist, he said, was ‘one of nature’s means’, hailing Redon as ‘one of those she has elected for this continuation of creation’.1 His use of the religious notion of election testifies to Gauguin’s adoption of the equivalence between God and Nature (Deus sive natura) postulated by Baruch Spinoza.2 In the Cahier pour Aline he wrote ‘there is in the firmament a book in which is written the law of harmony and the beautiful’ and quoted Swedenborg, according to whom ‘the men who can read in this book are favoured by God’ and the artist is ‘the true elect, since he alone has the power to set this reading down’.3 We have already encountered that metaphor in relation to Gauguin’s pansemiotism and the passage in Noa Noa in which the dry leaves of the pandanus fallen on the ground form the Oceanian name of the divinity.4 Natural phenomena were indeed given a divinatory reading in Oceania; Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, reported in 1896 that ‘an unknown fish was thrown upon the coast, an ominous word written on its scales.’5 But Gauguin’s sources were primarily European and Romantic, drawn from a number of sources including Balzac’s ‘mystical’ novels, Louis Lambert and Séraphita, to which he owed his knowledge of Swedenborg’s thought. The idea that the artist forms part of nature and that art consists of imitating not its achieved forms but its creative principle had itself been formulated by the Romantics. It corresponded to the distinction in Spinoza between natura naturata and natura naturans and found a new currency in the late nineteenth century, in particular in August 293

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Strindberg, who recommended the use of ‘chance in artistic production’ and defined ‘the art of the future’ in these terms: ‘imitate nature approximately; above all, emulate nature’s way of creating.’6 Achille Delaroche meanwhile announced an ‘Orphic’ art and an ‘aesthetic agnosticism’ inspired by F.W.J. Schelling’s ‘intuition’. Gauguin approved and copied out these formulations: ‘Art, in fact, symbolizes Nature, since it is creation.’7 Jan Assmann has interpreted the Spinozism of the German pre-Romantics as a return to ancient ‘cosmotheism’ and the ‘veneration of the divinely animated cosmos’, a cosmos repressed by monotheism. Carlyle defended ‘paganism’ as ‘old Thought’ that understood the world as divine. 8 The re-actualization of Romantic Naturphilosophie and its sources went hand in hand with developments in modern science, thanks to which many authors sought to rehabilitate conceptions of the world that had been considered out of date. In his popularizing work Les Merveilles du monde invisible (The Marvels of the Invisible World, 1866), Wilfrid de Fonvielle thus wrote about the egg, considered by the Vedas to be ‘the form under which the eternal and infinite Being manifested itself to the sensible world’; ‘the microscope’, he said, ‘seems to have confirmed these teachings of Brahmanic theocracy, since a profound anatomy has shown that the small God of this world begins in the same way as the incarnation of the infinite Being itself’.9 In 1891 André Chevrillon, speaking of the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer, cited an intellectual of Jaipur according to whom Spencer’s ‘matter, unknowable in itself, indeterminate, originally homogenous and which, through a series of imperceptible changes, developed by cycles all beings and all forms, recalls in many of its aspects the Brahma of our Vedantists’. 10 This description also matches the ideas on matter and ‘general life’ that we have discovered in the manuscripts of The Catholic Church and Modern Times and Catholicism and the Modern Mind and in Gauguin’s rapprochement of the Polynesian vision of the world with contemporary thought, including the theory of evolution. Transformism gave to natura naturans the sense of a creation always in process, whose elements, instead of being absolutely distinct, were more or less interconnected. Devoting an engraving in the Noa Noa suite to the Polynesian cosmogony, Gauguin characteristically 294

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Natura Naturans entitled it L’Univers est créé (The Universe is Created) (illus. 166), using the present tense and mixing in the image inchoate plant, animal, human and divine forms; these included a fish placed in front of a standing person, which thus seems to walk and move from sea to terra firma. Stating that ‘it was the soul that formed its organism’ and that ‘the transforming modifications of the species’ were caused by ‘a combination of animic influences and the environment’, Gauguin showed himself to be neo-Larmarckian rather than Darwinian.11 We remember that he criticized the ‘belated materialists of modern science, which is still progressing’ and that Philippe Verdier has compared his anti-mechanistic attitude with Bergson’s earliest books, which were then still recent.12 Gauguin localized the ‘main generating principle of animic and organic life’ in a ‘vital node’ situated at the centre of the nervous system; this and his conception of nature as endowed with a ‘power of imagination’ might also bring to mind Creative Evolution (1907), in which, a few years after Gauguin’s death, Bergson stated that ‘the role of life is to insert indetermination into matter’ in unpredictable forms but in growing proportions so that the nervous system finishes up as a ‘veritable reservoir of indetermination’.13 These observations make clear the relationships between the ‘realms of nature’ that we find in Gauguin’s works: far from being clearly separate, mountains and rock, plants, animals, humans and divinities (or images of the gods) are united by relations of analogy, homology and even permeability.14 We have already seen anthrozoomorphic treatments of mineral elements (illus. 58, 66, 164, 165) and will return to them. Many Gauguin sketches bring animals and humans together, for example the head of a bearded man and a dog’s head, placing them side by side on the same leaves of a sketchbook.15 These comparisons, frequent enough in the domain of the ludic image, tended to be perceived as pejorative; René Huygue notes that the title Breton et veau (Breton and Calf ), which accompanied one of Gauguin’s pictures at the Salon des XX in Brussels, provoked either indignation or laughter.16 In her memories of Brittany, Dorothy Menpes, the daughter of an Australian painter who lived at PontAven in the early 1880s, wrote that ‘many Bretons are barely more intelligent than the cattle on their farms’ and we can interpret in this 295

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perspective the caricatural aspects of Bretons represented among others by Gauguin and Bernard.17 The parallel between Breton women and geese persistently developed by Gauguin is connected not only to the role of women in looking after the farmyard but also to the role of this bird in metaphors of clumsiness, stupidity and naivety.18 The pig is associated in Gauguin with feminine nudity and has connotations of surrendering oneself to sexuality; examples include Two Women Bathers (1887, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires) and En pleine chaleur (In Full Heat (Woman with Pigs), 1888, private collection).19 This role is at one with the metaphorical use of the pig to refer to ‘crude sensuality’ or even latent vice, especially in the male of the species, and is close to traditional symbolism. The same is true of another animal, according to the explanation of the relief Be in Love and You Will Be Happy (illus. 34) that Gauguin gave to Bernard: ‘Gauguin (as a monster) taking the hand of a woman who defends herself, saying to her: love and be happy. The fox, an Indian symbol of perversity; then small figures in the interstices.’20 Perversity here means an inclination to evil and indifference to other people’s suffering, again in a sexual context: the fox reappears in Lost Virginity (1890–91, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, va), whose title is unusually explicit. Resting possessively on the bust of a completely naked woman, who lies on her back, the animal occupies the place of the lover, just as it is vertically associated with the face of Gauguin the seducer in Be in Love and You Will Be Happy. Sylvie Crussard has suggested that the woman grasped in the relief is Marie Louarn, the only woman in Pont-Aven who would agree to pose naked, a prostitute as of 1892 and whose name in Breton means ‘fox’.21 The ‘Indian symbol’ of the fox is thus overdetermined, the more so as the disquieting, enigmatic attitude and gaze that Gauguin bestowed on it bring to mind the qualities of liminality and transformation that the fox’s behaviour, combination of daylight and nocturnal habits and changing coat have earned it in many popular traditions, particularly in Asia. Crussard has also highlighted the pointed ears that Gauguin in 1888 gave to his self-portrait (National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc), to a Petit baigneur breton (Little Breton Bather, private collection) and to Madeleine Bernard (Musée de Grenoble), whose almond 296

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eyes make her an avatar of the fox in Lost Virginity.22 The emphasis on the animality of humans found in his work of the time therefore included the artist himself and was not pejorative per se, though it was perhaps morally ambivalent or amoral.23 The connection of these figures with the vase Le Faune (The Faun, whereabouts unknown) is revealing in so far as the faun is a hybrid being, at once human, animal and divine, and living evidence of ancient cosmotheism.24 Mallarmé, author of ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune’, is equipped with pointed ears by Gauguin in the etching that he made of him in 1891; a preparatory drawing (illus. 167) further compares the poet’s head to that of a crow and, by exaggerating the tuft of hair and crest of feathers, that of a kind of horned devil. The crow alludes to Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ as translated by Mallarmé, in which the bird, chosen by Poe as ‘a non-reasoning creature capable of speech’, appears in the

167 Paul Gauguin, Mallarmé, 1891.

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narrative as a messenger from his dead mistress.25 The sketch, by extending into the supernatural the motif of the frontal excrescence as an expression of poetic inspiration understood as ‘enthusiasm’ (in the classical sense of ‘divine inspiration’), is clear evidence that this recourse to analogy aggrandizes the figure of the poet on the ontological plane beyond as much as below what is normally considered human. In Avant et après Gauguin recorded an observation about his arrival in Arles that holds true of his travels in general: ‘Wherever I go I need a certain period of incubation, so that I may learn every time the essence of the plants and trees, of all nature in short, so varied and so capricious, which is never willing to surrender her secrets or yield herself up.’26 This confession brings to mind again the veiled Isis of the Romantic Spinozists, here described with a soupçon of eroticism, while the term ‘essence’ can be understood both in the philosophical and botanical senses. Plants subsume the ‘book of nature’ and Gauguin’s sketchbooks, like his works, show the attention that he devoted to them (illus. 123). Plants, like animals, served his purposes of self-representation. In early 1888, declining Mette’s invitation to visit his family in Denmark, he explained: ‘You need to remember that there are two natures in me, the Indian and the sensitive – the sensitive has disappeared, allowing the Indian to go steadfastly on his way.’ 27 The analogical sense of ‘sensitive’, describing a person of great sensitivity, does not obliterate its literal sense, which refers to a variety of mimosa (Mimosa pudica) whose leaves retract when they are touched.28 In Diverses choses Gauguin similarly compared artists to flowers: ‘Like flowers, they blossom forth at the least ray of sun and give off their scent, but they wilt upon the impure contact of the hand that sullies them.’ 29 The retraction of the sensitive plant, technically a thigmonasty – an active, rapid and reversible movement in response to a shock – expresses the animated character of the plant in a form that brings it close to animals and therefore humans. It is revealing that Gauguin referred to it in order to define artists; in 1897 he had approved a Darwinist explanation of genius as the ‘survival of the wild, rapacious, primitive individualists who lived in monogamous or polygamous families alongside the great human herds’. They were slowly exterminated by ‘the moral and social culture that develops solidarity between members of the crowd’. 298

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168 Paul Gauguin, Fatata te Miti, 1892.

Thus the sensitive and the Indian map on to one another in internal or external exile.30 It is therefore not surprising to find anthrozoomorphic aspects in the plants represented by Gauguin, in particular the tropical plants that he studied during the ‘incubation period’ of his first stay in Tahiti. In Fatata te miti (Near the Sea) (illus. 168), for example, a large hutu (Barringtonia asiatica) stretches along the beach, partly covering the bodies of two women. Thanks to an opportunely placed knot in the tree, which is extended by a branch rather in the manner of a horn, the tree seizes the hand of the ‘undine’ in the same way as ‘Gauguin (as a monster)’ in Be in Love and You Will Be Happy (illus. 34) grasped that of the naked woman. The teratomorphic character of this excrescence is more clearly visible in Parau na te varua ino (Words 299

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169 Paul Gauguin, Parau na te varua ino, 1892.

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Natura Naturans of the Evil Spirit) (illus. 169), where it is directly above the va¯rua ‘ino and where spots combine to give it an eye and mouth.31 The trunk as a whole resembles a large reptile and, in the upper-right corner, near the face of the Tahitian Eve, a serpentine branch bears a fruit coloured half-red, half-green, which is probably inspired by the lantern-shaped fruit of the hutu; here it gives the effect of a mask with two almondshaped eyes and offers a more abstract version of the hieratic face of the ‘spirit’.32 Taking into account the dry leaves outlining their cryptographic arabesques on the ground as in Man with an Axe (illus. 6) and the flowers that, like those in Manaò tupapaú (illus. 50), relate to the woman ‘as phosphorescence in the night (in her thoughts)’, we might say that the tree covers the entire ontological spectrum of the picture. Writing in 1895 about the works on Breton subjects by Armand Seguin exhibited in the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery in Paris, Gauguin mentioned his own pictures: ‘This beautiful Brittany, I too once painted it, I have gazed at its horizons, seeking the harmony between human life and plant and animal life in compositions in which I reserved an important role for the great voice of the earth.’33 The Fountain-shaped Vase in the Musée d’Orsay, which compares the behaviour of Bretons with that of their farmyards, has already provided one example of this ‘harmony’ between human and animal life. Gauguin seems to have been particularly struck by it during the spring of 1888, when, recovering in Pont-Aven from the malaria and dysentery that he had contracted in Martinique, he felt his strength returning just as the season of love was beginning in the countryside. Two pictures bear witness to his thoughts on the matter and include plant life in ‘parabolic’ manner. The first of these (illus. 170) shows a Breton woman and man standing at the foot of a wooded slope. The woman is seen from behind, her hands on her hips or her belly; she turns her head towards her companion, who stands in three-quarter profile, his hands in his pockets, as if he had approached her as she was passing. The proximity indicates a certain intimacy and allows us to imagine an amorous exchange. The couple are echoed in the two cows pictured lower down on the picture, placed very close to one another and partly repeating in their coats the colours of the human clothes. The grass, the ground and new-leaved 301

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170 Paul Gauguin, Shepherd and Shepherdess in the Meadow, 1888.

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Natura Naturans trees form a sort of tapestry in which men and beasts are as if immersed, but the role of plant life does not stop there. To the left, two tall trees stand out against the background. The first is divided mid-height by a fork, in the middle of which we discern the village bell tower in the distance. The second tree leans towards the first and stretches towards it a branch, creating an arc that becomes the upper side of a triangle whose other sides are formed by the fork. This gracious form, improbable if not indeed impossible in fact, suggests an embrace and is extended higher up when the right-hand tree in its turn forks and one of the branches of the left-hand tree in its turn passes through that fork. The tree-couple is thus engaged in the same ‘conversation’ as the human and animal couples. This anthrozoomorphic allusion to the sexuality of plants is confirmed by Végétation tropicale (Tropical Vegetation, 1887, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), painted in Martinique, where the same ‘gesture’ is made towards itself by a papaya tree, a species that comprises male, female and hermaphroditic plants, the latter being subject to changes of sex in accordance with environmental conditions.34 In a second spring picture from 1888 (illus. 171) the young shepherd approaches the seated shepherdess. Above her two young trees, one with a fork and the other with a rectilinear trunk, combine their canopies in a single crown, whose outline forms a large head leaning back, with pointed nose and open mouth. This very discreet anthropomorphic aspect might seem doubtful and only becomes genuinely identifiable thanks to its recurrence in the tree on the left of Matamoe (illus. 7), where it tends to the zoomorphic, and in the flowers of Parahi te marae (illus. 186), where its meaning, as we shall see, becomes more accessible. At this stage we can already note that plant life seems to express human emotion and go on to relate this open mouth to the ‘great voice of the earth’, for which Gauguin claimed to have ‘reserved an important role’. Carlyle wrote about Shakespeare that ‘It is Nature’s highest reward to a true simple great soul, that he get thus to be a part of herself’, with the effect that the works of such a soul grow unconsciously and in conformity with natural laws.35 By integrating artistic creation into natura naturans, Gauguin also compared it to the phenomenon of generation, which he described in the same terms when writing that 303

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the sexual act, considered by Westerners as a sin, was ‘largely redeemed by the most beautiful act in the world, Creation, the divine act in the sense that it is the continuation of the work of the Creator’.36 This notion illuminates the analogical links between volcano, potter’s kiln and phallus that we noted in relation to Oviri, and the use of material, in particular wood, that inscribes the genesis of the work in the continuation of its morphology (illus. 97). Natura naturans thus maps on to imago imagans. This equation finds visual form on the page of the sketchbook in which Gauguin has juxtaposed images of plants, animals and his own ceramics (illus. 123). The upper part shows leaves; the summary forms of poultry with a hummingbird above them; a vase without decoration; a banana tree inflorescence whose female flowers have produced bananas; a cashew drupe on its fleshy pedicel (cashew apple); and a bust-vase. The latter is complemented below by three other vases that include Woman-vase with Serpent-belt (illus. 114) and Pyriform Vase with Stirrup-shaped Handle-spout (illus. 128). The motif common to these apparently disparate elements is a sort of upper appendage: the head in the animals and anthropomorphic vases, the male flower of the banana tree and the fruit containing the seed or nut of the cashew. The collocations suggest on the one hand that vases grow like animals and more particularly like plants, and on the other that heads, far from playing an exclusively ornamental role, contain the principle of generation. This conclusion also holds true for Still-life with Japanese Print (illus. 75), in which the Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot (illus. 65), used as a vase, passes from the status of tragic image of an interrupted life to that of a source of fertility. We have seen that the Bust-Vase with Exploded Head (illus. 76), whose head opens like a dehiscent fruit, alludes to the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly. Writing to Redon when on the point of embarking for Polynesia, Gauguin made similar observations about a lithograph inspired by Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine (The Temptation of St Anthony), Redon’s La Mort: Mon ironie dépasse toutes les autres! (Death: My Irony Exceeds All Others!). ‘In Europe,’ Gauguin wrote, ‘this death with her serpent’s tail carries some conviction but in Tahiti the roots of death must be seen sprouting again into blossom.’37 Gauguin and Morice’s Noa Noa praised ‘Oceanian theology’ 304

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171 Paul Gauguin, View of Pont-Aven from Lézaven, c. 1888–9.

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for bringing together in a ‘unity of substance’ – an eminently Spinozan notion – the poles that it had previously contrasted, such as spirit and matter or ‘generative cause and the matter which has become fecund’.38 This cyclic and dialectical conception, materialized in the cylindrical form (or at least the base) of the wooden sculptures and ceramics, also structures several paintings on cosmological themes. Such is the case with Gauguin’s ‘testament’ painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (illus. 53). We have already seen that it functions rather in the manner of a palindrome, particularly thanks to the mummy-like posture of the old woman, which can be interpreted as a foetal posture and thus make a connection to the newborn baby asleep at the other end. The mummy aspect is clearly emphasized in the works of 1889 already mentioned (illus. 5, 34, 165), in which it symbolizes the pole of death. I pointed out, however, that in The Black Rocks (illus. 164) the mummy is one and the same with the rock, so that it is the rock that seems to be born into life and humanity, if not indeed divinity. The arrangement of the abstract motifs that animate the background, white or blue and outlined in black, introduces a correlative ambiguity. In the upper part they represent clouds; in the lower part they represent the sea foam but form strange arabesques that are perhaps reminiscent of the ‘cryptography’ of the pandanus leaves (on the left) and a maelstrom or Chinese dragon (on the right). 39 These motifs at several points cross the visual and ontological border constituted by the line of the horizon, moving from sea foam to cloud and vice-versa. This transgression brings to mind the changes of physical state in the cycle of evaporation and rain, to which the dark zones beneath the clouds allude. The spiral on the right and the arc shapes at the outer edges reinforce this cyclical effect, which brings under the influence of its circular movement both ocean and rocks, also united by relations of reciprocal determination. The presence of the anthropomorphic rock introduces a meta-artistic dimension and connects the cycle of nature with that of potential images; Bachelard attributed such images to the ‘aerial imagination’, which he saw as oscillating between the two poles of evaporation and crystallization.40 This meta-artistic dimension is developed still further in a picture that one might describe as retrospective, Mahana no atua (illus. 172). 306

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Painted in France in 1893–4 while Gauguin was writing and illustrating Noa Noa, it synthesizes many elements of his first Polynesian stay and evokes Tahiti in its pre-colonized and pre-Christianized state, when the gods had not yet been degraded to the rank of ‘evil spirits’; the title can be translated as ‘The Day of the God’ or ‘the Gods’ rather than ‘The Day of God’ that is sometimes found. Here again we find the dance and the amorous couple of the eponymous engraving, complemented by a player of the vivo or nasal flute and by two women carrying a large plate, perhaps an offering intended for the statue of the god – this being the goddess Hina, who replaces the large fire. The scene takes place on the shoreline, an area of contact between the elements dear to Gauguin’s heart. Large pandanus trees

172 Paul Gauguin, Mahana no atua, 1894.

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grow there and the form of one of them, whose aerial roots resemble paws and a tail, is repeated in reverse by a dog sitting at its foot. That Gauguin should have chosen to feature Hina is significant because she is the only female higher divinity in the Polynesian pantheon; the first woman in creation, she is the ancestor of humans and, in the legend ‘Eternity of Matter’, vainly asks Te Fatou to allow them to live again after their death.41 Below the statue, a bank of pink sand encloses a stretch of water, a river or pond that is distinct from the sea. Directly below the goddess a seated naked woman, whose torso is haloed by a green bush, has her feet in the water; her ankles are flanked by a paleblue crescent and her prominent position in contact with the liquid element makes her a figure of regeneration or even a sort of Polynesian Venus Anadyomene. At her sides lie two smaller figures, connected by an approximate axial and rotational symmetry: the one on the left faces the stretch of water, has her eyes open and legs bent; the one on the right, its back turned to the water, has its fist against its face and its legs bent up against its torso, as in the engraved version (illus. 132) of Manaò tupapaú. Seen together, they dissociate the two aspects of the mummy/foetus posture, with the mummy on the right and the foetus on the left – or perhaps we should say the newborn, whose feet still touch the water. Should we see in this water a sort of amniotic liquid? The abstract forms and intense colours that make up its surface of improbable reflections are certainly evocative of embryology and microbiology. There is an observable progression from one side to the other. On the left simple ovoid forms bring to mind plant life and a light-coloured point advances in parallel with the torso of the ‘newborn’, like a seed growing. On the right, on the ‘mummy’ side, areas of darker and more contrasted colour make play with the reversibility between ground and figure, suggesting amoebic creatures devouring one another and culminating at the bottom in a sort of open maw. The movement generated by this, like that of the ‘seed’, goes from right to left, from destruction to creation or from death to birth or rebirth (according to Hina’s wish). Lower down, an indented pink oval resembles both a water-lily leaf and a palette, reminding us of the pond in The Arlesiennes, Mistral (illus. 89) and introducing a meta-artistic element. Unlike what happens in The Black Rocks (illus. 164), the exchange 308

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Natura Naturans between water and sky here passes through the mediation of reflections; the world of potential images, which occupies the entire lower third of the picture, constitutes its primitive, dreamy, germinative base.42 Pursuing his semiotic ideal of ‘flowers that are . . . muscles or . . . muscles that are flowers’ and perhaps inspired by the life sciences, Gauguin here came close to the plastic equivalent of pluripotent and even totipotent cells – those capable of organizing themselves, as in the embryo, into the different cellular types of an organism, or even, as is the case in plants, of constituting or reconstituting the entire organism.43

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Parahi te marae We have already noted the permeability of ontological categories visible in the material remains of American cultures prior (and, to some extent, subsequent) to colonization, along with the remarkable role given to plant life. Alessandra Russo uses the words ‘anthropogenetic force’ about Mexican paintings representing heads that come out of seedlings of maize, the plant whose cycle serves as a prototype of the origin, death and regeneration of humanity. She also attributes to these pre-Christian conceptions the success in colonial art of plant motifs and the iconography of the Jesse Tree, often combined with that of the Tree of Life, as we saw in the pediment of the Casa Tristán in Arequipa (illus. 22).44 Gauguin’s reflections were nourished by ethnography and anthropology, especially those concerned with Oceania, no less than by natural sciences and philosophy. Having discovered Moerenhout’s work, he wrote on 25 March 1892 to Paul Sérusier: ‘What a religion the ancient Oceanian religion was. What a wonder! My brain can’t get over it and all it suggests to me will give [others] quite a fright.’45 Parahi te marae (illus. 173), one of the works born of this reading and the now completed ‘period of incubation’ in Tahiti, deals at several different levels with the full extent of natura naturans. Gauguin translated the title of this picture in his letter of 8 December 1892 to Mette: ‘Dwelling the Marae / (Marae) temple, place reserved / for the worship of the Gods / and for human sacrifices’.46 309

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173 Paul Gauguin, Parahi te marae, 1892.

Marae (me‘ae in Marquesan) was the name given to platforms of differing sizes and ranks in which the ceremonies of Polynesian cults took place. Moerenhout’s definition, which Gauguin copied out and accompanied with a drawing in Ancien culte mahorie, is primarily descriptive: ‘The Maraïs were their temples, open places, a kind of arena in the form of a parallelogram formed by a stone wall fourto-six-foot high and closed off at one end by an immense pyramidal pile of stone, wider than it is long.’47 Used as a verb, pa¯rahi means ‘to sit or be seated’ or ‘to dwell, inhabit, stay’; it is also an interjection addressed by those leaving to those who remain behind. In a journal publication of the poem inspired by this picture, which was included in Noa Noa, Charles Morice highlighted the ontological significance of the title: ‘In Maori thought, the temple is itself a person, a living being barely identical with the God; hence this apparent linguistic audacity: There the temple dwells.’48 The framing of the poem by Armand Seguin (illus. 174) literally illustrates this notion by 310

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providing columns with toes; placed on a sort of acropolis surrounded by the sea, they rise up into and are lost among the clouds. No columns are to be found in Gauguin’s picture. On the other hand, his marae resembles neither Moerenhout’s description nor the ruins that he could have visited in Tahiti. Parahi te marae shows a sort of fence or openwork wall partly masked by a brightly coloured mass of vegetation. Behind this fence rises a golden-yellow hill that occupies the majority of the surface of the picture. Its convex form stands out on the left against the blue sky, while on the right rises a chain of mountains with jagged profile. Against this rocky background

174 ‘Parahi te Marae’, poem by Charles Morice with frame drawn by Armand Seguin, 1897.

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we make out a large statue, two very big trees and two palm trees. Where is the temple? The perimeter wall has no equivalent in Polynesia and is reminiscent of the large sacred complexes of Indonesia or Mesoamerica, or even of Maori meeting places, if we abstract the constructions as such.49 Instead of a stupa, temple or house, what we see is a natural element, the hill, on which a watercolour study (illus. 175) bestows a less regular and more organic form. Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk suggests that the model for this hill is the volcano Rano Raraku on Easter Island, with its grassy slopes and mo‘ais.50 A connection with this already very famous site is probable but the differences are also important. The convex form of the hill emphasizes the summit as much as the slope and allows it to be ‘seated’; it is the hill that primarily embodies the sacred place. Informed by other sources or demonstrating his own intuition, Gauguin chose for his

175 Paul Gauguin, Parahi te marae, study, 1892.

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Natura Naturans marae an atypical form that is nevertheless concordant with what Craighill Handy has subsequently argued concerning the ‘primitive prototype’ of the Polynesian ‘holy of holies’: that it was a hillock, something to which the names and forms of the architectural parts of temples allude. The same author has stated that the mountain situated at the end of Atuona valley on Hiva Oa was formerly called ‘Mouna-tauna-etua’, ‘Mountain Landing Place of the Gods’, and that the crest of its ridge was considered a me‘ae.51 Philippe Peltier has compared the yellow of the hill to the sacred feathers of the to‘o and suggests that we see in it an aniconic epiphany of Ta‘aroa.52 Less culturally specific – but logical in the vegetal context of the picture, this colour also suggests pollen and thus fecundation. As to the convexity, it connotes not only a lofty position but also plenitude in the presence of an invisible content. These qualities suggest analogies with the tumulus and a pregnant womb, awaking a latent anthropomorphism that becomes explicit in the statue. This in turn offers an enlarged version of the Marquesan tikis (103, 139, 160, 198), which Gauguin knew to represent deified ancestors and not higher divinities. Its seated position derives less from the large, stone tiki and more from the smaller versions figuring on objects like ear ornaments (illus. 188), and fits with the primary sense of the verb pa¯rahi. A preparatory sketch (illus. 176), probably earlier than the watercolour, shows a robed human figure with long hair, seated on what seems to be a bank, with a goat some way below it; one has the impression of a Breton memory resurfacing, as if Gauguin, playing as he often did in his ceramics with the uncertainty of scale, had amused himself by transforming a shepherdess into a goddess.53 The superhuman status of this figure comes from the way in which its body occupies the space of the mountain behind it and the clouds that seem to settle on the top of its head. All these elements – size, profile, long hair and connection with stone – bring to mind the rock/ head of Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach (illus. 153), and one wonders whether the chain of mountains in Parahi te marae does not also have an anthrotheomorphic aspect. It does, but to discover this one has to rotate it 90 degrees to the right: the rock then outlines, in discreet but recognizable fashion, a large profile face whose nose is on one side of the statue and open mouth on the other. 313

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176 Paul Gauguin, Parahi te marae, sketch, 1892.

In its ‘primitive’ features, this giant face is close kin to Redon’s Sphinx and to his frontispiece for Verhaeren’s Idol (illus. 156).54 Its couched position, moreover, makes it resemble the chain of Alpilles painted by Van Gogh (illus. 90) and older landscapes inspired by Romantic Naturphilosophie and by local traditions of topographical interpretation. Thus the bay of Rio de Janeiro, into which Gauguin had sailed aboard the Luzitano on 11 January 1866, was said to contain a ‘lying giant’ (Gigante deitado) (illus. 177) and a view of the Bay of Naples by the Danish painter Constantin Hansen (1839–40, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen) lends to Vesuvius the outline of a profile face blowing out smoke. If we look closely at Parahi te marae (illus. 178) we see, to the right of the statue, a line rising up from the ground that passes in front of the mountain and describes a few arabesques in the sky before disappearing. One might see in this smoke from an offering and Morice perhaps alluded to it when speaking of ‘The peak for ever deserted and defamed 314

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177 Jean-Baptiste Debret, view of the coast of Rio de Janeiro, from Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil . . ., 1834–9.

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/ No longer exhaling the heroic fumes / Of the blood’ of human sacrifice.55 But the position of the smoke, which crosses the outline of the mountain at the level of the lower lip of the great face, also makes of it the breath of the sleeping giant. In the first manuscript of Noa Noa, Gauguin described in comparable terms the outline of the island of Mo‘orea, seen in the evening from Mataiea on the Tahitian coast: Against [the setting sun’s] light the mountains stood out in strong black against the blazing sky, all whose crests were like battlemented castles. While all those lands crumble in the deluge, there still remains, respected by these waves (rumour of some immense crowd) – there still remains, of a whole feudal society that has vanished forever, the protecting Crest – that one nearest the sky, looking down at the deep waters, and majestically (though its cleft has an ironic look) pitying, maybe, the multitude [that has been engulfed] for having touched the tree of knowledge that attacks the sphinx-head.56

The animation here is gradual, since the ‘sphinx-head’ first appears in the form of the ‘helmet crest’ (in French cimier), which was probably called forth by the spectacular ‘summit’ (cime) of Mt Rotui. A little sketch accompanying this passage in the manuscript shows a helmet with feathers whose lower part, part-opened by the ‘fissuremouth’, gives it somewhat the appearance of a death’s head. Another 315

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178 Parahi te marae, detail of the mountain (see illus. 173).

opening, more similar again to the mouth of the couched giant in Parahi te marae, appears on a page of the manuscript Ancien culte mahorie (illus. 179) immediately following the dialogue ‘Eternity of Matter’ and derives from the chapter ‘Voyages to the Islands of the Great Ocean’ devoted to the Polynesian theogony. The drawing represents the seven layers of sky corresponding to the hierarchy of the higher atuas. The head of Ta‘aroa, the creator god, is below, its ‘goggle’ eyes like those of the pillar in Manaò tupapaú (illus. 50). Above it at the top is a part-open mouth accurately reflecting Moerenhout’s description: ‘The seventh [sky] was Terai ama ma tané, the mouth of tané or opening, the door at the end through which light came in’.57 Tané, son of ‘Oro, was the grandson of Ta‘aroa; the genealogical 316

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179 Paul Gauguin, Ancient Maori Religion, 1892–3, f. 7 v [p. 14].

principle of hierarchization explains the biological, and notably botanical, perspective adopted by Gauguin here – in preference to the astronomical – to visualize the cosmogony. But one wonders whether this diagrammatic image, whose level of abstraction is close to that of the lower third of Mahana no atua (illus. 172), does not also allude to geology and volcanology: Ta‘aroa perhaps plays not only the role of primordial seed but also that of the magma chamber. It is true that no vent links him to the mouth of Tané but, because of this absence, 317

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the light seems not so much to enter the opening as to leave it, in the manner of an exhalation or volcanic eruption. Mo‘orea, like Tahiti, the Marquesas and all the Polynesian islands – and indeed Martinique – is of volcanic origin and its mountains are potential volcanoes. We remember that the volcano was for Gauguin a metaphor of creativity that he connected by analogy with the potter’s kiln and the phallus. The so-called ‘dormant’ volcano, liable to ‘awaken’, lends itself particularly well to animation, that is, not only to a ‘projection’ of biological traits but also to the perception and expression of a particular form of dynamism, in this case the geological kind.58 Living in a volcanic environment may have stimulated Gauguin’s interest in the numerous legends associating a mountain with an ancestor, like the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in Germany; the guardian figure is not dead but merely dormant. Pre-colonial and indigenous America is also rich in narratives of humans changed into mountains and gods metamorphosed into rocks; the Moche ceramics express analogies between mountain, head and phallus and, according to Susan Bergh, refer ‘to a family of concepts governing the origins and perpetuation of life, both in the human and agricultural realms, and to related ideas of vitality and life essence’.59 Whatever role may have been played for Gauguin by these sources and antecedents, the mountain in Parahi te marae is a manifestation of the divine presence in nature, and a visible sign – if we can but learn the ‘language of the listening eye’ – that the universe is ‘the shell of Taaroa’.60 It is significant that the statue, a man-made image of the divinity, stands out rather feebly against the background of the mountain, whose colour and value it approximately shares. We can thus see the mountain as an expansion of the statue and the statue as a contraction of the mountain. A comparable phenomenon takes place in certain works where a similar statue is placed before a large tree. The engraving Maruru from the Noa Noa suite (illus. 180) specifies the relationship between the two elements. The canopy of the tree, which encloses all of the upper part of the statue from the waist up, envelops it in a luminous aura. Moreover, a branch forks off at the level of the statue’s eye, ending in a repeated whisk shape at forehead level, and a light zone begins opposite the statue’s nose via a sort 318

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of vent that has its symmetrical equivalent on the face. The plant organism thus complements the statue’s orifices with signs of vital activity – breath, vision and thought – showing that at this moment the image is inhabited by the divinity. Maruru is generally translated by ‘satisfied’ and can express contentment but also trance, protection, the forbidden, and evoke the shade supplied by a tree or rock (maru). Gauguin gave some indication of how he understood this term by inscribing on a proof of the engraving sent to Monfreid ‘From far Tahiti / what Gauguin saw there: / a sated idol’.61 This satisfaction is no doubt connected to the homage rendered by the human figures, as in Mahana no atua (illus. 172). In Parahi te marae, however, this homage is reduced to the arabesque of smoke. But going back to Maruru gives us a better understanding of the shape of the big tree near the right side of the picture (illus. 178), which resembles a human head in profile with an eye, a very visible mouth and the sinuous outline of a great mane of hair – only its position and yellow, brown and green colours allow it to

180 Paul Gauguin, Maruru, 1893–4.

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pass for a plant.62 This is therefore another avatar of the divinity, this time taking plant rather than mineral form; it grows from the hill itself and turns towards the statue. I have already pointed out, relative to the material employed in L’Après-midi d’un faune (illus. 97), that the ta¯manu was planted around the maraes and that its wood, prior to Christianization, was used only to make to‘os. Gauguin must have observed the presence of these big trees, often of considerable age, around the edges of former sacred sites, and contemplated the fact that they were the only living witnesses of the ceremonies that he was attempting to imagine with the aid of Moerenhout. The latter, who also mentions as sacred trees the miro and the ‘aito, whose fruit only the priests had the right to harvest and eat, wrote that their ‘leaves, stirred by the wind, produced a strong whistling that they attributed to the gods’.63 Gauguin could then see in his ‘anthrotheomorphization’ of a tree, and in the identification of that tree with a tiki, an artistic act harmonious with the ancient religion of Tahiti and with what survived of the Oceanian vision of the world. The role played by plant life in Parahi te marae and in all of Gauguin’s Polynesian work also owes something to tropical nature, which had fascinated him at least since his stay in Martinique (illus. 33).64 The tropics, considered since the earliest period of colonization a reservoir of primordial fecundity and paradigmatic of what Gauguin called nature’s ‘power of imagination’, are indeed the part of the world where the flora is most diverse and where speciation – that is, the individualization of distinct species, which are often also endemic – is most active.65 This biological wealth may have contributed to the resistance made by nature – ‘so varied and capricious’– to any artistic attempt to grasp its ‘essence’; but it also embodied natura naturans in its exuberance. Though Gauguin criticized Huysmans’ use of the notion ‘monster’ about Redon, he was sensitive to the anti-normative and transgressive dimension encompassed by this notion. That dimension is apparent in the teratomorphic aspects of the big hutu in Fatata te miti (illus. 168) and Parau na te varua ino (illus. 169). There had been both pride and anxiety in his invitation to Félix Bracquemond to come and see ‘the little products of [his] wild folly’, meaning the first series 320

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Natura Naturans of his ceramics (illus. 92, 120, 126, 128, 129, 130), warning him: ‘You will shriek at these monstrosities but I am convinced that they will interest you.’66 The same ambivalence is perceptible in his reply to a letter of 1890 in which Schuffenecker described him as a ‘genius’. Even before Winiarski’s article, Gauguin declared this more damning than consoling: ‘Genius is a relative monstrosity that comes naturally and for which God is responsible. Whereas acquired talent has its own merit, which is owed to he who earns it.’67 The election of the artist as a ‘continuation of nature’ therefore has its negative side on the social level. Monstrosity is nevertheless a sign of this naturalness and Gauguin must have approved of the article of January 1895 in which Jarry, citing as example of a monster with divine status the ‘Pan of the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii], phallic in form’, discussed the definition of the term: ‘It is customary to call monster the unaccustomed harmony of dissonant elements: the Centaur, the Chimaera are defined in this way for those who do not understand. I call all inexhaustible original beauty monstrous.’68 In Avant et après Gauguin described medieval sculpture in comparable terms: ‘The gargoyles too, unforgettable monsters. My eye follows without fear the bizarre birthings of their accidental shapes.’69 The dynamism of natura naturans included in his view the transgression of ‘natural laws’ and notably the real or imagined barriers between species and ontologies. The Leda Vase is a good example of this, since it treats the love felt for a woman by a god metamorphosed into an animal and, in Gauguin’s humorous formulation, finishes up with a truly monstrous four-headed flying creature (illus. 113, 119). A curious watercolour from 1894 bears the inscription ‘Love one / another’ and shows a bird equipped with a human hand frolicking with two quadrupeds – dogs or foxes; one of them seems to sniff at the rear of the other and exhibits a distinctly phallic tail and back leg.70 In Diverses choses, Gauguin criticized the sexual morality of the Catholic Church and commented on the injunction from Genesis ‘to go forth and multiply’, which he attributed to Jesus Christ: ‘Multiply, that is, copulate, a law which applies to mankind just as much as it does to the animals and plants.’71 Love One Another interprets Christ’s commandments to his disciples in a sexual sense, suggesting that the Bible’s failure to mention a ‘legal form of copulation’, noted by 321

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Gauguin in Diverses choses, authorized love between species and indeed between partners of the same sex. Rick Brettell has pointed out the presence, at the foot of the ma¯hu¯-like Marquesan with Red Cape (1902, Musée d’Art Moderne, Liège), of a ‘a small, fox-like dog [that] appears to nibble affectionately at the wing of an exotic bird’; he notes that this ‘affectionate relationship . . . . is unnatural’ and wonders whether Gauguin sought in this way to force us ‘to ponder the issue of what is “natural” in human sexuality’.72 The same animals appear not only there but in various places including the lower corners of the engraving Te atua (illus. 159), separated by a large snake: the quadruped is on the left, turned towards the bird, which turns back in the quadruped’s direction; this detail suggests that the image is not about religion only or that its religion includes sexuality – a sexuality that is ‘catholic’ in the sense of universal.

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An Orgy of Flowers As in Mahana no atua (illus. 172), the lower third of Parahi te marae is profoundly mysterious and seems to be given over to ornament, abstraction and potential images. From an iconic point of view we can nevertheless distinguish the openwork fence, more or less parallel to the picture plane but sloping from right to left, a little bit of grassy soil in the right-hand corner, and a profusion of plant forms whose colours, a grisaille of pinks, mauves and violets, as well as vermillion, primarily describe flowers. The bright red, even more than the yellow of the hill, can be compared with the feathers in which the Polynesians saw, as Moerenhout puts it, the ‘emblems of their gods’: they were placed in to‘o and used to make the maro ‘ura, the belt worn by the most senior figures; according to Moerenhout, its property was to ‘render inviolable and sacred (moa) the person wearing one, who is thereby rendered almost equal to the gods’.73 This characteristic was connected not only to the aerial origin of feathers and their visual properties but to the colour red itself, which was sacred to the god ‘Oro.74 Craighill Handy interprets the whole set of arrangements associated with the sacred places, including the trees planted around the precinct and 322

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Natura Naturans the vegetation used to decorate the places, as intended to induce ‘the presence of the deity through rapport, or perhaps of inducing a flow of his mana through materials known to be in rapport with him’.75 The forms of the plants at the base of Parahi te marae are visually very specific though lacking in any kind of botanical precision. This contradiction could be interpreted as resulting from a ‘decorative’ intention but the sense that Gauguin bestowed on this term makes one suspect the presence of a further iconic dimension. This is particularly the case with the areas of bright red, which may have been inspired by hibiscus flowers but which resemble them only vaguely, whereas their edges are underlined with a continuous series of black brush marks running perpendicular to each outline. 76 The most intriguing of these motifs (illus. 181) is somewhat isolated at the foot of the fence and directly under the smoke-breath. It is formed of two parts placed one above the other, each of which is crowned by an appendage or ‘head’ that is then supplied with eyes by two parallel brushstrokes. This anthrozoomorphization suggest the coupling of two figures, one on all fours and the other placed behind the first. That position is often represented in Moche ceramics (illus. 182) and the resemblance may be something more than a coincidence. The relevance of this ‘aspect’ for Gauguin is confirmed by the recurrence in his late work of a crouching posture matching that of the lower part of the floral motif. We have already encountered it at the bottom of the engraving Te atua (illus. 159) and it reappears towards 1900 in a header for the journal Le Sourire (The Smile), and in a monotype drawing (illus. 183) in which the figure grasps an animal in its hands, in an ambivalent gesture reminiscent of that of the ceramic sculpture Oviri (illus. 107).77 A further variation occurs in a polychrome wood relief bearing the inscription ‘te fare amu’ (c. 1901–2, Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation), which Gray has compared to a carved Oceanian object.78 The resemblance is striking but the object, whose function is still unknown, seems altogether exceptional. By contrast, precedents for this posture appear in Gauguin’s work, and other sources might also be considered, such as the kind of Moche ceramics mentioned earlier. The first clearly identifiable precedent of this kind forms part of a series of sketches after Degas pastels drawn around 1888–9 on a page of the Briant 323

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181 Parahi te marae, detail of the ‘little couple’ (see illus. 173).

182 Vase with stirrup-shaped spout-handle representing coitus, Moche culture, 1st–8th century ad.

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183 Paul Gauguin, Untitled (Woman with Cat), 1900.

album: a naked woman is shown there on her knees, buttocks raised, bust inclined and head resting on her elbows.79 More indirectly one can also compare this posture to that of figures represented fully dressed and at work: peasant women, women collecting wood, Provençal and Breton washerwomen such as they were also painted and drawn by Van Gogh and Bernard and by Millet and Seurat before them.80 Finally the picture entitled Otahi (private collection) from 1893 represents a young Tahitian woman with a pareo around her loins, legs folded under her body and her bust resting on her elbows with her hands supporting her head; her horizontal back is seen from above on the yellow background of a hill whose outline echoes that of her body.81 The primary significance of this posture and the interest that Gauguin took in it are clearly sexual. The other poses copied on the page of the Briant album represented women at their toilet but it has been suggested that this one originated in the brothels that Degas also frequented.82 Rarely employed in the field of the fine arts because it is considered obscene, it expresses readiness for sexual intercourse and anal penetration.83 The comparison with the figures of women stooping to do their work may seem doubtful but there are several 325

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indications of its relevance, among others a page of the Carnet de Bretagne on which Gauguin has placed in parallel a peasant woman on her knees (perhaps washing clothes) and a pig standing on all four legs.84 The pig, as we have seen, refers to the satisfaction of sexual desire; it figures in a number of places, notably In Full Heat (Woman with Pigs) (En pleine chaleur, 1888, private collection) with a Breton woman – Marie Louarn, according to Crussard – with bare torso and spread legs, represented from the back and resting her weight on a mound of hay.85 The back view is a constant in Gauguin works with erotic subjects, among others in Manaò Tupapaú; we remember that he attributed the genesis of the picture to this pose, explaining to Mette, ‘This is how I want her’ and summarizing its composition in a drawing in which his added ‘Q’ circles the bottom of the prone figure with the vulgar French term cul, ‘arse’ (illus. 50, 52). The back view also plays a fundamental role in the passage already cited from Noa Noa, in which the narrator feels a strong desire for the young Tahitian who precedes him up the mountain, a desire interrupted when the latter turns round, ‘presenting his chest’.86 The importance of these points of view and positions no doubt derives in part from the sexual tastes and preferences of the artist. A letter from Gauguin to Roderic O’Conor, which has never been published and is apparently lost, has been described as ‘too scatological for publication – details on the ideal position during sexual intercourse’.87 The use of the term ‘scatological’ rather than ‘pornographic’ suggests anal intercourse and indicates that the position in question was close to that which concerns us here. It is worth noting that the Church, with which Gauguin was permanently in conflict on the subject of sexuality, especially in the colonial context, had always virulently condemned the coital positions termed retro (vaginal penetration with the man behind the kneeling woman) and a tergo (anal penetration); these were deemed ‘against nature’, as were, a fortiori, homosexual relations. The sole authorized position, which remained unnamed and was authorized exclusively in the context of marriage, was the one that, over the course of the twentieth century, ironically became known as the ‘missionary position’.88 The justifications for these prohibitions are still much debated but include the rejection of pleasure (especially sexual pleasure), the intention of subordinating 326

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sexuality to procreation and the desire to distinguish between ‘natural’ and deviant forms of behaviour; a further consideration was to distance human behaviour as far as possible from its animal equivalents.89 We remember that for Gauguin, on the contrary, nature had an ‘infinite power of imagination’ and that he sought to highlight the presence of the animal in humanity – and not just the animal but the vegetal and even the mineral and the divine. We have seen that, in the drawing entitled Love One Another, he attributed to Christ himself the imperative to couple and a refusal to consider anything ‘unnatural’. The passage in Noa Noa and the interpretation given in the cylindrical L’Après-midi d’un faune of the Marquesan motif of two tiki placed one behind the other (illus. 111) leads one to wonder to what extent Gauguin included homosexual relations in his pansexual conception of nature. Over and beyond the biographical interest, which is particularly relevant to an artist who made his sexual life a major element of his public persona – it has left its mark on his legend too – this question affects the reasons that Gauguin may have had for making use of a ‘parabolic’ form of communication and influences our interpretation of certain of his works. One such case is the little floral ‘couple’ in Parahi te marae; there is nothing on the formal plane here to tell us whether these are intended to be humans or animals and whether or not they are same-sex. Perhaps because of the publicity that Gauguin gave to his heterosexual adventures, the question has scarcely been touched on and here we can do no more than raise it.90 In addition to the works that we have just mentioned and those featuring a ma¯hu¯, we should bear in mind the Symbolist cult of androgyny to which Gauguin subscribed and note that several of his declarations in favour of sexual liberty allude to sodomy, without always specifying the sex of the parties involved. In Cahier pour Aline, defending the ‘freedom of the flesh’, he wrote that ‘he or she who gives his or her arse commits a small sin and even that is debatable’, going on to wonder: ‘Was it really God who punished Sodom? For my part I think it must have been a woman otherwise Lesbos would not survive’. And in Diverses choses he made fun of the idea of a personal God ‘concerning himself with the arsehole of every one of his little productions’.91 327

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Whatever the precise nature of this sexual meaning, it cannot fully account for Gauguin’s use of the kneeling figure, especially around 1899–1900. The context in which it appears at that time compels us to recognize the religious or sacred dimension of a posture of adoration, evident in the monotype drawing La Madeleine pénitente (The Penitent Magdalene) and in Te atua (illus. 159), where the crouching figure echoes the theomorphic rock placed above her and turns towards the Virgin and Child. 92 Here the posture invites comparison with the proskynesis, the form of self-prostration before the sovereign customary in the ancient East (for example at the Achaemenid court), introduced to Greece by Alexander the Great and to the Roman Empire by Diocletian and subsequently adapted to both Christian and Islamic worship. A particular form of this was observed by the Spanish in the pre-Inca sanctuary of Pachacamac, south of Lima, where priests approached the image of the creator god with their backs to him when requesting an oracle. Richard Trexler has suggested that we should see these priests as berdaches – men behaving as women, not least on the sexual plane (this phenomenon was present throughout pre-Columbian America) – and should interpret this rite as an expression of the kinship between prayer, reverence towards a superior power, and the ‘anal presentation of the body’.93 Pre-Columbian ceramics representing sexual acts and organs (illus. 79, 182) have also been connected with ritual sexual practices, probably associated with fertility; a recurrent image in Moche iconography thus shows a tree covered with fruit growing out of the back of a divinity who is copulating with a woman.94 Was Gauguin au fait with these aspects of a culture that attracted him and with which he liked to identify? It is not impossible that he had access to certain sources and the corresponding images but there is no allusion to such things in his writings. It is a different matter for the South Pacific, in particular thanks to the passages from Moerenhout that he copied out or paraphrased in Ancien culte mahorie and Noa Noa. Ritual sexuality played a central role in the ceremonies of the ‘arioi, who were an object of fascination to Gauguin as to numerous other travellers and readers before him. Moerenhout compared this ‘society’ or ‘brotherhood’, which came into being in the eighteenth century and was devoted to the god ‘Oro, to the ‘ancient associations 328

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Natura Naturans of Eleusis in Greece and of Sais in Egypt (mysteries of Ceres and Isis)’, to the secret societies of the Middle Ages and the modern epoch, to the ‘Bards and . . . Skalds of ancient Gaul and Scandinavia’ and to the troubadours and minstrels.95 Quoting Moerenhout but omitting the moral condemnation that followed this statement, Gauguin wrote around 1893 in Ancien culte mahorie: ‘In the society of the ‘arioi, prostitution was the principle and infanticide the obligation.’96 He also described the participation of the ‘arioi in the ceremony of the ‘appointment of a King’. This was completed at the marae, where the new king had already received the eyes of a human victim and where he now received ‘the last homage of the people’:

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This consisted of the most shockingly filthy, coarsely obscene dances and representations, in which several entirely naked men and women surrounded the king and strove so hard to touch him with the various parts of their body that he had difficulty avoiding their urine and their excrement, with which they sought to cover him. This went on until the priests began once again to sound their trumpets and beat their drums, which was the signal to withdraw. The celebrations were ended. The king then returned to his residence, accompanied by his attendants.97

This passage, in which reverence for the new sovereign takes the apparently carnivalesque (and anal and genital) form of orgiastic saturnalia, is followed in Gauguin’s manuscript by a drawing (illus. 184) that forms a kind of tailpiece. It represents the top of an anthrozoomorphic plant whose symmetrical side-stems end in paws or four-fingered hands such as we find in Marquesan art. Turned towards the spectator, the plant raises these appendages in the gestures of an orant and presents its corolla, in the middle of which, instead of its own sexual organs, appear a man and a woman making love. The woman is lying on her back and embraces her partner with both arms and legs. Their bodies are relatively schematic and are distinguishable mainly by their hair, long for the woman and short for the man, and their pigmentation, lighter for the woman and darker for the man, especially at face level. The woman’s face with its 329

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184 Paul Gauguin, Ancient Maori Religion, 1892–3, f. 24 v [p. 46].

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pupil-less eyes and mouth half-open is directed towards the spectator while the man’s is turned in the opposite direction. Their heads partly cover one of the trifoliate petals of the flower but the two others have openings at the base of each division that give the impression of a gaze. This double image, which brings together vegetal and human biology in the act of fertilization, thus supplies a new, more explicit and more sexual version of Redon’s There Was Perhaps a first vision Attempted in the Flower (illus. 15). Gauguin represented the same couple on a writing pad phonetically inscribed ‘soumin’ (for sous-main, or notepad) and dated ‘1892’ (illus. 185). He also copied the composition from Ancien culte mahorie into the manuscript of Noa Noa, gluing in below it a print

185 Paul Gauguin, Soumin (sous-main, notepad), 1892.

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of the engraving Manaò tupapaú cut down to the figure in mummy/ foetal position.98 The first image is more realistic and seems likely to have served as a model for the others; the man wears a sleeveless shirt and the woman, who opens her mouth more and seems to be groaning or crying out, has pupils visible in her eyes. This motif, begun in the year in which Parahi te marae was painted, turns out to be intimately linked to the picture and gives us a better understanding of the main plant element in that work: the confused pink and violent mass expanding amid other bright-red forms (illus. 186). Close observation reveals this mass to be divided into two parts, upper and lower, and that the upper part is darker than the lower. This contrast is clear and most pronounced to the far left of these shapes. The lower shape is particularly light-toned and equipped with an eye; to the right, it ends in a concave outline like a wide-open mouth. The form of this light-toned area exactly matches the canopy or crown of the tree in Matamoe, which also dates from 1892, and (less precisely) that of View of Pont-Aven from Lézaven of 1882 (illus. 7, 171) reversed towards the right. This is then a further anthrozoomorphic aspect, one that gained in precision with Gauguin’s move from Brittany to Tahiti; it helps us to recognize the homology between the copulating human couple of Soumin and Ancien culte mahorie and what one might call the floral ‘great couple’ of Parahi te marae. Their overall forms do indeed match. The floral couple is on a slight incline, as if they were lying on the bed of red flowers rather than directly on the ground. Something similar is true of certain details: for example, one of the large petals is level with the ‘nape’ of the upper form and thus plays the role of the woman’s left hand. This coincidence is nevertheless unsystematic: there is no equivalent to the woman’s legs surrounding the waist of her partner, while two other hand-shapes appear in the lower part, on what seems to be a swollen belly, which in turn echoes (as does the general form of the couple) the shape of the golden hill. These aspects are not unequivocal and the light-coloured head, which is in any case more animal than human, is extended to the right in what seems closer to a plant motif, one that ends in a tongue or a stamen. This relative indeterminacy gives literal form to the ‘harmony between human life and plant and animal life’ that Gauguin claimed to be seeking in the landscapes of 332

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186 Parahi te marae, detail of the ‘big couple’ (see illus. 173).

Brittany. While mixing up the various biological ‘realms’, the openness and polyvalence of this imagery – we might speak here of perceptive ‘multi-instability’ – further suggest a movement and a process. Something like threads produce a kinetic effect around the large inclined almond that occupies in this ‘couple’ the site of sexual union. One might see in the almond a form of vulva, an interpretation corroborated by the ‘eyelashes’ surrounding it on the right and again bringing to mind the anthropomorphic plant of There Was Perhaps a first vision Attempted in the Flower (illus. 15). It is divided into two and the division of colours is inverted relative to that of the ‘couple’, as in a yin-yang symbol; this schematic effect is also reminiscent of biological models of cellular division and germination.99 The process for which this plant mass provides a ‘parabolic’ figure is therefore that of generation, of which the various aspects mentioned suggest the stages from conception to birth. The emphasis is on the initial moment and the cries suggested by the form of the 333

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open mouth – ‘the great voice of the Earth’ – is, as in Soumin, orgasmic. The fact that the physiognomic expression of this is ambivalent, and as evocative of pain as of pleasure, fits with the French description of the orgasm as ‘little death’ and a remark made by Gauguin in Diverses choses: ‘Is there any happiness without Pain?’100 Moreover, death is not far away, appearing in the form of the skull images that decorate the top of the fence and allude to human sacrifice, whose importance Gauguin had emphasized when describing the function of the marae. To the far left, one of the skulls occupies the centre of an ornamental motif of petals and leafage in an inverted ‘Y’. The ascendant movement of this sort of natural garland, whose axes point to the sky on the one hand and to the statue of the god and the mountain on the other, reminds us of Gauguin’s comment on the image of death drawn by Redon: ‘In Tahiti, the roots of death must be seen sprouting again into blossom.’ Connected to the ‘big couple’, this motif completes, over and beyond death and pointing towards renascence and deification, a cycle bringing together all the elements of the picture, as in The Black Rocks (illus. 164). The passage from the ‘little couple’ to the ‘big couple’ is effected by a sort of horned capsule that points towards the ‘vulva’, while to the left another bright-red, clearly delimited figure, whose form brings to mind that of a bird with open wings, stands out against a formless mass of the same colour, and is imitated by two other more embryonic fragments. The ‘bird’ resembles the principal motif of the pareo on which sits the naked woman of Tea aa no areois (1892, Museum of Modern Art, New York), which represents, according to the aetiological myth of the ‘arioi reported by Moerenhout, the mortal Vairaumati pregnant by the god ‘Oro.101 Placed under the sides of the young woman and below the germinated seed that she holds in her left hand, this motif again suggests fecundation, and it is tempting to compare its angelic attitude with an ironic remark made by Gauguin in Noa Noa about the birth of a child five months after the marriage of the mother with a young Tahitian chief, a marriage arranged by the Protestant priest who ‘protected’ the woman in question: ‘But why had the bishop been so anxious to hurry the marriage ceremony? . . . Evil tongues insinuated that . . . / We prefer to believe in the angel of the Annunciation.’102 334

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Natura Naturans The mass itself, like pure colour – and like the ocean in Above the Abyss (illus. 58) – seems to play the role of the undifferentiated matter from which individuals separate themselves and to which they return. A last question arises relative to the two floral ‘couples’, that of the significance of the different sexual positions that they adopt, ‘missionary’ for the large couple and retro or a tergo for the small couple. Are these variants expressing in the sexual domain the ‘imaginative power’ of nature, or should we see in them an opposition like that between reproductive and anal sexualities, such as has been proposed in the interpretation of Moche ceramics?103 The latter hypothesis could be connected with the practice of infanticide among the ‘arioi but Gauguin, who had adopted Moerenhout’s Malthusian explanation of this phenomenon, was clearly less interested in this than in ‘prostitution’ and commented on his own fertility in typically vegetal terms when writing to Monfreid in March 1893: ‘I am again going to be a father in Oceania – Dammit! Must I sow my seed everywhere?’104 The hypothesis of variants is therefore the more likely, connecting different sexual practices to a common principle that is expressed in more abstract fashion in the design of the fence.

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Abstraction and History The studies for Parahi te marae (illus. 175, 176) show that this design underwent substantial evolution. In the watercolour, it is a rural fence similar to those that Gauguin represented in Brittany but whose posts end in globes suggesting little skulls.105 In the drawing, the fence resembles a wall pierced with rectangular openings and crowned with indistinct elements, some of which are directly above the posts and some above the openings. This alternation of solidity and opening recurs in more complex form in the painting. The principal source of the motif has been identified thanks to a leaf (illus. 187) bringing together two studies of a Tahitian woman with bare torso, awake and asleep, and the sketch of a Marquesan ear ornament called a taiana (or pu taiana, pu meaning shell). The studies are in pen and the sketch in pencil, suggesting that they 335

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were not made at the same time and are not directly related. It is in any case improbable that the Tahitian woman owned a taiana, a very precious and much coveted heirloom in Marquesan families; Gauguin probably saw it in one of the collections of Oceanian objects to which he had access.106 We have already pointed out that this fence does not resemble what we know about the marae; it has sometimes been argued on the basis of this difference and the transposition of an ear ornament, entirely without ethnographic precedent, that Gauguin indulged in superficial and illegitimate ‘borrowings’ or ‘appropriations’. As so often, however, the accusation of superficiality can be turned against its authors. Stone tiki heads can be found built into the low walls that support the cult platforms in the Marquesas.107 The value of taiana, moreover, resided in their connection with the cult of ancestors,

187 Paul Gauguin, Two Tahitian Women and a Marquesan Ear Ornament, 1891–3.

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Natura Naturans which had survived Christianization; they were often carved in the bones of the dead, thus incorporating their mana, and always represented tiki.108 It is also worth noting that they involved an element of dissimulation, since they were worn behind the ear and were therefore far from conspicuous.109 On the front of the ear, on the other side of the pierced lobe, the end was kept in place by a sort of cap carved from shell, as shown by Gauguin in his sketch. He was aware that this cap could be detached, since he represented it on its own in Arii matamoe (illus. 19), above the figure in mummy/foetal position, as a kind of lamp. Immediately to its left and behind the ‘royal’ head, we recognize the motif of the taiana, which proves that Gauguin associated that object with ideas of death and deification. This link is further confirmed by a letter of 1897 in which Gauguin advised Morice about the decor and costumes for a ballet on the ‘crowning of the last true Maori king’ that the latter was planning to create on the basis of Noa Noa. Gauguin wrote: ‘By way of decor, a background curtain like an old tapestry made in imitation of one of my pictures. The picture (Parahi te marae) would I think be excellent for the Salome scene . . .’; The scene probably included St John the Baptist, whose beheading Arii matamoe brings to mind.110 The taiana that Gauguin sketched precisely matches the form of the fence, which he obtained by repeating its design laterally. Like many Marquesan objects, taianas showed infinite variety in combining in endlessly new ways a small number of basic elements, in this case the tiki, more or less blended with the orthogonal structure that carries them. As they were relatively frequently found in collections, Gauguin must have seen a number of them and therefore chose the design of this one to serve as a model for the boundary of his marae and the kind of openwork partition wall in Arii Matamoe. Karl von den Steinen made a systematic study of the taiana and was able to distinguish a number of iconographic families. The one that interests us – he reproduced (in graphic form) a very similar example at no. 31 of his plate fR (illus. 188) – forms part of the representations of a legend in which the daughters of Pahuatiti, sitting on a swing, urinate in the kava bowl of Chief Akaui, and are then hurled into the sea by the sling stones of the chief’s warriors; the vertical stem at the centre, the (relatively) distinctive feature of this group, 337

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188 Marquesan taiana, after Karl von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst, 1925.

is said to represent the rope holding up the swing.111 But there is some reason to doubt the credibility of the interpretation supplied by Von den Steinen’s informants and there is little likelihood of it having reached Gauguin.112 Moreover, in the example that Gauguin chose, the vertical stem is in any case, by way of exception, separate from the horizontal element above it, thus invalidating the hypothesis of a support for the swing. An attentive examination of Parahi te marae and a page of sketches relating to the design of the fence (illus. 189) allows us to specify the reasons for Gauguin’s choice and the nature of his interest in this motif. The horizontal-profile tiki head that, in the sketch of the taiana, was placed at the very summit – thus suggesting that the vertical stalk in fact derived from a torso – was replaced in the 338

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fence by a non-anthropomorphic trilobate form, which makes this part of the motif resemble the handle of a Rajput katar or dagger. The suppression of the vertical elements placed under the other tiki heads, by extending the horizontal openings, emphasizes moreover the broken-off stalks and the effect of oscillation between positive and negative form produced by these stalks and the space that surrounds them. We remember how much Gauguin loved reversibility and the alternation of the solid and the empty, a trait that he cultivated in his ceramics. The page of sketches concentrates on this part of the taiana, confirming that it was the decisive element. To the right, the verticality of the stalk is echoed in the schematic image of an idol seen in profile, which seems to be sitting astride another figure, and again in a Buddha seated cross-legged. However, the torso of the Buddha is divided by a vertical element that is anatomically ambiguous but can be compared with the ithyphallic representation of the creator god Ta‘aroa that Gauguin included in his transcription of the Polynesian cosmogenesis (illus. 190). To the left of the taiana the vertical element makes a second and weaker appearance, crowned by a V-shaped line suggesting a jet or a volcanic eruption. The stem is therefore at the centre of a network of analogies, all present in Parahi te marae, which contribute to identify it as a phallus or more precisely as a lingam (illus. 102), the abstract image of Shiva as organ of generation. Its complement, the image of the vagina called yoni, is figuratively represented by the negative space

189 Paul Gauguin, Detail of Marquesan Ear Ornament, Buddha and Other Sketches, n.d. (1892?).

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surrounding the stem and perhaps also by the chevron form that Gauguin, without seeking a prototype in the taiana, introduced in alternation with the stem at the lower level of the fence. The two sketches of the taiana show that Gauguin found in the vertical elevation surrounding the central stem – which, perceived as a dynamic element, the stem seems to cause – a formal (ornamental and architectural) and symbolic potential. The importance of this motif or the rest of his work can hardly be exaggerated: it recurs in the upside-down

190 Paul Gauguin, Ancient Maori Religion, 1892–3, f. 5 v [p. 10].

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Natura Naturans ‘U’ arrangement (with serifs or footings extending beyond the ‘downstrokes’) of the carved surround to the entrance of the Maison du Jouir. This suggests that the door, which was that of the artist’s bedroom, featured the phallus repeated in the cylindrical statues of Father Lechery and Thérèse (illus. 100, 101). Ancien culte mahorie includes another image of an ithyphallic divinity, holding his phallus (like a monopod his foot) in front of a sort of mirror/vulva, which probably evokes the ‘Union of taaroa and hina’ mentioned in the text.113 This theme probably also explains the abstract motif already noted on the arm of the Faun of L’Après-midi d’un faune, in Barbarous Tales and The Pony (illus. 97, 142). Gauguin must also have been attracted by the parallel connecting the stem of the taiana to the vertically placed tiki heads, since he extended it to the ‘royal’ head in Arii matamoe (illus. 19). We have seen that the lingam sometimes includes an anthropomorphic representation of the head of the god and that anthropologists admit the existence of kinship or even an equivalence between the tiki and the phallus. For Craighill Handy, each Marquesan tiki ‘is actually a phallic symbol transformed into a human figure; or perhaps it should be stated the other way – that each is a human figure carved in forms suggestive of a phallus’.114 He also thought that in the peripheral islands of Polynesia such as the Marquesas, it was easier to discern the ancient founding elements of a system of thought that he described as ‘Indo-Polynesian’ because of its strong Hindu component and that was characterized, in his view, primarily by a phallic symbolism corresponding to a ‘procreational philosophy’.115 This symbolism was visible in the myths, especially in the ‘genealogies of creation’ (or genealogical cosmogeneses) specific to Polynesia and in objects such as pestles used for making po¯poi (a food made from grinding fruits and tubers to a paste). Gauguin owned one of these vessels (illus. 191) which, like the ‘u‘u (illus. 105), comprises a triple image, the two tiki heads seen in profile suggesting both a face seen frontally and the gland of the phallus – let us also note here, to return to the point later, that the large bifid eyes characteristic of Marquesan art also resemble the almond-like form of the ‘big couple’ in Parahi te marae.116 Thus the fence, ontologically and spatially sited between the ‘orgy of flowers’ with its multiple aspects and the pure colour field 341

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191 Ke‘a tuki po¯poi (po¯poi pestle), 19th century.

of the hill, expresses in more abstract fashion the union of the male and female, active and passive, spiritual and material principles that, according to Moerenhout and Ancien culte mahorie, underpinned the Polynesian conception of the universe as continued creation.117 In accordance with the metaphysical ambivalence of Shiva, a destructive and creative divinity, this natura naturans includes death as well as generation, bestowing on the alternation between images of the skull and the motif of the lingam/yoni a justification that goes beyond the allusion to human sacrifice. One might wonder whether the yogic sense of lingam as the transubstantiation of semen into thought is also implied but it seems that Gauguin, unlike Van Gogh, never conceived of artistic activity as a ‘sublimation’ of sexual activity requiring him to limit or renounce the latter.118 As a ‘continuation of [natural] creation’, artistic creation rather seemed to him a mode of generation. He thus compared painting to a living being possessed of a soul and, praising Giotto’s ‘enormously fertile conception’, cited an anecdote in which the painter is said to have excused himself for the 342

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Natura Naturans ugliness of his children by explaining that they were the product of ‘night work’ and his pictures of ‘day work’.119 This abstraction again poses the question of communication and we may wonder why Gauguin gave these self-evidently crucial aspects of Parahi te marae a form such that they have never previously been mentioned in any commentaries on the picture. His own writings, relatively explicit concerning the importance that he ascribed to sexuality, can lead one to underestimate the role perhaps played here by his concern for social convention; we remember, however, that Gauguin claimed that he wished to avoid any indecency relative to the pose of Manaò tupapaú (illus. 50) and his pictures are relatively chaste on the explicit iconic plane. The two images of copulation that I have compared with the ‘big’ floral ‘couple’ (illus. 184, 185) appeared in graphic works that were not intended for the wider public; in the case of Ancien culte mahorie Gauguin even went to the length of repeating the text of the relevant page on the following one without copying the illustration, in order to be able to avoid showing the illustration to certain spectators. 120 The pornographic photographs that he had bought at Port Said and pinned up in the Maison du Jouir served to attract certain visitors – women visitors in particular – but also keep others away, as if they were apotropaic images.121 He was therefore perfectly aware of the scandalous character of such subjects and could imagine the fate to which they might condemn his works. Indeed, an auto-da-fé organized after his death seems to have caused the disappearance of the photographs and of drawings and perhaps paintings too.122 As to the sculptures, I have already cited the breaking of the walking stick with phallic pommel by the gendarme Claverie, who saw it as ‘filth’. Another witness said of the sale of 2 September 1903 in Tahiti: ‘When his pictures and statues were sold at auction in Papeete, people were shouting “Hide that! Hide it!” My goodness, I remember one really dirty statue: it was a naked woman, head on the ground and arse in the air! It was smashed there and then!’123 But it would be reductive to attribute Gauguin’s recourse to ‘parabolic’ language simply to his fear of obscenity; we have seen that this language is systematic in his work. The ‘little couple’ and ‘big couple’ are not images of human intercourse camouflaged in 343

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the form of plants but equivalents (as Maurice Denis would have said) of the process of generation in which plants, animals and humans all take part, thus revealing that they are all ‘the shell of Taaroa’. This is what Delaroche wrote, as copied out by Gauguin in Diverses choses: ‘Supernatural vegetation that prays, flesh that blossoms, on the indeterminate threshold of the conscious and unconscious.’124 Ambiguity and ‘multi-stability’ are therefore plastic and psychological means capable of giving form to a vision of the world characterized by continuity and the permeability of modes of existence – by dynamism and metamorphosis. They are also suited to communicating this vision of the world thanks to the imaginative perception that they require and they thus possess an epistemological or even initiatory value. Parahi te marae presents a world that is entirely animated, ranging from the flowers to the volcanic mountain (not to mention the slender clouds that mark its breath) to the pregnant hill and the sacred trees. This world is an answer to the question raised by the title, the question of where the ‘temple’ – in other words, the sacred – is to be found. The man-made objects and images that the picture contains, the fence and tiki, manifest both the principles that govern this universe and an understanding of these principles. But their authors and users remain invisible, with the exception of the allusions that we have identified, and the interpretation above does not explain the lack of explicit human presence. Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk imagined that the marae, which she conceived as being covered with weeds, had been transformed into paddocks for domestic animals, and proposed that we understand Parahi te marae as a ‘visual poem which laments the disappearance of the old culture’, just as Arii matamoe referred in her view to the end of the Tahitian royal line at the death of Pomare v in 1891.125 There is indeed a deliberate contrast between this picture and works such as Matamua (1892, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), Maruru and Mahana no atua (illus. 172, 180), which show Tahitian women in pareos dancing and making music around a large seated tiki or the statue of Hina. The title Matamua, which means ‘beginning’ and ‘once’, situates this scene in the past, suggesting that the ‘day of the god’ and his ‘satisfaction’ are also a thing of the past. Parahi te marae seems by contrast to be inscribed into the present, even if this 344

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present comprehends various temporalities, of which some are cyclical and on a grand scale. In addition to the abandonment of the ancient cults enforced by the missionaries, the lack of human presence may allude to the catastrophic depopulation that Tahiti, like most of the Pacific Islands, experienced – several centuries after the same phenomenon occurred with Amerindian societies – as a result of contact with navigators and their illnesses, including venereal diseases. In 1846 in his novel Typee, Herman Melville had denounced the fact that the destruction of paganism meant ‘the destruction of the pagans’ and painted a portrait of Christianization as utterly disastrous: ‘Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolaters converted into nominal Christians, then disease, vice and premature death make their appearance.’126 In an article of 1894, Julien Leclerq defined the ambition of Gauguin’s art in opposition to this mortality: ‘He dreams in order to render eternal this temporal life of a race diminishing every day and that will soon, with the death of its last survivors, carry off the secret of its happiness and simplicity; he creates the immortal legend of it.’127 A prediction by the missionary and ethnologist William Ellis, attributed by Melville to a Tahitian grand priest, contrasted humans with plants and animals in this respect, in terms reminiscent of the legend ‘Eternity of Matter’: ‘The palm-trees shall grow, / The coral shall spread, / But man shall cease’.128 In the poem inspired by Parahi te marae and included in Noa Noa, Morice associates the abandonment of ancient cults with demographic decline: The gods are dead. With them, Tahiti dies. The sun that once inflamed it leaves it cold, In desolate sleep shaken with fearful cries; Fear of the future fills the golden Eve, She sighs to see her breast, a weave Of heaven’s marks sealing the sterile gold.129 Gauguin copied this stanza on to a panel in the Maison du Jouir, thus signifying his approval. Though they cannot claim the status of selfinterpretation, the poem and the commentaries with which Morice 345

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accompanied it must have benefited from the discussions that he shared with Gauguin during the latter’s French stay of 1893–5. And indeed, perspicacious observations bear witness to this proximity. I have already cited the idea that the temple is living, the remark about the title and the identification of the place represented as the summit of the island. Morice also speaks of the vegetation ‘where nature is born, dies and is endlessly reborn’ and writes that ‘High above, the sages contemplate / Mouths opening wide, whose thirst / Our blood alone can sate’, mouths that can be compared with those of Tané and the volcano (illus. 178, 179). He further enumerates, relative to this summit, metaphors such as ‘lighthouse, temple, refuge’ which, though typical of the Symbolists’ denunciation of progress as a new ‘flood’, take on a particular sense in the colonial context of Polynesia. It will be remembered that Gauguin, in the first manuscript of Noa Noa, compared the summit of Mo‘orea to a ‘protective helmet’ surviving from a ‘feudal society that has vanished forever’ in the flood.130 In Morice’s poem, men no longer pray on the ‘forever deserted and defamed peak’ and only the ‘pious trees’ make the ‘gestures of an incense-bearer’. Human sacrifice has been abandoned and brought about the sterility of humankind, which ‘is poisoned by the blood reft from the altars’. From the summit thousands of tu¯pa¯pa‘u descend in search of Tehura – the name given to Teha‘amana in Noa Noa – so that she can be united with Ta‘aroa and give birth to a superior being.131 There is nothing in Gauguin to directly corroborate this connection between Parahi te marae and Manaò tupapaú (illus. 50) and it is difficult to know if Gauguin too had thoughts about human sacrifice that prefigure those of Georges Bataille on the notion of ‘expense’. But the (somewhat confusing) succession of deaths and rebirths in the poem echoes a certain ambivalence in the picture: if the marae is represented as abandoned, it is nevertheless not ruined, unlike those that Gauguin was able to visit, and nature is perpetuating in it the cycle of generations. The statue has not been overthrown, smoke ascends in front of it, and the volcano whose breath is formed by the smoke is only sleeping: the gods are not completely dead. In the version of 1901, Morice concluded his poem by summoning the ‘expiring race’ of the Polynesians to re-ascend ‘out of time . . . towards the eternity of the Summit’ and to ‘return to its Gods’, then 346

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cited by way of historical confirmation the armed French annexation of Ra‘iatea in 1897, during which one of the ‘insurrectionaries’ had stated: ‘We have no other recourse than daily flight into the mountains.’132 Moreover, since the earliest version of Noa Noa Gauguin had defined the meaning of his effort with the help of an image akin to that of the dormant volcano. Having given an account of the burial of Pomare v, which occurred shortly after his arrival, and noted that the world that had attracted him had already disappeared, the narrator wondered, ‘Shall I manage to recover any trace of that past, so remote and so mysterious? And the present had nothing worthwhile to say to me. To get back to the ancient hearth, revive the fire in the midst of all these ashes. And, for that, quite alone, without any support.’133

347

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192 Victor Hugo, The Gouliot Caves, 1859.

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Epilogue: The Eye of the Sunflower In 1902, Gauguin was ill and thinking of leaving the Marquesas to settle in the south of France, ‘though I may go to Spain to seek some new elements’. Daniel de Monfreid advised him to do nothing of the kind: ‘you enjoy the impunity of the great dead, you have entered the history of art’.1 Gauguin had thus obtained in absentia the status of an ancestor and the image that he had so carefully cultivated had become a myth, a collective fiction. The history of art, as a discipline, has sought to distinguish the facts from the legend but the legend too has its share of truth on the imaginative level. We can say about individuals and the communities formed around them what Lévi-Strauss said about societies: ‘The real question is not what genuine results they obtain but rather by what lasting purpose they are guided, for their image of themselves is an essential part of their reality.’2 We saw that in Gestures and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician, Jarry made of Gauguin the king of an isle ‘fortified by madrepores’ who ‘prunes’ with an axe ‘images of living wood’; his function, Jarry wrote, was to ‘safeguard for the people the image of its gods’. 3 The writer thus naturalized the artist, making of him an ari‘i, while simultaneously naturalizing his sculptures by restoring them to the trees that provided their material. This fitted well with Gauguin’s desire to return to a ‘savage’ state but, by eliminating the reciprocal strangeness of artist and Polynesians along with the historical cut-off constituted by colonization, it also cancelled out one of his motives. Victor Segalen, the future theoretician of exoticism, proposed a more complex mythical interpretation of Gauguin’s endeavours. Born in 1878 in Brest, a ship’s doctor and Symbolist poet, 349

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Segalen arrived in Tahiti and subsequently the Marquesas in 1903, too late to meet Gauguin but in time to take part in the auction of the contents of his house-studio, become acquainted with his works and manuscripts and question his friends.4 This indirect meeting took on an initiatory value for Segalen, as he confessed in November 1903 to Monfreid: ‘I can say that I had seen nothing of the country and its Maoris before going through, indeed almost living through, Gauguin’s sketches.’5 In a novel entitled Les Immémoriaux (A Lapse of Memory), conceived in 1903 and published in 1907, Segalen evoked the Tahiti of pre- and post- colonization and Christianization; in it, the way in which a reciter forgets the sacred genealogies that he is responsible for conserving and transmitting is made to symbolize the disappearance of Polynesian culture. He also attempted a sequel, which remained unfinished and was to be entitled Le Maître-du-Jouir (The Master of Pleasure), with reference to the ‘arioi and the Maison du Jouir. The hero of this narrative is not a Polynesian king but a European artist named Paul Gauguin, who attempts to reverse the flow of history and restore to the inhabitants of a Pacific island ‘the joyous naked life’; it is not a biography of Gauguin, to whom Segalen had several times paid public homage, but an attempt to ‘reimagine his dream’.6 Before armed colonial forces put a stop to it, this ‘resurrection’ is initially crowned with success, in particular in the rediscovered fertility of the women and the regression of disease. Segalen’s Gauguin helps ‘memories to revolve around themselves and retrace the course of the seasons’, to unlearn what had been taught by ‘the strangers greeted as masters’ and to restore their grasp of the ancient language. In an essential passage, this reversion is enacted in a dialogue between the artist and the Tahitians: One day, gazing at Vakehui point, which forms, out at sea, something like the snout of a male pig: – What is that? What do you see? What do you say when you see that? [The Tahitians stammer until one of them remembers:] – It’s a promontory, a promontory is a point of land projecting into the sea. 350

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[Gauguin is furious and reproaches him with repeating ‘a stupid trick that his master taught him’ and explains:] What do I see? The muzzle of the stooping island, – like a thirsty animal drinking in the river of the sea . . . The spine is hard – but the eye that follows it can soften that . . . and this rock that overhangs: the eye must rest there for a while, without interruption, in order to lift things and lower them . . . All this, the way the island fits together, is the house the god destined for you: where you walk, where you eat, where you magnificently eat and breathe . . . Don’t you find it astonishing and perfectly made for you? And, while he was speaking, the Master was tattooing an image on the sand with a staff full of swirling figures . . . he moved away. Only then did they dare look and they saw: the spine of rock – the rock at the ear . . . but so undulating and simple that it seemed to have been fashioned just for the pleasure of the eye. And so he was already doing the work of recreation. And simulating the god.7

In this extraordinary lesson in vision, drawing comes to support the word in order to share a way of seeing and cure all the blindness induced by learning an abstract nomenclature. The question ‘what is that?’ is the one that, several years later, Rorschach was to ask the subjects of his ‘perception diagnosis’ test. We are reminded of Redon’s account of the way in which his father initiated him: ‘Look at those clouds; do you not see in them, as I do, changing forms?’8 In 1859 Hugo made a zoomorphic sketch of the Channel Island Sark (illus. 192), recording in his notebook that it reminded him of a monster lying on the sea and stretching out its neck to drink.9 This coincidence perhaps owes something to the resemblances between certain Pacific Islands (in particular the Marquesas) and those of the Atlantic. At a deeper level, it testifies to the kinship between Romantic conceptions of nature and the mind and those cultivated by artists and writers of the turn-of-the-century, who were well informed about developments in natural science, psychology and anthropology. Thus Carlyle had defined the poetic faculty as an eye: ‘The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant, what musical 351

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idea Nature has wrapped-up in these often rough embodiments.’10 The notion of harmony was capital for Gauguin and we remember that in his sketches, which opened Segalen’s eyes, he sought to approach nature, which he described as ‘so various and capricious, never wanting to surrender her secrets or yield herself up’.11 In his fictional work Segalen thus approached Gauguin in his turn and one might apply to The Master of Pleasure the deliberately paradoxical formula invented by Morice at the end of his introduction to Noa Noa: ‘Here is the true Tahiti, that is, faithfully imagined.’12 This book has shown the importance of imaginative perception for Gauguin’s art from its earliest days. We have seen him painting the rocks and cliffs of Brittany as animated beings (illus. 58, 66, 67, 153, 164, 165); Armand Seguin remembered having heard him prophesy in 1894 on the beach at Pouldu, ‘draped in his dazzling red pareo’ and constructing ‘immense reliefs in the sand’.13 In 1893 the American artist John LaFarge, who had travelled between 1890 and 1891 in the South Pacific with his friend the historian Henry Adams, explained the synthetic capacities of drawing in a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum in New York by invoking the memory of ‘a little savage maiden dressed in flowers and leaves’ who was entertaining herself with her young brothers and sisters by drawing outline animals on the damp sand of the beach: ‘I marvelled at the fact that the savage – the beginner in thinking – was representing these things chosen out by him, in the most abstract conceivable form’.14 Segalen’s fable bears at one and the same time on seeing and drawing: the eye of the artist, which sees an animal in the form of the island, makes that animal appear by making the rocky ‘spine’ more supple; his hand, extended by the sculpted staff, makes the outline undulating and simple, ‘recreating’ nature and ‘simulating’ the god, that is, working not after but as Natura sive Deus. The dialogue that Segalen imagined makes Gauguin’s art maieutic, capable of helping the spectator to regain a perception once native. The double image that affects this conversion of the gaze is ‘tattooed’ on the sand, and therefore on the skin of the island-animal, which is itself living because it forms part of the ‘shell of Taaroa’, created by the god and recreated by the artist to serve as a ‘house’ for humans.15 That idea brings to mind the notion of parahi (dwell) and 352

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Epilogue: \e E¥e of the Sunflower highlights the utopian and polemical dimension of the Maison du Jouir, a temple devoted to the cult of generation on a plot of land that Gauguin had obtained from Bishop Martin by faithfully attending his church, though only until he had reached his goal. As to the vision of the island-animal, it synthesizes a conception of the world summed up by Craighill Handy in 1927 as ‘a universe which is a psychic dynamism manifesting itself physically: behind and within all natural manifestations is life and psychic force’.16 The quality of the information that Gauguin had obtained on Polynesian culture, which did not all come from Moerenhout’s book, can be appreciated by the fact that Craighill Handy’s principal informant during his stay on the Marquesas in 1920–21 was Ha‘apuani, one of Gauguin’s friends during his last years in Hiva Oa.17 In his essay on Marquesan legend, the anthropologist paid homage to this ‘native scholar’, describing him as ‘probably the most learned man in all the islands at the time’; he reproduced a photo (illus. 193) that shows him standing beside the statue of Takai‘i at Puamau (illus. 139, 160), eyes lowered before the photographic lens but his hands on his sex next to the image of the ancestor imbued with mana or ‘procreative power’.18 The relevance of Segalen’s fable is therefore attested for Oceania but by no means limited to that region. In the Commentarios reales, written in the late sixteenth century by the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, we find testimony of the process of acculturation that the Gauguin of Master of Pleasure sought to reverse by his drawing. After describing the ideas of his maternal ancestors on the subject of heavenly bodies, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega noted a break in tradition comparable to that of Segalen’s A Lapse of Memory: They discerned in certain black spots near the Milky Way the face of a ewe suckling her young. It was often shown me when I was a child. ‘Look,’ people would say, ‘this is its head, arms, and legs.’ And yet I never succeeded in seeing anything but spots.19

In 1821 the Exposé de l’état actuel des missions évangéliques (Report on the Current State of the Evangelical Missions) registered 353

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193 Isaac Puhetete, called Haapuani of Atuona, Hivaoa, Standing Beside the Great Stone of Figure of Takaii, at Puamau, c. 1920–21.

as evidence of the success of the conversion enterprise the fact that the inhabitants of Mo‘orea said that they had, until the arrival of the missionaries, been ‘blind in three eyes – the two eyes of the body and the eye of understanding; meaning that they could neither read nor understand’.20 In 1891, in the article that instated Gauguin as a pictorial representative of Symbolism, Aurier had distinguished two contradictory tendencies in the history of art, ‘the realist tendency and the ideist tendency’, which he claimed derived from blindness and clairvoyance respectively. He cited Swedenborg on the subject of the second tendency: ‘That very night, the eyes of my inner man were opened: they were made such as to be able to see into the heavens, 354

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Epilogue: \e E¥e of the Sunflower into the world of ideas and into hell!’21 The opposition between blindness and discernment, cecity and clairvoyance was thus a weighty argument in the face-off between cultures and between artistic movements. It is also the theme of a series of four pictures representing sunflowers painted by Gauguin in 1901 when he was on the point of leaving Tahiti for his final place of residence in the Marquesas. Three years earlier Gauguin had asked Monfreid to send ‘some tubers and flower seeds’ tolerant of hot weather, such as ‘simple dahlias, nasturtiums and various suns’, explaining, ‘I should like to embellish my plantation, and as you know, I adore flowers.’22 In April 1899 he announced that most of the seeds had come up and predicted that with the flowering shrubs of Tahiti they were going to form around his house ‘a veritable Eden’ that would serve as a model: ‘If I have no more imagination I shall do some studies of flowers.’23 But, replying in January 1900 to Vollard, who was requesting precisely floral still-lifes, he wrote that Tahiti was not ‘really the country of flowers’ and that he himself was less than ever ‘a painter after nature’: ‘Everything with me happens in my mad imagination.’24 This context thus reactivated the debate that had taken place between Gauguin and Van Gogh concerning the respective merits of observation and imagination, one of whose endpoints had been The Painter of Sunflowers (illus. 85). The sunflowers of 1901 therefore brought back memories of Vincent, whom Gauguin was to evoke two years later in Avant et après by retrospectively attributing to himself the ‘task of enlightening him’; his teaching resulted, he claimed, in ‘the whole series of suns over suns in bright sunlight’ (illus. 86).25 The ‘suns’ mentioned by Gauguin in his request to Monfreid were indeed sunflowers, but they were not on that account a ‘French flower’, to cite the title of Te tiare farani (1891, Pushkin Museum, Moscow), a bouquet of oleander painted during his first stay in Tahiti. The sunflower had reached Europe from the Americas via Peru, for which reason it had long retained names such as Sola indianus and Flos solis peruvianus.26 Gauguin can hardly have been unaware of this association and wrote to Schuffenecker in late December 1888 concerning a projected stay in Martinique: ‘The Inca, according to the legend, came directly from the sun and I shall return there.’27 Because of the way it always presents its flower to the sun, the sunflower 355

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was also an emblem of painting as an art of imitation, figuring, for example, in a famous self-portrait by Anthony van Dyck (after 1633, private collection). The sunflowers that Gauguin painted in 1901 are nevertheless not represented in nature but posed on a table or on a seat, as in Sunflowers in an Armchair (illus. 194). 28 Placed on a table, they emerge from wooden recipients inspired by Oceanian art and particularly from a kumete conserved in Auckland.29 On a seat, they emerge from a woven basket, which perhaps suggests that the plants are in earth and therefore living rather than cut. Gauguin had already painted flowers on a chair in Pour faire un bouquet (To Make a Bouquet, 1880, private collection), whose title pointed to the trajectory from the garden, visible through a halfopen door, to the vase as yet absent; the appeal to the imagination of the spectator is confirmed in the bird motif visible (for the first time) on the seat back.30 The wooden chair with its cane back painted twice in 1901 is close kin to the one used by Van Gogh to represent Gauguin himself in 1888, a resemblance that perhaps reinforces the dimension of self-representation suggested by the Peruvian origin of the sunflower. Van Gogh had painted that chair by artificial light; it carries a lit candle and two books and is thus associated with night and the inner world, while the natural light bathing his own portraitas-chair associated it with daylight and the external world.31 Gauguin adopted this identification by placing his sunflowers in a closed space, above all in the Hermitage picture, whose background is dark. A white cloth is thrown over the chair back and separates the flowers from this dark background, setting off their colours; behind it, at the top of the picture, there is another sunflower head, painted in grisaille, with an eye at its centre. It will be remembered that in The Painter of Sunflowers (illus. 85) the flower at the top of the bouquet also possessed an eye and that Van Gogh himself had employed this double image in reference to Redon’s lithograph There Was Perhaps a first vision Attempted in the Flower (illus. 15). The pictures of 1901 have a strong retrospective dimension and pay homage to the main artists who counted for Gauguin: not only Van Gogh but also Cézanne, through still-life, Puvis de Chavannes, whose L’Espérance (Hope, 1872, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) is quoted on the wall in Nature morte à L’Espérance (private 356

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collection) and above all Redon. The flower/eye of Sunflowers in an Armchair is represented face-on like that of vision and resembles a halo or schematic sun as much as it does a plant; its lack of colour relates it more generally to Redon’s ‘noirs’, the drawings in charcoal and the engravings that had cemented Redon’s reputation, starting with the appearance in 1879 of the programmatically titled album In Dream. Brettell has noted the contrast between this Redonlike flower and those of Van Gogh, which lack sun and look rather in need of water too.32 Whereas Van Gogh’s flowers seem disorientated and turn their corollas in all directions, the eye-flower ‘absent from all bouquets’ shoots its gaze directly at the spectator, to whom it transmits its light and from whom it receives its own. This contrast is again that of blindness and clairvoyance and one might say that Van Gogh’s flower seeks ‘around the eye’ whereas Gauguin’s is established in ‘the mysterious centre of thought’. The picture that he sent

194 Paul Gauguin, Sunflowers in an Armchair, 1901.

357

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to Vollard is not therefore a ‘still’ life or nature ‘morte’, as Gauguin correctly stated in his reply. Moreover, it includes a figure that is, like the quotation from Puvis, an ‘image within an image’ and closer to the female profiles suspended by Redon in indeterminate spaces (illus. 18, 199) than to any tangible presence from the external world. The question of the relationship between the senses and the ‘mysterious centre of thought’ had already been raised by an undated drawing (illus. 195), which might be a (mirror-image) study for Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ (1890–91, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).33 The face is interrupted at the level of the eyebrows; the space where the forehead would be is occupied by an enlarged detail of the left eye, surrounded by a quickly drawn circle; on the right edge of the leaf, a detail of the nose is repeated, with a very visible nostril that can be seen neither in the full drawing nor in the painting. A series of curves, perhaps representing a curl of hair, points towards the ear, and a double straight line, which probably alludes to the slope of the shoulder, crosses the outline of a cheek and reaches the mouth. We can see in this drawing a simple study for a face complemented by details but Gauguin seems deliberately to have highlighted the images of the sense organs. There would be nothing astonishing about this since on 8 October 1888 he wrote to Schuffenecker concerning Selfportrait (Les Misérables): ‘the drawing of it is very special, complete abstraction. The eyes, the mouth, the nose are like the flowers of a Persian carpet thus personifying the symbolic side.’34 Gauguin did not, at the time, specify what he meant by the ‘symbolic side’ but the notes written in Tahiti around a decade later returned to the question of the sense organs: ‘The eyes and the mouth and the ears, all three placed in the head, are agents of the brain while at the same time suggesting acts to it. Thus the eye has a force of personal impulsion and suggests to the brain a force of expulsion deriving from it. Thereof comes the painter, an artist.’35 Gauguin went on to attribute the mouth to the ‘littérateur’ and the ear to the musician: ‘since the immaterial is infinitely divided up, infinitely mysterious, more or less in balance, all these forces of expulsion, (these artists) are subdivided into infinitely mysterious, complicated and more or less balanced arts.’ He thus insisted on the reciprocal nature of the exchange between internal and external world effected by the 358

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195 Paul Gauguin, Self-portrait, study, n.d. (1889?).

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senses and identified the creator with the direction that the neurosciences today describe as ‘top-down’, meaning ‘downward’ trajectories such as those highlighted by the phenomena of mental image, accidental image and imaginative perception. Looking ahead to these remarks, we can perceive in the single eye placed in the middle of the artist’s forehead an image of the eye whose ‘force of personal impulsion . . . suggests to the brain a force of expulsion’ and of the ‘vital node’ towards which the nervous centres converge according to The Catholic Church and Modern Times; those nervous centres ‘were the generating cause of sensations, presided over spontaneous movements, and according to their special organism were nervous centres of sight, hearing, smell, taste, thought and will’.36 In 1889 in the Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot (illus. 65) Gauguin took the opposite course, closing the eyes and covering the ears of his effigy, offering an image of the self or subject that can be described as solipsistic and related to the advice that he gave Monfreid in 1897:

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Then, let sculpture mean bumps, but never holes. There has to be a hole for the human ear to hear, but that of God needs no such thing. He understands and sees, he perceives without the help of the senses that only appear there in order to be tangible to humans; all of that takes place through fluid, through the soul. Suggest that.37

Bodelsen nevertheless observes that Gauguin cut off the top of his self-portrait’s forehead with crenellations suggesting rays, ‘in order to express the simplest idea of the eyes as the seat of the artist’s thoughts’.38 We might add that this centrifugal detail, akin to the flower/eye/sun that we have studied, expresses the passage from intromission to extramission, from the eye which receives impulses to the eye that emits them. The supplementary eye in the Strasburg drawing can also be compared to the ‘third eye’ of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, associated with the figures of Shiva (illus. 102) and Buddha and with ideas of the supra-sensory and illumination. We find an explicit allusion to this in Idole à la perle (Idol with Pearl, 1892, Musée d’Orsay, Paris); this apparently feminine figure is seated in half-lotus 360

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Epilogue: \e E¥e of the Sunflower in a linga-shaped niche and wears at the top of her forehead a little pearl representing the urna (tuft of hair) or usnisa (cranial protuberance); the plant forms surrounding the niche suggest the sacred banyan and the lowered right hand of the ‘idol’ with closed eyes means the Awakening or passage from blindness to clairvoyance.39 The third eye is again present in ‘parabolic’ form in a letter head engraved by Gauguin in 1900 and reproduced as the tailpiece of this work (illus. 200): the two birds facing each other above the artist’s monogram make, when one turns it upside down, the lineaments of a face endowed with a third eye, whose pupil, as in Redon’s vision (illus. 15), looks upward. This return to the motif of the eye confirms that it plays a pivotal role in the art and thought of Gauguin. I have already pointed out the evolutionist and neurological explanations of the pre-eminence of the eye and the face in potential images. Gauguin, moreover, obtained a remarkable knowledge of Oceanian and more particularly Marquesan sculpture, which constitutes a particularly rich field for anthropological observation of this phenomenon. Eyes and faces are indeed the most common motifs in Marquesan art for reasons already partly described. Eric Kjellgren notes that in Marquesan (as indeed in Tahitian), mata means both ‘face’ and ‘eye’ and that mata ‘enana, ‘the people of the face/eye’, refers to the ancestors and their mana.40 The term matatetau, literally ‘count the faces/eyes’, referred to the recitation of an individual’s genealogy; such recitations, tracing the genealogy back to the creation of the world, underpinned the cultural transmission whose interruption Segalen so deplored.41 There is a further connection to the network in which the eye belongs in Gauguin’s world, the connection to which I could only allude in reference to Parahi te marae (illus. 173). We have seen that the abstract motif representing the vulva in the ‘big couple’ resembles the bifid eye typical of Marquesan sculpture and found for example on the pestle with po¯poi that once belonged to the artist (illus. 186, 191). The association is unlikely to be fortuitous since it has precedents, for example on a vase thought to be a portrait of Louise Schuffenecker (illus. 196). Émile’s wife is represented bust-length, bare-breasted; her hair is crowned by an orange ribbon ocellated with blue and gold, suggesting a snake and echoing the snake curled up 361

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196 Paul Gauguin, Portrait Vase of Mme Schuffenecker, c. 1889–90, back view.

in a tree incised on the back of the vase.42 At the top of the back of the pot, the ribbon forms a curl through which a hand passes its thumb. Bodelsen felt that this hand belonged to Mme Schuffenecker and was holding the ribbon in place but it is not connected to the bust and is reminiscent of Gauguin’s hand in two self-representations contemporary with the vase, that of Be in Love and You Will Be Happy (illus. 34) and the Self-portrait Pot with Thumb on Lip (illus. 91). In both cases, the thumb of the artist’s left hand penetrates his half-open mouth. We remember that he described the first image as 362

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Epilogue: \e E¥e of the Sunflower that of ‘Gauguin (as a monster) taking the hand of a woman who defends herself’ and wrote to Bernard about the second: ‘Like the Gauguin of the pot, the hand stifling in the kiln, the cry that seeks to escape’.43 This interpretation is not very convincing since only the thumb passes between the lips. The gesture is more reminiscent of the action of sucking one’s thumb, a stimulation of the oral erogenous zone that Donald Winnicott has interpreted as a ‘transitional phenomenon’ on the same level as playing with a doll, situating it in the same intermediary zone between subjectivity and objectivity.44 It is therefore a ‘primitivist’ gesture in which Laurence Madeline has seen a sign of regression and of a prenatal state. It must have mattered to Gauguin because he adopted it again in a late pencil self-portrait, very close to Redon in style, which Segalen bought in the posthumous sale (illus. 197).45 Allusion to this auto-erotic gesture, characteristic of early childhood, contributes in Self-portrait Pot with Thumb on Lip to the embryonic aspect of a figure emerging into matter; in Be in Love and You Will Be Happy, it casts doubt over the reality of the meeting with the naked woman, the more so since the hand that grasps hers is not connected to the head with closed eyes. In the vase-portrait of Mme Schuffenecker, the generous proportions of her breast, her pointed ear and the snake motif clearly eroticize the theme. The loop of the ribbon, penetrated from within by the thumb, suggests both mouth and vagina, while the image resulting from this action forms an eye with heavy lids, close to that of the late self-portrait, with the thumb as pupil.46 The (auto-) erotic allusion may originally have been directed towards the vase’s model, Mme Schuffenecker, but the condensation of eye and vagina belongs to a more structural level, as is shown by its presence in the ‘big couple’ of Parahi te marae. Taking in the semen and giving passage to the newborn, the vagina is not only one of the orifices through which the body regulates its exchanges with the environment, on a par with mouth, nose and ears (illus. 195), it also shares the directional ambivalence of the eye, which both receives impulsions and transmits a ‘force of expulsion’. The analogy of the two organs therefore shares in the parallelism established by Gauguin between creative thought in general, artistic creation 363

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197 Paul Gauguin, Self-portrait with Thumb on Lip, n.d. (after 1900?).

in particular and procreation: the eye, like the vagina, conceives and gives birth. No such double image has been identified in Oceanian art but there are motifs that come close to it, for example a relief of the me‘ae of Utukua on Hiva Oa (illus. 198), where it is clearly a response to the phallic tiki (illus. 103).47 In The Master of Pleasure Segalen stages the recognition of the artist’s procreative power by a Polynesian, Tioka, named after the Marquesan who, on Hiva Oa, had carried out the traditional exchange of names with his friend Gauguin.48 Segalen describes Gauguin using a gouge to carve the head of a Maori man in a trunk whose ‘obstinate fibres themselves led the blade’, producing 364

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a deformation ‘apparently demanded by the matter’, which gave ‘birth to a sort of new being, – not at all ugly, not at all indifferent’.49 While he is considering the result with some surprise, Gauguin hears behind him the voice of Tioka saying ‘Hello, you! The man who makes men!’ And the narrator adds that this greeting ‘revealed the obscure movement that had arisen at the same moment in the artist – and in the matter too’. We understand that this metamorphosis of an image of the ‘Maori’ prefigures the transformation of the islanders themselves described in the scene at Vakehui point. Segalen’s imago imagans is very close to the passage in Faustroll in which the king of the Fragrant Isle ‘prunes with an axe from the images of living wood the growths that would disfigure their likeness to the gods’. 50 Not only does it accord with Gauguin’s own aesthetics of the material but the formula attributed to Tioka had already appeared in Noa Noa, at the point at which the narrator, having started out on a voyage around Tahiti, receives an invitation that leads to his meeting with Teha‘amana: ‘“Hey! Man who makes men” (he knows that I am a painter).’51 The Marquesan creators

198 Slab with low relief, n.d. (probably 18th century), me‘ae of Utukua, Hiva Oa (see illus. 103).

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of tattooed or sculpted images belonged to the class of tuhunas, a generic term for a person in possession of wide knowledge and great practical capacities.52 Craighill Handy explains that work was tapu (sacred) and that the building of a house, for example, was accompanied by ritual songs appealing to the divine personifications of the materials employed to come and contribute to their erection; the achieved object was consecrated by reciting the song of generation, which linked the new product of human activity to the chain of the stages of creation since the beginning of the world.53 Since the anthropologist gathered this information after Gauguin’s death, in particular thanks to Ha‘apuani (and by consulting earlier sources), it seems probable that Gauguin knew about these practices, which might have been designed to reinforce his own conception of creative activity. We might also compare his practice of continuous transformation, visible in the dessins-empreintes made on Hiva-Oa (illus. 142), with the remark made by Craighill Handy on the subject of Polynesian genealogies of creation, according to which the term ‘reproduction’ was not an apt description of the result of mythical unions, which were more accurately defined as a process of ‘continuous impregnation producing successive mutations’.54 Despite these affinities, Gauguin’s artistic production represented an unprecedented phenomenon in Polynesia and one wonders to what extent his works found an audience there, as they undoubtedly had in Brittany (illus. 82, 83). According to Lieutenant Jénot, who was close to Gauguin in Tahiti, the artist lived there ‘secluded and his brain functioned in a vacuum’.55 We remember that the function of parables in his case was as much to exclude the profane as to include the initiate, with the emphasis perhaps on the former.56 In his article of 1891 Aurier also contrasted the innate clairvoyance of the ‘superior man’ to the incurable blindness of the ‘imbecilic human herd’.57 Gauguin shared the taste for mystery cultivated in the Symbolist coteries and their nostalgia for periods and societies in which the ‘disenchantment’ of the world had not brought about a devaluation of secrecy.58 Again, from this point of view, Polynesian culture could have been designed to attract him. Adrienne Kaeppler has pointed out that it is a culture of allusion, noting its ‘intimate association of verbal and visual modes of expression’ and the fact that 366

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Epilogue: \e E¥e of the Sunflower ‘many Polynesian words have hidden or veiled meanings that must be unravelled layer by layer until the metaphors on which they are based become apparent.’59 The absence of writing (in the Western sense), as in the pre-Columbian cultures, also represented an attraction for Gauguin, who rejected ‘literary means’ in art and always located his art as rivalling ‘littérateurs’, not least himself in his own role as author.60 Von den Steinen in 1897–8 recorded an extraordinarily revealing declaration concerning the mnemonics that helped to transmit the genealogies: ‘The tuhuna considers his knots as a better invention than European writing because anyone . . . can read the latter, whereas the knowledge enclosed in the knots remains the property of the tuhuna.’ 61 This comparison, made from the Polynesian point of view, helps us to relativize another comparison, made from the Western point of view by the anthropologist Michael C. Rockefeller in New Guinea, but which one is nevertheless tempted to apply to Gauguin:

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The Asmat artist enjoys some real advantage over the artist of the Western world. The Asmat culture offers the artist a specific language in form. This is a language which every artist can interpret and use according to his genius, and a language which has symbolic meaning for the entire culture. Our culture offers the artist no such language. The result is that each painter or sculptor must discover his own means of communicating in form. Only the greatest geniuses are able to invent an expression which has meaning for a nation or people.62

In the production of non-Western cultures and particularly those of peoples formerly called ‘naturals’ or ‘natives’, the anonymous and collective aspects of forms of communication supposed to be, as it were, set in stone, have long been exaggerated. Von den Steinen, by contrast, remarked about Marquesan tattoos that ‘creativity deliberately surrenders to the charm of new configurations’, and one cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that the Polynesia explored by Gauguin had already undergone a process of transformation begun more than a century before by the first contact with Westerners.63 367

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199 Odilon Redon, Black Profile (Gauguin), 1903–4.

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Epilogue: \e E¥e of the Sunflower The fact remains that by taste, ambition and his need to satisfy the ‘critic-dealer system’, Gauguin took innovation further than the tuhunas had done and indeed further than most of his European colleagues.64 We can compare this difference with the distinction proposed by Lévi-Strauss between ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies: cold societies seek to ‘annul the possible effects of historical factors on their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion’ whereas hot societies resolutely internalize ‘the historical process and [make] it the moving power of their development’.65 Willingly subject to the imperatives of novelty and originality, modern artists might be said to have constituted (like scientists) hot societies within hot societies, aptly illustrating a comparison made by Lévi-Strauss between the way in which the notions of species and individual apply among plants and among humans. Social life, the anthropologist wrote, transforms humans because ‘it encourages each biological individual to develop a personality; and this is a notion no longer recalling specimens within a variety but rather types of variety or species, probably not found in nature (although there is a suggestion of it now and again in the tropical milieu) and which could be termed “mono-individual”.’66 In his contribution to the public homage organized in Mercure de France by Morice after Gauguin’s death, Redon expressed the same idea about Gauguin’s ceramics: ‘There he created new forms. I compare them to the flowers of an original region where every flower would be the type of the species, leaving to future artists the task of providing for varieties by affiliation.’67 Probably in the same year, Redon paid homage to Gauguin in pictorial form (illus. 199) by surrounding the effigy of the artist, here reduced to a head (like Arii matamoe, illus. 19), with just such primordial flora.68 Gauguin’s ‘Inca’ profile stands out like that of an idol on a golden background resembling the hill in Parahi te marae (illus. 173). It is an apotheosis that brings to mind the Wagner quotation used by Gauguin, just before leaving for Tahiti, as a way of promising Redon that they would meet again: ‘I believe . . . that the true disciples of pure art will be glorified in a divine atmosphere of sun-illumined, fragrant concords, and united eternally with the divine source of all harmony.’ 69 369

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These two homages, verbal and pictorial, show that Redon understood Gauguin very well, as had Segalen and the other writers and artists cited in the pages above. By seeking to highlight aspects of the art and thought of Gauguin that have remained latent, I do not therefore pretend to unveil the mysteries that restricted access to them. Rather, this is one contribution to the wealth of research into Gauguin’s oeuvre and into the elements that fed into it, a research project that will continue indefinitely. Gauguin himself supplied the model for an enterprise of this kind, both cumulative and collective, by reflecting on his own effort in Avant et après: ‘On a single intelligence, my own, I have attempted to build a higher intelligence – one that will become my neighbour’s too, if it suits him.’70

200 Paul Gauguin, Letterhead, 1900, reproduced upside-down.

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References Abbreviations Catalogues and Reference Books

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[Abbreviations are followed by catalogue numbers to identify works of art] Bodelsen: Merete Bodelsen, Gauguin’s Ceramics: A Study in the Development of his Art, London, 1964 Druick and Zegers: Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, in collaboration with Britt Salvesen, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, exh. cat (Art Institute of Chicago and Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), London, 2001 dw: Daniel Wildenstein, Gauguin: Premier itinéraire d’un sauvage. Catalogue de l’œuvre peint (1873–1888), texts and research Sylvie Crussard, documentation and chronology Martine Heudron, 2 vols, Paris and Milan, 2001 Field: Richard S. Field, Paul Gauguin: Monotypes, Philadelphia, 1973 Gray: Christopher Gray, Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin, Baltimore, md, 1963 Kornfeld: Elizabeth Mongan, Eberhard W. Kornfeld and Harold Joachim, Paul Gauguin: Catalogue raisonné of his Prints, Bern, 1988 Paris 1989: Gauguin, exh. cat. (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris), 1989 W: Raymond Cogniat and Daniel Wildenstein, eds, Gauguin, vol. i: Catalogue, Paris, 1964

Writings By and About Gauguin Ancien culte mahorie: see Gauguin écrivain Avant et après: Paul Gauguin, Avant et après, Taravao, 1989 Cahier pour Aline: Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline, unpaginated manuscript, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’inha, Collections Jacques Doucet (available online at www.inha.fr/spip.php?rubrique87) Cooper: Douglas Cooper, ed., Paul Gauguin: 45 lettres à Vincent, Theo et Jo van Gogh, La Haye and Lausanne, 1983

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Diverses choses: see Gauguin écrivain Gauguin écrivain: Isabelle Cahn, Gauguin écrivain: Noa Noa, Diverses choses, Ancien culte mahorie, cd-rom, Paris, 2003 Gauguin and Morice: Paul Gauguin and Charles Morice, Noa Noa, Paris, 1901 Joly-Segalen: Paul Gauguin, Lettres à Daniel de Monfreid : Précédées d’un hommage par Victor Segalen, ed. Mme Joly-Segalen, Paris, 1950 Lettres à André Fontainas: Paul Gauguin, Lettres à André Fontainas, Caen, 1994 Loize 1966: Jean Loize, Noa Noa par Paul Gauguin, Paris, 1966 [transcription of manuscript held at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Special Collections] Malingue: Paul Gauguin, Lettres à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue, Paris, 1946 Merlhès 1984: Victor Merlhès, ed., Correspondance de Paul Gauguin, documents-témoignages, vol. i: 1873–1888, Paris, 1984 Merlhès 1989: Victor Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887–1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, Taravao, 1989 Merlhès 1995: Victor Merlhès, De Bretagne en Polynésie: Paul Gauguin, pages inédites, Tahiti, 1995 Noa Noa / Voyage de Tahiti [manuscript held at the Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Fonds du Musée d’Orsay]: see Gauguin écrivain Oviri, écrits d’un sauvage: Paul Gauguin, Oviri, écrits d’un sauvage, ed. Daniel Guérin, Paris, 1974 Prather and Stuckey: Marla Prather and Charles F. Stuckey, eds, Paul Gauguin, 1848–1903, Cologne, 1994 Racontars de rapin: Paul Gauguin, Racontars de Rapin, Paris, 1951 Verdier 1986: Philippe Verdier, ‘Un manuscrit de Gauguin: L’Esprit moderne et le catholicisme’, in Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, vols 46–47, 1985–6, pp. 273–328 [transcription of the manuscript on pp. 299–328] Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters: at www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters (online edition, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, Huygens Institute-knaw)

n.b.: The spelling and punctuation of Gauguin’s writings have been respected as much as possible, including in the titles of his works when these are based on inscriptions.

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References, pages 7–13

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Introduction: Irritations, Echoes and Parables 1 Diverses choses [1896–1898], f. 136 r [paginated 263], manuscript reproduced in Gauguin écrivain; partial transcription in Daniel Guérin, ed., Paul Gauguin: The Writings of a Savage (New York, 1978), p. 139. 2 Jules Huret, ‘Paul Gauguin devant ses tableaux’, L’Echo de Paris, 23 February 1891, p. 2 (Writings of a Savage, p. 48). 3 Paul Gauguin, ‘Armand Seguin’, Mercure de France, xii, February 1895, pp. 222–4 (223). 4 Jean Dolent, ‘Chronique’, Le Journal des artistes, 22 February 1891, reprinted in J. Dolent, Monstres (Paris, 1896), p. 121. Gauguin thought very highly of this article, pasting it into the manuscript of Cahier pour Aline and copying it into Diverses choses, f. 118 v [paginated 230]. 5 Letter of 11 or 12 November 1888 (Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 719; all translations of the Van Gogh letters are taken from the online edition at www.vangoghletters.org [Translator’s note]). 6 Lettres à André Fontainas, Letter 1 (March 1899), p. 10. 7 Odilon Redon, À soi-même: Journal (1867–1915). Notes sur la vie, l’art et les artistes (Paris, 1961), p. 100. 8 Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (London, 2002). 9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1967), p. 193. 10 Cf. Gamboni, Potential Images, notably pp. 18–20 and 148. 11 Ibid., pp. 86–104, in particular pp. 87–8, and Dario Gamboni, Portrait of the Artist as a Landscape (Amsterdam, 2002). 12 Cf. my published articles on this subject, the principal elements of which have been included in the present book: ‘Paul Gauguin’s Genesis of a Picture: A Painter’s Manifesto and Self-analysis’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Autumn 2003, available at www.19thc-artworldwide.org; ‘Mana’o tupapa’u: Jarry, Gauguin et la fraternité des arts’, in Michael Einfalt, ed., Intellektuelle Redlichkeit – Intégrité intellectuelle: Literatur – Geschichte – Kultur. Festschrift für Joseph Jurt, Heidelberg, Winter 2005, pp. 459–75; ‘Parahi te marae: où est le temple?’, 48/14: La revue du musée d’Orsay, 20, Spring 2005, pp. 6–17; ‘The Vision of a Vision: Perception, Hallucination, and Potential Images in Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon’, Van Gogh Studies, iii, 2010, pp. 11–28. 13 Felix Thürlemann, ‘L’aquarelle de Dürer Fenedier Klawsen: La double mimesis dans l’analyse picturale d’un lieu géographique’, Revue de l’art, 137, 2002–3, pp. 9–18; Thürlemann, Dürers doppelter Blick, Konstanz (2008); Michel Weemans, ‘Herri met de Bles’s Sleeping Peddler: An Exegetical and Anthropomorphic Landscape’, The Art Bulletin, lxxxviii/3, September 2006, pp. 459–81. Cf. too Jean-Hubert

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14

15

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18 19

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Martin, ed., Une image peut en cacher une autre: Arcimboldo – Dalí – Raetz, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (2009), pp. 39–65. Karl von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst. Studien über die Entwicklung primitiver Südseeornamentik nach eigener Reiseergebnisse und dem Material der Museen, 3 vols (Berlin, 1925; reprinted Saarbrücken, 2006); Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998), pp. 168–9; Jürgen Golte, Moche: Cosmología y sociedad. Una interpretación iconográfica (Lima and Cusco, 2009). Cf. also the works of Carlo Severi, in particular Le Principe de la chimère: Une anthropologie de la mémoire (Paris, 2007). Henri Focillon, ‘Foreword’, in Paul Gauguin, 1848–1903: A Retro spective Exhibition of His Paintings, May 24 to June 5 1936, exh. cat., The Baltimore Museum of Art (1936), n. p. Richard S. Field, ‘Gauguin’ (a review of Kornfeld and The Art of Paul Gauguin), Print Quarterly, vi/3, June 1989, pp. 197–204 (203). See notably Charles Stuckey, ‘Gauguin Inside Out’, in Eric M. Zafran, ed., Gauguin’s Nirvana, exh. cat., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, ct, (New Haven, ct, and London, 2001), pp. 129–41; Richard R. Brettell and Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Gauguin and Impressionism, exh. cat., Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, tx, and Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen (New Haven, ct, and London, 2005). dw p. 76; see also, for example, entries 154, 164, 308, 325, 326 and 329. Alan C. Birnholz, ‘Double Images Reconsidered: A Fresh Look at Gauguin’s Yellow Christ’, Art International, xxi/5, October–November 1977, pp. 26–34. Bernard Demont, ‘L’ambiguïté dans la peinture de Paul Gauguin entre 1885 et 1894’, L’Œil, March 1985, pp. 32–9 (34, 36). Birnholz, ‘Double Images’, pp. 33–4. Cf. Dario Gamboni, ‘Voir double: Théorie de l’image et méthodologie de l’interprétation’, in Martin, ed., Une image peut en cacher une autre, pp. xiv–xxv; Marc Gotlieb, ‘Our Monstrous Double: The Dream of Research in “Outsider Art History”’, in Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith, eds, What is Research in the Visual Arts ? Obsession, Archive, Encounter (Williamstown, ma, 2008), pp. 85–102. Paul Gauguin, ‘Une lettre de Paul Gauguin a propos de Sèvres et du dernier four’, Le Soir, 23 April 1895, p. 1 (excerpts in ‘About Sèvres and the Latest Kiln’, in Writings of a Savage, pp. 106–7). See Dario Gamboni, The Listening Eye: Taking Notes after Gauguin / Das hörende Auge: Aufzeichnungen nach Gauguin (Ostfildern, 2011). Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, ma, 1960), p. 371. dw, p. 292; June Hargrove, ‘Woman with a Fan: Paul Gauguin’s

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Heavenly Vairaumati – a Parable of Immortality’, The Art Bulletin, lxxxviii/3, September 2006, pp. 552–66 (552). Letter to J. F. Willumsen, late 1890, in Writings of a Savage, p. 45; Diverses choses, f. 106 v, see Writings of a Savage, p. 126. Diverses choses, f. 119 r [paginated 231], in Writings of a Savage, p.131; repeated with variants in Avant et après, p. 88 (Paul Gauguin, Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (New York, 1997), p. 46). Eugène Tardieu, ‘La Peinture et les peintres’, L’Écho de Paris, 13 May 1895 (Writings of a Savage, pp. 108–111), p. 109. Diverses choses, f. 138 [paginated 3] (Writings of a Savage, pp. 144–5). Henri Dorra, though he did not relate the drawing to Yellow Haystacks, saw in Bretonnerie ‘the head of the artist with his very particular nose’ and imagined that Gauguin, struck by the graceful backs of the Breton women, dreamed of upending them in the hay: Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity (Berkeley, ca, and London, 2007), p. 135. Alfred Jarry, Œuvres complètes, vol. i, ed. Michel Arrivé (Paris, 1972), pp. 252–5. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1846’, in Art in Paris 1845–1862. Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, trans. and ed. J. Mayne (London, 1965), p. 44; Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. ii, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris, 1976), p. 418. Cf. Dario Gamboni, The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature (Chicago, 2011), pp. 301–28. Cf. Jill Fell, Alfred Jarry (London, 2010), p. 43. Félix Fénéon, ‘Calendrier de décembre 1887: V. Vitrines des marchands de tableaux’, La Revue indépendante, [15] January 1888, pp. 169–71, reprinted in Fénéon, Œuvres plus que complètes, vol. i: Chroniques d’art, ed. Joan U. Halperin (Geneva, 1970), pp. 90–91. Ibid., p. 479; Gauguin, ‘Une lettre de Paul Gauguin’. Achille Delaroche, ‘D’un point de vue esthétique: A propos du peintre Paul Gauguin’, L’Ermitage, 5e année, January 1894, pp. 35–9. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 18. Jarry, Les Minutes de sable mémorial, p. 171; Œuvres complètes, p. 1096. Letter of 8 December 1892 (Malingue, p. 237). For an example of such ‘irritation’, see the article of 1893 by the Danish critic Karl Madsen cited in Suzanne Greub, ed., Gauguin Polynesia, exh. cat., Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, and Seattle Art Museum (Munich, 2011), p. 42. Letter of 1 October 1888 (Merlhès 1984, p. 234). Diverses choses, f. 119 v [paginated 232]; letter of August 1901 (JolySegalen, p. 182). Cf. dw p. 304. Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of

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Movement, trans. E. R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas, tx, 1988), p. 13. Letter to Monfreid, August 1901 (Joly-Segalen, p. 182), in Writings of a Savage, p. 211. Le Carnet de Paul Gauguin, ed. René Huygue (Paris, 1952), p. 164. dw p. 374. Letters to Pissarro, October and late October or November 1884 (Merlhès 1984, pp. 71–2); see Merlhès’ comments in ibid., pp. 398–401 and 409–10. Merlhès 1984, p. 88. G.-Albert Aurier, ‘Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin’, Mercure de France, March 1891, pp. 155–65, reprinted in Albert Aurier, Textes critiques, 1889–1892: De l’impressionnisme au symbolisme (Paris, 1995), p. 26–39. Cf. H. R. Rookmaker, Gauguin and 19th Century Art Theory [1959] (Amsterdam, 1972), pp. 118–22; dw p. 494; H. Dorra, op. cit., p. 28. Novalis, The Novices of Sais, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 2005), p. 3. Loize 1966, p. 22. Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: Voyage to Tahiti, trans. J. Griffin (London, 2010), pp. 18–19. Jean-Hyppolite Michon, Système de graphologie: L’art de connaître les hommes d’après leur écriture [1875] (Paris, 1880), pp. 144–5, quoted in Merlhès 1984, pp. 409–10. Letter to É. Schuffenecker, 14 January 1885 (Merlhès 1984, p. 88). Richard Shiff, ‘The Primitive of Everyone Else’s Way’, in Guillermo Solana, ed., Gauguin and the Origins of Symbolism, exh. cat., Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2004) pp. 65–79 (77), with reference to Charles Morice, ‘Art moderne: La Grande querelle’, Mercure de France, lxx, 1 December 1907, p. 547. Diverses choses, f. 138 r [paginated 6–7] (Writings of a Savage, p. 145). Ibid. (not included in Writings of a Savage). Verdier 1986, p. 313. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Hérésies artistiques: L’Art pour tous’ [1862], in Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1945), pp. 257–60; letter from Strindberg to Leopold Littmansson, 31 July 1894, in M. Robinson, ed., Strindberg’s Letters, vol. i (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 494–5. Undated letter [late 1890?], J. F. Willumsens Museum, Frederikssund, Gamle Samling no. 585 (passage absent from Writings of a Savage, pp. 44–6). Avant et après, p. 142; cf. also Diverses choses, f. 137 r (Intimate Journals, p. 76; Writings of a Savage, p. 141). Renée Hamon, ‘Sur les traces de Gauguin en Océanie’, L’Amour de l’art, July 1936, pp. 246–50 (250), quoted in Nay Mowll Mathews,

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64 65 66 67 68

Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life (New Haven, ct, and London, c. 2001), pp. 240–41. Belinda Thomson sees in the use of the word parabole an example of Gauguin’s taste for puns and assumes that he is referring to the geometrical meaning of the word (parabola), which is applicable to a number of his compositions; see Thomson, Frances Fowle and Lesley Stevenson, Gauguin’s Vision, exh. cat., National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2005), p. 35. Letter of 16 October 1888 (Merlhès 1984, p. 255); undated letter [September 1889] (Malingue p. 167). Diverses choses, added to f. 138 r [paginated 8] (see Writings of a Savage, p. 146, with which this text only partially coincides). Dolent, ‘Chronique’. Diverses choses, f. 161 v (Writings of a Savage, p. 148). Racontars de rapin, pp. 22–3; cf. also Racontars de Rapin: Fac-similé du manuscrit de Paul Gauguin, ed. Victor Merlhès (Taravao, 1994); Writings of a Savage, p. 216.

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one: Seeing Double 1 Merlhès, 1984, p. 210. 2 Cahier pour Aline, unpaginated manuscript, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’inha Collections Jacques Doucet (available online at www.inha.fr); see also ‘À ma fille Aline, ce cahier est dédié: Notes éparses, sans suite comme les rêves, comme la vie toute faite de morceaux: Journal de jeune fille, ed. Victor Merlhès (Bordeaux and Paris, 1989); Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Works, vol. xvi: Marginalia – Eureka (New York, 1902), p. 164. 3 Emile Zola, Le Bon combat, de Courbet aux impressionnistes: Anthologie d’écrits sur l’art, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon (Paris, 1974), p. 14. Cf. Philippe Junod, Transparence et opacité: Réflexions autour de l’esthétique de Konrad Fiedler (Lausanne, 1976), pp. 33–7. 4 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh [1836] (London, 1891), p. 143. On Gauguin’s knowledge of Carlyle’s text, which was at first indirect, see, among others, H. R. Rookmaker, op. cit., p. 40. 5 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 151. 6 Ibid., p. 153. 7 Letter of 20 or 21 November 1889 (Cooper, pp. 169–71). 8 Loize 1966, p. 25 (Noa Noa, 2010, p. 24) 9 Sigrid Hinz, ed., Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen (Munich, 1968), p. 92 (Charles Harrison and Paul Wood with Jason Geiger, eds, Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, 1998), p. 51).

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10 Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts décoratifs: Décoration intérieure de la maison (Paris, 1882), pp. 380–81. 11 Ibid., p. 383; Philippe Dagen, ed., La Peinture en 1905: L’Enquête sur les tendances actuelles des arts plastiques de Charles Morice (Paris, 1986), p. 121. 12 A. Delaroche, op. cit., copied into Diverses choses, f. 129 v–130 r [paginated 250–51] (Intimate Journals, p. 19). 13 Letter of c. 20 October 1889 (Cooper, p. 275). 14 Letter from the last third of August 1888 (Merlhès 1984, p. 216). 15 Dictionnaire en ligne de l’Académie Tahitienne – Fare Vana‘a, www.farevanaa.pf/dictionnaire.php; in the absence of any other indication, translations from Tahitian in the present work are taken from this lexicographic resource, which includes references to earlier dictionaries. The extent to which Gauguin understood and mastered Tahitian is a much discussed question. The most extreme views are those of Bengt Danielsson and Hiriata Millaud: see Danielsson, ‘Gauguin’s Tahitian Titles’, Burlington Magazine, 109, April 1967, pp. 228–33, and Gauguin in the South Seas [1964] (New York, 1966), p. 122; Millaud, ‘Les Titres tahitiens de Gauguin’, in Ia Orana Gauguin, exh. cat., Musée de Tahiti et des Îles – Te Fare Manaha, Puna‘auia, Tahiti (Paris, 2003), pp. 81–90. Danielsson thinks Gauguin’s Tahitian was rudimentary and error-prone; Millaud has more recently deemed Gauguin capable of ‘grasping and above all expressing concepts, ideas and practices that did not belong among his Western cultural references’. In her view, Gauguin gave his works their titles ‘on the basis of an idea, a thought, a specific discursive context, an expression or even a single word’, employed unusual spellings because of the context of orality in which he was submerged, made play with this ‘incompetence’ and added a mischievous semantic element by giving ambiguous French translations of his Tahitian titles. I cannot decide this controversy on a linguistic level but I note that Danielsson has often missed Gauguin’s intentions by attempting to confine him to semantic norms, for example when he imagined that the title of Vahine no te miti (1892, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires), ‘Femme de la mer’ (Woman of the Sea, and translated as such in the catalogue of the 1893 exhibition), was a mistake for ‘Femme à la mer’ (Woman by the Sea); Cf. Dario Gamboni, notices to Vahine no te miti and Dos bañistas, in Roberto Amigo and María Isabel Baldassare, eds, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Colección (Buenos Aires, 2010), vol. i, pp. 457–62. One is reminded of the observation made by Richard Brettell in his foreword to Dorra’s book, that Gauguin was ‘deliberately evasive – too intelligent for his commentators and interpreters’ (H. Dorra, op. cit., p. xi). 16 Paris 1989, p. 242; Loize 1966, p. 24 (Noa Noa, 2010, p. 21). Stuckey

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17 18 19

20

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offers another explanation: an ‘allusion to the ocellated feathers of the peacocks’ in the foreground. Richard S. Field, ‘Gauguin: An Exhibition’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, xix/4, September–October 1988, pp. 129–38 (135). Ibid. Loize 1966, p. 22, Cf. Noa Noa, 2010, p. 18. Danielsson has noted that Matamoe was translated as Mort (Dead) in the catalogue of the exhibition of Tahitian works held in Paris in 1893 and suggested relating this fact to the motif of the cut-down tree about to be metamorphosed into flames (‘Gauguin’s Tahitian Titles’, p. 231; Exposition d’œuvres récentes de Paul Gauguin, Galeries Durand-Ruel, 16 rue Laffitte, Paris, November 1893, p. 17, no. 2). Paul Gauguin, ‘Notes sur l’art à l’Exposition Universelle’, Le Moderniste Illustré, 4 and 11 July 1889, cited in ‘Quand Gauguin se faisait critique d’art: L’exposition de 1889’, Le Figaro, 9 May 1952, p. 9 (Writings of a Savage, p. 30). Fereshteh Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse, and Kandinsky, PhD thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1988 (New York and London, 1991), p. 95. Cf. Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, Paul Gauguin: Pages from the Pacific, exh. cat., Auckland City Art Gallery (1995), p. 14. Letter of 8 October 1888 (Merlhès 1984, p. 249). Diverses choses, added to f. 138 r [paginated 3–4] (Writings of a Savage, pp. 144–5). Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art, p. 96. Persian carpet, probably Kashan, Mobilier National, reproduced in Revue des arts décoratifs in 1883–4 (Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art, illus. 25). Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers have related this drawing to the head of one of the carved lions placed in front of the Cambodian pavilion during the Universal Exhibition of 1889 (‘Le Kampong et la pagode: Gauguin à l’Exposition Universelle de 1889’, in Gauguin: Actes du colloque Gauguin, Musée d’Orsay, 11–13 janvier 1989 (Paris, 1991), pp. 101–42 [113], and again in Greub (ed., op. cit., p. 70). Bodelsen p. 186. Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art, pp. 105–6; Gray 73. Letter of late November or early December 1884 (Merlhès 1984, p. 77). Ibid., p. 88. Cf. Gray p. 52. This exhibition included a Maya inscription from Palenque and tablets from Easter Island. On ‘multi-stability’, see in particular Groupe Mu (Francis Edeline, JeanMarie Klinkenberg, Philippe Minguet), Traité du signe visuel: Pour une rhétorique de l’image (Paris, 1992), pp. 176–85; and W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago

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and London, 1995), pp. 45–57. 33 A. Jarry, op. cit., pp. 171, 1096. 34 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 194. Cf. Mitchell, Picture Theory, pp. 54–5; D. Gamboni, ‘Voir double’, pp. xvi–xvii. 35 Gamboni, Potential Images, passim; Gamboni, ‘Parsifal/Druidess: Unfolding a Lithographic Metamorphosis by Odilon Redon’, The Art Bulletin, lxxxix/4, December 2007, pp. 766–96. 36 Jean Loize, ‘Un inédit de Gauguin’, Nouvelles Littéraires, 7 May 1953 (partly translated in Writings of a Savage, pp. 38–40; J.-K. Huysmans, L’Art moderne: Certains [1883; 1889] (Paris, 1975), pp. 379–92, 433–40. 37 André Mellerio, Odilon Redon (Paris, 1913, reprint New York, 1968), no. 63. 38 Redon, À soi-même, p. 100. 39 Gauguin, ‘À ma fille Aline, ce cahier est dédié’, note 1. Cf. dw, p. 538. 40 A. Mellerio, op. cit., nos 54–59; J.-K. Huysmans, ‘Le Nouvel album d’Odilon Redon’, La Revue Indépendante, February 1885, pp. 291–6. Cf. D. Gamboni, The Brush and the Pen, pp. 133–52. 41 Joly-Segalen, p.57. 42 Ancien culte mahorie, f. 10 v [paginated 20]; J.-A. Moerenhout, Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan, contenant des documens nouveaux sur la géographie physique et politique, la langue, la littérature, la religion, les mœurs, les usages et les coutumes de leurs habitans; et des considér ations générales sur leur commerce, leur histoire et leur gouvernement, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1837), vol. i, p. 459. On the relationship between Gauguin and Moerenhout’s texts, see René Huygue, ed., Ancien culte mahorie [1951] (Paris, 2001), pp. 26–30, 34–5. 43 Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, ‘Kunsten at finde ting. Om Gauguin og l’objet trouvé’, in Meddelelser fra Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 1990–1994, vols xlvi–l (Copenhagen, 1994), pp. 147–69; Fonsmark, ‘Gauguin Creates his World: The Object in a World of Myth and Dream’, in Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth and Dream, exh. cat., Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome (Milan, 2007), pp. 35–47. 44 dw p. 271 (no. 217). 45 dw 218. 46 Cf. Gamboni, Potential Images, pp. 145–8. The expression ‘rights of the imagination’ comes from an anonymous article, ‘Le Cas de Richard Mutt’, Mercure de France, 16 June 1918, attributed to Apollinaire and reprinted by Pierre Caizergues in Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Échos et anecdotes inédits’, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, 6, 1981, pp. 12–15. 47 Cf. Filiz Eda Burhan, Visions and Visionaries: Nineteenth Century Psychological Theory, the Occult Sciences and the Formation of the

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References, pages 52–62

48 49

50 51 52 53 54

55

56

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57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64 65

Symbolist Aesthetic in France, PhD thesis, Princeton University (Ann Arbor, mi, 1979), pp. 57–171; Gamboni, Potential Images, pp. 183–6. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [1841] (Boston, 1907), pp. 146–50. Georges Guéroult, ‘Du rôle du mouvement des yeux dans les émotions esthétiques’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, June 1881, pp. 535–42, and July 1881, pp. 82–90 (85). Paul Souriau, Théorie de l’invention (Paris, 1881), pp. 86–7. Gabriel Séailles, Essai sur le génie dans l’art [1883] (Paris, 1902), p. 156. Ibid., p. 79. Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, De l’intelligence [1870] (Paris, 1895), vol. i, pp. 12–13; On Intelligence, trans. T. D. Haye (London, 1871), p. 224. L.-F.-Alfred Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves: Études psychologiques sur ces phénomènes et les divers états qui s’y rattachent suivies de recherches sur le développement de l’instinct et de l’intelligence dans leurs rapports avec le phénomène du sommeil (Paris, 1862), pp. 78–9. August Strindberg, ‘Du hasard dans la production artistique’, Revue des revues, xi, 15 November 1894, pp. 265–70. Strindberg, ‘The New Arts! Or the Role of Chance in Artistic Production’, in Strindberg, Selected Essays, ed. M. Robinson (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 105–6. Félix Fénéon, ‘Les Impressionnistes’, La Vogue, 13–20 June 1886, pp. 261–75; see Ruth Berson, ed., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886, Documentation, vol. i: Reviews (San Francisco, 1996), pp. 441–5 (442). Avant et après, p. 181. Cf. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 100. Jacques Boucher de Perthes, Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes: Mémoire sur l’industrie primitive et les arts à leur origine (Paris, 1847), vol. i. Cf. Marc Groenen, Pour une histoire de la préhistoire: Le Paléolithique (Grenoble, 1994), pp. 240–46, and for example the account of Isaië Dharvent, Premiers essais de sculpture de l’homme préhistorique (1902) by Alexander F. Chamberlain in American Anthropologist, n.s., iv, 1902, pp. 523–4. A. Thieullen, ‘Deuxième étude sur les pierres figures à retouches intentionnelles à l’époque du creusement des vallées quaternaires’, Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, ii/2, 1901, pp. 166–88. Tito Vignoli, Mito e scienza: Saggio (Milan, 1879), p. 249. Tito Vignoli, Myth and Science: An Essay (New York, 1882), p. 284. Ibid., pp. 88–91. Tito Vignola, Della legge fondamentale dell’intelligenza nel mondo animale. Saggio di psicologia comparata (Milan, 1877). Vignoli, Myth and Science, p. 290 Ibid., p. 108. Cf. Verdier 1986, p. 283–4. Ibid.; Merlhès 1984, p. xiii. Cf. also H. R. Rookmaker, op. cit., p. 140.

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66 Lettres à André Fontainas, p. 25–6; Avant et après, p. 195. 67 Quoted by V. Merlhès in Gauguin, ‘À ma fille Aline, ce cahier est dédié’, p. 61. 68 Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, trans. F. C. Conybeare (New Haven, ct, 1912), ii.22, pp. 174–7, available at www.livius.org. 69 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and trans. C. Grayson (London, 1972), p. 121. 70 Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. Francis Rigaud (London, 1835), p. 89, available online at www.openlibrary.org. 71 Philippe Morel, Les Grotesques: Les Figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris, 1997), pp. 80–83, 111–12. 72 G. B. Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna, 1587), quoted in Morel, Grotesques, p. 38. 73 E. Tardieu, op. cit. (Writings of a Savage, p. 46); letter of 23 or 24 August 1888 (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 668). 74 Ernst Haeckel, Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (Leipzig, 1874); on Haeckel’s antecedents, in particular Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, see Paul Mengal, ed., Histoire du concept de récapitulation (Paris, 1993). 75 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, ed. Charvet (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 398. 76 Cf. dw pp. 562–6. For relative exceptions, see David Sweetman, Paul Gauguin: A Life (New York, 1995), pp. 22–7; Druick and Zegers, pp. 23–8; and the film by Waldemar Januszczak, Gauguin: The Full Story, bbc4/zcz Films, 2003. 77 Avant et après, pp. 120–23 (Intimate Journals, p. 65). 78 Huysmans, L’Art moderne, p. 228. 79 Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, in, 2010). 80 Cf. Antonio San Cristóbal Sebastián, Arquitectura planiforme y textilográfica virreinal de Arequipa, ed. Ricardo Cruz Cuentas and Julio César Aspilcueta (Arequipa, 1997). Druick and Zegers have reproduced one of the grotesque heads decorating the facade of the Echenique house where the Gauguins stayed during their visit to Lima (p. 26, illus. 30). 81 Sold at Sotheby’s (London), 7 December 1966, under the title Paysage en Bretagne (Landscape in Brittany), no. 71. 82 Redon, À soi-même, p. 10 (text written in 1898 and completed in 1909). 83 Reproduced in Gamboni, Potential Images, p. 157, illus. 130. 84 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. H. M. Chevalier [1942] (New York, 1993), p. 37. 85 Dario Gamboni, ‘Fiction et vérité: Un souvenir d’enfance d’Odilon

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References, pages 63–86

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89 90 91 92 93 94

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95 96

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Redon partagé par d’autres artistes’, Genesis, 24, 2004, pp. 70–88, and ‘Dalí, souvenirs d’enfance, perception imaginative et publications pour la jeunesse’, in Astrid Ruffa, Philippe Kaenel and Danielle Chaperon, eds, Salvador Dalí à la croisée des savoirs (Paris, 2007), pp. 206–21. R. Brettell and A.-B. Fonsmark, op. cit.; Richard R. Brettell, ‘Gauguin versus Pissarro’, lecture at the conference ‘Impressionnisme(s): Nouveaux chantiers, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 10–12 December 2009. See dw 72 and pp. 81–2 on the house. An unpublished text dating from 1884 on the same phenomenon: ‘When by moonlight you have before you a sight that is very difficult to explain, its shapes ill-defined, your sensations either of fear [or] melancholy or any wholly different impression, do not arise in response to [the question] ‘why’, and you . . . [happen not to] flee, [even though the situation] is not [susceptible to a reasoned] explanation. [This would point to the fact that,] in general, mystery begins where poetry is born’; my thanks to Victor Merlhès for providing me with the original passage, published in English translation by H. Dorra (op. cit., p. 27). Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves, pp. 78–9. Cf. Jacqueline Carroy and Nathalie Richard, Alfred Maury, érudit et rêveur: Les Sciences de l’homme au milieu du xixe siècle (Rennes, 2007). dw 84. Merlhès 1984, p. 21. dw 88 and cf. pp. 51–3. Gray 54, Bodelsen 37. In the absence of titles transmitted by Gauguin or for which there is consensus among the various catalogues of his ceramics, I have chosen titles sufficiently descriptive to identify the work, but not excessively long, avoiding incorrect interpretations and without straying too far from those commonly used; the same goes for other works without titles. Bodelsen p. 73. I have not been able to verify the presence of a face in the mirror. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Freud, Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. J. Strachey, Pelican Freud Library vol. xiv (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 347, 362. Laurence Madeline, Ultra-sauvage: Gauguin sculpteur (Paris, 2002), pp. 89–91; letter of 20 June 1887 (Merlhès 1984, p. 155). See Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (London, 1926), and The Primitive Mentality (London, 1923), both trans. Lilian Ada (Lilian A. Clare). Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de saint Antoine [1874] (Paris, 1967), p. 190. This use is very widespread among the Polynesian mythologies that interested Gauguin; see E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion,

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Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 34 (Honolulu, 1927), p. 19. 101 Haruko Hirota, ‘La Sculpture de Paul Gauguin dans son contexte (1877–1906)’ suivi du ‘catalogue de l’œuvre’, PhD thesis, Paris i Panthéon Sorbonne, pp. 157–8. 102 Cf. Merlhès 1984, pp. 440–41. 103 dw, p. 319; see in particular the print ‘Sara yashiki’ (‘The Dish Mansion’) from the series Hyaku monogatari (One Hundred Stories), 1830. 104 See D. Gamboni, Potential Images, p. 41, and ‘The Underground and the Virgin of Guadalupe: Contexts for La Virgen del Metro, Mexico City, 1997–2007’, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 95, Autumn 2009, pp. 119–53 (131–2). 105 Bodelsen, p. 95; the observation is cited by Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark in Catalogue Gauguin Ceramics Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen, 1996), p. 50. The vase appears in the picture Bouquet and Ceramic on a Sideboard (dw 239) dated 1886, but was probably added later (ibid.). 106 J. Golte, op. cit., especially pp. 131–50. On the ethnological and historical status of the term Moche or mochica, see Jeffrey Quilter, ‘Moche: Archaeology, Ethnicity, Identity’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines, xxxix/2, 2010, pp. 225–41. 107 Dario Gamboni, ‘Anthropomorphism’, The Art Bulletin, cxiv/1, March 2012, pp. 20–22.

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two: Dreams and Visions 1 See Stefanie Heraeus, Traumvorstellung und Bildidee. Surreale Strategien in der französischen Graphik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1998); ibid., ‘Artists and the Dream in Nineteenth-century Paris: Towards a Prehistory of Surrealism’, History Workshop Journal, 48, 1999, pp. 153–68. 2 Cf. Heraeus, Traumvorstellung und Bildidee, in particular pp. 28–31, 104–7, 148. 3 dw 22. Cf. also R. Brettell and A.-B. Fonsmark, op. cit., p. 42. 4 These two works belong to the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Charles F. Stuckey has compared the form of the base of Tête de Jean Gauguin to a broken eggshell (S. Eisenman, ed., op. cit., p. 166). 5 Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, ‘A New Gauguin: Bust of Jean Gauguin’, Ordrupgaard Focus 01, Copenhagen, 2005, pp. 4–10 (6). 6 See dw pp. 575–98. Emil lived in Denmark from 1880 with a friend of Mette’s, Karen Lehmann. Gauguin left Copenhagen for France in October 1885 with Clovis; Mette came to Paris to fetch him in April 1887. 7 A. Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves, pp. 377–85. 8 Cf. dw pp. 86–7, 128–9, 171–2.

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References, pages 86–99

9 Robert W. Edis, Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (London, 1881), quoted in ‘Wallpapers for Children’, Victoria & Albert Museum, www.vam.ac.uk. 10 See in particular C. Stuckey, op. cit., pp. 137–41; he speaks of ‘dreamscapes and mindscapes’; Merlhès 1984, p. 232. 11 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight (New York, 2009), p. 170. 12 Letter of 8 October 1888 to É. Schuffenecker (Merlhès 1984, p. 249). 13 Letter of 14 January 1885 to É. Schuffenecker (ibid., p. 88). 14 Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves, p. 378. 15 Ibid., pp. 56–102. 16 D’Hervey de Saint-Denys, Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger: Observations pratiques [1867] (Île Saint-Denis, 1995), p. 231; the original edition did not carry the author’s name. 17 Ibid., p. 230. 18 Mikael Wivel, Ordrupgaard: Selected Works (Copenhagen, 1993), quoted in Anja Petz, notice ‘Paul Gauguin, Die kleine Träumerin’, in Innenleben – Die Kunst des Interieurs, exh. cat., Staedelsches Kunstinstitut and Staedelsche Galerie, Frankfurt (1998), pp. 233–4. 19 H. Dorra, op. cit., p. 22. 20 Letter of 29 January 1887 to Ferdinand Loyen du Puigaudeau (Merlhès 1989, p. 32). 21 D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, xxxiv/2, 1953, pp. 89–97 (90), available online at www.mit.edu. 22 Dorra thinks that it is a ‘fur hand puppet, perhaps in the shape of a rabbit, lying on doll sheets, its head resting on a child’s orange wooden clog’ and imagines that ‘Five high-value spots on the surface may represent small tears in the fur’ (op. cit, p. 23). However, the spots seem too regular to be tears. 23 dw 60, 92, 164; cf. ibid., p. 67. 24 André Fontainas, Notes et scolies, unedited notes, pp. 124–5, 24 February 1895, quoted in Laurent Houssais, ‘André Fontainas (1865–1948), critique et historien de l’art’, PhD thesis, Université Blaise-Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand ii, Aubière (2003), p. 422. AnneBirgitte Fonsmark compares the child and the tine to ‘two equal containers (Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth, p. 37), each of which conceals unknown contents’ and one could extend this metaphor by reference to communicating vessels. 25 Hippolyte Bernheim, ‘La Suggestion dans l’état hypnotique et l’état de veille’, Revue médicale de l’Est, 1883, quoted in H. Bernheim, Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothérapie. Études nouvelles (Paris, 1891), pp. 22–3.

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26 A. Aurier, op. cit. Cf. Dario Gamboni, ‘Le “symbolisme en peinture” et la littérature’, Revue de l’art, 96, 1992, pp. 13–23; James Kearns, Symbolist Landscapes: The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and his Circle (London, 1989), pp. 1–52. 27 dw p. 475. 28 Merlhès 1984, p. 232. 29 Cf. dw p. 472. The identification of the priest with Gauguin and the Breton women at the extreme left with Madeleine Bernard was first proposed by Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes, PhD thesis, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1969 (New York and London, 1985), p. 31. 30 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development [1883] (London and New York, 1907), p. 69. 31 See for example Alfred Maury, ‘Les Mystiques extatiques et stigmatisées’, Annales médico-psychologiques, 1835, pp. 181–252; Alexandre Brière de Boismont, Des hallucinations, ou histoire raisonnée des apparitions, des visions, des songes, de l’extase, du magnétisme et du somnambulisme (Paris, 1845). 32 Cf. dw pp. 475–6; B. Thomson, op. cit., pp. 68–70. 33 Guy de Maupassant, ‘Le Pays des Korrigans’, Le Gaulois, 10 December 1880 (quoted in dw p. 365). 34 Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Munich, 1919). 35 Ernest Renan, Recollections of my Youth (translator not named) (London, 1897), p. 154, available at www.openlibrary.org. 36 Letter of late February or early March 1888 (Merlhès 1984, p. 172). On the use of jute canvas, see in particular Druick and Zegers p. 355. 37 Mark Roskill, Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Impressionist Circle (Greenwich, ct, 1970), pp. 104–5. 38 Merlhès 1984, p. 232. 39 Yvonne Thirion, ‘L’Influence de l’estampe japonaise dans l’œuvre de Gauguin’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., 47, January–April 1956, pp. 95–114. 40 On the verso of the folio, an Étude de tête de saule / Study of a Willow Head shows a still more explicit eye at the join of the branch with the trunk (reproduced in Jean-Marie Cusinberche, Gauguin e I suoi amici pittori in Bretagna: Pont-Aven e Le Pouldu, exh. cat., Centro SaintBénin, Aoste, Milan (1993). 41 See the photo of a similar configuration in Dario Gamboni, The Listening Eye: Taking Notes after Gauguin / Das hörende Auge: Aufzeichnungen nach Gauguin, Documenta 13, Kassel (Ostfildern, 2011), p. 19. 42 Henri Focillon, Hokusai [1914, 1924] (Lyon, 2005), p. 114. 43 J. Kearns, op. cit., p. 7. 44 Letter of c. 20 October 1889 (Cooper pp. 274–5). 45 Gauguin also drew eyes on the inside of the loops of a knot in ribbon

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in his Maquette d’assiette décorative: Les Folies de l’amour (1890), reproduced in Ronald Pickvance, The Drawings of Paul Gauguin (Feltham, 1970), pl. 47. Maurice Barrès, ‘Les Filles de Bretagne’, Le Voltaire, 16 August 1886. J. Kearns, op. cit., pp. 7–8. On Dürer, see Karl Möseneder, ‘Blickende Dinge. Anthropomorphes bei Albrecht Dürer’, Pantheon, xliv, 1986, pp. 15–23; F. Thürlemann, Dürers doppelter Blick, op. cit. Letter of 8 December 1892 to Mette (Malingue pp. 239–42); letter of late December 1892 to Monfreid (Joly-Segalen, pp. 61–3); ‘La Genèse d’un tableau’, in Cahier pour Aline; Loize 1966, p. 38; Gauguin and Morice pp. 133–5. A number of these texts have been assembled by Jean-Paul Bouillon in an appendix to his study ‘Descriptions de Gauguin, 1888–1893’, in Anne-Lise Desmas, ed., La Description de l’œuvre d’art: Du modèle classique aux variations contemporaines, actes du colloque organisé par Olivier Bonfait (Paris, 2004), pp. 251–72 (268–70). Teha‘amana is called Tehamana in Gauguin’s first manuscript and Téhura in the version ‘corrected’ by Charles Morice. Letter of 8 December 1892 to Mette (Malingue, p. 240). Ibid., p. 242. Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves, p. 66. Cahier pour Aline (J.-P. Bouillon, op. cit., p. 269). Henri Dorra sees in this motif a sinister allusion to a hook baited with plumes (p. 22); this reading is unconvincing. See Claire Frèche-Thory, notice for Manaò tupapaú in Paris 1989, no. 154, p. 281. D’Hervey de Saint-Denys, op. cit., p. 230. Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves, p. 65. T. Vignoli, op. cit., p. 270. Edward Burnett Tylor’s theory of animism, quoted by Vignoli (ibid., pp. 14–16), ascribed the origins of ‘primitive’ religious belief to dreams and death. S. Mallarmé, op. cit., pp. 50–53 [1867] (Mallarmé, Collected Poems, pp. 40–41). A. Jarry, op. cit., pp. 254–5. Cahier pour Aline (J.-P. Bouillon, op. cit., p. 269). J. Loize, ‘Quand Gauguin se faisait critique d’art’ (Writings of a Savage, 30). For an example of a pillar, see Jean-Marc Pambrun, ed., No hea mai matou? D’où venons-nous? Destins d’objets polynésiens, exh. cat., Musée de Tahiti et des Îles – Te Fare Mahana, n.d. [2007], p. 22. Tiki is the Marquesan form of the Tahitian word ti‘i and is preferred to it in this book as the more common of the two. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 25. Malingue, p. 240.

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66 H. Millaud, op. cit. 67 Malingue pp. 267–8. According to Danielsson, this characteristic is exaggerated in Gauguin’s titles by the omission of particles; this prevents the identification of subject and object (op. cit., pp. 29–231). 68 The catalogue of the 1893 exhibition also translates Manaò tupapaú as The Spirit Watches (Exposition d’œuvres récentes de Paul Gauguin, op. cit., no. 9). Danielsson, for whom this title consists of ‘two roots without agreement’, deems the second meaning proposed by Gauguin grammatically impossible because the Tahitians have a separate word for ‘watch/stay awake’ (op. cit., p. 231); in my view, he has failed to grasp that the world veiller is only a way of formulating the relationship of thought/belief directed from the tu¯ pa¯pa‘u towards the mortal woman. 69 The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York, 1968), p. 49. 70 A. Jarry, op. cit., p. 794. 71 See Catherine Stehlin, ‘Jarry, le cours Bergson et la philosophie’, Europe, lix/623–24, March–April 1981, pp. 34–51 (46–7). 72 See Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed: An Interpretation of Gauguin’s Polynesian Symbolism, PhD thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1975 (Ann Arbor, mi, 1983), pp. 73–5. 73 Ancien culte mahorie, f. 16 v [paginated 32]. This interpretation derives mainly from Moerenhout but is also found in Craighill Hardy, who summarizes it thus: ‘The Polynesian dualism placed on the positive side nature superior, the sacred and divine, the psychic, superior power (mana), the male principle, light, life, occult knowledge, the east and day (ao), and the strong, right side of man; while on the negative side were included nature inferior, the common and the unsacred, the physical, passive, receptive female principle, darkness, destructive influences and death, ignorance, the west and night (po), and the left or weak side’ (Polynesian Religion, p. 37). 74 Paul Valéry, ‘Leçon inaugurale du cours de poétique du Collège de France’ [1937], in Variétés V (Paris, 1945), pp. 295–322 (300). 75 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, in Tales, Poems, Essays (London and Glasgow, 1952), pp. 503–13; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘La Genèse d’un poème’, in Œuvres en prose, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 1951), pp. 979–97. 76 Cahier pour Aline (J.-P. Bouillon, op. cit., p. 269). 77 See Gauguin, Racontars de rapin; D. Gamboni, The Brush and the Pen, pp. 315–20; Victor Merlhès, ‘Art de Papou & Chant de rossignoou: La Lutte pour les peintres’, in Racontars de Rapin: Fac-similé du manuscrit de Paul Gauguin (Taravao, 1994), pp. 1–117. 78 Loize 1966, p. 38. 79 Gauguin and Morice pp. 134–5 (Noa Noa, 1985, p. 35).

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References, pages 113–31

80 Loize 1966, p. 24 (Noa Noa, 2010, p. 24; 1981, p. 13). 81 Marcel Giry, ‘Une source inédite d’un tableau de Gauguin’, Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de l’art français [1970], 1972, pp. 181–7. 82 André Fontainas, ‘Revue du mois: Art moderne’, Mercure de France, 29 January 1899, pp. 235–42, quoted in Lettres à André Fontainas, pp. 41–8. 83 Letter of March 1899 to Fontainas, in ibid., pp. 14–15. 84 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 85 Wayne V. Andersen, ‘Gauguin and a Peruvian Mummy’, The Burlington Magazine, cix/1769, April 1967, pp. 615–19. 86 Ovid, Metamorphoses, viii, 162–6, trans. Samuel Croxwall, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Sir Samuel Garth [1717] (Ware, 1998), p. 248. 87 Dictionnaire en ligne de l’Académie tahitienne – Fare Vana‘a, www.farevanaa.pf/dictionnaire.php, which on this subject refers to H. J. Davies, A Tahitian and English Dictionary . . . (Tahiti, 1851). Danielsson confines the meaning of this term to ‘nightmare’ and criticizes Gauguin’s use of it (p. 233, no. 74). 88 See Bronwen Nicholson et al., Gauguin and Maori Art (Birkenhead, Auckland, 1995), pp. 63–6, and Bronwen Nicholson’s contribution to S. Greub, op. cit., pp. 261–2. 89 J. Teilhet-Fisk had also spotted this face, in which she perceived a Gauguin self-portrait ‘with dream images at the back of his head’ (p. 120). 90 Letter of 12 March 1897 (Joly-Segalen, p. 102). 91 Field p. 41. 92 T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, op. cit., pp. 35–6. H. R. Rookmaker noticed the coincidence and the fact that Taine had cited this passage in his L’Idéalisme anglais, étude sur Carlyle (Paris, 1864), p. 233, translating it as Mais d’où venons-nous? O Dieu, où allons-nous? 93 Souriau, Théorie de l’invention, pp. 137–8. 94 Paul Chabaneix, Le Subconscient chez les artistes, les savants et les écrivains (Paris, 1897), pp. 93–108. 95 Letter of 16 August 1898 (Lettres d’Odilon Redon, 1878–1916, Paris and Brussels, 1923, p. 33). 96 Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten [1869] (Berlin, 1874), p. 239. 97 See Jacqueline Carroy, ‘Écrire et analyser les rêves avec Maury et Freud’, in J. Carroy and N. Richard, op. cit., pp. 105–13 (127). 98 Cf. Sarah Kofmann, L’Enfance de l’art: Une interprétation de l’esthétique freudienne (Paris, 1970). 99 Charles Morice, ‘L’Hommage à Goya’, La Petite Tribune Républicaine, 2 April 1885.

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three: You Are What You See 1 Loize, ‘Un inédit de Gauguin’ (Writings of a Savage, pp. 38–40). 2 Avant et après, pp. 64–5. (I assume that the café is called Le Grand 9 as illustrated in the drawing; the pun would appeal to Gauguin since the name could mean The Big 9 or Le Grand [Café] Neuf, the Big New [Café]. Cf. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 31, for a slightly different interpretation. Translator’s note.) 3 Cf. Puvis de Chavannes, 1824–1898, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (1976), no. 131. Included in the Puvis de Chavannes exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1887, the picture was criticised as ‘primitive’ and ‘archaic’ and associated with Symbolism; the figure was copied by Redon (Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint et dessiné, vol. iv, text and research by MarieChristine Decroocq (Paris, [1998]), no. 2250). 4 Letter of June 1892 to Monfreid (Joly-Segalen, p. 57). 5 J. Dolent, Monstres, p. 196. Cf. Pierre Pinchat, Jean Dolent, 1835–1909: Écrivain, critique d’art et collectionneur, PhD thesis, Paris i Sorbonne, 2007 (Rennes, 2010), pp. 122–4. 6 Cf. Paris 1989, no. 211. 7 See Martin Kemp, ‘“Ogni dipintore dipinge se”: A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo’s Art Theory?’, in C. H. Clough, ed., Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller (New York, 1976), pp. 311–23; Frank Zöllner, ‘“Ogni Pittore Dipinge Sé”: Leonardo da Vinci and “Automimesis”’, in Matthias Winner, ed., Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk. Internationales Symposium der Biblioteca Hertziana Rom 1989 (Weinheim, 1992), pp. 137–49. 8 See Wildenstein 2011, pp. 486–8 (no. 310) and pp. 612–13, for the chronology of Gauguin’s stays in Le Pouldu. 9 Ibid., p. 487. On the Japonisme of the composition, see Vojtech JiratWasiutynski, Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism, PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1975 (New York and London, 1978), pp. 81–2. 10 Cf. D. Gamboni, Potential Images, pp. 45–6; J.-H. Martin, ed., pp. 185–91. 11 Reproduced in Les Devinettes d’Épinal, album no. 1, Épinal (n.d. [1983]), n.p. 12 Ernst Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations, trans. C. M. Williams [German edn 1886] (Chicago, 1897), p. 92, available at www.openlibrary.org. 13 Cf. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament Illustrated by Examples from Various Styles of Ornament [1856] (Paris, 2001), p. 17 (figure ‘Plaited Straw from the Sandwich Islands’ in the commentary on plates i–iii, ‘Ornaments of Savage Tribes’). 14 Merlhès 1984, p. 211, and the reproduction of the photo p. 215.

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15 Druick and Zegers, p. 236. The authors of the technical study of the pictures included in this work infer that Van Gogh chose jute for this portrait because that material had, in his eyes, come to seem emblematic of Gauguin (ibid., p. 364). 16 Cf. Merlhès 1984, pp. 247, 232, 247; Paris 1989, p. 72; dw pp. 615–16; Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letters 704 and 717. 17 The scientific examination (description of the canvas and stretcher, x-ray, and photography in direct light, infra-red, raking light, ultraviolet fluorescence and infrared reflectography was conducted in 2006 by the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France at my request, passed on by the Director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Béatrice Salmon (dossier c2rmf 61071) and I should like to offer them my sincere thanks. 18 dw, p. 487. The ‘painters’ walk’ was created by the Clohars-Carnoët municipality with the support of the European Union, the Regional Council of Brittany and the General Council of Finistère. On the identification of the sites painted by Gauguin at Le Pouldu, see also Wayne V. Andersen, ‘Gauguin’s Motifs from Le Pouldu – Preliminary Report’, The Burlington Magazine, September 1970, pp. 615–19. 19 T. Vignoli, op. cit., p. 275. 20 Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer [1866], ed. Yves Gohin (Paris, 1980), pp. 33–4 21 Armand Seguin, ‘Paul Gauguin’, L’Occident, 16–18, April–May 1903, pp. 158–67, 230–39, 298–305 (166). 22 See W. Andersen, ‘Gauguin’s Motifs from Le Pouldu’, illus. 72; dw 303. Gauguin enhanced the rocks’ analogy with faces by exaggerating the big ‘nose’ of the first and lending a mouth to the second. 23 A. Seguin, op. cit., p. 231. For Ko¯rin, see for example the screen Rough Waves (c. 1704–9, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), where the spume evokes a dragon; for Hokusai, the print Mount Fuji Seen from the Sea (1834, in the series One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji), in which it becomes birds. 24 See, for example, dw 2011, nos 246, 252, 274. 25 Dorra spotted these aspects, which he describes as ‘a malevolent dolphin’s head and a disquieting skeletal human face’, in which he perceives an evocation of ‘fear itself’; similarly, in the reflections of Aha oe feii? (1892, Pushkin Museum, Moscow), he sees ‘an incongruous black arabesque – turning into a malevolent lizard-inspired monster of Gauguin’s invention . . . an intriguing cryptogram of jealousy’. 26 B. Danielsson, op. cit., p. 230 no. 7. 27 The two women, one seated on the ground and the other leaping into the water, echo the contrast in Deux baigneuses / Two Women Bathers (1886–7, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires); Gauguin created many variations on this theme, in which the ‘undine’ represents

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the pole of life, and particularly sexual life. See H. Dorra, op. cit., pp. 62–4, 93–5, 100–102; D. Gamboni, notices Vahine no te miti and Dos bañistas. Gamboni, The Listening Eye, pp. 10–13. Paul Gauguin, Carnet de croquis, texts by Raymond Cogniat and John Rewald (New York, 1952), p. 25. dw p. 433. Crussard dates La Rivière blanche to around June, given the blooms on the brambles and tamarinds, and places Pêcheurs et baigneurs sur l’Aven later (but before Above the Abyss) because of the new experiments with space that it exhibits. Voyeurism is implicit in Auti te pape. Relative to the erotic dimension of White River, I note that the back of the canvas was used around September 1888 for the portrait Madeleine Bernard (dw 305), whom Gauguin desired and to whom he lent slanting eyes and pointed ears. See Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: Vite de’ Pittori Bolognesi [1678], ed. Giampietro Zanotti (Bologna, 1841), vol. i, p. 335; Focillon, Hokusai, p. 114. Cf. Merlhès 1989, p. 228; dw 200, pp. 186, 591, 617. The Seaside at Palavas is generally interpreted as a self-portrait but might represent Bruyas (conversation with Michel Hilaire, Paris, 21 March 2011); Palavas lies south of Montpellier. See Wolfgang Drost, ‘Über Baudelaires Affinitäten zur deutschen Kunst und Ästhetik’, in Bernd Kortländer and Hans T. Siepe, eds, Baudelaire und Deutschland / Deutschland und Baudelaire (Tübingen, 2005), pp. 127–50 (141–2). Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich. Naturwirklichkeit und Kunstwahrheit (Munich, 2000), p. 127; he writes that if one turns the picture upside down, ‘the negative form of the opening is transformed into a positive one, that of a bizarre mountain peak’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Gesang der Geister über den Wassern’, in Goethe, Goethes Werke, vol. i, ed. Erich Trunz [1948] (Wegner, 1969), pp. 143, 534–5. Translation here by A. S. Kline, available at www.poetryintranslation.com. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods [1854] (New York, 1991), p. 151. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. J. McGowan (Oxford, 1993), pp. 32–5. Ibid., pp. 696, 668. Cf. C. Baudelaire, Œuvres posthumes et correspondances inédites (Paris, 1887). Ibid., p. 696. The first note in Mon cœur mis à nu / My Heart Laid Bare also offers a striking parallel to the twofold movement of individu ation and deindividuation of the figure of the artist relative to the bottom of the ocean in Above the Abyss: ‘Of the vaporization and the centralization of the Ego. Everything depends on that’ (ibid., p. 676;

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Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. C. Isherwood (Mineola, ny, 2006), p. 63). Reproduced in Gamboni, Potential Images, p. 233. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. ii, p. 598 (L’Art philosophique, c. 1858–1860, published posthumously in 1869); Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. J. Mayne (London, 2006), p. 205. Notably Lao Tzu (Laozi), Tao Te Ching, Book 1, ch. 11. See, for example, the parallel translations available at www.bu.edu. Cf. Avant et après, pp. 24, 158–9 (Gauguin’s Intimate Diaries, pp. 10ff, 85ff); Merlhès 1989, pp. 211–12; dw pp. 617–18; Druick and Zegers pp. 257–60, 265–6. F. Fénéon, ‘Calendrier de décembre 1887’, in Fénéon, Œuvres plus que complètes, p. 91. Druick and Zegers pp. 87–8. Dorra compared the vase represented in Still-life with Laval’s Profile to the ‘headgear of medieval court jesters’ and adds that ‘the piece of clay that extends from the surface is a human tongue, pulled out as if to hurl vehement, sarcastic invectives’ (pp. 43–4). Van Gogh alludes to the metamorphosis of caterpillar into butterfly in a letter to Emile Bernard and wonders ‘roughly what I am the larva of myself’ (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 633, 27 June 1888). On Gauguin’s access to Van Gogh’s letters to Bernard and their impact on him, see Druick and Zegers, pp. 133ff. Manuscript included in Diverses choses, f. 153 v ff. Many parts of it reappear in L’Esprit moderne et le catholicisme (1897–1902); cf. Verdier 1986. Ibid., f. 154 r–157 r. Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion, Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 251–60, 255, 259. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900] (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 524–7; Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology [1909], trans. G. C. Richter and J. Smith Ely (New York, 1914); S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1915–17] (Harmondsworth), pp. 194ff (with a reference to Rank p. 202); ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ [1922], in S. Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. xviii: Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Works, trans. and ed. J. Strachey in collaboration with A. Freud (London, 1955), pp. 212–13, available at www.clas.ufl.edu (University of Florida). My thanks to Ilse Grubrich-Simitis and Klaus Herding for drawing my attention to these texts. See Kornfeld 48, Field 66 and 67. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p. 253.

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56 Hesiod, Theogony, trans. D. Wender (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 29, ll. 188–206; Susan E. Bergh, ‘Death and Renewal in Moche Phallicspouted Vessels’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 24, 1993, pp. 78–94 (81–3). 57 Cf. dw pp. 568–74. 58 Mallarmé, Collected Poems, p. 25; quoted in Marcel Guérin, L’Œuvre gravé de Gauguin (Paris, 1927), no. 14. 59 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. ii, p. 667; Art in Paris, p. 201. 60 André Lhote, ‘De la nécessité des théories’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 1 December 1919, pp. 1002–13 (1003). See also Lhote’s ‘Réflexions sur le Salon d’automne’, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 December 1921, p. 760. My thanks to Jean-Roch Bouiller for pointing these passages out to me. 61 Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. ii, p. 627; Art in Paris, p. 162. 62 Merlhès 1984, p. 216; this is the letter quoted earlier in which Gauguin speaks of ‘our rutting and insatiable eyes’. (It should perhaps be noted here that the ‘phantom vessel’ (vaisseau fantôme) is the French title of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and a clear reference to that myth. Translator’s note.) 63 The comparison with a rhyton was suggested by Fabienne Lavenex and that with the horses from the Parthenon frieze by Richard Shiff. 64 dw 216; Sylvie Crussard suggests a doll of Chinese origin. 65 Avant et après, p. 27 (Writings of a Savage, p. 127). 66 See Racontars de rapin, pp. 53–8; Avant et après, pp. 81, 199 (Intimate Diaries, pp. 42, 112; Writings of a Savage, p. 220). 67 Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres (Paris, 1960), pp. 128–31; ‘The Drunken Ship’, trans. A. S. Kline, at www.poetryintranslaton.com. 68 Lettres de Paul Gauguin à Émile Bernard, 1888–1891 (Geneva, 1954), p. 83 (Malingue p. 174, in a slightly different transcription). 69 See dw p. 488 (dw 310). 70 Cf. ibid., pp. 612–15; the expressions quoted are from various sources. 71 J.-H. Martin, op. cit., p. 206. My thanks to Jean-Hubert Martin for drawing this picture to my attention. 72 Paris 1989 no. 97. 73 This aspect was discovered by Sadao Fujihara and I should like to thank him for pointing it out to me (in conversation, Kyoto, 6 July 2009). 74 See, for exemple, Maxime Maufra, Les Trois falaises (1894, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper; reproduced in L’Aventure de Pont-Aven et Gauguin, exh. cat., Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper (Milan, 2003), no. 82), and the drawing Falaises, Saint-Jean-du-Doigt (1894, reproduced in Władysława Jaworska, Gauguin et l’école de Pont-Aven, trans. S. Laks, Paris and Neuchâtel, 1971, p. 194); Charles Filiger, Paysage du Pouldu (c. 1890, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, reproduced in D. Gamboni, Potential

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Images, p. 98), and Paysage rocheux (c. 1891, Musée de Pont-Aven). 75 Richard Kendall, Degas Landscapes (New Haven, ct, and London, 1993), pp. 218–19, 227–8, 242–3; R. Kendall, ‘“A Little Mystery, Some Vagueness, Some Fantasy . . .”: Degas’ Anthropomorphic Landscapes’, Apollo, 139, February 1994, pp. 39–45; D. Gamboni, Potential Images, pp. 108–10; J.-H. Martin, pp. 210–11. 76 Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 649. 77 Ibid., Letter 665. 78 Letter of the last third of August 1888 (Merlhès 1984, p. 216). 79 Druick and Zegers, especially p. 133. 80 First quarter of the 14th century, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (reproduced in J.-H. Martin, op. cit., pp. 52–3, no. 30). On anthropomorphization in knotty trees in the landscapes drawn in pen by Van Gogh in March and April 1884 at Nuenen, see Sjraar van Heugten, Les Dessins de Van Gogh: Les Chefs-d’œuvre (Amsterdam and Brussels, 2005), pp. 57–61. 81 Merlhès 1984, p. 284. 82 Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 656. 83 See especially Evert van Uitert, Vincent Van Gogh in Creative Competition: Four Essays from Simiolus (Zutphen, 1983). 84 Merlhès 1989, p. 237 (Van Gogh on Gauguin); Diverses choses, f. 135 r [paginated 261] (Gauguin on Van Gogh). 85 Letter of 21 October (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 709). 86 Cf. Druick and Zegers pp. 220, 236; W 312; Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letters 722, 723. 87 Emile Bernard, Autoportrait dédicacé à Vincent Van Gogh (1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam); see for example Druick and Zegers, pp. 147–5. 88 Druick and Zegers also date this picture to around 1 December (ibid., pp. 233–43). The title appears in a letter of the third week of December from Gauguin to Theo (Merlhès 1984, p. 302). 89 Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski observes that the practice of posing a bouquet on a seat was typical of Gauguin and not of Van Gogh, but explains this unexpected choice by the fact that Van Gogh was then painting his own symbolic self-portrait in the form of a straw-seated chair, Van Gogh’s Chair (National Gallery, London) (‘Painting from Nature versus Painting from Memory’, in Cornelia Peres, Michael Hoyle and Louis van Tilborgh, eds, A Closer Look: Technical and Art-Historical Studies on Works by Van Gogh and Gauguin (Zwolle, [1991]), pp. 90–111 [97]). 90 This significant detail was spotted by Shigemi Inaga (‘Van Gogh’s Japan and Gauguin’s Tahiti Reconsidered’, in Ideal Places in History – East and West (Kyoto, 1995), pp. 153–78 [159]), and by Jirat-Wasiutynski (‘Painting from Nature . . .’, p. 101), who draws no conclusion from

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the fact, and, less clearly, by Druick and Zegers (p. 240). 91 This aspect was noted by Sylvie Crussard, who also sees ‘just below it, in the left-hand roundel, an imploring, naïve little face [that] seems to evoke Van Gogh’s lacerated soul, aspiring to escape the confinement overtly inscribed in his features’ (dw p. 544). Van Gogh had already made two studies of cut sunflowers during the summer of 1887, which he had given to Gauguin in exchange for the Martinican picture Riverside (ibid., pp. 342–4, 544). 92 See dw, pp. 542–7 (dw 326); Druick and Zegers, pp. 236–43. 93 Avant et après, p. 23. Cf. Gauguin’s Intimate Diaries, p. 11. 94 Letter of c. 9 January 1889 (Cooper pp. 251–2). Cf. dw p. 544. 95 Tournesols / Sunflowers (1888, Seiji Togo Memorial Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art, Tokyo). See Druick and Zegers, p. 240, and on the debates about the authenticity of this picture, Louis van Tilborgh and Ella Hendriks, ‘The Tokyo Sunflowers: A Genuine Repetition by Van Gogh or a Schuffenecker Forgery?’, Van Gogh Museum Journal 2001, pp. 17–44. 96 Druick and Zegers, p. 139. 97 Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 741. 98 Richard Nicolaus Roland Holst, cover of Tentoonstelling der Nagelaten Werken van Vincent Van Gogh, exh. cat., Kunstzaal Panorama, Amsterdam (1892). 99 Jean Moréas, ‘Manifeste du symbolisme’, Le Figaro, 18 September 1886, literary supplement, pp. 1–2; René Ghil, Traité du verbe, avec avant-dire de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris, 1886), pp. 5–7. 100 Druick and Zegers, pp. 139, 209–10. 101 Ibid., p. 142; Henry Cochin, ‘Boccace d’après ses œuvres et les témoignages contemporains’, La Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 July 1888, pp. 373–415. 102 Letter of 5 July to Theo (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 636). 103 Letter of 26 September to Theo (ibid., Letter 689). Druick and Zegers wrongly identify these oleanders with the main spherical bush (p. 142). Van Gogh had used the motif of the oleander shoots as an expression of vitality and contrasted it with his own fears of creative impotence (ibid., pp. 126–8, 165, 203, 217–18). 104 Carlyle, Sartor resartus, p. 64. 105 Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 689. 106 Ibid. 107 See the excellent analysis by Druick and Zegers, pp. 202–3. 108 Letter of c. 5 October 1888 (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 698). 109 Druick and Zegers p. 202; Vincent Van Gogh, L’Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) (1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). 110 Letter of 12 November 1888 (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 720).

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111 Letter of 11 or 12 November 1888 (ibid., Letter 719). 112 Ibid., Letter 723. 113 The presence of these anthropomorphic elements has elicited a number of contradictory observations and interpretations. Ronald Pickvance, for example, believes that their non-appearance in the engraved version of the composition (Kornfeld 9) argues against ‘those who believe that Gauguin’s features may be seen in the foreground bush in the painting’ (Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994, p. 36), while Richard Field felt that the same bush ‘unmistakingly hides a face with Gauguin’s features’ (Gauguin: An Exhibition, op. cit., p. 134). On the basis of a scientific examination of the picture, Druick and Zegers have confirmed the intentional nature of the reddish eye-motif (in which they perceive an eye-flower) but think that ‘the image of an entire face may in part be fostered by a chance or Rorschach-like reading of indeterminate form in these complex layers’ (p. 301, n. 264). There is no need to accept the hypothesis of a self-portrait but it seems clear to me that Gauguin sought precisely to suggest the face while leaving the responsibility for its perception to the spectator. 114 Letter of c. 5 October 1888 (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 698). 115 Diverses choses, f. 113b–114t [paginated 220–21]. The quotation comes from Achille Piron’s anonymous publication Eugène Delacroix, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris, 1865); the (slightly different text) by Delacroix dates from 1854 and can be found in Eugène Delacroix, Journal, ed. Michèle Hannoosh (Paris, 2009), vol. ii, p. 1757. 116 Druick and Zegers think that, after Gauguin’s departure, Van Gogh was reconciled with his own views and continued their dialogue in the form of an internal and pictorial monologue (pp. 283–90, 302–8). 117 Kornfeld 9; cf. above the opposite interpretation of this absence given by R. Pickvance in Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, p. 36.

four: Matter and Material 1 Paul Gauguin, Carnet de Bretagne, Taravao, n.d. [2002]; P. Gauguin, Carnet de croquis, texts by Raymond Cogniat and John Rewald (New York, 1952), with transcription pp. 57–64 (60); partial transcription Writings of a Savage, pp. 8–11 (this passage is not included). 2 Merlhès 1984, p. 256; Malingue p. 193. 3 Avant et après, p. 195 (cf. Intimate Diaries, p. 109). 4 J.-A. Moerenhout, p. 420; Ancien culte mahorie, f. 5 r [paginated 9] (with formaient partie instead of faisaient partie and a capital for Divinité). 5 Moerenhout, pp. 427–9; Ancien culte mahorie, f. 7 r [paginated 13].

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6 Gauguin et Morice 1901, pp. 183–4 (cf. Noa Noa, 1985, p. 49). On the status of this version of Noa Noa relative to others, see Cécile Thézelais, ‘Charles Morice (1860–1919) et les arts: “Entre le rêve et l’action”’, PhD thesis, Université Paris i Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2009. The passage is prefigured in Ancien culte mahorie, f. 16 v–17 r [paginated 32–3]. Craighill Handy also saw in the cosmogenesis an ‘illustration of the principle of evolution in Polynesian thought’ (Polynesian Religion, pp. 20–21). 7 Ibid. On dualism, see Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 313. Carlyle had similarly written that ‘the Universe is but one vast symbol of God’ (Sartor Resartus, p. 152). Cf. Noa Noa, 1985, pp. 48–9 (the second part of the translation has been slightly changed. Translator’s note). 8 Ibid., pp. 173, 183, 185 (Noa Noa, 1985, pp. 40, 49–50. There the English text reads ‘philosophical intention’ for pressentiment philosophique). 9 Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris, 1864), pp. 421–2, quoted in Jean-Paul Bouillon, ‘Denis, Taine, Spencer: les origines positivistes du mouvement nabi’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art français, 1999, pp. 291–308 (300); History of English Literature, trans. H. Van Laun, New York (1885), p. 514, available online at archive.org. 10 Diverses choses, f. 159 r–159 v. 11 Verdier 1986, p. 301. 12 Ibid., pp. 301–2, with a reference to Pierre Flourens, Expériences sur le système nerveux (Paris, 1825). On this point, Dorra assumes a theosophical influence, notably that of theosophy’s founder Helena Blavatsky (op. cit., p. 34). 13 Diverses choses, f. 136 v, Writings of a Savage, p. 140. 14 Merlhès 1984, p. 284. 15 Carol Christensen, ‘The Painting Materials and Technique of Gauguin’, Conservation Research, Studies in the History of Art, 41, Monograph Series ii (Washington, dc, 1993), pp. 63–104; Kristin Hoermann Lister, Cornelia Peres and Inge Fiedler, ‘Tracing an Interaction: Supporting Evidence, Experimental Grounds’, in Druick and Zegers, pp. 354–69. 16 Cf. Merlhès 1974, p. 172. 17 Letter of 14 July 1897 (Joly-Segalen p. 109; cf. also ibid., p. 141). 18 Letter of May 1899 (ibid., p. 144). 19 Gauguin, ‘Armand Seguin’, p. 224. 20 Undated letter [late 1890?], J. F. Willumsens Museum, Frederikssund, Gamle Samling no. 585 (partial and incorrect transcription in Writings of a Savage, p. 44–5). Cf. also Cooper pp. 282–3. (‘Great intelligence’ here translates Gauguin’s more physical expression, grand cerveau: ‘big brain’. Translator’s note.)

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21 ‘Une lettre de Paul Gauguin: à propos de Sèvres et du dernier four’, Le Soir, 23 April 1895, p. 1 (Writings of a Savage, p. 106); letter of January 1901 to Monfreid (Joly-Segalen, p. 170). Cf. Bodelsen p. 212. 22 A. Aurier, p. 165 (1995, p. 38), Writings of a Savage, p. 107. 23 Cahier pour Aline. See also the following note on a folio of the Walter album: ‘Intelligence not technique – / Consult Edg Poë – ’ (rf30569.5v). (This translation follows Gauguin’s version of Poe rather than Poe’s English. Translator’s note.) 24 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James H. Harrison, vol. xvi, Marginalia – Eureka (New York, 1902), pp. 98–9; Edgar Poe, Contes grotesques, trans. E. Hennequin (Paris, 1882), pp. 212–13 (Gauguin does not respect Poe’s punctuation. Translator’s note). 25 Albert Jacquemart, Histoire de la céramique: Étude descriptive et raisonnée des poteries de tous les temps et de tous les peuples (Paris, 1873), p. 216 (the contemporary translation, History of the Ceramic Art: A Descriptive and Philosophical Study of the Pottery of All Ages and All Nations, trans. Mrs Bury Palliser, London, 1873, p. 193, is eccentric in this passage). 26 J. Golte, op. cit., p. 155. 27 Loize, ‘Quand Gauguin se faisait critique d’art’ (Writings of a Savage, p. 30). 28 Cooper, pp. 162–3. 29 Loize, ‘Quand Gauguin se faisait critique d’art’ (Writings of a Savage, p. 31). 30 Gray 66; Bodelsen 53 and cf. ibid., pp. 128–35. 31 Letter of June 1890 (Malingue, p. 194, with an error of transcription: céramique de gris [for grès]; cf. Lettres de Paul Gauguin à Émile Bernard, pp. 101–2). 32 Louis Gonse, ‘L’Art japonais et son influence sur le goût européen’, La Revue des arts décoratifs, April 1898, pp. 112–15, reproduced in Le Japonisme, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris; Musée National d’Art Occidental, Tokyo (Paris, 1998), pp. 138–9. 33 Jean-Paul Bouillon, Journal de l’art nouveau, 1870–1914 (Geneva, 1985), pp. 23ff; Günter Bandmann, ‘Der Wandel der Materialbewertung in der Kunsttheorie des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Helmut Koopmann and J. Adolf Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, eds, Beiträge zur Theorie der Künste im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 129–57; Dietmar Rübel, Monika Wagner and Vera Wolff, eds, Materialästhetik. Quellentexte zu Kunst, Design und Architektur (Berlin, 2005), entry ‘Materialstil, Materialstimmung, Materialgerechtigkeit’. 34 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art [1934] (New York, 1948), p. 72. 35 ‘Une lettre de Paul Gauguin’, op. cit. (Writings of a Savage, p. 106); F. Fénéon, ‘Calendrier de décembre 1887’, in Fénéon, Œuvres plus que

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complètes, p. 91. Gauguin reused the term géométrie gobine about Marquesan art in Avant et après (p. 73). For example, in the Vase décoré d’un buste de femme / Vase Decorated with Woman’s Bust [illus. 120], openings that have been blocked up and transformed into something like medallions. Carole Andréani, Les Céramiques de Gauguin (Paris, 2003), pp. 80, 123. Diverses choses, f. 162 r/v; Avant et après, pp. 49–51 (Gauguin’s Intimate Diaries, pp. 23–5: the expression ‘simulacrum of the Sabbath’ does not appear there). Victor Merlhès has suggested as the source of this anecdote the Chinese cloisonné enamel studio reconstituted by the sinologist and oneirologist D’Hervey de Saint-Denys in the retrospective exhibition of work and the anthropological sciences that formed part of the Exposition Universelle of 1889 (E. Zafran, op. cit., p. 86). Marcel Poulet, La Grande aventure des grès flammés, 1900–1950 (Merry la Vallée, 2008) (Les Cahiers du grès de Puisaye, no. 4). Avant et après, p. 204 (Intimate Diaries, p. 115). Élie de Mont, ‘L’Exposition du boulevard des Capucines’, La Civilisation, 21 April 1881, quoted in Paris 1989, p. 54. Letter of 22 January 1887 (Camille Pissarro, Lettres à son fils Lucien, Paris [1950], pp. 131–2). Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind [1962] (1966), pp. 19ff. Joly-Segalen, p. 57. There is a resemblance with the Asmat shields of Papua; on etua motifs, see K. von den Steinen, op. cit., particularly vol. i, pp. 148–56. R. Field, ‘Gauguin: An Exhibition’, p. 133. Gray 47, 80, 90, 104–6, 117. Guillaume Le Bronnec, ‘La Vie de Gauguin aux Marquises’, Bulletin de la Société d’études océaniennes, March 1954, reprinted in Prather and Stuckey, pp. 308–31 (330–31). Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, David J. Getsy and Matthew Withey, The Cult of the Statuette in Late Victorian Britain: From the Collections of Leeds Museums & Galleries (Leeds, 2000), p. 2. L. Madeline, op. cit., pp. 209–16; Philippe Dagen, Le Peintre, le poète, le sauvage: Les Voies du primitivisme dans l’art français (Paris, 1998), pp. 129ff; Jonathan Wood, ‘Ornaments, Talismans and Toys: The Hand-held Sculptures of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’, in Jonathan Black et al., Blasting the Future! Vorticism in Britain, 1910–1920 (London and New York, 2004), pp. 41–8. Gray 4; Paris 1989, no. 6. Camille Mauclair, Mallarmé chez lui (Paris, 1935), pp. 18–19, quoted in Merlhès, ‘Art de Papou & chant de rossignoou’, p. 91. In a letter of 8 December 1893, Geneviève, Mallarmé’s daughter, assured Mauclair that she had not ‘found any likeness to the Gauguin log’ (ibid.). On the iconic level, we should remember what Druick and Zeger state

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in relation to the vase Le Faune / The Faun (1886–7, known from a sketch in the Briant album, see Bodelsen p. 202), that, in Greek mythology, ‘fauns, satyrs and the god Pan embody the self-perpetuating vitality of nature in its elementary form and symbolize free sexuality and unbridled lust’ (p. 61). See the remarks by Charles F. Stuckey about two other Gauguin wooden sculptures in Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth, pp. 208, 232. Joly-Segalen, p. 67. Victor Merlhès, De Bretagne en Polynésie: Paul Gauguin, pages inédites (Tahiti, 1995), p. 84. Male figure (erect) carved in oak, c. 600 bc, found in 1880 at Viborg (Jutland-Central) with the fragments of at least four pots, National museet, Copenhagen. A. Gell, op. cit., p. 29, with a reference to Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture [1871] (London, 1875), p. 216. Cf. Ramón Pané, Relation de l’histoire ancienne des Indiens (Paris, 1992). A. Jarry, op. cit., p. 683. Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien did not appear in its entirety until 1911 but chapter xvii, ‘De l’île fragrante’ / ‘From the Fragrant Island’, was one of the chapters published in May 1898 in Mercure de France (ibid., pp. 1217–18). See, for example, Pambrun, ed., op. cit., pp. 16–23; Steven Hooper, ‘La Collecte comme iconoclasme: La London Missionary Society en Polynésie’, Gradhiva, 7, 2008, pp. 120–33. Cf. Gray 136; Paris 1989, no. 259; Suzanne Glover Lindsay, entry ‘Père Paillard’, in Ruth Butler and Suzanne Glover Lindsay, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art: Systematic Catalogue: European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century (Washington, dc, 2000), pp. 245–51 (especially p. 249); S. Greub, ed., op. cit., pp. 314–15. See Gray 135. Stella Kramrisch, Manifestations of Shiva, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1981, especially no. 1; see online catalogue of Philadelphia Museum of Art, www.philamuseum.org/collections. K. von den Steinen, op. cit., vol. i, p. 150. Gustave Flaubert, Par les champs et par les grèves, voyage en Bretagne, accompagné de mélanges et fragments inédits (Paris, 1886), p. 103. See for example Paul Sébillot, ‘Tradition de la Haute Bretagne’, in Les Littératures populaires (Paris, 1882), vol. ix, Part 1, pp. 3–64, to which Gray refers (p. 44) on this subject. See Stephen Hooper, ‘Embodying Divinity: The Life of A‘a’, in Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 116, 2007, pp. 131–79. The first reproduction of A‘a was on the cover of Missionary Sketches no. 24 in 1824. Ibid., pp. 167f and 173f. Ibid., p. 154f.

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69 Ibid., p. 151f. 70 K. von den Steinen, especially vol. ii, pp. 55–6, 265–89; A. Gell, op. cit., pp. 209–11; Stephen Hooper, Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (London, 2006), pp. 194–240; S. Hooper, ‘Embodying Divinity’, pp. 154ff. 71 See K. von den Steinen, vol. ii, pp. 167–72; Gray 125; Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Gauguin’, in William Rubin, ed., ‘Primitivism’ in 20th-century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York (Boston, 1984), vol. i, pp. 179–209 (195–9). On the evolution of Marquesan style in the twentieth century and especially in the 1890s, see S. Greub, ed., op. cit., pp. 123 and 322–34 (Carol S. Ivory, ‘Shifting Visions in Marquesan Art at the Turn of the Century’). 72 Avant et après, p. 73 (Gauguin’s Intimate Diaries, p. 37). 73 Mallarmé, Collected Poems, pp. 40–43. 74 Undated letter [late 1890?], J. F. Willumsens Museum, no. 585 (see also Gauguin’s Intimate Diaries, p. 28). Gauguin had already used this image when criticising the ‘quest for infinite detail’ in his pastiche Des théories du professeur Mani-Vehbbi-Zunbul-Zadi / Concerning the Theories of Professor Mani-Vehbbi-Zunbul-Zadi (see Prather and Stuckey, p. 58). 75 Letter of March 1898 (Joly-Segalen p. 121). 76 Z. Amishai-Maisels, op. cit., figs 96–7; D. Druick and P. Zegers, Paul Gauguin: Pages from the Pacific, op. cit., pp. 26–7; Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenthcentury Europe (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 266–71. 77 Drawing on a copy of Le Sourire (Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. rf28844), reproduced in Paris 1989, p. 365. 78 Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, ed., 1898: Le Balzac de Rodin, exh. cat., Musée Rodin, Paris, 1998, e.g. pp. 358–61. 79 Butler and Lindsay, pp. 243–4. 80 K. von den Steinen, see especially vol. i, p. 150, and vol. ii, p. 114. 81 Charles F. Stuckey, one of very few authors to note the presence of the third figure (though he does not perceive its sexual ambiguity), also interprets this position well: ‘the Mallarmé-Faun figure standing on a rock as he mounts a woman whose facial expression is anything but pleased’ (Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth, op. cit., p. 234). 82 Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London, 1997), pp. 91–147; Georges Wildenstein, ‘Le Premier séjour de Gauguin à Tahiti d’après le manuscrit Jénot (1891–1893)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., xlvii, January–April 1956, pp. 115–26 (117). 83 Loize 1966, pp. 27–8 (Noa Noa, 2010, pp. 29–32); Gauguin and Morice 1901, pp. 84–91 (Noa Noa, 1985, pp. 17–20). 84 Noa Noa, 2010, p. 34. On the propitiatory rites, see Hooper,

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‘Embodying Divinity’, op. cit., pp. 151, 159. Ziva Amishai-Maisels has suggested a source for this passage in a Buddhist text, the Dhammapada, published in 1878 in the French translation of Fernand Hû (op. cit., p. 408). See for example Walther Karl Zülch, Entstehung des Ohrmuschelstiles (Heidelberg, 1932); Martina Droth, ed., Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts, exh. cat., Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 2009); James Trilling, The Language of Ornament (London, 2001), pp. 19–20, 66–7, 204–5. Lars Olof Larsson, Von allen Seiten gleich schön. Studien zum Begriff der Vielansichtigkeit in der europäischen Plastik von der Renaissance bis zum Klassizismus (Stockholm, 1974). A.-B. Fonsmark, Catalogue Gauguin Ceramics, p. 21. Cf. also Haruko Hirota, ‘De la poterie à la sculpture: Aubé, Carriès et Gauguin’, Histoire de l’art, 50, June 2002, pp. 109–21 (116). Charles F. Stuckey compares Gauguin’s cylinders to Mesopotamian seals (Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth, p. 324). Barbara Braun, ‘Paul Gauguin’s Indian Identity: How Ancient Peruvian Pottery Inspired His Art’, Art History, ix/1, March 1986, pp. 36–53 (44); ibid., Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art (New York, 1993), pp. 65–6. This motif has also been compared to the statue of the Egyptian god Bes (Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. n437), a propitious divinity particularly dear to pregnant women, who wears a snake knotted below his navel as a belt (Barbara Landy, ‘Paul Gauguin: Symbols and Themes in His Pre-Tahitian Works’, ma thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1968, cited in Jirat-Wasiutynski, Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism, p. 135). See the online edition of Le Trésor de la langue française, at http://atilf.atilf.fr. Druick and Zegers, p. 89. A. Gell, pp. 232–58; Gell illustrates this suggestion with the work of Marcel Duchamp. dw 241; D. Gamboni, ‘Dos bañistas’, op. cit. Druick and Zegers find that the feminine figure represented on the Leda Vase resembles Gauguin’s daughter Aline and take incest to be among the taboos ‘unleashed’ by this work (p. 89). See especially H. Dorra, op. cit., pp. 62–4, 93–5, 100–102. B. Braun, ‘Paul Gauguin’s Indian Identity’, p. 44. Avant et après, pp. 154–5 (Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 83). dw p. 574; Druick and Zegers p. 28. A Maury collection appears neither in the list of the main foreign collections of Peruvian art included in Rogger Ravines, ed., Fuentes para la historia de la arqueología peruana, Boletin de Lima, xviii/105–106 (Lima, 2006), pp. 185–6,

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98 99

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109

nor in the provenances of the works in the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly. Flora Tristán, Pérégrinations d’une paria (1833–1834) [1838] (Paris, 1979), p. 323; Peregrinations of a Pariah, trans. Charles de Salis (London, 1986), p. 247. Max Radiguet, Souvenirs de l’Amérique espagnole: Chili, Pérou, Brésil (Paris, 1856), cited in R. Ravines, ed., op. cit., p. 159. B. Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World, p. 53. However, the catalogue of the sale of this collection does not include a single American piece (Catalogue des faïences anciennes des diverses fabriques Italiennes, Hispano-mauresques, Espagnoles, de Perse et de Rhodes, de Delft, de Nevers, de Rouen et autres. Porcelaines de la Chine et du Japon. Pièces d’échantillons, Composant la Collection de M. G. Arosa et dont la vente aura lieu Hôtel Drouot, salle no 3, Les Jeudi 21, Vendredi 22 et Samedi 23 Février 1878 à deux heures, Paris, 1878). A. Jacquemart, History of the Ceramic Art, p. 191. Natalia Majluf, ‘“Ce n’est pas le Pérou”, or, the Failure of Authenticity: Marginal Cosmopolitans at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855’, Critical Inquiry, 23, Summer 1997, pp. 868–93, referring to the principal critiques, reproductions and caricatures of the picture. J. Golte, op. cit., passim, especially pp. 20ff and 27ff. Gray 68, Bodelsen 51 (coll. part.); dw 297, 298. Carole Andréani describes this element as follows: ‘an organ that may be an arm, a masculine sex or a snake’ (op. cit., p. 132). Gray 21; Bodelsen 26 (inv. af14329 5). Bodelsen sees qualities in the ornaments surrounding the woman’s bust ‘possibly suggesting an orchestra’ (p. 17). We have seen that the two medallions mark two occluded openings. Charles F. Stuckey has recently proposed that this vase should be seen as ‘an opened cloth bag equipped with pulls with which to close it . . . two eyelets, from each of which emerge two slight laces tipped with little buttons’ (Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth, p. 190). Bodelsen p. 104 (Bodelsen 47; Gray 53). Ibid.; B. Braun, ‘Paul Gauguin’s Indian Identity’, pp. 44–6; B. Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World, op. cit., pp. 70–72. Inv. pp003439. A piece unknown to Gray or Bodelsen and represented on a folio of the Briant album (f. 21). See Dominique Morel, ‘Trois céramiques de Gauguin au Musée du Petit Palais’, La Revue du Louvre et des musées de France, 3, 1998, pp. 70–74. The caption to the Demmin plate identifies the objects thus: ‘Little jug with handle (apilotti), 17 centimetres tall, in blackish terracotta without cover, found in the valley of Mexico . . . Vase 16 centimetres tall, in black earth without cover, found at Tlaxcala’.

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References, pages 230–43

110 H. Hirota, ‘La Sculpture de Paul Gauguin dans son contexte’, op. cit.; H. Hirota, ‘La Sculpture en céramique de Gauguin: Sources et significations, Histoire de l’art, 15, October 1991, pp. 43–60; Druick and Zegers p. 88. 111 See, for example, the Exeter Puzzle Jug (c. 1300, Royal Albert Museum, Exeter), probably made in Saintonge. 112 S. Bergh, op. cit., p. 89. 113 See for example the Snake Jug (c. 1865, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, inv. 2004.122). 114 Avant et après, p. 88; Diverses choses, f. 119 r [paginated 231] (Writings of a Savage, p. 131). 115 Haruko Hirota has noted that ‘the ornaments in the form of water-lily leaves and symmetrically applied would represent eyes, suggesting a face on the side of the vase’, but did not point out the reversibility of this face (‘La Sculpture de Paul Gauguin dans son contexte’, p. 158). 116 See Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding, The Playful Eye (London, 1999), pp. 37–48; D. Gamboni, Potential Images, pp. 39, 45, 153–5; J.-H. Martin, ed., op. cit., pp. 74–5, 86–9, 194–5. 117 Edgar Degas, Têtes caricaturales réversibles, c. 1865–8, Carnet de croquis no. 21, f. 18 (Theodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas: A Catalogue of the Thirty-eight Notebooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale and Other Collections (Oxford, 1976), vol. i, pp. 107–9). 118 Ségolène Le Men, ‘Gravures, caricatures et images cachées: La Genèse du signe du roi en Poire’, Genesis, 24, 2004, pp. 42–69; Christine Van Schoonbeek, Les Portraits d’Ubu (Paris, 1997). 119 See Trésor de la langue française online; pointed out by Merlhès 1984, p. 447. 120 C. Blanc, op. cit., p. 295. 121 Avant et après, pp. 81, 199 (Gauguin’s Intimate Diaries, pp. 42, 112). 122 Diverses choses, f. 134 r [paginated 259]. 123 See notably Ulla Holmquist Pachas, Museo Larco: Trésors de l’ancien Pérou, trans. Carole Fraresso, Lima (?), p. 130; E. S. Craighill Handy, The Native Culture in the Marquesas, Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 9 (Honolulu, 1923), p. 230; E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 133; S. Hooper, ‘Embodying Divinity’, p. 173, with reference to W. Ellis, vol. i, pp. 524–5. 124 K. von den Steinen, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 95–8. 125 See among others J. Golte, op. cit., pp. 106–13; U. Holmquist Pachas, op. cit., p. 184; Steve Bourget, Sexe, mort et sacrifice dans la religion mochica, exh. cat., Musée du quai Branly, Paris (Paris, 2010), p. 46. 126 See in particular Druick and Zegers, p. 69. 127 Bodelsen, pp. 66 (no. 33) and 119. 128 C. Andréani, op. cit., p. 139 (Gray 69, Bodelsen 52) and reproduction p. 189; the face of the Triton resembles Gauguin’s. 129 On the reasons for this preference, see in particular Richard S. Field,

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130

131 132 133

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‘Gauguin’ (review of Kornfeld and R. Brettell et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin), Print Quarterly, vi/3, June 1989, pp. 197–204 (202). Daniel Arasse, ‘La Science divine de la peinture selon Léonard de Vinci’, in Philippe Morel, ed., L’Art de la Renaissance entre science et magie (Paris and Rome, 2006), pp. 343–56. On Gauguin’s engraving technique, see M. Guérin, op. cit., pp. 14–16; Richard S. Field, ‘Gauguin’s Noa Noa Suite’, The Burlington Magazine, cx/786, September 1968, pp. 500–511; Richard R. Brettell in Paris 1989, pp. 316–18. M. Guérin, op. cit., p. 15; Paris 1989, pp. 316–18. On this edition, see in particular M. Guérin, op. cit., pp. 89ff, and Kornfeld pp. 48–9. If we are to believe Morice, Gauguin approved of the formula by which the former summarized Poe’s conception of the relationship between artist and material during a discussion: ‘Nature is matter/ material, the mind is the womb’ (Charles Morice, Paul Gauguin [1919] (Paris, 1920), p. 56). József Rippl-Rónai, inscription on the back of an engraving cited by R. Brettell in Paris 1989, p. 317 and n. 15; J. Rippl-Rónai, ‘Emlekezesei’ [1911], in Prather and Stuckey, p. 230. Julien Leclercq, ‘Exposition Paul Gauguin’, Mercure de France, January 1895, quoted in Prather and Stuckey, pp. 245–7 (247). The authors of the Kornfeld catalogue assume that it is ‘probably maculature impression’ (17/i p. 76) but it is significant that Gauguin kept this proof, which subsequent entered Marcel Guérin’s collection. Prints made by rubbing were obtained from certain of Gauguin’s sculptures, notably by Monfreid (cf. Kornfeld, Supplement A, pp. 265–75). According to Guérin, Gauguin had already taken rubbings of the reliefs on the furniture made with Emile Bernard in 1888 (op. cit., p. xiii). See especially Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, ed., The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation (Bologna, 1998). The unexpected spelling mahna suggests to H. Millaud a possible play on the words mahana and mana (power, authority, influence) (op. cit., pp. 88–9). Kornfeld 21. Dorra compares this engraving with a preparatory drawing for Upaupa (1891, Israel Museum, Jerusalem), where the figure of an idol is placed at the centre of a circle of dancers and spectators; in the absence of this figure, the flame is, he believes, an incarnation of the deity (op. cit., p. 170). Stuckey relates the scene to the ‘indigenous custom of firewalking’ (Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth, no. 66 p. 276). The anonymous author of the Exposé de l’état actuel des missions évangéliques chez les peuples infidèles / Report on the Current State of Evangelical Missions among the Infidel Peoples wrote, for example: ‘The Gods . . . have fallen into the greatest discredit; the people no

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143 144

145 146

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148 149

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longer hesitate to call them evil spirits, while calling Jehovah the Good Spirit’ (Geneva, 1821), p. 303. Craighill Handy cites ‘gazing into a reflecting liquid or sacred fire’ among the traditional techniques of divination (Polynesian Religion, p. 165). Te faruru is generally translated by ‘Making Love’, which Danielsson explains as a meaning derived from fa‘aru¯ru¯, to tremble and make tremble (from a dance in which the body trembles) (op. cit., p. 233 no. 68). As an intransitive verb, fa‘aruru also means shelter oneself and to‘a fa‘aruru refers to a mass of coral surrounded by swell (Dictionnaire en ligne de l’Académie Tahitienne, with a reference to Davies, op. cit.); these senses and this situation can also be related to the couple folded together in Te faruru. Kornfeld 35; Paris 1989, no. 213, pp. 365–6. Dario Gamboni, ‘“Fabrication of Accidents”: Factura and Chance in Nineteenth-century Art’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 36, Autumn 1999, pp. 205–25; Gamboni, ‘Hasard, arts’, in Dictionnaire des idées (Paris), Notionnaire, ii, 2005, pp. 362–5; Gamboni, ‘Stumbling Over/Upon Art’, Cabinet, 19, Autumn 2005, pp. 58–61. Joly-Segalen, p. 203. On the origin and terminology of this procedure, see Field and R. Brettell in Paris 1989, pp. 432–8, 449–53, 459–61, 466–9. Field also speaks of ‘monotypes’ and Peter Zegers (quoted by Brettell) of ‘transfer drawings’. More recently, Marjorie Shelley has suggested seeing in the dessin-empreinte an adaptation of the use of carbon paper to make copies of letters: Colta Ives, Susan Alyson Stein, Charlotte Hale and Marjorie Shelley, Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, and London, 2002), pp. 213–15. Field pp. 24, 29. Matthias Schatz, Der Betrachter im Werk von Odilon Redon. Eine rezeptionsästhetische Studie (Hamburg, 1988), pp. 48, 52–3. Cf. D. Gamboni, Potential Images, pp. 204–5. See especially Field p. 29, and R. Brettell in Paris 1989, p. 433. The statue of Takai‘i [illus. 139] is represented on the folio of a sketchbook used by Gauguin in Auckland from 1895 to 1897 (private collection) but it seems probable that this was executed after a photo (see Merete Bodelsen, ‘Gauguin and the Marquesan God’, Gazette des Beaux-arts, March 1961, pp. 167–80). W 597; Paris 1989 no. 256; Field 104. V. Merlhès reproduced the monotype under the title L’Amazone / The Amazon (‘Art de Papou & chant de rossignoou’, pl. xxiii). See the notice by R. Brettell in Paris 1989, no. 271, pp. 461–5, with bibliographical references. Guillaume Le Bronnec described Ha‘apuani, whom he met in 1910 when he was around 30, as ‘destined to become Taua, a sort of priest of the ancient Marquesan customs’; he knew better

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than anyone else ‘the legends and ancient indigenous customs’ but was reduced by the missionaries and settlers to ‘master of ceremonies at the Hiva Ova festivities’ (Prather and Stuckey, p. 328). 154 See R. Brettell in Paris 1989, no. 280, p. 474. 155 June Hargrove, ‘Les Contes barbares de Paul Gauguin’, Revue de l’art, 169, 2010, pp. 25–37 (25).

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five: From Puppet to Idol 1 V.-L. Saulnier, ed., Fables mises en vers par Jean de La Fontaine (Paris, 1960), vol. ii, pp. 135–6 (Deuxième recueil de fables, 1678, ix, vi). Trans. Robert Thompson, see www.la-fontaine-ch-thierry.net. 2 Loize, ‘Un inédit de Gauguin’, excerpted in Writings of a Savage, pp. 38–9 (38). 3 Sotheby & Co., London, Catalogue of Impressionnist and Modern Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture . . ., 28 June 1961, 46, Jeune Tahitien; manuscript note in the copy of this catalogue in the collection of the Duveen Library, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, ma: ‘Seller – Unidentified Nun of the Dominican Order’; Gray 101; P. Pinchon, op. cit., p. 242. 4 W 385; cf. dw p. 570. 5 K. von den Steinen, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 116. 6 Renata and Luis Millones, Calendario tradicional peruano (Lima, 2003). 7 Psalms 115:5–8 (Vulgate 113:12–16). 8 Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean by Captain David Porter . . ., 1815, quoted in E. S. Craighill Handy, The Native Culture in the Marquesas, p. 166. 9 Letter of 19 February 1816 quoted in Missionary Sketches, vol. iii, 1818, p. 3 (in S. Hooper, ‘Embodying Divinity’, p. 137). The Exposé de l’état actuel des missions évangéliques chez les peuples infidèles of 1821 gives a noticeably different French version of this document: Pomare on that account sent his idols ‘so that the English could acquaint themselves with the Gods adored in Tahiti’ (op. cit., p. 307). 10 See Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific; an Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea (London and New York, 1922). 11 Gauguin and Morice pp. 138–41 (Noa Noa, 1985, pp. 35–8). The Mara‘a caves are known for an optical illusion that makes the back of the caves recede as one advances and were reputed to be ‘full of tupapa‘u’ (see Bjarne Kroepelien, Tuimata [1944], trans. J. Petersen, Tahiti, 2009). 12 Mercvre, ‘Les Livres, choses d’art, échos divers’, Mercure de France, ii /17, May 1891, pp. 308–20. 13 E. Tardieu interview (Writings of a Savage, pp. 108–11 [110]).

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References, pages 259–73

14 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., pp. 184–5. 15 Cahier pour Aline (cf. Writings of a Savage, p. 69); cf. Diverses choses, f. 115 r [paginated 223]. 16 Diverses choses, f. 107 r (Writings of a Savage, p. 127); rehearsed in Avant et après, p. 27 (cf. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 13). (Gauguin’s expression, ‘je me suis reculé bien loin’ [‘I have taken myself a long way back’] does not mention his ‘art’. In deference to the polyvalence of ‘hobby-horse’, it is here preferred to Wayne Andersen’s term ‘horsie’. Translator’s note.) 17 See the online edition of the Trésor de la langue française. This usage is attested from the 1830s on. 18 G. Séailles, op. cit., p. 79; Paul Souriau, La Suggestion dans l’art (Paris, 1893), p. 95. 19 Bruno Latour, Petite réflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches (Paris, 1996). 20 Avant et après, p. 52 (cf. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 26). 21 Albert Boime, Revelation of Modernism: Responses to Cultural Crises in Fin-de-siècle Painting (Columbia, mi, 2008), p. 212. 22 Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du xixe siècle, 15 vols (Paris, 1866–76), vol. i, p. 434. 23 Félix Fénéon, ‘M. Gauguin’, Le Chat Noir, 23 May 1891, reprinted in Fénéon, Œuvres plus que complètes, op. cit., pp. 192–3. ‘Monstrous fetishes . . .’: Jacquemart, History of the Ceramic Art, p. 190. 24 See especially J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., pp. 471–4; Hooper, ‘Embodying Divinity’, p. 140; S. Greub, ed., op. cit., p. 115. 25 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., p. 471. 26 Ibid., pp. 471–3, 479. 27 Philippe Peltier, ‘Gauguin, artiste ethnographe’, in Gauguin Tahiti: l’atelier des Tropiques, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Paris, 2003), pp. 22–41 (33). 28 J. Loize, ‘Quand Gauguin se faisait critique d’art’ (Writings of a Savage, p. 30); Diverses choses, f. 138 p. 3 (Writings of a Savage, p. 144); ibid., f. 129 r [paginated 249] and f. 138 p. 6, also Lettres à André Fontainas, pp. 13–14 (letter of March 1899); Delaroche, cf. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 19. 29 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., p. 473. Cf. for example the to‘os reproduced in Hooper, Pacific Encounters, pp. 177–8 (nos 130, 131, 133). 30 Hooper, ‘Embodying Divinity’, p. 165. 31 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., p. 421. 32 Merete Bodelsen, Gauguin’s Ceramics in Danish Collections (Copenhagen, 1960), p. 6; Bodelsen, p. 45. 33 Paris 1989, no. 54 p. 130. Cf. dw 311; letter from Vincent to Theo Van Gogh of 23 or 24 August 1888 (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 668).

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34 Kjeld Heltoft, Hans Christian Andersen as an Artist (Copenhagen, 1977); Beth Wagner Brust, The Amazing Paper Cuttings of Hans Christian Andersen (Boston, 1994); Friedrich Weltzien, Fleck – Das Bild der Selbsttätigkeit. Justinus Kerner und die Klecksografie als experimentelle Bildpraxis zwischen Ästhetik und Naturwissenschaft (Göttingen, 2011); Hermann Rorschach, Psychodiagnostik. Methodik und Ergebnisse eines wahrnehmungs-diagnostischen Experiments (Deutenlassen von Zufallsformen) [1921] (Bern, 1948); Dario Gamboni, ‘Un pli entre science et art: Hermann Rorschach et son test’, in Anne von der Heiden and Nina Zschocke, eds, Autorität des Wissens. Kunst- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte im Dialog (Zurich and Berlin, 2012, pp. 47–82). 35 Hans Christian Andersen, ‘Dance, Dance, Doll of Mine!’, at The Hans Christian Andersen Center, www.andersen.sdu.dk. 36 C. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. ii, p. 1159; The Painter of Modern Life, p. 8. 37 Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Elder Tree Mother’ and ‘What the Whole Family Said’, at The Hans Christian Andersen Center. 38 Hans Christian Andersen, ‘What the Whole Family Said’, at The Hans Christian Andersen Center. 39 Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep’, at The Hans Christian Andersen Center. 40 dw 171. 41 Merlhès 1984, p. 88. 42 Online edition of the Trésor de la langue française. Gauguin himself categorized his wood carvings as a ‘kind of savage knick-knack’ (letter of 31 March 1893 to Monfreid, Joly-Segalen p. 67). 43 dw 60; Fables mises en vers par Jean de La Fontaine, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 230–31 (Book 5, Fable ii). See hwww.la-fontaine-ch-thierry.net. 44 According to Crussard, the picture may date from the first months of 1882, dw 92; the couple’s fourth child, Jean-René, was born on 12 April of that year. 45 Reproduced in Merlhès 1984, p. 101. 46 dw p. 196 (dw 164); Crussard identifies the woman with the bun as the maid, Louise Jensen, and the children as Jean and Clovis. 47 On the horror that Danish reception rooms inspired in Gauguin, see his letter of late November or early December 1884 to Pissarro (Merlhès 1984, p. 76), and Avant et après, p. 185 (Writings of a Savage, pp. 242–3). 48 dw p. 309 (dw 239). 49 Letter sent 25 October 1888 (Merlhès 1984, p. 264); Musée du Louvre, Paris, Département des Arts Graphiques, Fonds du Musée d’Orsay, inv. rf30273,9. According to Bodelsen, the term rats à cornes was used of ‘curiosities’ made in the French North African colonies by

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References, pages 273–90

grafting tails onto the heads of living animals (p. 218, n. 96). 50 Letter of 11 or 12 November 1888 to Theo (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 719); Bodelsen pp. 154–5. 51 Cf. W 455; Paris 1989, no. 148. The title is translated as Terre délicieuse / Delightful Land in the 1893 catalogue (Exposition d’œuvres récentes de Paul Gauguin, op. cit., no. 16). 52 See for example le Portrait de jeune homme / Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1480–85, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden) reproduced and commented on in D. Gamboni, ‘Voir double’, p. xxiii. 53 Edmond Picard, ‘Le Fantastique réel’, in L’Art moderne (Brussels], vii/4, 23 January 1887, pp. 25–7; cf. Anne Pingeot and Robert Hooze, eds, Paris-Bruxelles Bruxelles-Paris: Réalisme, impressionnisme, symbolisme, Art nouveau. Les relations artistiques entre la France et la Belgique, 1848–1914, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Gand (Paris and Antwerp, 1997), pp. 320–28. 54 Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik. Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst [1906] (Leipzig and Hamburg, 1914), vol. i, p. 163. 55 Alfred Irving Hallowell, ‘Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View’ [1960], in Raymond D. Fogelson, ed., Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell (Chicago, il, 1976), pp. 357–90; I should like to thank Ruth Phillips for drawing this study to my attention. Cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies’, Common Knowledge, x, 2004, no. 3, pp. 463–84, Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris, 2009), and, for Oceania, E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, pp. 25–6. 56 A. I. Hallowell, op. cit., p. 363; the Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Society was founded in the eighteenth century, that is, during the period of contact with Europeans. 57 dw p. 294 (no. 234). On Maufra, see in particular W. Jaworska, op. cit., pp. 193–8. The rock on Bellangenet beach is not interpreted in cephalo morphic fashion in Tas de varech sur la plage au Pouldu / Pile of Varech on Le Pouldu Beach (1891, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes), but a cliff/ head can be seen in Les Trois falaises / The Three Cliffs (1894, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper); it is reproduced in L’Aventure de Pont-Aven et Gauguin, op. cit., no. 82. 58 René Sieffert, ‘Shinto¯’, in Encyclopædia Universalis, Corpus 20 (Paris, 1996), pp. 991–4. 59 A. Mellerio, op. cit., no. 74. See Douglas Druick, ed., Odilon Redon Prince of Dreams, 1840–1916, exh. cat, The Art Institute of Chicago, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and Royal Academy of Arts, London (New York, 1994), no. 87, notably pp. 165–6 and 188–9. 60 Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus [1863] (chap. 25), unknown translator, available at www.lexilogos.com.

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61 Avant et après, p. 86 (cf. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 45). 62 This legend has been interpreted as a dialogue by Robert Rey, who translates it with ‘What are you? I am a Breton woman / I am a Tahitian woman’ (Onze menus de Paul Gauguin: Menus propos de Robert Rey (Geneva, 1950), n.p., and by Suzanne Greub, who renders it ‘What! [Are] you Breton? / No, I [am] woman [of] Tahiti’ (op. cit., p. 24, with thanks to Carol Ivory et Tara Hiquily). It seems that we should attribute both lines to the woman on the left and understand her to say ‘What! Are you Breton? I am a woman of Tahiti’. 63 Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. R. Savage (Stanford, ct, 2010). 64 The terms here are borrowed from the Exposé de l’état actuel des missions évangéliques . . ., pp. 296–7. 65 According to Captain Gilbert Mair, who deposited this whakapakoko (sculpted figure) with Auckland Museum in 1890, it was carved by an anonymous sculptor, c. 1845, for a Catholic chapel in the Bay of Plenty and rejected by the Catholic priest; the New Zealand historian and ethnologist James Cowan has linked it to the Maori sculptor Patoromu Tamatea who, in 1890, carved for the consecration of the Catholic church of Ohinemutu (Rotorua) a Virgin and Child that was also rejected by the priest, after which Tamatea abjured Christianity. See http://tekakano.aucklandmuseum.com/objectdetail.asp?database= maori&objectid=86. 66 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., pp. 419–20; Ancien culte mahori, p. 9. 67 A. Seguin, op. cit., p. 231. 68 A.-B. Fonsmark, Catalogue Gauguin Ceramics, p. 5. 69 Jules Michelet, The Sea, unknown translator (New York, 1861), pp. 140–41, available at Internetarchive.org. Druick and Zegers relate Redon’s rocks/idols to this book (Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, p. 165). 70 A. Maury, Le Sommeil et les rêves, pp. 377–8. 71 Ibid., p. 376. (See chapter Two of this volume for the earlier connection.) 72 Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, pp. 18–19. 73 Ibid., pp. 133–4; Craighill Handy, The Native Culture in the Marquesas, p. 257. 74 Richard S. Field, Paul Gauguin: The Paintings of the First Voyage to Tahiti, PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1963 (New York and London, 1977), p. 130; Gray p. 44. 75 If it is authentic, as seems plausible, we can add the Headshaped Vase (n.d., private collection, included in an annex by Gray [A-10]) to this series. 76 The comparison is also found in Michelet, who writes about the Indian Gulfs: ‘There, the Sea is veritably a great artist. There it gives to the earth its most adorable forms, lovely, loving, and lovable. With her

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assiduous caresses, she rounds or slopes the shores, and gives it those maternal outlines, and I had almost said the visible tenderness of that feminine bosom on which the pleased child finds so softly safe a shelter, such warmth, such saving warmth, and rest.’ Michelet, The Sea, p. 127.

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six: Natura Naturans 1 Loize, ‘Un inédit de Gauguin’ (Writings of a Savage, p. 39). 2 Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics [1677], Part iv, Proposition iv, available at www.gutenberg.org. 3 Cahier pour Aline. 4 Loize 1966, p. 22 (Noa Noa, 2010, p. 18). 5 Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas [1896] (London, 1924), p. 186, Part ii, chap. 6. On divination in Polynesia, see E. S. Craighill Handy, The Native Culture in the Marquesas, p. 278, and E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 165. 6 Spinoza, Part 1, Proposition xxix, scholium; P. Houe, S. Hakon Rossel and G. Stockenström, eds, August Strindberg and the Other: New Critical Approaches (Amsterdam and New York, 2002), p. 89. 7 A. Delaroche, op. cit; Diverses choses, f. 129 v–130 r (Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 19). 8 Jan Assmann: Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, ma, 1997); T. Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 339 (Carlyle’s Summary, Lecture i). 9 Wilfrid de Fonvielle, Les Merveilles du monde invisible (Paris, 1866), pp. 188–9. 10 André Chevrillon, Dans l’Inde (Paris, 1891), p. 269 11 Verdier 1986, pp. 303 and 325 n. 16. Cf. Z. Amishai-Maisels, op. cit., pp. 432–3. 12 Ibid., p. 301. 13 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell [1907] (New York, 1911), p. 126, available at www.gutenberg.org. 14 Gauguin is alleged to have given the following explication of Where Do We Come From? to Henry Lemasson in 1898: ‘And in this terrestrial context, a statue symbolising the divinity inherent in humanity’ (‘Gauguin vu par un de ses contemporains à Tahiti’, Encyclopédie de la France et d’Outremer, February 1950, reprinted in Prather and Stuckey pp. 276–81 [279]). Craighill Handy similarly states that according to the Polynesian ‘idea of organic evolution’, ‘the appearance of man does not mark the end of the evolutionary process’ (Polynesian Religion, p. 21). 15 Brittany sketchbook (1884–8, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, inv. 1991.217.40.a). 16 See Le Carnet de Paul Gauguin, p. 104.

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17 Dorothy Menpes, Brittany (London, 1905), p. 141, quoted in J. Fell, op. cit., p. 47. 18 See on this subject Victor Merlhès in E. Zafran, ed., op. cit., p. 95. 19 dw 241, 320. Cf. Druick and Zegers p. 197. (The French titles suggests both ‘in heat’ and ‘In the heat of the day’. Translator’s note.) 20 Letter of early September 1889 (Malingue p. 167). On this symbolism, which is at least as European as it is ‘Indian’ (and perhaps more so), see Z. Amishai-Maisels, op. cit., p. 149. 21 dw p. 410. 22 dw 291, 295, 305 and 312, with thoughts about pointed ears on p. 413 and on slanting eyes on p. 495. 23 See also Gray pp. 80–83 (appendix ‘Gauguin’s Use of Animal Symbols’); Stephen F. Eisenman, ‘Identity and Non-Identity in Gauguin’s Te nave nave fenua’, in Aruna D’Souza, ed., Self and History: A Tribute to Linda Nochlin (London and New York, 2001), p. 96. 24 See Bodelsen p. 202; Druick and Zegers pp. 61–2. 25 Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, p. 508. 26 P. Gauguin, Avant et après, facsimile reproduction of the manuscript, p. 10; slightly modified transcription in Avant et après, p. 19. Intimate Journals, p. 8. (The quotation has been changed to give Nature its French gender. Translator’s note.) 27 Merlhès 1984, p. 170. 28 The metaphorical sense of ‘sensitive’ was used of Baudelaire by Verlaine (‘Charles Baudelaire’ [1865], in Baudelaire, Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. J. Borel (Paris, 1972, p. 600), for example, and occurs too in a letter of 16 May 1888 from Emile Bernard to his mother, in which he contrasts the ‘sensitive’ and the ‘brute’ and describes aesthetics as being a ‘corrupt sensitive, the flower that grows in the midst of dung and despite that exhales a virginal perfume’ (Laure Harscoët-Maire, ‘Lettres d’Émile Bernard (1888): À Saint-Briac’, Le Pays de Dinan, xvii, 1997, pp. 160–83 [169]). The literal sense of ‘sensitive’ is generally lost in translations of Gauguin’s text, which opt for the analogical meaning. 29 Diverses choses, f. 107 r (Writings of a Savage, p. 127). 30 Diverses choses, f. 167 v, copy of extracts from an article by Dr Léon Winiarski, ‘Morituri (essai sur le génie)’, La Revue blanche, xiv/3, 1897, pp. 104–12. 31 The 1893 catalogue translates the title by ‘Paroles du Diable’ / ‘Words of the Devil’ (Exposition d’œuvres récentes de Paul Gauguin, op. cit., no. 10). Danielsson shows how little he understands the picture by proposing to replace the title, which he finds illogical, with Parau no te varua ino, ‘Talk about the evil spirit’ (‘Gauguin’s Tahitian Titles’, p. 232 no. 47). 32 Wayne V. Andersen has described the two-part fruit as an ‘evil eye’ and suggested a phallic interpretation (confirmed by a later engraving,

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33 34

35 36 37

38 39

40 41

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42

43

44

Kornfeld 42) of the gnarl, which he mistakes for an outline of the coast (Gauguin’s Paradise Lost, London, 1971, p. 185). P. Gauguin, ‘Armand Seguin’, p. 223. dw 248. On human implication in plant sexuality, see S. Eisenman, ‘Identity and Non-Identity in Gauguin’s Te nave nave fenua’, in which the picture (illus. 152) is related to the artificial insemination of vanilla on Tahiti (p. 98). T. Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 152. Cahier pour Aline. Cf. also Diverses choses, f. 120 r [paginated 233]; Avant et après, p. 89. Undated letter of September 1890 (Roseline Bacou, ed., Lettres de Gauguin, Gide, Huysmans, Jammes, Mallarmé, Verhaeren . . . à Odilon Redon (Paris, 1960), pp. 193–4). Cf. André Mellerio, Odilon Redon (Paris, 1913, reprinted New York, 1968), no. 97. The expression ‘roots . . . sprouting again into blossom’ reinforces the interpretation that I have given of Stock-shaped Vase (illus. 35). Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa (1985), p. 48. Note that Armand Seguin compared these elements to Leonardo da Vinci’s use of imaginative perception: ‘Just as Leonardo da Vinci sought in marble a harmonious vein of form, he takes pleasure in following the undulation of the clouds that pursue one another in the sky and captures it with an elegant stroke. The sea gives him its embroidery of silver and its white ruff, which Moret would often redo later’ (op. cit., p. 231). Bachelard, Air and Dreams, p. 13. Ancien culte mahorie, f. 7 r [paginated 13]. Cf. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 118; J. Teilhet-Fisk, op. cit., pp. 57–60. It is worth remembering on this subject that gazing at a reflective liquid was one of the main traditional techniques of divination enumerated by Craigshill Handy (The Native Culture in the Marquesas, p. 278; Polynesian Religion, p. 165) and that Aphrodite – if the comparison between the woman with her feet in the water and Venus is relevant – was born according to Hesiod from the foam raised in the sea by the sex of Ouranos, thrown there by Cronos who had cut it off (Theogony, ll. 188–206). Stephen Eisenman has emphasized the stylistic contrast between this zone of relative ‘illusionism’ and the rest of the picture; he suggests that these abstractions of reflections should be seen as ‘a third term of representation between material and spiritual realms’ (Gauguin’s Skirt, p. 133). Alessandra Russo, ‘El renacimiento vegetal: Árboles de Jesé entre el Viejo Mundo y el Nuevo’, Anales del Instituto de investigaciones estéticas, 73, 1998, pp. 5–39 (10, 12–13), on a mural painting in the Red Temple at Cacaxtla (17th–18th century).

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45 Paul Sérusier, abc de la peinture suivi d’une correspondance inédite (Paris, 1950), p. 60. Field thinks that the discovery of Moerenhout’s book represented a turning point or even a break with the past for Gauguin (Paul Gauguin: The Paintings of the First Voyage to Tahiti, p. 75). 46 Malingue p. 236. 47 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., pp. 466–7; cf. Ancien culte mahorie, f. 11 v [paginated 22]. 48 Charles Morice, ‘Parahi te marae’, L’Image, 10, September 1897, pp. 37–40 (37), repeated in Gauguin and Morice pp. 203–16. In the catalogue of the 1893 exhibition, the title is translated as Là réside le temple / There the Temple Dwells (Exposition d’œuvres récentes de Paul Gauguin, no. 20). The fact that pa¯rahi is normally used about human beings was evidence, in Danielsson’s view, of Gauguin’s inadequate knowledge of Tahitian (‘Gauguin’s Tahitian Titles’, p. 232 no. 44). 49 Gauguin’s interest in the reliefs of Borobudur, in pictographs (including Maya ones) and (at least from 1895 on) in Maori meeting houses has already been mentioned. Craigshill Handy further points out that we know little about the provisional elements in Tahitian temples and cites a description dating from the first years of contact with Europeans, which refers to a sacrificial precinct of around 30 metres squared surrounded by a wooden fence interrupted on one side by a pile of stones crowned with carved planks representing the guardian ancestors of the marae (Polynesian Religion, p. 171). 50 J. Teilhet-Fisk, op. cit., pp. 61–2. 51 E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 176; ibid., The Native Culture in the Marquesas, p. 248. 52 Peltier, op. cit., p. 33. More recently, Carol Ivory has pointed out that the colour yellow was ‘symbolically related to sensuality and sexual attraction’ (op. cit., p. 118). 53 Charles F. Stuckey sees to the right of the seated figure ‘traces of what I take to be another figure, this one standing, observed from the back, with her hair hanging down on her bare shoulders’ and in the watercolour ‘a small corresponding female figure in a purple dress who seems to be worshipping the stone idol’ (in Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth, no. 71 p. 286). 54 It is possible, on the other hand, that the anthrotheomorphic mountain of Parahi te marae inspired the very similar profile that Rodolphe Rapetti has recently spotted in the advancing mountainside that borders the left side of Redon’s large panel Le Jour / Day (1910) at the abbaye de Fontfroide (R. Rapetti, ed., Odilon Redon – Prince du Rêve, exh. cat., Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (Paris [2011]), p. 85. Cf. ibid., pp. 328–9, for a comparison between the landscape sketched by Redon in his rediscovered pastel Hommage à Gauguin / Homage to

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55 56

57

58

59

60

61 62

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63

64 65

66 67 68 69

Gauguin (no. 122, c. 1903–4, private collection), and that of Hiva Oa described by Victor Ségalen in his 1904 article ‘Gauguin dans son dernier décor’ (Œuvres complètes, ed. Henry Bouillier, Paris, 1950, vol. i, pp. 287–91). Charles Morice, ‘Parahi te Marae’, L’Image, 10, September 1897, pp. 37–40 (38). Loize 1966, p. 22 (Noa Noa, 2010, p. 17. [The last two words ‘head. Sphinx’ of Griffin’s translation have been changed]). In this passage, the manuscript shows evidence of many hesitations (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Special Collections, 850041). Cf. Gauguin and Morice (p. 46 and p. 32) for an unfavourable comparison of the approaches to Tahiti with the bay of Rio de Janeiro and a definition of the island as ‘summit of a mountain submerged at the time of one of the ancient deluges’ (Noa Noa, 1983, p. 1). J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., p. 443. Field sees in this motif ‘an obvious vaginal symbol (Paul Gauguin: The Paintings of the First Voyage to Tahiti, p. 130). Elizabeth King et al., ‘Notes from the Field: Anthropomorphism’, The Art Bulletin, xciv/1, March 2012, pp. 11–31, including my own contribution, pp. 20–22. S. Bergh, op. cit., p. 86. Cf. A. Hallowell, op. cit.; E. Viveiros de Castro, op. cit.; J. Golte, op. cit., pp. 22–3; Carolyn Dean, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock (Durham, nc, 2010), passim. Diverses choses, f. 138, pp. 3–4 (Writings of a Savage, pp. 144); Moerenhout, op. cit., p. 421; Ancien culte mahorie, f. 16 r [paginated 31]. H. Millaud, op. cit., pp. 84–5; quoted in V. Merlhès, ‘Art de Papou & chant de rossignoou’, p. 109. I should like to thank Elizabeth Childs for drawing my attention to this tree/head (letter of 16 December 2003 to the author). J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., pp. 468–9. By contrast, Gauguin departs on one capital point from Moerenhout (and other authors): Moerenhout states categorically that ‘women could not enter any Marai’ (p. 469). See dw p. 333. Francis Hallé, In Praise of Plants (Portland, or, 2002), pp. 222, 268. The iconography of pre-Hispanic and colonial art alike is marked by contacts with the Amazon forest, as we see, for example, from the old sacristy of the Jesuit church in Arequipa. Letter of late November 1886 or early 1887 (Merlhès 1984, p. 143). Letter of 30 October (Merlhès 1995, p. 57). Alfred Jarry, ‘Les Monstres’, L’Ymagier, 2, January 1895, reprinted in Œuvres complètes, p. 972. Avant et après, pp. 196–7 (Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 110). Cf. H. Hirota, ‘De la poterie à la sculpture’, p. 115, on Gauguin’s and Carriès’

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predilection for the monstrous. Cf. Gauguin’s Intimate Diaries, p. 110. 70 Field 33. 71 Diverses choses, f. 166 r (Writings of a Savage, p. 152). See Genesis 1:22, 1:28, 9:1 and 9:7. 72 Paris 1989, no. 271, p. 484. 73 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., p. 472. Cf. Ancien culte mahorie, f. 23 v [paginated 44]. For James Cook’s information on the value attributed by Tahitians to red feathers, see Jean-Jo Scemla, Le Voyage en Polynésie: Anthologie des voyageurs occidentaux de Cook à Segalen (Paris, 1994), p. 181 (25 April 1774). 74 Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 131. On Amerindian and colonial usage of feathers and the role of their specific visual properties, see Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf et Diana Fane, eds, El vuelo de las imágenes: Arte plumario en México y Europa / Images Take Flight : Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, exh. cat., Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, 2011. 75 Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 178. 76 It is perhaps worth noting that in the poem that the picture inspired in him, Morice mentions ‘the flower of the oleanders’ (‘Parahi te Marae’, op. cit., p. 39); we have seen that Van Gogh in Arles associated the oleander with vitality and sexuality (illus. 87). 77 Field 73. See also Kornfeld 64 (title vignette for Le Sourire, 1900). 78 Gray 122; C. Ives et al., op. cit., no. 112 (repr. p. 145). The object reproduced by Gray is of unknown function (British Museum, London, inv. oc.4681), comes from Hawaii and was collected in the 1860s. Te fare amu, literally ‘house/hut eat’ does not match any common expression and Danielsson suggests correcting to fare tama‘ara‘a (‘Gauguin’s Tahitian Titles’, p. 233 no. 65); it is possible that Gauguin chose it for its phonetic resemblance to faire l’amour (‘make love’) in the spirit of the House of Pleasure. 79 Musée du Louvre, Paris, Département des Arts Graphiques, Fonds du Musée d’Orsay, inv. rf30273, 6. 80 dw p. 373 on ‘inclined postures’, and particularly dw 259, 265, 274, 282, 317, 322. 81 W 502; Paris 1989 no. 156. The title is generally translated by Seule / Alone, ‘otahi meaning ‘unique’, ‘singular’ or ‘only’. 82 Edgar Degas, Femme nue, à genoux (1887–8, private collection). See Richard Thomson, The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889–1900 (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 49–51, which points to the sexual connotation of the colour red surrounding the nude and sees in the posture of the nude ‘a sexual position, described as en levrette in the pornographic tales of Pierre Louÿs and for which particular courtesans were recommended in the guidebooks for upper-class English visitors to Paris’.

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83 Ibid., pp. 48–59. The main exceptions are in the work of Rodin, for example La Danaïde / Danaid and Andromède / Andromeda of 1885 (cf. Albert E. Elsen with Rosalyn Frankel Jamison, Rodin’s Art: the Rodin collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (New York, 2003), pp. 505–8); most are however found in drawings whose diffusion was very limited and these often lend a cosmic dimension to their subject; examples include Bas soleil / Low Sun (n.d., The Art Institute of Chicago, inv. 1949.901) or Montagne des Alpes / Alpine Mountains (1900, Musée Rodin, Paris, inv. d.4178). 84 National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, inv. 1991.217.47.b. 85 dw 320. 86 Loize 1966, pp. 27–8 (Noa Noa, 2010, ‘his chest . . . towards me’, p. 32); cf. Gauguin and Morice p. 87 (Noa Noa, 1983, ‘showed himself fullface’, p. 20). 87 Denys Sutton, ‘Roderic O’Conor – Little Known Member of the PontAven Circle’, Studio, 811, November 1960, pp. 168–74, 194–6 (173), quoted from Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, pp. 193–4. 88 James Brundage, ‘“Let Me Count the Ways”: Canonists and Theologians Contemplate Coital Positions’, Journal of Medieval History, x, 1984, pp. 81–93. On the origin of the expression ‘missionary position’, indirectly linked to Malinowski’s research in Melanesia, see Robert J. Priest, ‘Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, and Postmodernist’, Current Anthropology, xlii/1, February 2001, pp. 29–68 (29–31). 89 See J. Brundage, op. cit. The connection with animality is emphasized in other expressions such as mos canis, canino more, mos camelorum, and en levrette quoted above. 90 The question has been briefly raised by Nay Mowll Mathews (op. cit., pp. 70, 113–14). Extrapolating from the episode of the walk in the forest described in Noa Noa, Mario Vargas Llosa gave Gauguin a passive homosexual experience in his novel El paraíso en la otra esquina and alluded to sexual propositions that the young Gauguin would have rejected during his years as a sailor (The Way to Paradise, trans. N. Wimmer (London, 2003), pp. 56–8. 91 Cahier pour Aline; Diverses choses, f. 139 r. See also Avant et après, pp. 12, 148. 92 La Madeleine pénitente / The Penitent Magdalene (Field 26) was reproduced in Remy de Gourmont’s magazine and in Alfred Jarry’s L’Ymagier, 3, April 1895, p. 142, and has been compared by Ziva Amishai-Maisels to Rodin’s Danaid (op. cit., p. 99). 93 Richard C. Trexler, ‘Den Rücken beugen: Gebetsgebärden und Geschlechtsgebärden im frühmodernen Europa und Amerika’, in Klaus Schreiner and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds, Verletzte Ehre. Ehrkonflikte in Gesellschaften des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, Weimar

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and Vienna, 1995), pp. 235–51. See also S. Bergh, op. cit., p. 80. 94 S. Bergh, op. cit., pp. 79–80; S. Bourget, op. cit., p. 70–73. 95 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., pp. 484–5, 499. 96 Ancien culte mahorie, f. 16 r [paginated 31]; see Moerenhout, op. cit., p. 495. Moerenhout himself referred to Cook; cf. J.-J. Scemla, op. cit., pp. 109, 128. 97 Ancien culte mahorie, f. 24 r–f. 24 v [paginated 45–6]. Writings of a Savage, p. 62. 98 W 496, sent from Tahiti to Ambroise Vollard folded in four, sold anonymously in Paris on 27 April 1951; Noa Noa / Voyage de Tahiti (1894–1901, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Département des Arts Graphiques du Musée du Louvre, inv. rf7259), f. 41 r [paginated 75], reproduced in Gauguin Tahiti, op. cit., p. 145. 99 See, for example, W. de Fonvielle, op. cit., p. 187, on the germination of spores. 100 Diverses choses, f. 171 r; the phrase reappears in Avant et après, p. 45. 101 Te aa no areois was translated in 1893 catalogue by Le Germe des Aréois / The Seed of the Areois (Exposition d’œuvres récentes de Paul Gauguin, op. cit., no. 14), and a‘a means ‘root’. Vairaumati does not seem pregnant but ‘Oro is absent (contrast the picture Vairaumati tei oa, 1892, Pushkin Museum, Moscow) and the pink smoke visible behind her probably alludes to the god’s departure as an ‘immense column of fire’ (Ancien culte mahorie, f. 15 r [paginated 29]; cf. J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., pp. 485–9). 102 Loize 1966, p. 40. Cf. Noa Noa, p. 40 (incomplete transcription). 103 S. Bourget, op. cit., p. 77. 104 Joly-Segalen p. 68. 105 See, for example, the picture Bonjour M. Gauguin (1889, Narodni Galerie, Prague) and the engraving Bretonnes à la barrière / Breton Women at the Fence (Kornfeld 8). It is worth noting the analogy with the head that appears at the summit of the wall in Poplar-lined Lane, Osny (illus. 27). 106 Craighill Handy, The Native Culture in the Marquesas, p. 286. Taianas and their masculine equivalents, ha‘akais, were among the objects exhibited at the Palais des Colonies at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (Véronique Mu-Liepmann, ‘The Participation of the “Établissements Français de l’Océanie”’ at the World Fair in Paris in 1889’, in S. Greub, ed., op. cit., pp. 80–105 [89]). 107 Eric Kjellgren and Carol S. Ivory, Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, ct, and London, 2005), p. 33; Catherine Chavaillon and Eric Olivier, Le Patrimoine archéologique de l’île de Hiva Oa (archipel des Marquises), Tahiti (Dossier d’Archéologie Polynésienne 5), 2007, pp. 42, 47, 70, 80, 90, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 125, 142.

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References, pages 337–52

108 K. von den Steinen, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 136–48; Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 135; S. Hooper, ‘Embodying Divinity’, p. 163. 109 Alfred Gell has suggested linking the narrative dimension of ear ornaments with the fact that ‘it is through the ear that myths enter the body’ (op. cit., p. 212); Gauguin similarly wrote: ‘She had a flower behind her ear, which was listening to her fragrance’ (Loize 1966, p. 25; Noa Noa, 2010, p. 24). 110 Letter of 10 December 1897, Bibliothèque Centrale des Musées Nationaux, Paris, Ms 310, f. 461. Gauguin advises ‘an austere Greek style’ and explains ‘Reading Télémaque would give you a remote idea of what it has in common with Tahiti and the Maori islands in general’. I should like to thank Cécile Thézelais for detailed information about the subject of this ballet, described by Morice in his letter to Gauguin of 30 September 1897 (ibid., Ms 440 [2,2], f. 20–21). 111 K. von den Steinen, op . cit., pp. 144–8. 112 See this revelatory observation by Von den Steinen, one that he nevertheless failed to extend to the rest of the interpretation suggested to him: ‘It is a thankless task commenting on or describing each of the variants of the swing. If you ask the tuhuna what a given part means, after short reflection there will come into his mind a reply with which he will attempt laughingly to assuage our greed for knowledge’ (ibid., p. 147). 113 Ancien culte mahorie, f. 17 v–18 r [paginated 34–5]. 114 Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 107. 115 Ibid., pp. 107, 312–20. 116 Cf. ibid., p. 22 (on the myths), 145 (on the pestles); E. Kjellgren, Adorning the World, no. 73 (on the pestle that belonged to Gauguin). 117 Ancien culte mahorie, f. 16 v–17 r [paginated 32–3]. 118 See W. Andersen, Gauguin’s Paradise Lost, pp. 64–5; Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York, 2000), pp. 244–7; Druick and Zegers pp. 122–5, 137–8, 183, 197. 119 Diverses choses, f. 138 p. 6; ibid., f. 120 r (Writings of a Savage, p. 135), repeated in Avant et après, p. 89 (see Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 47). The anecdote comes from Commentarius ad Dantis Comediam (c. 1350) by Benvenuto da Imola and is adapted from Macrobius’s Saturnalia (ii, 2, 10); see George Didi-Huberman, ‘Ressemblance mythifiée et ressemblance oubliée chez Vasari: La Légende du portrait sur le vif’, Mélanges de l’école française de Rome, cvi, 1994, no. 2, pp. 383–432 (400). 120 Ancien culte mahorie, added on the recto of f. 25 v. 121 Avant et après, p. 10 (Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, pp. 2–3). 122 P. Verdier, op. cit., p. 276; G. Le Bronnec, op. cit., p. 331. 123 Testimony of Lénore recorded by Renée Hamon, À Tahiti et aux îles Marquises: Gauguin, le solitaire du Pacifique (Paris, 1939), quoted in Gilles Manceron, ‘Segalen et Gauguin’, in Gauguin: Actes du colloque

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Gauguin, op. cit., pp. 33–48 (39). 124 Diverses choses, f. 129 r [paginated 249]. Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 19. 125 J. Teilhet-Fisk, op. cit., pp. 62, 65. 126 Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life [1846] (New York, 1996), p. 195. 127 Herman Julien Leclercq, ‘La Lutte pour les peintres’, Mercure de France, November 1894, pp. 254–71, quoted in Merlhès, ‘Art de Papou & chant de rossignoou’, op. cit., p. 158. Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life [1846] (New York, 1996), p. 195 128 Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas [1847] (New York, 2007), p. 207, and p. 365 n. 7 for the reference to William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, op. cit. 129 Gauguin and Morice, p. 210. 130 Loize 1966, p. 22 (Noa Noa, 2010, p. 17). 131 Gauguin and Morice pp. 203–16. 132 Ibid., p. 219. Morice’s source is a letter from Gauguin of January 1897, partly transcribed in Malingue, pp. 278–9, and wholly in Gilles Artur, ‘Notice historique du Musée Gauguin de Tahiti suivie des quelques lettres inédites de Paul Gauguin’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, xxxviii/74–75, 1982, pp. 7–17 (14–15). 133 Loize 1966, pp. 19–20 (Noa Noa, 2010, p. 12). The published version emphasizes the desperate nature of the enterprise: ‘How to relight a fire the very ashes of which are scattered?’ (Gauguin and Morice p. 41, Noa Noa, 1983, p. 7).

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Letter of 11 December 1902 (Joly-Segalen p. 233). Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, p. 234. A. Jarry, op. cit., p. 683. G. Manceron, op. cit.; Victor Segalen, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henry Bouillier (Paris, 1995), vol. i, p. lvi. Letter of 29 November 1903, quoted in V. Segalen, op. cit., p. 103. Letter of 18 October 1907 from Segalen to Jules de Gaultier, quoted ibid., p. 293. Ibid., p. 315. H. Rorschach, op. cit., p. 16; O. Redon, ‘De soi-même’ [1898/1913], in A. Mellerio, op. cit., p. 48, reprinted in O. Redon, À soi-même, op. cit., p. 10. Roger Corneille and Georges Herscher, Der Zeichner Victor Hugo (Wiesbaden, 1964), no. 220, p. 95. T. Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 148. P. Gauguin, Avant et après, p. 10 (slightly modified transcription in

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References, pages 352–64

Avant et après, p. 19); Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 8. 12 Gauguin and Morice p. 24. 13 A. Seguin, op. cit., quoted in Prather and Stuckey, p. 102. 14 John La Farge, Considerations on Painting: Lectures Given in the Year 1893 at the Metropolitan Museum of New York (New York and London, 1895, pp. 94–5. On La Farge and Gauguin, see Elizabeth C. Childs, ‘Common Ground: John La Farge and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti’, in Elisabeth Hodermarsky et al., John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890–1891, exh. cat., Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, ct, and Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, ma (New Haven, ct, 2010), pp. 121–44. 15 J.-A. Moerenhout, op. cit., p. 421; Ancien culte mahorie, f. 16 r [paginated 31]. 16 Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 26. 17 E. S. Craighill Handy, Marquesan Legends, Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 69 (Honolulu, 1930), p. 3. To the best of my knowledge, this connection has only been spotted by Charles F. Stuckey in Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth, p. 378. Craighill Handy also emphasized the quality of the place for acquainting oneself with the old culture, since Atuona was recognized by Marquesans as ‘the great centre of lore in the fenua enata’ – that is, the ‘land of men’, as they called the islands. 18 Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, pp. 27, 313. 19 El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, The Incas: The Royal Commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, trans. Maria Jolas (New York, 1961), p. 37, available online at www.quaestia.com. 20 Exposé de l’état actuel des missions évangéliques, p. 319. 21 G.-A. Aurier, op. cit., pp. 30–31. 22 Letter of October 1898 (Joly-Segalen p. 131). 23 Ibid., p. 141. 24 Letter of January 1900, quoted in Paris 1989, p. 440. 25 Avant et après, p. 21 (Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, p. 10; the translators take the soleils to be ‘sun-effects’. Translator’s note). Cf. Druick and Zegers p. 352. 26 Debra N. Mancoff, Sunflowers (London, 2001), pp. 15–18. Cf. Druick and Zegers pp. 77–9, 85. 27 Merlhès 1989 p. 193. 28 W 602, 603, 604 and 606. 29 B. Nicholson, op. cit., figs 57 and 58, and the new version of this study in S. Greub, ed., op. cit., p. 262. 30 dw 62. Brettell thinks that placing the flowers in a chair and not on a table is a kind of ‘counter-procedure’ (Paris 1989 no. 253). 31 Gauguin’s Chair (1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam); Van Gogh’s Chair (1888, National Gallery, London). 32 Paris 1989 no. 253.

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33 Paris 1989 p. 27, and E. Zafran, ed., op. cit., p. 30; the leaf carries on its verso the portrait of an unidentified man. 34 Malingue pp. 140–41. 35 Getty Research Center, Los Angeles, Special Collections, dossier 850329.2 (Essays, Mss, Notes), inv. ams n0210. 36 Diverses choses, f. 152 v. 37 Joly-Segalen p. 113. 38 Bodelsen p. 112. 39 See the entry by Charles F. Stuckey in Paris 1989 no. 138; for urna, see J. Teilhet-Fisk, op. cit., p. 186 n. 52; for usnisa, see Gray p. 58. On the identity of the figure, much discussed, see too Z. Amishai-Maisels, op. cit., pp. 360–61. 40 Kjellgren, Adorning the World, p. 33. 41 Ibid. Cf. K. von den Steinen, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 63–6. For this purpose, an aide-mémoire in plaited and knotted coco fibre was used. Von den Steinen compares it with the Peruvian quipus (p. 63). 42 Gray 67; Bodelsen 50 and p. 119; Claire Frèches-Thory, entry in Paris 1989 no. 62. Bodelsen relates this vase to Woman-vase with Snake-belt (illus. 114), which is also said to represent Louise Schuffenecker. 43 Letters of early September and November 1889 (Malingue pp. 167, 172). Alluding to the expression s’en mordre les doigts (‘to bite one’s fingers over something’, i.e. ‘bitterly regret it’), Jirat-Wasiutynski comments on the image of Gauguin in Be in Love and You Will Be Happy thus: ‘He bites his thumb as though regretting his action already’ (Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism, p. 180). 44 D. Winnicott, op. cit., pp. 89–90. Druick and Zegers speak of a ‘regressive impulsion’ in relation to the Self-portrait Pot with Thumb on Lip and emphasize the narcotic function of this tobacco pot (p. 279). 45 L. Madeline, op. cit., p. 129. 46 This interpretation is implicitly made by Anne Pingeot in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Le Corps en morceaux’, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (Paris, 1990), p. 182; it is confirmed by the presence of eyes in the bows of the knotted ribbon holding up a pig beside the heads of a couple in Maquette d’assiette décorative: Les Folies de l’amour / Maquette for a Decorative Plate: The Follies of Love (R. Pickvance, The Drawings of Paul Gauguin, op. cit., pl. 47). 47 C. Chavaillon and E. Olivier, op. cit., pp. 74–5. The authors have described the motif carved in the centre as ‘two ovoid forms, one within the other, that evoke a vulva’ and add that ‘The base is deepened with three teeth’. They note that these excrescences ‘could represent the labia’, which it was customary to stretch in order to make the body more attractive. They add that the presence of the motif on the facade of the sacred dwelling, behind a tiki of ‘frankly phallic’ form, might be explained by use of the me‘ae as a place of circumcision (email to the

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48 49 50 51

52 53

54 55 56 57 58

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author, 25 March 2012). G. Le Bronnec, op. cit., pp. 327–8. V. Segalen, op. cit., p. 303. A. Jarry, op. cit., p. 683. Loize 1966, p. 32 (Noa Noa, 2010, p. 41); Gauguin et Morice p. 124 (Noa Noa, 1983, p. 27: ‘“Halloa! Man who makes human beings!” – He knows that I am a painter’). In a letter of 26 June 1888 to Bernard that was known to Gauguin, Van Gogh wrote that Christ had ‘lived serenely as an artist greater than all artists’ because he was working ‘in living flesh’ and made ‘living men, immortals’ (Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, Letter 632). See on this subject Z. Amishai-Maisels, op. cit., p. 22; V. Jirat-Wasiutynski, Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism, op. cit., p. 280. K. von den Steinen, op. cit., vol. i, p. 59. Craighill Handy, The Native Culture in the Marquesas, pp. 143–51. This tapu, intended to protect the work from any ‘contaminating influence’, related particularly to women and their reproductive functions, a point on which Gauguin departs from Polynesian tradition, as when he represents Tahitian women dancing around the image of the divinity in works such as Maruru et Mahana no atua (illus. 172, 180). Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion, p. 22. G. Wildenstein, op. cit., p. 125. Diverses choses, copied on to the recto of f. 138 [paginated 6]; letter of 1 July 1901 to Morice (Malingue p. 306). G.-Albert Aurier, op. cit., p. 34. Daniel Jütte, ‘Als die Geheimenistuerei populär war. Über Arkanwissenschaft und Arkanpolitik in der frühen Neuzeit’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 170, 23 July 2011, p. 57; Jütte, Das Zeitalter des Geheimnisses. Juden, Christen und die Ökonomie des Geheimen (1400–1800) (Göttingen, 2011). Adrienne L. Kaeppler, ‘Rapa Nui Art and Aesthetics’, in Eric Kjellgren, Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2001), pp. 32–41 (33), quoted in E. Kjellgren, Adorning the World, p. 32. Malingue p. 241. Cf. Gauguin, Racontars de rapin, op. cit.; Gamboni, La Plume et le pinceau, pp. 231–4. K. von den Steinen, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 65. Letter of 16 November 1961, quoted in the rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, devoted to Oceanian art. K. von den Steinen, op. cit., vol. i, p. 142. Cf. C. Ivory, op. cit., and Anne D’Alleva, ‘On 1890s Tahiti’, in S. Greub, op. cit., pp. 174–87. See Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institution Change in the French Painting World [1965] (Chicago and London, 1993).

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65 Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, p. 279–80. Lévi-Strauss notes however that ‘some Polynesian mythologies are at the critical point where diachrony irrevocably prevails over synchrony’ (p. 233). Gell contrasts stylistic innovation conceived as virtuosity in traditional societies, for example among the Maori, with the kind of innovation that underpins an artistic identity in Western culture. He writes about the Marquesan style that it is ‘only the sedimented product of an infinite number of tiny social initiatives taken by Marquesan artists over a long period of historical development’ (op. cit., pp. 158, 219). 66 Ibid., p. 214. 67 Redon, ‘Quelques opinions sur Paul Gauguin’, Mercure de France, xi, 1903, pp. 413–33 (428). 68 See my entry in R. Rapetti, op. cit., no. 121, and that of Rodolphe Rapetti on the rediscovered Hommage à Gauguin / Homage to Gauguin (c. 1903–4, private collection) (ibid., no. 122). 69 Undated letter of September 1890. English translation taken from Corinne Heline, Esoteric Music (Oceanside, ca, 1948), p. 15. 70 Avant et après, p. 198.

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Unless otherwise indicated, all works are by Paul Gauguin. 1 La Moisson blonde / Yellow Haystacks (The Golden Harvest), 1889, oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 2 Bretonnerie / Breton Matters, c. 1889, pencil on paper, 31.6 × 49.1 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims. Photo © C. Devleeschauwer. 3 Nature morte au profil de Laval / Still-life with Laval’s Profile, 1886, oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm. Indianapolis Museum of Art, through the generosity of Lilly Endowment Inc., the Josefowitz Family, Mr and Mrs James M. Cornelius, Mr and Mrs Leonard J. Betley, Lori and Dan Efroymson, and other Friends of the Museum. Image © Indianapolis Museum of Art. 4 Viera and Claude-Charles Farina, copy of Gauguin, Still-life with Laval’s Profile, 2001, oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm, detail. Espace Culturel Paul Gauguin, Atuona, Hiva Oa. Photo Dario Gamboni. 5 Nirvana (Portrait of Meyer de Haan), 1889–90, gouache on cotton, 20 × 29 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, ct, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. 6 L’Homme à la hache / Man with an Axe, 1891, oil on canvas, 92 × 70 cm. Private collection. Photo Christie’s. 7 Matamoe, 1892, oil on canvas, 115 × 86 cm. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. 8 Noa Noa, 1893, pen on paper, folio 40 × 26.5 × 0.7 cm, detail. Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Los Angeles. 9 Tilly, Les Nouvelles salles des collections Dieulafoy, au Musée du Louvre / The New Dieulafoy Collection Rooms in the Musée du Louvre, n.d. [1888], engraving. From Christiane Aulanier, Histoire du palais et du musée du Louvre, Paris, 1947–71, vol. ix. 10 Lion Frieze, east court of the palace of Darius i at Susa, c. 510 bc, silicate bricks with glaze. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski. 11 Autoportrait (Les Misérables) / Self-portrait (Les Misérables), 1888, oil on canvas, 45 × 55 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

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12 Letter to Émile Schuffenecker of 8 October 1888 with drawing after Self-portrait (Les Misérables). From Victor Merlhès, ed., Correspondance de Paul Gauguin, Paris, 1984. 13 Untitled drawing of a capital from a column (Apadana) in the audience chamber of the palace of Darius i, graphite on squared paper, 15.3 × 9.4 cm. From the Walter album, f. 26v [paginated 41]. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Martine Beck-Coppola. 14 Capital of a column in the audience chamber of the palace of Darius i, c. 510 bc, sculpture in the round, limestone. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski / Franck Raux. 15 Odilon Redon, Il y eut peut-être une vision première essayée dans la fleur / There Was Perhaps a first vision Attempted in the Flower, 1883, lithograph, 22.3 × 17.2 cm. From the album Les Origines, plate ii. Art Institute of Chicago, Charles Stickney Collection. 16 Odilon Redon, L’Homme fut solitaire dans un paysage de nuit / The Man was Alone in a Night Landscape, 1886, lithograph, 29.3 × 22 cm. From the album La Nuit, plate ii. Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 17 L’Inintelligible au profil dur / The Unintelligible with Harsh Profile, n.d. (1885?), oil on canvas, 42 × 40 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Photo Dario Gamboni Archives. 18 Odilon Redon, Au réveil j’aperçus la déesse de l’intelligible au profil sévère et dur / On Awakening, I Saw the goddess of the intelligible with her Severe and Harsh Profile, 1885, lithograph, 27.6 × 21.6 cm. From the album Hommage à Goya, vi. Kunstmuseum Winterthur. Photo H. Humm. 19 Arii matamoe, 1892, oil on rough canvas, 45.1 × 74.3 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo © J. Paul Getty Trust. 20 Ancien culte mahorie / Ancient Maori Religion, 1892–3, f. 11 r [p. 21], watercolour and ink on paper, 21.5 × 17 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 21 Drinks dispenser (anonymous) with base and cover carved by Paul Gauguin, c. 1889, stoneware and wood, 44.5 × 35 × 22.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Daniel Arnaudet. 22 Casa Tristán del Pozo, 1738, detail of sculpted pediment, Arequipa, Peru. Photo Dario Gamboni. 23 Untitled drawing (Femme et enfant face à un paysage / Woman and Child before a Landscape), n.d. (c. 1888–9), watercolour on paper, 19 × 29 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Photo Dario Gamboni Archives. 24 Camille Pissarro, Scène de sous-bois, printemps / Woodland Scene,

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Spring, 1878, oil on canvas, 73 × 54 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Un coin du mur (effet de nuit) / Wall by Night, 1881, oil on canvas, 22 × 31 cm. Private collection. Photo Dario Gamboni Archives. Chemin aux peupliers, Osny / Path with Poplars, Osny, 1883, oil on canvas, 73 × 54 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Path with Poplars, Osny, detail. Le Toit rouge au bord de l’eau / Red Roof by the Water, 1885, oil on canvas, 82 × 66 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Rudolf Staechelin Family Foundation. Jacob de Gheyn the Younger, Rochers envahis de plantes, figurant des têtes grotesques / Rocks Invaded by Plants, Configuring Grotesque Heads, first half of 17th century, pen and brown ink on paper, 26.6 × 17.5 cm, detail. Fondation Custodia, Paris. Carrière aux environs de Pontoise / Chou Quarry, Hole in Cliff, 1882, oil on canvas, 89 × 116 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich. Vase en forme de souche / Stump-shaped Vase, c. 1887–8, stoneware, slip and gilding, 22.2 × 13.8 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Stump-shaped Vase, side view. Martinique, 1888–9, oak wood, paint and gilding, 30 × 49 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses / Be in Love and You Will Be Happy, 1889, limewood and paint, 95 × 72 × 6.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Arthur Tracy Cabot Fund. Drinks dispenser, Normandy (?), 18th century, glazed earthenware, h. 30 cm, ø 27 cm. Sèvres – Cité de la Céramique. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Sèvres – Cité de la Céramique) / Thierry Olivier. Vase en forme de tronc avec visage féminin / Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face, 1887–8, stoneware, glaze and gilding, h. 19.5 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Photo Ole Haupt. Vase-portrait féminin à anse-goulot en étrier / Femine portrait-vase with stirrup-shaped spout-handle, Moche culture, 1st–8th century ad. Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú, Lima. Photo Dario Gamboni. Vase à anse-goulot en étrier en forme de pomme de terre à visage humain / Potato-shaped vase with human face and stirrup-shaped spout-handle, Moche culture, 1st–8th century ad. Museo Larco, Lima. Photo Dario Gamboni. Tête de Jean Gauguin / Head of Jean Gauguin, 1881, wax and pigment, h. 13.8 cm. Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen. Photo Pernille Klemp. La Petite rêve / The Little One is Dreaming, 1881, oil on canvas, 59.5 × 73.5 cm. Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen. Clovis endormi / Clovis Asleep, 1884, oil on canvas, 46 × 55.5 cm. Private collection.

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42 Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger / Dreams and How to Guide Them, Paris, 1867, frontispiece. 43 La Vision du sermon / The Vision of the Sermon, 1888, oil on canvas, 72.2 × 91 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. 44 Katsushika Hokusai, Wrestlers, 1816, wood engraving, 22 × 13 cm. From Hokusai Manga, Nagoya and Edo, vol. iii, pp. 6 v and 7 r. Paris, Musée Guimet – Musée National des Arts Asiatiques. Photo © rmnGrand Palais (Musée Guimet, Paris) / Thierry Ollivier. 45 Preparatory sketch for The Vision of the Sermon, 1888, graphite on paper. From the Walter album. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Thierry Le Mage. 46 Etude pour vache et paysanne dans un chemin creux / Study for Cow and Peasant Woman in Sunken Lane, 1890, watercolour and gouache on card, 26.4 × 31.9 cm. Collection of Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky. 47 Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige, Moon Pine, Ueno, 1857, wood engraving, 36 × 23.5 cm. From One Hundred Views of Edo, no. 89. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). Photo © BnF / rmn-Grand Palais / image BnF. 48 Sketch after The Vision of the Sermon, 1888, pen and ink on paper, 11.7 × 15.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 49 Sketch of Breton costumes and coif-face, c. 1888, graphite and charcoal on paper, 21 × 17 cm (sketchbook used in Arles and Brittany, p. 88). The Israel Museum Collection, Jerusalem, donation of Sam Salz, New York, to the America–Israel Cultural Foundation, 1972. 50 Manaò tupapaú, 1892, oil on jute mounted on canvas, 73 × 92 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, ny, A. Conger Goodyear Collection. 51 Manao tupapau, 1894–5, lithograph on paper, 42.8 × 58.8 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York, Charles Stewart Smith Memorial Fund. 52 Cahier pour Aline / Notebook for Aline, 1892–3, double page on Manaò tupapaú. Ink and watercolour on paper, 21.5 × 34 cm. Bibliothèque de l’inha – Collections Jacques Doucet, Paris. Photo © inha / rmn-Grand Palais / image inha. 53 D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? / Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897–8, oil on canvas, 139.1 × 374.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo Dario Gamboni Archives (state as of c. 1936). 54 Te rerioa (The Dream), 1897, oil on canvas, 95 × 130 cm. Courtauld Institute Galleries, Courtauld Collection, London. 55 Patoromu Tamatea, kumete (bowl), before 1890 (probably 1870s). Wood and ormer/abalone (paua) shell, 48.4 × 64 × 41.5 cm. Auckland War Memorial Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira, Auckland. Anonymous

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photo also showing two boxes, British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum. Avant et après / Before and After, p. 43, detail, ‘Au Café, au grand 9’, 1903, pen on paper. Private collection. Photo Dario Gamboni Archives. Autoportrait / Self-portrait ‘Oviri’, 1894–5, painted plaster, 35.5 × 34 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Au-dessus du gouffre / Above the Abyss, 1888, oil on canvas, 72.5 × 61 cm. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Photo © Musée d’Orsay / rmn-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt. H. Burn, The Spirit of Byron in the Isles of Greece, c. 1830, lithograph. The Puzzle Museum, Honiton, Devon (Hordern-Dalgety Collection). Anonymous picture puzzle, 1878, photomechanical reproduction. From La Question, 4, p. 17. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, nj (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey). Figure demonstrating the reversibility of figure and ground in Ernst Mach, Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen / Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations, Fischer, Jena, 1886. Anonymous portrait of Gauguin in Brittany, 1888, photograph. From the Gauguin album, f. 23 r. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean. Vincent Van Gogh, Portrait de Gauguin / Portrait of Gauguin, 1888, oil on canvas, 34 × 33 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. X-ray of Above the Abyss (illus. 58), © c2rmf / Elsa Lambert. Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot, 1889, stoneware, glaze and gilding, h. 19.5 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen. Photo Dario Gamboni. La Côte rocheuse / The Rocky Coast, 1886, oil on canvas, 71 × 92 cm. Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Gothenburg. La Vague / The Wave, 1888, oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm. David Rockefeller Collection, New York. Photo Dario Gamboni Archives. Les Laveuses / Washerwomen, 1889, zincograph on yellow paper, 21.2 × 26.5 cm. From the album Dessins lithographiques. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). Photo © BnF / rmn-Grand Palais / image BnF. Auti te pape, 1893–4, wood engraving printed in black and brown on Japanese paper prepared with paintbrush, 20.3 × 35.3 cm. From the Noa Noa suite, printed by Pola Gauguin, 1921. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum. Les Drames de la mer / Dramas of the Sea, 1889, zincograph, 18 × 27.2 cm. From the album Dessins lithographiques. Indianapolis Museum of Art. Image © Indianapolis Museum of Art. Untitled sketch (Paysage-visage / Face-Landscape), c. 1888, graphite on paper, 16.9 × 11.3 cm (‘Carnet de Bretagne’, p. 57). National Gallery

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of Art, Washington, dc, The Armand Hammer Collection. 72 La Rivière blanche, or Petit Breton au bord de l’Aven / White River, or Breton Boy by the Aven, 1888, oil on canvas, 58 × 72 cm. Musée de Grenoble. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais / Agence Bulloz. 73 Pêcheur et baigneurs sur l’Aven / Fisherman and Bathers on the Aven, 1888, oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm. Private collection. 74 Caspar David Friedrich, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, 1818–19, oil on canvas, 90 × 70 cm. Museum Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur. 75 Nature morte à l’estampe japonaise / Still-life with Japanese Print, 1889, oil on canvas, 73 × 90 cm. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. 76 Vase-buste à la tête éclatée / Bust-Vase with Exploded Head, 1887–8, stoneware, glaze and gilding, 23.8 × 28 × 16.8 cm. Private collection. 77 Cup representing a human head with geometrical facial decorations and circular ear pendants, Cajamarca culture, 1st–8th century ad, ceramic, 22.2 × 16.7 × 16.6 cm. Museo Larco, Lima. Photo Dario Gamboni. 78 Caricatural Motifs Including Portraits of Roderic O’Conor, Meyer de Haan and the Artist, 1890, graphite on paper, 24 × 44.5 cm. J. F. Willumsens Museum, Frederikssund. 79 Vase with double phallic spout joined by stirrup-shaded handle, Vicús culture, 13th century bc–2nd century ad, ceramic, 24 × 19.8 × 206 cm. Museo Larco, Lima. Photo Dario Gamboni. 80 Paul Sérusier, L’Adieu à Gauguin, or Tityre et Mélibée / Farewell to Gauguin, or Tityrus and Meliboeus, 1906, oil on canvas, 65 × 92 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper. 81 Nature morte à la tête de cheval / Still-life with Horse’s Head, c. 1886, oil on canvas, 49 × 38 cm. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo. 82 Paul Sérusier, Mer grise / Grey Sea, 1916, oil on canvas, 72 × 45.5 cm. Galerie Bérès, Paris. 83 Georges Lacombe, Vorhor, vague grise / Vorhor, Grey Wave, 1893–4, egg tempera on canvas, 81 × 61 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais / rights reserved. 84 Vincent Van Gogh, Le Martin-pêcheur / The Kingfisher, 1884, pencil, brown ink and white gouache on paper, 40 × 54 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 85 Le Peintre de tournesols / The Painter of Sunflowers, 1888, oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. 86 Vincent Van Gogh, Tournesols dans un vase / Sunflowers in a Vase, 1888, oil on canvas, 93 × 73 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo © The National Gallery, London / rmn-Grand Palais / National Gallery Photographic Department. 87 Vincent Van Gogh, Le Jardin du poète / The Poet’s Garden, 1888, oil on canvas, 73 × 92.1 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr and Mrs Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.

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88 Vincent Van Gogh, Souvenir du jardin à Etten / Memory of the Garden at Etten, 1888, oil on canvas, 73.5 × 92.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photo © Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovet. 89 Arlésiennes, mistral / The Arlesiennes, Mistral, 1888, oil on jute, 73 × 92 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr and Mrs Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection. 90 Vincent Van Gogh, Paysage près de Saint-Rémy / Landscape near Saint-Rémy, 1889, oil on canvas, 70.5 × 88.5 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. 91 Pot-autoportrait au pouce sur la lèvre / Self-portrait Pot with Thumb on Lip, 1889, stoneware and glaze, h. 28 cm, ø 21.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 92 Pot double avec Bretonne et agneau / Double Vase Decorated with Breton Figure and Lamb, 1886–7, stoneware and slip, h. 15 cm, l. 24 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen. Photo Dario Gamboni. 93 Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face (illus. 36), side view. 94 Camille Pissarro, Gauguin sculptant ‘Dame en promenade’ / Gauguin Carving ‘Woman out Walking’, c. 1880, black chalk on paper, 29.7 × 23.3 cm. From Gauguin sketchbook, f. 22 v. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. 95 Woman out Walking, 1880, tropical laurel wood (Terminalia) and stain, h. 25 cm. The Kelton Foundation, Santa Monica. Photo © 2013 by The Kelton Foundation. ¯ mete, c. 1891, pua wood, 45.1 × 20.1 × 5.2 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 96 ‘U Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 97 L’Après-midi d’un faune / The Afternoon of a Faun, c. 1892, ta¯manu wood and stain, 35.6 × 14.7 × 12.4 cm, looking towards the faun. Musée Départemental Stéphane Mallarmé, Vulaines-sur-Seine, with the kind authorisation of the Conseil Général de Seine-et-Marne. © Yvan Bourhis – dapmd/cg77. 98 L’Après-midi d’un faune, looking towards the nymph. 99 Destruction of the Idols at Otaheite; Pulling down a Pagan Altar, and Building a Christian Church, Mo’orea, 1819, anonymous woodcut, detail. From London Missionary Society, Missionary Sketches, 6, July 1819. soas, University of London, Council for World Mission Archives and Manuscripts. 100 Père paillard / Father Lechery, 1902, miro (rosewood) and paint, 67.9 × 18 × 20.7 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Chester Dale Collection. 101 Thérèse, 1902, miro (rosewood) and paint, h. 66 cm. Private collection. 102 Lingam with face of the god Shiva (Ekamukha Shiva linga), Afghanistan, 9th century ad, white marble, 57 × 27 × 33.6 cm. The Metropolitan

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Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund. Photo Bruce White, 1980. 103 Tiki, n.d. (probably 18th century), stone, 93 × 40 cm. Me’ae of Utukua, Punaei Valley, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands. Photo Dario Gamboni. 104 ‘Idols Worshipped by the Inhabitants of the South Sea Islands’, from William Ellis, Polynesian Researches . . ., London, 1829, vol. ii, frontispiece. Bibliothek des Ethnologischen Museums, Berlin. 105 Head of a war club (‘u‘u), Marquesas Islands, anonymous photograph, gelatin silver print. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum. 106 Cylindre avec le Christ en croix / Cylinder with Christ on the Cross, 1891–2, toa (ironwood), h. 50 cm. Private collection. 107 Oviri, 1894, stoneware and glaze, 75 × 19 × 27 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 108 Oviri, back view. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 109 Ève / Eve, 1890, stoneware and glaze, 60 × 28 × 27 cm, back view. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. 110 L’Après-midi d’un faune (illus. 97), looking towards the tree/hair. 111 L’Après-midi d’un faune, looking towards the third figure. 112 Pots en grès, Chaplet / Stoneware Pots, Chaplet, c. 1887–9, gouache, watercolour and charcoal on paper, 31.8 × 41.6 cm. Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, ny, bequest of Sarah Hamlin Stern, class of 1938, in memory of her husband, Henry Root Stern, Jr. 113 Vase Léda / Leda Vase, 1887–8, stoneware and slip, h. 22.5 cm, looking towards the bird. The Art Institute of Chicago, anonymous loan, all rights reserved. 114 Vase-femme avec ceinture-serpent / Woman-vase with Snake-belt, 1887–8, stoneware, slip, glaze and gilding, h. 26 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Photo Ole Haupt. 115 Projet d’assiette – Léda / Design for a Plate – Leda, 1889, zincograph, 30.1 × 25.7 cm. From the album Dessins lithographiques. Bibliothèque de l’inha – Collections Jacques Doucet, Paris. 116 Woman-vase with Snake-belt (illus. 114), profile view. Photo Ole Haupt. 117 Céramiques américaines / American Ceramics. Plate cxl from Auguste Demmin, Histoire de la céramique en planches phototypiques inaltérables, Paris, 1875. 118 Francisco Laso, Inhabitant of the Cordillera of Peru, 1855, oil on canvas, 145 × 90 cm. Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Marino, Municipalidad de Lima Metropolitana, Lima. 119 Leda Vase (illus. 113), looking away from the bird. Photo Dario Gamboni. 120 Vase décoré d’un buste de femme / Vase Decorated with Woman’s

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Bust, 1886–7, stoneware, h. 21.6 cm, front. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen. Photo Pernille Klemp. Vase Decorated with Woman’s Bust, back. Photo Pernille Klemp. Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, detail of the portal, 1649. Photo Dario Gamboni. Étude de céramiques et de fleurs / Study of Ceramics and Flowers, c. 1887, charcoal on paper, 22.8 × 34.2 cm. From the Briant album. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmnGrand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean. Vase à double goulot joint par une anse en étrier / Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrup-shaped Handle, 1886–7, stoneware and slip, 14 × 20 cm, ø 9.5 cm. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. Photo © Petit Palais / Roger-Viollet. Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrup-shaped Handle, side view. Photo © Petit Palais / Roger-Viollet. Pot à trois poignées / Pot with Three Handles, 1886–7, stoneware, slip and gilding, h. 13.6 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen. Photo Dario Gamboni. Pot with Three Handles, side view. Photo Dario Gamboni. Vase piriforme à anse-goulot en étrier / Pyriform Vase with Stirrupshaped Handle-Spout, 1886–7, stoneware, slip, glaze and gilding, 19.6 × 24.8 cm. Sèvres – Cité de la Céramique. Vase avec ‘La Moisson’ de Cézanne / Vase with Motifs from Cézanne’s ‘Harvest’, 1886–7, stoneware, slip and gilding, h. 16 cm. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Vase with Motifs from Cézanne’s ‘Harvest’, seen from above. Photo Dario Gamboni. Matrix of the wood engraving Mahana atua, 1894–5, block of six assembled sections of boxwood, 18.2 × 20.3 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Rosenwald Collection. Manao tupapau, 1893–4, wood engraving, 20.5 × 35.5 cm, printed by Pola Gauguin, 1921. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc. Manao tupapau, 1893–4, wood engraving, 20.5 × 35.5 cm, printed by Gauguin. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Te atua, 1893–4, wood engraving, 20.6 × 34.6 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, The Joseph Brooks Fair Collection. Rubbings of Marquesan reliefs pasted on a page of the manuscript of Noa Noa, f. 168, 1893–7. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. Mahna no varua ino, 1893–4, wood engraving, 20.3 × 35.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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137 Te faruru, 1893–4, wood engraving, 35.6 × 20.3 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Rosenwald Collection. 138 Oviri, 1894, wood engraving, 20.5 × 12 cm, two prints mounted by Gauguin in 1895 on card. The Art Institute of Chicago, Print Sales Miscellaneous Fund. 139 Takai‘i, n.d., Ke‘etu (red volcanic tufa), h. 267 cm. Me‘ae of I‘ipona, Puamau Valley, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands. Photo Dario Gamboni. 140 Deux Tahitiennes récoltant des fruits / Two Tahitian Women Picking Fruit (verso), 1899–1900, graphite and blue crayon on paper, 62.8 × 51.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc. 141 Two Tahitian Women Picking Fruit (recto), dessin-empreinte on paper, 62.8 × 51.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc. 142 Le Poney / The Pony, c. 1902, gouache monotype with gum or varnish on paper, 32.7 × 59.7 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Rosenwald Collection. 143 J. J. Grandville, ‘Le Statuaire et la statue de Jupiter’ / ‘The Statuary and the Statue of Jupiter’, illustration from Fables de La Fontaine, Paris, 1838. 144 Buste de Tahitienne / Bust of a Tahitian Woman, c. 1894, ta¯manu wood, paint or stain, boxwood, coral and shells, h. 25.4 cm. Private collection. Photo Sotheby’s. 145 Johann Benedikt Wunder, Gallop of the Wooden Horses, n.d., 19th century (before 1893), coloured lithograph, 28.3 × 27.8 cm. London, British Museum, Lady Charlotte Schreiber donation. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum. 146 The Family Idols of Pomare (with a series of to‘os in the upper row), wood engraving. From Missionary Sketches, 3, 1818. soas, University of London, Council for World Mission Archives and Manuscripts. 147 Hans Christian Andersen, Dancers under the Trees, n.d., paper cut-out, 9.5 × 15 cm. The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Laage-Petersen Collection. 148 Nature morte avec carafon et figurine / Still-life with Carafon and Figurine, 1885, oil on canvas, 46 × 65 cm. Private collection. Photo Christie’s. 149 À la fenêtre, nature morte / At the Window (Still-life with Tine and Carafon), 1882, oil on canvas, 54 × 65.3 cm. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photo © Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovet. 150 Nature morte dans un intérieur, Copenhagen / Still-life, Interior, Copenhagen, 1885, oil on canvas, 60 × 74 cm. Private collection. 151 Madame Alexandre Kohler / Mrs Alexandre Kohler, 1889, oil on linen, 46.3 × 38 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Chester Dale Collection. 152 Te nave nave fenua, 1892, oil on coarse canvas, 91 × 72 cm. Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan.

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153 Rochers près de la plage de Bellangenet / Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach, 1886, oil on canvas, 75 × 112 cm. Private collection. Photo Sotheby’s. 154 Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige, Futami Bay in Ise Province, 1858, woodblock print, 36.7 cm × 24.9 cm. From the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, no. 27. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum. 155 Odilon Redon, L’Idole / The Idol, 1887, lithograph, 16.2 × 9.4 cm. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum. 156 Odilon Redon, Le Rocher rose / The Pink Rock, c. 1883, oil on canvas, 28 × 40.5 cm. The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan. 157 Le Calvaire breton, or Le Christ vert / Breton Calvary, or The Green Christ, 1889, oil on canvas, 92 × 73.5 cm. Musées Royaux des BeauxArts de Belgique, Brussels. 158 Les Saintes Images / The Holy Images, c. 1903, ink on paper, 22 × 17 cm (manuscript of Avant et après, p. 105). Private collection. 159 Te atua, 1898–9, wood engraving, 23.1 × 20.2 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Print and Drawing Club. 160 Takai‘i (illus. 139), side view. Photo Dario Gamboni. 161 Illustrated Menu, 1899, charcoal and watercolour, 20.5 × 16 cm. Private collection. 162 Maori sculptor, Virgin and Child, c. 1845 (?), wood and abalone shell (paua), 83 × 15 cm. Auckland War Memorial Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira, Auckland. Photo Dario Gamboni. 163 Head of Jean Gauguin (illus. 39), side view. Photo Pernille Klemp. 164 Les Roches noires / The Black Rocks, 1889, gouache, watercolour, ink and metallic paint on paper, 24.2 × 40.9 cm. Private collection. 165 Aux roches noires / At the Black Rocks. Illustration from Catalogue de l’exposition de peintures du groupe impressionniste et synthétiste, Paris, 1889. 166 L’Univers est créé / The Universe is Created, 1893–4, engraving on wood, 20.3 × 35.3 cm. From the Noa Noa suite. The Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection. 167 Portrait de Mallarmé / Mallarmé, 1891. Graphite and ink on cream paper, 25.5 × 18.5 cm. Private collection. 168 Fatata te miti, 1892, oil on canvas, 67.9 × 91.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Chester Dale Collection. 169 Parau na te varua ino, 1892, oil on canvas, 91.7 × 68.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc. Gift of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman. 170 Berger et bergère dans le pré / Shepherd and Shepherdess in the Meadow, 1888, oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Musée d’Art Moderne, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. 171 Vue de Pont-Aven prise de Lézaven / View of Pont-Aven from

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176 177

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Lézaven, c. 1888–9, oil on carton mounted on panel, 70 × 54 cm. Private collection. Mahana no atua, 1894, oil on canvas, 68.3 × 91.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. Parahi te marae, 1892, oil on canvas, 66 × 88.9 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, gift of Mr and Mrs Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee. ‘Parahi te Marae’, poem by Charles Morice with frame drawn by Armand Seguin. From L’Image, 10, September 1897. Parahi te marae, study, 1892, graphite and watercolour on paper, 18.5 × 22.9 cm. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Cambridge, ma, Bequest of Marian H. Phinney. Photo © Imaging Department / President and Fellows of Harvard College. Parahi te marae, sketch, 1892, graphite on paper. Private collection. Photo Dario Gamboni Archives. Jean-Baptiste Debret, view of the coast of Rio de Janeiro, colour lithograph from Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, séjour d’un artiste français au Brésil depuis 1816 jusqu’en 1831 inclusivement . . ., 3 vols, Paris, 1834–9. Parahi te marae (illus. 173), detail of the mountain. Ancien culte mahorie, 1892–3, f. 7 v [p. 14], watercolour and ink on paper, 21.5 × 17 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. Maruru, 1893–4, wood engraving, 23.5 × 39.1 cm. From the Noa Noa suite, printed by Pola Gauguin, 1921. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum. Parahi te marae (illus. 173), detail of the ‘little couple’. Vase with stirrup-shaped spout-handle representing coitus, Moche culture, 1st–8th century ad. Larco Museum, Lima. Photo Dario Gamboni. Untitled (Woman with Cat), 1900, dessin-empreinte on paper, 46.5 × 61.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, through prior bequest of the Mr and Mrs Martin A. Ryerson Collection. Ancien culte mahorie, 1892–3, f. 24 v [p. 46], watercolour and ink on paper, 21.5 × 17 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. Soumin (‘notepad’), 1892, painting on parchment, 89 × 58 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Photo Dario Gamboni Archives. Parahi te marae (illus. 173), detail of the ‘big couple’. Two Tahitian Women and a Marquesan Ear Ornament, 1891–3, ink and graphite on vellum, 24 × 31.7 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, David Adler Memorial Fund. Marquesan taiana, after Karl von den Steinen, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst, 1925, vol. iii.

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List of Illustrations

189 Detail of Marquesan Ear Ornament, Buddha and Other Sketches, n.d. (1892?), graphite on paper, 6 × 17.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi. 190 Ancien culte mahorie, 1892–3, f. 5 v [p. 10], watercolour and ink on paper, 21.5 × 17 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 191 Ke‘a tuki po¯poi (po¯poi pestle), 19th century, stone, h. 14.6 cm. Mark and Carolyn Blackburn Collection, Honolulu (former Paul Gauguin Collection). 192 Victor Hugo, Le Gouliot / The Gouliot Caves, 1859, pencil on paper, 9 × 15 cm (carnet 13450, f. 58 v). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 193 Isaac Puhetete, called Haapuani of Atuona, Hivaoa, Standing Beside the Great Stone Figure of Takaii, at Puamau, c. 1920–21. Photograph reproduced in E. S. Craighill Handy, Marquesan Legends, 1930. 194 Fleurs de tournesol dans un fauteuil / Sunflowers in an Armchair, 1901, oil on canvas, 73 × 91 cm. State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. 195 Self-portrait, study, n.d. (1889?), charcoal on paper, 31 × 19.91 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg. 196 Vase dit ‘au portrait de Mme Schuffenecker’ / Portrait Vase of Mme Schuffenecker, c. 1889–90, stoneware and glaze, 23.65 × 17.15 × 17.78 cm, back view. Dallas Museum of Art, The Wendy and Emery Reves Collection. 197 Self-portrait with Thumb on Lip, n.d. (after 1900?), black crayon on paper, 24 × 14.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, held at the Musée du Louvre. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Michèle Bellot. 198 Slab with low relief, n.d. (probably 18th century), ke‘etu (volcanic stone), w. 34.5 cm. Me‘ae of Utukua, Punaei Valley, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands. Photo © Eric Olivier. 199 Odilon Redon, Profil noir (Gauguin) / Black Profile (Gauguin), 1903–4, oil and metallic gold paint on canvas, 66 × 54.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © rmn-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski. 200 Letterhead, 1900, wood engraving, 6.8 × 10.6 cm, reproduced upsidedown. Private collection.

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Bibliography

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Since the list that follows is primarily intended to facilitate the identification of references given in abridged form in the notes, it comprises only works to which more than one reference is made. For the same reason, titles mentioned in in the list ‘References and Abbreviations’ are repeated here, preceded by their abridged form in square brackets. Amishai-Maysels, Ziva, Gauguin’s Religious Themes (PhD thesis, Hebrew University, 1969), New York and London, 1985 Andersen, Hans Christian, Contes et histoires, trans. Marc Auchet, Paris, 2005 Andersen, Wayne V., ‘Gauguin’s Motifs from Le Pouldu – Preliminary Report’, The Burlington Magazine, September 1970, pp. 615–19 ——, with the assistance of Barbara Klein, Gauguin’s Paradise Lost, London, 1971 Andréani, Carole, Les Céramiques de Gauguin, Paris, 2003 Aurier, G.-Albert, ‘Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin’, Mercure de France, March 1891, pp. 155–65, reprinted in Albert Aurier, Textes critiques, 1889–1892: De l’impressionnisme au symbolisme, Paris, 1995, pp. 26–39 Bachelard, Gaston, L’Air et les songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement [1943], Paris, n.d. Baudelaire, Charles, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols, ed. Claude Pichois, Paris, 1975–6 Bergh, Susan E., ‘Death and Renewal in Moche Phallic-Spouted Vessels’, in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 24, 1993, pp. 78–94 Birnholz, Alan C., ‘Double Images Reconsidered: A Fresh Look at Gauguin’s Yellow Christ’, Art International, xxi/5, October–November 1977, pp. 26–34 Blanc, Charles, Grammaire des arts décoratifs: Décoration intérieure de la maison, Paris, 1882 [Bodelsen:] Bodelsen, Merete, Gauguin’s Ceramics: A Study in the Develop ment of his Art, London, 1964

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Bibliography

Bourget, Steve, Sexe, mort et sacrifice dans la religion mochica, exh. cat. (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris), 2010 Braun, Barbara, ‘Paul Gauguin’s Indian Identity: How Ancient Peruvian Pottery Inspired His Art’, Art History, ix/1, March 1986, pp. 36–53 ——, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art, New York, 1993 Brettell, Richard R., et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin, exh. cat. (National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, and Art Institute of Chicago), Washington, dc, 1988 ——, and Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Gauguin and Impressionism, exh. cat. (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, tx, and Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen), New Haven, ct, and London, 2005 Brundage, James, ‘“Let Me Count the Ways”: Canonists and Theologians Contemplate Coital Positions’, Journal of Medieval History, x, 1984, pp. 81–93 Butler, Ruth, and Suzanne Glover Lindsay, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue: European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century, Washington, dc, 2000 [Gauguin écrivain:] Cahn, Isabelle, Gauguin écrivain: Noa Noa, Diverses choses, Ancien culte mahorie, cd-rom, Paris, 2003 Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh [1836], London, 1891 ——, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [1841], Boston, 1907 Le Carnet de Paul Gauguin, ed. René Huygue, Paris, 1952 Carroy, Jacqueline, and Nathalie Richard, Alfred Maury, érudit et rêveur: Les Sciences de l’homme au milieu du xixe siècle, Rennes, 2007 Chavaillon, Catherine, and Eric Olivier, Le Patrimoine archéologique de l’île de Hiva Oa (archipel des Marquises), Dossier d’Archéologie Polynésienne 5, Tahiti, 2007 Colta, Ives, Susan Alyson Stein, Charlotte Hale and Marjorie Shelley, Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic, exh. cat. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), New Haven, ct, and London, 2002 [Cooper:] Cooper, Douglas, ed., Paul Gauguin: 45 lettres à Vincent, Theo et Jo van Gogh, La Haye and Lausanne, 1983 Daftari, Fereshteh, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse, and Kandinsky (PhD thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1988), New York and London, 1991 Danielsson, Bengt, Gauguin in the South Seas [1964], New York, 1966 ——, ‘Gauguin’s Tahitian Titles’, Burlington Magazine, 109, April 1967, pp. 228–33 (‘Les Titres tahitiens de Gauguin’, Bulletin de la Société des Océanistes, 160–161, September–December 1967, pp. 738–62) Davies, H. J., A Tahitian and English Dictionary . . ., Tahiti, 1851

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Delaroche, Achille, ‘D’un point de vue esthétique: A propos du peintre Paul Gauguin’, L’Ermitage, 5e année, January 1894, pp. 35–9 Dictionnaire en ligne de l’Académie Tahitienne – Fare Vana‘a, www.farevanaa.pf/dictionnaire.php Dolent, Jean, ‘Chronique’, Le Journal des Artistes, 22 February 1891 ——, Monstres, Paris, 1896 Dorra, Henri, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2007 Druick, Douglas W., and Peter Kort Zegers, Paul Gauguin: Pages from the Pacific, exh. cat., Auckland City Art Gallery, 1995 [Druick and Zegers:] Druick, Douglas W., and Peter Kort Zegers, in collaboration with Britt Salvesen, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago and Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), London, 2001 Eisenman, Stephen F., Gauguin’s Skirt, London, 1997 ——, ‘Identity and Non-Identity in Gauguin’s Te nave nave fenua’, in Aruna D’Souza, ed., Self and History: A Tribute to Linda Nochlin, London and New York, 2001 ——, ed., Paul Gauguin : Artist of Myth and Dream, exh. cat. (Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome), Milan, 2007 Ellis, William, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, including Descriptions of the Natural History and Scenery of the Islands, with Remarks on the History, Mythology, Traditions, Government, Arts, Manners, and Customs of the Inhabitants, London, 1829 Exposé de l’état actuel des missions évangéliques chez les peuples infidèles, Geneva, 1821 Exposition d’œuvres récentes de Paul Gauguin, Galeries Durand-Ruel, Paris, November 1893 Fell, Jill, Alfred Jarry, London, 2010 Fénéon, Félix, Œuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan U. Halperin, vol. i: Chroniques d’art, Geneva, 1970 [Field:] Field, Richard S., Paul Gauguin: Monotypes, Philadelphia, 1973 ——, Paul Gauguin: The Paintings of the First Voyage to Tahiti (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1963), New York and London, 1977 ——, ‘Gauguin: An Exhibition’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, xix/4, September–October 1988, pp. 129–38 Focillon, Henri, Hokusai [1914; 1924], Lyon, 2005 Fonsmark, Anne-Birgitte, Catalogue Gauguin Ceramics Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 1996 Fonvielle, Wilfrid de, Les Merveilles du monde invisible, Paris, 1866 Freud, Sigmund, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [1930] und andere kulturtheoretische Schriften, Frankfurt, 1994

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of the manuscript held at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Special Collections] ——, ‘Un inédit de Gauguin’, Nouvelles littéraires, 7 May 1953 (partially reprinted in Oviri, écrits d’un sauvage, pp. 59–61) Mallarmé, Stéphane, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. JeanAubry, Paris, 1945 Manceron, Gilles, ‘Segalen et Gauguin’, in Gauguin: Actes du colloque Gauguin, Musée d’Orsay, 11–13 January 1989, Paris, 1991, pp. 33–48 Martin, Jean-Hubert, ed., Une image peut en cacher une autre: Arcimboldo – Dalí – Raetz, exh. cat. (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris), 2009 Mathews, Nay Mowll, Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life, New Haven, ct, and London, 2001 Maury, L.-F.-Alfred, Le Sommeil et les rêves: Études psychologiques sur ces phénomènes et les divers états qui s’y rattachent suivies de recherches sur le développement de l’instinct et de l’intelligence dans leurs rapports avec le phénomène du sommeil [1861], Paris, 1862 Mellerio, André, Odilon Redon, Paris, 1913, reprinted New York, 1968 [Merlhès 1984:] Victor Merlhès, ed., Correspondance de Paul Gauguin, documents-témoignages, vol. i: 1873–1888, Paris, 1984 [Merlhès 1989:] ——, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887–1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, Taravao, 1989 ——, ‘Art de Papou & chant de rossignoou: La lutte pour les peintres’, in Racontars de Rapin: Fac-similé du manuscrit de Paul Gauguin, Taravao, 1994, pp. 1–117 [Merlhès 1995:] ——, De Bretagne en Polynésie: Paul Gauguin, pages inédites, Tahiti, 1995 Michelet, Jules, La Mer, Paris, 1861 Millaud, Hiriata, ‘Les Titres tahitiens de Gauguin’, in Ia Orana Gauguin, exh. cat. (Musée de Tahiti et des Iles – Te Fare Manaha, Puna‘auia, Tahiti), Paris, 2003, pp. 81–90 Mitchell, W.J.T., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago and London, 1994 Moerenhout, J.-A., Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan, contenant des documens nouveaux sur la géographie physique et politique, la langue, la littérature, la religion, les mœurs, les usages et les coutumes de leurs habitans; et des considérations générales sur leur commerce, leur histoire et leur gouvernement, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, 1837 [Kornfeld:] Mongan, Elizabeth, Eberhard W. Kornfeld and Harold Joachim, Paul Gauguin: Catalogue Raisonné of his Prints, Bern, 1988 Morice, Charles, ‘Parahi te Marae’, L’Image, 10, September 1897, pp. 37–40 Nicholson, Bronwen, et al., Gauguin and Maori Art, Birkenhead, Auckland, 1995

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Pambrun, Jean-Marc, ed., No hea mai matou? D’où venons-nous? Destins d’objets polynésiens, exh. cat., Musée de Tahiti et des Iles – Te Fare Mahana, 2007 [Paris 1989:] Gauguin, exh. cat. (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris), 1989 Peltier, Philippe, ‘Gauguin, artiste ethnographe’, in Gauguin Tahiti: L’Atelier des Tropiques, exh. cat. (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Paris, 2003, pp. 22–41 Pickvance, Ronald, The Drawings of Paul Gauguin, Feltham, 1970 ——, Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School, exh. cat., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994 Pinchon, Pierre, Jean Dolent, 1835–1909: Ecrivain, critique d’art et collectionneur (PhD thesis, Paris i Sorbonne, 2007), Rennes, 2010 Poe, Edgar Allan, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, in Tales, Poems, Essays, London and Glasgow, 1952, pp. 503–13 (‘La Genèse d’un poëme’, in Œuvres en prose, trans. Charles Baudelaire, Paris, 1951, pp. 979–97) Prather, Marla, and Charles F. Stuckey, eds, Paul Gauguin, 1848–1903, Cologne, 1994 Rapetti, Rodolphe, ed., Odilon Redon: Prince du Rêve, exh. cat. (Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris), 2011 Ravines, Rogger, ed., Fuentes para la historia de la arqueología peruana (Boletin de Lima, xviii/105–106), Lima, 2006 Redon, Odilon, À soi-même: Journal (1867–1915): Notes sur la vie, l’art et les artistes, Paris, 1961 Rookmaker, H. R., Gauguin and 19th-century Art Theory [1959], Amsterdam, 1972 Rorschach, Hermann, Psychodiagnostik. Methodik und Ergebnisse eines wahrnehmungsdiagnostischen Experiments (Deutenlassen von Zufallsformen) [1921], Bern, 1948 Scemla, Jean-Jo, Le Voyage en Polynésie: Anthologie des voyageurs occidentaux de Cook à Segalen, Paris, 1994 Séailles, Gabriel, Essai sur le génie dans l’art [1883], Paris, 1902 Seguin, Armand, ‘Paul Gauguin’, L’Occident, 16–18, April–May 1903, pp. 158–67, 230–39, 298–305 Segalen, Victor, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henry Bouillier, Paris, 1995, vol. i Souriau, Paul, Théorie de l’invention, Paris, 1881 Spinoza, [Baruch de], L’Éthique [1677], trans. Roland Caillois, Paris, 1954 Steinen, Karl von den, Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst. Studien über die Entwicklung primitiver Südseeornamentik nach eigener Reiseergebnisse und dem Material der Museen, 3 vols, Berlin, 1925 (reprinted New York, 1969, and Saarbrücken, 2006; published in French as Les Marquisiens et leur art, 2 vols, Tahiti, 2005) Strindberg, August, ‘Du hasard dans la production artistique’, Revue des revues, xi, 15 November 1894, pp. 265–70

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Stuckey, Charles F., ‘Gauguin Inside Out’, in Eric M. Zafran, ed., Gauguin’s ‘Nirvana’, exh. cat. (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, ct), New Haven, ct, and London, 2001, pp. 129–41 Tardieu, Eugène, ‘La Peinture et les peintres’, L’Écho de Paris, 13 May 1895 Teilhet-Fisk, Jehanne, Paradise Reviewed: An Interpretation of Gauguin’s Polynesian Symbolism (PhD thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1975), Ann Arbor, mi, 1983 Thomson, Belinda, with Frances Fowle and Lesley Stevenson, Gauguin’s Vision, exh. cat. (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh), 2005 Trésor de la langue Française informatisé [1971–1994] [Verdier 1986:] Verdier, Philippe, ‘Un manuscrit de Gauguin: L’Esprit moderne et le catholicisme’, Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, lxvi–lxvii, 1985–6, pp. 273–328 [transcription from the manuscript on pp. 299–328] Vignoli, Tito, Mito e scienza: Saggio, Milan, 1879 [Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters] Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, ‘Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies’, Common Knowledge, x/3, 2004, pp. 463–84 [W:] Cogniat, Raymond, and Daniel Wildenstein, eds, Gauguin, vol. i: Catalogue, Paris, 1964 [dw:] Wildenstein, Daniel, Gauguin: Premier itinéraire d’un sauvage: Catalogue de l’œuvre peint (1873–1888), texts and research Sylvie Crussard, documentation and chronology Martine Heudron, 2 vols, Paris and Milan, 2001 Wildenstein, Georges, ‘Le Premier séjour de Gauguin à Tahiti d’après le manuscrit Jénot (1891–1893)’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., lxvii, January–April 1956, pp. 115–26 Winnicott, D. W., ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, xxxiv/2, 1953, pp. 89–97 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Tagebücher 1914–1916. Philosophische Untersuchungen (Werkausgabe, i), Frankfurt, 1995 Zafran, Eric M., ed., Gauguin’s Nirvana, exh. cat. (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, ct), New Haven, ct, and London, 2001

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Acknowledgements

The research whose results are presented in this book was conducted over a long period and has benefited from a great deal of support. I began it in the second half of the 1990s, when preparing my study on ‘potential images’, and was able to bring it to a conclusion thanks to the grants and hospitality of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, and above all the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, which allowed me to devote a sabbatical from the University of Geneva to drafting the manuscript in the sylvan calm of western Massachusetts. I should like to thank the directors, collaborators and librarians of these research centres, in particular Elizabeth Cropper, Penelope Curtis, Jon Wood, Michael Ann Holly, Michael Conforti and Mark Ledbury, as well as my ‘fellow fellows’ and colleagues at Williams College with whom I had fertile exchanges, especially Michèle Hannoosh, Richard Wrigley, Aron Vinegar, Marc Gotlieb and Marc Simpson. The illustration of this work and its English translation were made possible by a generous subsidy from Richard R. Brettell and by overhead contributions from the Swiss National Science Foundation. I was assisted in researching the illustrations by Nolwenn Mégard. Working with Chris Miller on the English text has been a pleasure and a privilege. I owe special thanks to the collectors and curators of museums and collections who gave me the ‘hands-on’ access to Gauguin works that my study required: in Boston, George T. M. Shackelford at the Museum of Fine Arts; in Chicago, Noel and Florence Rothman, as well as Douglas W. Druick and colleagues at the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Art Institute of Chicago; in Copenhagen, Ulla Houkjær, Christian Holmsted Olesen and Charlotte Malte at the Kunstindustriemuseet (now Designmuseum Danmark), Line Clausen Pedersen at the Ny Carslberg Glyptotek, Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark at Ordrup gaard and Annette Johansen at the Willumsens Museum; in Geneva, Danielle Hodel and Claude Ghez at the Musée du Petit Palais; in Lausanne, Samuel Josefowitz; in Los Angeles, Richard Kelton at the Kelton Foundation; in New Haven, Laurence Kanter at the Yale University Art Gallery; in New York, Hsia Ay-Whang at Wildenstein & Co.; in Paris, Béatrice Salmon and Odile

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Acknowledgements

Nouvel-Kammerer at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and Catherine Chevillot, Laurence Madeline and Marie-Pierre Salé at the Musée d’Orsay; at Vulainessur-Seine, Hélène Pillu-Oblin at the Musée Départemental Stéphane-Mallarmé; in Washington, dc, Kimberly Jones, Peter Parshall and Andrew Robison at the National Gallery of Art; in Williamstown, Jay Clark and Richard Rand at the Clark Art Institute. My work has benefited from students’ reactions to the courses on Gauguin that I have taught at the Universities of Geneva and Fribourg-en-Brisgau and from the observations and suggestions made at lectures given at the invitation of Klaus Herding, Anne Leonard, Jean-Hubert Martin, Atsushi Miura, Francesco Pellizzi, Raphael Rosenberg and Richard Shiff, and in response to articles written at the request of Petra Chu, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Peter Krieger and Chris Stolwijk. I have gained a great deal from discussions and exchanges with colleagues and researchers who have been working – sometimes for much longer than I have – on Gauguin, notably Caroline Boyle-Turner, Barbara Braun, Richard R. Brettell, Sue Canterbury, Elizabeth Childs, Carol Christensen, Sylvie Crussard, Henri Dorra, Douglas Druick, Elise Eckermann, Stephen F. Eisenman, Richard S. Field, Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, June E. Hargrove, Haruko Hirota, Heather Lemonedes, Heather MacDonald, Nancy Mowll Mathews, Victor Merlhès, George T. M. Shackelford, Susan Alyson Stein, Belinda Thomson and Peter Zegers. My study has also benefited from the observations of conservators including Charlotte Hale, Ann Hoenigswald, Kristin Lister, David Marquis and above all Carol Christensen and Travers Newton. Valuable new light was shed by Hiriata Millaud in Tahiti and Éric Olivier and Catherine Chavaillon-Olivier at Hiva Oa. I owe ideas and information to many other colleagues, among whom I should like to mention Andreas Blühm, JeanRoch Bouiller, Roger Diederen, Thierry Dufrêne, Sadao Fujihara, Richard Kendall, Thomas Kirchner, David Lemaire, Ségolène Le Men, Antoinette Le NormandRomain, Natalia Majluf, Ruth Phillips, Pierre Pinchon, Rodolphe Rapetti, Cécile Thézelais, Richard Thomson, Merel van Tilburg, Ittai Weinryb and Friedrich Weltzien. Last but not least, Johanna accompanied me up hill and down dale in my research, from the cliffs of Brittany to the north coast of Peru and from the Berkshire Hills to California. Without her, this book would have lacked much of its bite.

Translator’s Acknowledgements Dario Gamboni has been the perfect author to translate, providing many original English quotations with his typescript, gently rectifying misunderstandings and answering my numerous questions patiently and meticulously.

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Index

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Numbers in italic refer to illustrations A‘a statue, Rurutu 104, 200–201, 203, 229, 257, 261, 264 Above the Abyss 16, 58, 64, 126–44, 291, 335 bird’s-eye view 142–4, 151, 172 choice of title, possible influences on 146–7, 150–51 cliff as ‘barbarian idol’ 157, 160, 277 collective and individual aspect of hidden figure 147–8, 150–51 cow motif 155, 157 double image as self-portrait 9, 133–4, 140–41, 145, 147–8, 150–51, 160, 166 Face-Landscape sketch 71, 141–2, 144, 146 as ‘painting for painters’ 159 phallic symbolism 152, 153–4, 198 possible tribute in Farewell to Gauguin (Sérusier) 80, 156, 159–60 reversibility of figure and ground 13, 128–37, 140–41, 147–8, 156–7, 159, 230 spatial incoherence 126–8, 157–8 Vincent Van Gogh’s reaction to 164–5 see also Gauguin, Paul, pictures abstraction 12, 13, 30–31, 34, 38–9, 88, 98, 104, 106, 131, 259–60 accidental images see double images acheiropoieta 57, 241 aesthetic communication 9, 18, 22, 23, 38, 147, 159, 327, 343 Alberti, Leon Battista 58, 67–8, 71, 194, 273 ambiguity

double images 11, 13–16, 39–42, 48–9, 65–9, 363–5 Tahitian language’s potential for 108–9 American Ceramics 117, 220, 229, 231 Ancien culte mahorie 20, 46, 48, 179, 184, 190, 310, 316–17, 330, 340 plant motif 49, 60 Polynesian cosmogony 111, 177 sexual symbolism 328–9, 331–2, 341, 342, 343 Ta‘aroa creation god 106 ti‘i 47–8 see also Gauguin, Paul, writings Andersen, Hans Christian, Dancers under the Trees 147, 265–6 androgyny 123–4, 206, 245, 327 animism animated objects and children’s stories 264–74 entification 55, 105, 194, 255 and fear 69–73 natura naturans, emulation and creativity 295–7 anthropomorphism 54–5, 63–4, 116–17, 159–62, 168–9, 235–7, 274 anthrotheomorphism 313, 320 anthrozoomorphism 49–50, 80–81, 276, 299–300, 303, 332 biomorphism 16, 18, 270 phytomorphism 60, 191, 209, 227–9 ‘arioi society 328–9, 334, 335, 350 Arles 298 Washerwomen at Arles (Gauguin) 68, 137–9 Arosa, Gustave 220 Art Nouveau 180, 211

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Index

artistic techniques chiaroscuro 42 colour, non-mimetic use 14, 23 creative process, ejaculation comparison 203–6 dessins-empreintes 245–51, 366 flat relief 33, 60, 96 impasto, avoidance of 179 polychrome relief sculpture 38 texture variation methods 179 woodcuts and prints 237–51 artistic techniques, ceramics aesthetic development 183–4 coil pots 185 firing and glazes 186–8 firing, and transubstantiation 182–3 gold outlines 186, 188 grotesque faces 225–7 ‘hunchback geometry’ 16–17 and ‘intelligent hands’ 180–82 sculpture 206–7 sculpture, cylindrical form 207–9, 211–12, 306 artistic techniques, wood and sculpture 188–203 cylindrical 192–203, 207–10, 211–12, 306 cylindrical, phallic dimension 203 ‘imaginary beings’ on trees 194–6 maritime experiences 189–90 and Marquesan sculpture 199–203 staining 191–2 artists and writers, interaction between 16–18 associationism 13–14, 52, 259 Atuona Maison du Jouir 24–6, 196, 343, 345, 350, 353 Paul Gauguin Cultural Centre 4, 19 Aurier, Albert 21, 92, 180, 182, 366 Avant et après creation of cloisonné vase 186–8 double images 54 on his own abilities 370 Holy Images drawing 158, 281–3, 286, 290 on Marquesan art 202–3 medieval sculpture 321 mirror motif 56, 123–4 Peruvian vase collection 219 on travel 298

on Van Gogh 355 see also Gauguin, Paul, writings Barbizon school landscapes 63 Baudelaire, Charles 16, 21, 76, 111, 146–7, 155 Bernard, Émile 94, 132, 161, 174, 179, 296 letters to 26, 158–9, 163, 176, 183 Bernard, Madeleine 176, 183 biology 55, 60, 72, 88, 151, 308, 317, 318, 320, 331, 333 microbiology 40, 308 birds goose motif 212, 213, 216, 218, 222, 227–8, 296 metaphorical associations 89 swan motif 212, 213, 214–16, 218, 222 bird’s-eye view technique 142–4, 151, 172, 214, 233 Birnholz, Alan C. 11 bistability see ambiguity Bodelsen, Merete 38, 69, 78, 212, 225–6, 236, 265, 273, 360, 362 botany 73, 97, 298, 317, 323, 331 Boucher de Perthes, Jacques, ‘figurestones’ 54, 194 Brancusi, Constantin, Head of a Sleeping Child 84–5 Braun, Barbara 213, 218, 226 Brettell, Richard 10, 322 British ‘New Sculpture’ 192, 211 Brittany The Breton Calvary or The Green Christ (Gauguin) 135, 157, 280, 281 Breton figure in Parahi te Marae 313 Breton Matters (Gauguin) 2, 14, 15, 218 Breton women, positions and attitudes, The Vision of the Sermon 99–101 Catholicism in 94, 99 Double Vase with Breton Figure and Lamb (Gauguin) 92, 185–6, 226 Hôtel Gloanec 16, 105 Le Pouldu see Le Pouldu monoliths and fertility rites 199–200 Pont-Aven see Pont-Aven The White River or Breton Boy by the Aven (Gauguin) 72, 142, 143, 144 Buddhism 110, 283, 286, 360, 361

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Burn, H., The Spirit of Byron in the Isles of Greece 59, 128–9, 133, 143

see also primitivism Christianity in Brittany 94 denouncement of idols 57 holy image motifs 281–3, 284, 286 and incarnation 255, 262, 294 see also Catholicism Cogniat, Raymond 141–2 colour, non-mimetic use 14, 23 cosmogony (man created from earth) 286, 288, 294–5, 317, 339, 366 Courbet, Gustave, The Seaside at Palavas 144–5 Craighill Handy, E. S. 313, 322–3, 341, 353, 366 Crussard, Sylvie 11, 13, 19–20, 50, 68, 76, 135, 142, 267, 271, 276, 296–7, 326

Cahier pour Aline 29–30, 42–3, 52, 107–11, 181, 259, 293, 327 Genesis of a Picture 111–21 see also Gauguin, Paul, writings Caldecott, Randolph 76, 224, 264 caricatural humour 230–35 Carlyle, Thomas 51–2, 294, 303, 351–2 Sartor Resartus 30–31, 56, 118, 169 Carroll, Lewis, Through the LookingGlass 111, 117, 264 The Catholic Church and Modern Times 150–51, 178, 294, 360 Catholicism 23–6, 59, 93–4, 321–2 see also Christianity Catholicism and the Modern Mind 178, 294 Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot 65, 134, 137, 235–6, 286, 360 Moche vase-portraits, comparison to 79, 220 red glaze 85, 148, 187, 236 Redon, influence on 45 in Still-life with Japanese Print 75, 148, 236, 271, 304 see also Gauguin, Paul, ceramics ceramics see artistic techniques, ceramics; Gauguin, Paul, ceramics Cézanne, Paul 22, 23, 26, 38, 68–9, 356–7 A Modern Olympia 113 Vase with Motifs from Cézanne’s ‘Harvest’ (Gauguin) 129–30, 233–5 Chaplet, Ernest 180, 183, 185, 188 Stoneware Pots, Chaplet (Gauguin) 112, 212–13, 218, 247 chiaroscuro 42 childhood animated objects and children’s stories 264–74 ‘children’s painting’, and Primitivism 58–9 children’s toys and dreaming, as transitional objects 90–91 dada (hobbyhorse) and imagination 258–64, 266 plants and birds as decoration for 86–9 representation of 60–63 sleeping child motif 115, 116–17

Daftari, Fereshteh 33, 34, 38 Dalí, Salvador, ‘False Childhood Memories’ 62 decoration for children, plants and birds as 86–9 value of 33–4 Degas, Edgar 60, 162, 233, 257, 323–5 Delaroche, Achille 17, 117–18, 264, 344 Demmin, Auguste, American Ceramics 117, 220, 229, 231 dessins-empreintes 245–51, 366 see also artistic techniques Dieulafoy-Collection Rooms, Louvre 9, 33–8, 206 dissimulation Above the Abyss, collective and individual aspect of hidden figure 147–8, 150–51 obfuscation techniques, and matter, concept of 237–51 see also parables Diverses choses artists compared to flowers 298 on cannibalism 236 on colour 23 creation of cloisonné vase 186–8 dada 261 dual-purpose parabolic meaning 26, 344 evolution of art 179 intericonicity 13–14 law of recapitulation 259

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on pain 334 personal God, making fun of 327 senses, use of 18 sexual morality of Catholic Church 321–2 on subject-matter 174 Tahiti, reasons for going to 7–8 see also Gauguin, Paul, writings Dolent, Jean 8, 26, 124, 255 Dorra, Henri 89 double images 11, 13–16, 39–42, 48–9, 65–9, 363–5 drawings see Gauguin, Paul, drawings dreams and hallucination 52–3 ‘mysterious centre of thought’, search for 83–91, 102–11, 114–15, 116–18, 120–21 see also psychology drinks dispenser (fontaine de table) 21, 49, 51, 60, 76, 190 comparison 35, 76, 78 see also Gauguin, Paul, ceramics Druick, Douglas, and Peter Zegers 119, 132, 149, 163, 164, 216 dual-purpose parabolic meaning 97, 107–8, 202, 226, 301, 327, 333–4, 343–4, 361 Duchamp, Marcel 9, 50, 218 Dürer, Albrecht 9, 101, 250

natural theogony (rocks and heads) 276–91 Face-Landscape sketch, Above the Abyss 71, 141–2, 144, 146 Farina, Viera and Claude-Charles, copy of Still-life with Laval’s Profile 4, 19, 21 Fénéon, Félix 16–17, 54, 148, 185, 262 Field, Richard 10, 32, 117, 191–2, 246–7 Filiger, Charles 161 flat relief 33, 60, 96 Flaubert, Gustave 75, 200, 304 flower-eye motif 167, 174, 232–3, 356, 357 Focillon, Henri 98, 144, 180–81, 185 Fonsmark, Anne-Birgitte 49, 50, 85, 212, 286 Fontainas, André 56, 91, 114, 117, 119 ‘found objects’ 49, 50, 190 fox motif 296–7, 321, 322 Freud, Sigmund 72, 153, 274 religion as an illusion 152 The Interpretation of Dreams 120, 152 Friedrich, Caspar David 144–5 Chalk Cliffs on Rügen 74, 145 Gauguin, Aline 255 Cahier pour Aline see Cahier pour Aline Gauguin, Clovis, Clovis Asleep 41, 86, 87, 88, 89–91, 102, 104, 117, 255, 268 Gauguin, Mette 83–4, 86, 91 letters to 75, 102, 104, 108, 109, 112 Gauguin, Paul childhood 59 children 83–91 education 56 photographic portrait 62, 131, 132 Gauguin, Paul, ceramics Bust-Vase with Exploded Head 76, 148–50, 151, 304 Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot see Cephalomorphic Self-portrait Pot Double Vase with Breton Figure and Lamb 92, 185–6, 226 Double-necked Vase Joined by Stirrup-shaped Handle 124–5, 227–30, 231–2 drinks dispenser see drinks dispenser

Easter Island 21–2, 160, 278, 312 Eiffel Tower architecture 182 Eisenman, Stephen 209 eroticism see under sex and sexuality Ethnographical Museum of the Trocadéro, mummy posture 115, 289 Exposition Universelle 33–8, 181–2, 183, 221 eye motif 34, 49, 98–9, 101, 105–6, 361–3 fables animated objects and children’s stories 264–74 dada (hobbyhorse) and (children’s) imagination 258–64, 266 and dolls (puppets) 253–8 ‘Myth and Science’ (Vignoli) 55–6, 135, 194, 274

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Eve 109, 207, 208, 235 Fountain-shaped Vase 222–4, 301 Head of Jean Gauguin 39, 84–5, 86, 116, 163, 286, 287, 288, 290 Horned Rats 273 Leda Vase 113, 119, 212, 213, 214, 216, 218–19, 222, 223, 321 Oviri 107–8, 124–5, 204–5, 206, 289, 304, 323 Portrait Vase of Madame Schuffenecker 196, 361–2, 363 Pot with Three Handles 126, 230–31 Pyriform Vase with Stirrup-shaped Handle-Spout 128, 231–2, 237, 304 Self-portrait Pot with Thumb on Lip 91, 183, 184, 187, 362–3 Stump-shaped Vase 31–2, 69–72, 73, 75–8, 190, 200, 207, 221, 222, 225–6, 264–5 Thérèse 101, 198–9, 203, 341 Trunk-shaped Vase with Female Face 36, 76–9, 81, 93, 97, 186–8, 190, 222, 265, 289–90 Vase Decorated with Woman’s Bust 120–21, 224–5, 226 Vase with Motifs from Cézanne’s ‘Harvest’ 129–30, 233–5 Woman-vase with Serpent-belt 114, 116, 212, 213, 215, 216–19, 227, 304 Gauguin, Paul, drawings Ancient Maori Religion 184, 329–31 Breton Matters 2, 14, 15, 218 Caricatural Motifs 78, 152–3 Face-Landscape 71, 141–2, 144, 146 Holy Images 158, 281–3, 286, 290 Love One Another 321–2, 327 Penitent Magdalene 328 Self-portrait 195, 358, 359, 363 Self-portrait with Thumb on Lip 197, 363, 364 Study of Ceramics and Flowers 123, 227 Two Tahitian Women and a Marquesan Ear Ornament 187, 335–6 Woman with Cat 185, 323–5 Gauguin, Paul, paintings Above the Abyss see Above the Abyss Arii matamoe 19, 45–6, 47, 48, 124, 190, 236, 337, 341, 344, 369 Arlésiennes, Mistral 89, 172–5, 226, 308

At the Window (Still-life with Tine and Carafon) 149, 269–70, 271 The Black Rocks 164–5, 288–90, 306, 334 The Breton Calvary or The Green Christ 135, 157, 280, 281 Chou Quarry, Hole in Cliff 30, 68, 71 Clovis Asleep 41, 86, 87, 88, 89–91, 102, 104, 117, 255, 268 Exotic Legends 250–51 Fatata te miti (Near the Sea) 97, 168, 299 Fisherman and Bathers on the Aven 73, 142–4, 233–4 Haystacks in Brittany 54 Illustrated Menu 161, 283–4 The Little One is Dreaming 40, 84–90, 92, 95, 102, 117, 253, 255 Lost Virginity 256, 296, 297 Madame Alexandra Kohler 151, 272, 273 Mahana no Atua 172, 306–9, 317, 322, 344 Man with an Axe 6, 22, 24, 32, 33, 301 Manaò tupapaú see Manaò tupapaú Matamoe 7, 28, 31–3, 303, 332 Nirvana (Portrait of Meyer de Haan) 5, 21, 24, 306 Otahi 325 The Painter of Sunflowers 85, 165–7, 172, 174, 355, 356 Parahi te marae see Parahi te marae Parau na te Varua ino 97, 169, 299–301 Path with Poplars, Osny 26–7, 65–7, 88 The Pony 142, 249–50, 341, 366 Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ 358 Red Roof by the Water 28, 67, 70, 163 Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach 153, 276, 277, 281, 282, 286, 290–91, 313 Rocky Coast 66, 136–7, 138, 175 Self-portrait (Les Misérables) 11–12, 18, 34, 36, 38, 45, 88, 165, 358 Self-portrait ‘Oviri’ 57, 125, 131 Shepherd and Shepherdess in the

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Meadow 170, 301–3 Soumin (Sous-main, Writing Pad) 185, 331, 332, 334 Still-life with Carafon and Figurine 148, 267–8 Still-life with the Head of a Horse 81, 157, 158 Still-life, Interior, Copenhagen 150, 270–72 Still-life with Japanese Print 75, 148, 236, 271, 304 Still-life with Laval’s Profile 3, 18–19, 20, 29, 91, 101, 149, 271 Stoneware Pots Chaplet 112, 212–13, 218, 247 Study for Cow and Peasant Woman in Sunken Lane 46, 97, 98, 163 Sunflowers in an Armchair 194, 356, 357–8 Te nave nave fenua 152, 273, 275 Te reroia (The Dream) 54, 116, 118 Two Bathers 218, 296 The Unintelligible with Harsh Profile 17, 43–5, 124, 146 View of Pont-Aven from Lézaven 171, 303, 305, 332 The Vision of the Sermon see Vision of the Sermon Wall by Night 25, 63–5, 67, 88 Washerwomen at Arles 68, 137–9 The Wave 67, 137, 138, 277, 286 Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 53, 114–17, 119–20, 203, 306 The White River or Breton Boy by the Aven 72, 142, 143, 144 Woman and Child before a Landscape 23, 60–61, 62, 95, 122, 125, 144, 255 Yellow Haystacks (The Golden Harvest) 1, 14, 15, 218 Gauguin, Paul, wood carvings Be in Love and You Will Be Happy 34, 75, 77, 182, 256, 296, 299, 306, 362–3 Bust of a Tahitian Woman 144, 255–7 Cylinder with Christ on the Cross 106, 202, 203, 284 Father Lechery 100, 153, 196–8, 203, 341 Idol with Pearl 360–61

L’Après-midi d’un faune 97–8, 105, 110–11, 157, 192–3, 195, 203, 207–11, 237, 251, 320, 327, 341 Martinique 33, 73–5, 190–91, 320 Woman Out Walking 94–5, 188, 189–90, 191–2 Gauguin, Paul, woodcuts and prints Auti te pape 69, 139–40, 244 Dramas of the Sea 70, 140, 141 Mahana atua 131, 237, 238 Mahna no varua ino 136, 241–3, 244–5 Maruru 180, 241, 318–19, 344 Oviri 138, 235, 245, 246 Te atua 134, 159, 240–41, 282, 284, 286, 290, 322, 323, 328 Te faruru 137, 243–4 Two Tahitian Women Picking Fruit 140–41, 245–6, 248, 249 The Universe is Created 47, 166, 166, 292, 294–5 ‘Volpini Suite’ prints 115, 214–16, 218 Gauguin, Paul, writings Ancien culte mahorie see Ancien culte mahorie Avant et après see Avant et après Cahier pour Aline see Cahier pour Aline Diverses choses see Diverses choses Noa Noa see Noa Noa ‘Notes sur l’art à l’Exposition Universelle’ 33–8 Gauguin, Pola 132, 237–40 Gheyn the Younger, Jacob de, Rocks Invaded by Plants 29, 67, 71 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 145–6, 148 Goya, Francisco 134 Hommage à Goya (Redon) 18, 43–5, 120–21, 358 Grandville, J. J. 83 ‘The Statuary and the Statue of Jupiter’ 143, 252, 254 graphology 20–22, 38 grotesque tradition 76, 225–7, 232–3 Ha‘apuani (Gauguin’s friend) 193, 250, 353, 354, 366 hallucination 52–3, 102–3, 104–6, 110–11

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see also visions as subject of picture Hargrove, June 13, 250–51 Hartmann, Eduard von 119–20 Hervey de Saint-Denys, Marquis de, Les Rêves 42, 89, 90, 104, 120 Hinduism 75, 110, 150, 209, 341, 360 Hiroshige, Utagawa 128 Futami Bay in Ise Province 154, 277 The Moon Pine 47, 97–8, 100 Hirota, Haruko 76 Hokusai, Katsushika, Wrestlers 44, 95, 96, 230 homosexuality 326, 327 see also sexuality hostility and incomprehension towards Gauguin’s art 23–4 Hugo, Victor 135 The Gouliot Caves 192, 348, 351 Humbert de Superville, D.P.G. 21, 114, 233 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Certains 40, 42, 122–3, 254–5, 257, 320 hybrid baroque, Peru 22, 60, 61, 89, 191, 309

influence of 63, 137–9 work already seen as 10–11 Impressionist Exhibitions 42, 60, 63–5, 67 indeterminacy factors 19, 251, 294, 295, 332–3 see also misperception, aesthetic virtues of intericonicity 13–16

idolatry cliff as ‘barbarian idol’ 157, 160, 277 The Idol (Redon) 155, 278, 279, 314 idolatry, Marquesas Islands 257–8 Polynesia, Family Idols of Pomare 146, 263 imaginative perception 39–40, 48–9, 54, 352–5 children, representation of 60–63 dada (hobbyhorse) and imagination 258–64, 266 and origin of images 57–63 psychological explanations 57–8 reversibility of figure and ground 128–40 self-representation (artist recognizing himself in his own work) 122–75, 196–8 see also misperception, aesthetic virtues of imitation of nature 30, 33, 38–9, 58, 264, 355–6 see also natura naturans, emulation and creativity Impressionism criticism of 7–8, 50–51, 179

La Fontaine, Jean de 257, 260, 268–9 ‘The Statuary and the Statue of Jupiter’ 143, 252, 253–4 Lacombe, Georges, Vorhor, Grey Wave 83, 160, 162 LaFarge, John 352 landscapes and trees 63–78 language ambiguity, Tahitian language’s potential for 108–9 of listening eye 34, 94–5 ‘mysterious unknown language’ 23 polysemic nature of 31–3, 38–9, 108–9 semiotics 21, 38, 108, 112, 182, 309 Tahitian language titles 17–18 verbal language and phonetic shortcuts 19–20, 112 see also writing Laso, Francisco, The Inhabitant of the Cordillera of Peru 118, 221–2 Le Pouldu 30, 135–7, 159, 276 in Above the Abyss 135 rock representations 276–7, 281–2, 288–91 Rocks Near Bellangenet Beach 153,

Jacquemart, Albert, History of the Ceramic Art 181, 220–21, 262 Japan ceramics 183, 186 painting, influence of 137, 140, 144 prints, in Gauguin’s pictures 76 sacred rocks 154, 277–8 see also Hiroshige, Utagawa; Hokusai, Katsushika Jarry, Alfred 16, 17, 39, 194, 233, 321, 349 Les Jours et les nuits 110, 118 Manao tùpapaù 105–6, 110, 113 Kearns, James 99–101

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276, 277, 281, 282, 286, 290–91, 313 Leclercq, Julien 240, 345 Leonardo da Vinci 58, 237, 245 Lion Frieze, Palace of Darius i 10, 13–14, 33–4, 35, 37, 38, 39–40, 104, 201

taiana and cult of ancestors 188–9, 313, 336–8, 339, 340, 341 war club (‘u‘u) 105, 191, 201–2, 207, 231, 261 Marquesas Islands, tiki statues 103, 139, 160, 193, 199, 202–3, 245, 247, 283, 338–9, 353, 354 comparison to 206, 246, 313, 320 as images of ancestors 106, 200, 236, 263, 313, 336–7 as phallic symbol 209, 327, 341, 364 and to‘o, opposition between 264 Martin, Bishop 26 Father Lechery 100, 153, 196–8, 203, 341 Martinique 355 Study of Ceramics and Flowers 123, 227, 298, 304 Mataiea 32, 102–4, 113, 315 see also Tahiti matter, concept of caricatural humour 230–35 materials, aesthetic of, and character of matter 182–3 materials, aesthetic of 178–84 obfuscation techniques 237–51 as part of divinity 176–8 process and genesis 185–206 three-dimensionality and polyiconicity 159, 161, 163, 207–37 Mauclair, Camille 192–3 Maufra, Maxime 31, 161 Maury, Alfred 52–3, 65, 67, 83, 86, 89, 93, 102, 105, 240, 288 me‘ae of Utukua on Hiva Oa 198, 364, 365 see also Marquesas Islands Merlhès, Victor 56 metaphor ‘veil of the soul’ 30–31 wallpaper (background), metaphorical interpretation 89 Meyer de Haan, Jacob 30, 78, 153 Nirvana (Portrait of Meyer de Haan) (Gauguin) 5, 21, 24, 306 Michon, Abbé Jean-Hippolyte, Système de graphologie 20–21, 38 Millaud, Hiriata 108, 241 mimetic illusionism 108 mimetic naturalism, criticism of 29–31 mirror motif 123–4

Mach, Ernst, picture puzzles 61, 130, 131 Majluf, Natalia 221 Mallarmé, Stéphane 8, 167, 168, 192–3, 203, 210, 245, 251, 297–8 ‘Sea Breeze’ 155 Manaò tupapaú 16, 50, 102–11, 244, 258, 301, 316, 326, 332, 343, 346 background motifs 103–4, 111–12 in Cahier pour Aline 52, 107–8, 109, 110–11, 112 eroticism 112–14 face and eyes motifs 105–6 genesis of 17, 111–13 The Little One is Dreaming, parallel with 253, 254 in Noa Noa 113, 237–8 ontological reversibility 109–10, 128, 148, 264–5 pillar, theomorphic aspect (cult of the dead) 106 stone engraving of 51, 106, 107, 332 Tahitian language’s potential for ambiguity and polysemy 108–9 Taoist parable of ‘dream of the butterfly’ 110, 148 wood engraving of 106, 132–3, 238, 308 see also Gauguin, Paul, paintings Maori kumete (bowl) 55, 116, 119 Maori sculptor, Virgin and Child 162, 284, 285 Marquesas Islands 22, 106–7 cannibalism 236 eyes in sculpture 256–7, 361 Manaò tupapaú 113, 132–3, 237–40, 250 me‘ae of Utukua on Hiva Oa 198, 364, 365 po¯poi pestle 191, 341, 342, 361 and primitivism 259 relief rubbings 135, 241, 242 religion and idolatry 257–8

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misperception, aesthetic virtues of 50–57, 95 animism and fear 69–73 grotesque and carnivalesque tradition, combination of 76, 232–3 hallucination and dreams 52–3 indeterminancy factors 19, 251, 294, 295, 332–3 motif and theme 63–82, 95, 97–8 ‘mysterious centre of thought’ see ‘mysterious centre of thought’ and superstition 53, 65, 93–4 see also ‘imaginative perception’ Moche culture see Peru, Moche culture Moerenhout, Jacques-Antoine 177, 309, 311, 320, 322, 328–9, 334–5, 342 Monfreid, Georges-Daniel de 18, 45–6, 104, 116–17, 203–6, 335, 349–50, 355 monogram ‘P Go’ 20 Mo‘orea 194–6, 315, 318, 354 Morice, Charles 22, 120–21, 154–5, 314–15, 337, 369 ‘Parahi te Marae’ 174, 310, 311, 345–7 public homage to Gauguin 369 see also Noa Noa motifs cow 155, 157 eye 34, 49, 98–9, 101, 105–6, 361–3 and figures, combination of 13–14 flower-eye 167, 174, 232–3, 356, 357 fox 296–7, 321, 322 goose 212, 213, 216, 218, 222, 227–8, 296 holy image 281–3, 284, 286 Manaò tupapaú 103–6, 111–12 mirror 123–4 and misperception, aesthetic virtues of 63–82, 95, 97–8 mummy 115–16, 238, 289, 306, 307, 308 sleeping child 115, 116–17 swan 212, 213, 214–16, 218, 222 see also phallic symbols multiple viewpoint ideal 212–13 mummy motif 115–16, 238, 289, 306, 307, 308 musical model 18, 112, 114 ‘mysterious centre of thought’, search for 9, 358–60

‘absolute unconscious’ 120 children’s toys and dreaming, as transitional objects 90–91 and dreams 83–91, 102–11, 114–15, 116–18, 120–21 hallucination 102–3, 104–6, 110–11 ‘poietics’ (study of poetic and artistic ‘making’) and Genesis of a Picture 111–21 visions and mental image as subject of picture 92–101 wallpaper (background) evoking dream images 86–9, 95 wallpaper (background), metaphorical interpretation 89 mystical nature of the Orient 22, 33, 38 myths see fables Nabi group 159, 160, 240 natura naturans, emulation and creativity 293–347, 351–2 abstraction and history 335–47 and ancient Oceanian religion 309–22 animality 295–7 anthropomorphism 295, 304, 306, 313–20, 327, 341 embryology 308–9, 334 generation and sexual act 303–9 imago imagans 304, 365 imitation of nature 30, 33, 38–9, 58, 264, 355–6 mountain as manifestation of the divine presence in nature 318–19 orgy of flowers and crouching posture 322–35 orgy of flowers and crouching posture, and Gauguin’s sexual tastes 326–7 Parahi te marae see Parahi te marae plants 298–301, 320 plants, anthrozoomorphic allusion to sexuality of 303, 329–31 transformism 294–5 tropical nature and plants 320 natural or accidental images (stealing from nature) 45–50 Noa Noa 7, 16, 293, 331–2, 334, 337, 365–6 abandonment of ancient cults and demographic decline (Morice) 345 Man with an Axe (L’Homme à la hache) 6, 22, 24, 32, 33

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Manaò tupapaú in 105, 113, 132–3, 237–40, 332 Mara cave 258 Maruru engraving 180, 241, 318–19 on Mataiea 32 on Mo‘orea 315 ‘Parahi te Marae’ (Morice) 174, 310, 311, 345–7 and sexuality 209, 327, 328–9 on Tahitian anatomy 8, 32, 33 Te faruru print 137, 243–4 unity of substance 177–8, 304–6 The Universe is Created 166, 292, 294–5 Vahine no te tiare 30 see also Gauguin, Paul, writings ‘Notes sur l’art à l’Exposition Universelle’ 33–8 see also Gauguin, Paul, writings

Peltier, Philippe 263–4, 313 perception see imaginative perception; misperception, aesthetic virtues of Persia Achaemenid art 33–8, 39–40, 94 and Oceania, perceived link between 108 Peru Arequipa, Casa Tristán del Pozo and hybrid baroque 22, 60, 61, 89, 191, 309 Catholicism, influence of 59–60 ceramics taking the form of genital organs 79, 153, 154, 230, 328, 335 hybrid baroque 22, 60, 61, 89, 191, 309 Peruvian mummy posture, Ethnographical Museum of the Trocadéro 115, 289 pre-Hispanic and pre-Inca objects 22, 78–9, 148–9, 218–22, 227, 229–30, 232, 262–3 pre-Hispanic and pre-Inca objects, preservation of skulls 236 statues as mannequins 257 Peru, Moche culture ceramics, three-dimensionality 222, 224 female ‘portrait vase’ 37, 79, 80 Potato-shaped Vase with Human Face 38, 80–81, 91, 181–2, 191 vase representing coitus 182, 323, 324, 328 phallic symbols horned head 152–4 Peru ceramics 79, 153, 154, 230 phalluses mistaken for hammers 24–6 volcanoes 206, 304, 318 see also motifs philosophy Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 9, 39 ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (Poe) 111, 114 Philosophy of the Unconscious (Von Hartmann) 119–20 positivism 40, 155, 178 Romantic Spinozists 293–4, 298, 306 photographic portrait 62, 131, 132 phytomorphism 60, 191, 209, 227–9 pictograms and glyphs 21–2

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obfuscation techniques 237–51 see also dissimulation observation qualitiies 13 O’Conor, Roderic 78, 153, 326 ‘P Go’ monogram 20 paintings see Gauguin, Paul, paintings Palace of Darius i, Lion Frieze 10, 13–14, 33–4, 35, 37, 38, 39–40, 104, 201 parables Taoist parable of ‘dream of the butterfly’ 110, 148 use of 23–6, 82, 366 see also dissimulation parabolic meaning, dual-purpose 97, 107–8, 202, 226, 301, 327, 333–4, 343–4, 361 Parahi te marae 173, 175–8, 181, 186, 264, 303, 309–22, 324, 333, 344–5, 369 fence design 189, 335–9, 341–3 plants at base (couple) 322–3, 327, 332, 361–2, 363 stem (vertical element) 339–41 taiana and cult of ancestors 188–9, 336–8, 339, 340, 341 see also Gauguin, Paul, paintings; natura naturans ‘Parahi te Marae’ poem (Morice) 174, 310, 311, 345–7

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paul gauguin

‘picture puzzles’ 40, 68–9, 129–31 pig, and feminine sexuality, link between 296, 326 Pissarro, Camille 38, 65 Gauguin Carving ‘Woman out Walking’ 94, 188, 189, 192 letter to 68–9 Woodland Scene, Spring 24, 63, 64 Poe, Edgar Allan Marginalia 29–30, 42–3, 181 ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ 111, 114 ‘The Raven’ 13, 17, 43, 111, 297–8 polychrome relief sculpture 38 polyiconicity 159, 161, 163, 207–37 Polynesia Christianization, effects of 345 cosmogony (man created from earth) 180, 286, 288, 294–5, 317, 339, 366 culture, attraction of 366–9 Family Idols of Pomare 146, 263 gods as evil spirits 243 science and positivism 177–8 see also Atuona; Marquesas Islands; Mo‘orea; Rurutu; Tahiti polysemy in language 31–3, 38–9, 108–9 Pont-Aven bird’s-eye view technique 144, 151, 172 love for 94 nude model 296 School 26 View of Pont-Aven from Lézaven 171, 303, 305, 332 popular art, medieval 59, 76 potential images 9, 11–12, 16, 117, 243, 273, 306, 309 primitivism 10, 31, 89, 185, 352, 363 and ‘children’s painting’ 58–9 and Tahiti 258–9, 307–8 see also childhood psychology imaginative perception 57–8 ‘Myth and Science’ (Vignoli) 55–6, 135, 194, 274 physio-psychological foundations of artistic activity 122–3, 157–8 see also dreams; suggestion; uncanny Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 18, 114, 124, 356–7

reception of works 16–17, 19, 105, 159 Redon, Odilon 8–9, 61–2, 67, 85, 119–20, 207, 293, 314, 351, 357 Black Profile (Gauguin) 199, 358, 368 Dans le rêve (In Dream) 42 on death 304, 334 Homage to Goya 18, 43–5, 120–21, 358 The Idol 155, 278, 279, 314 The Man Was Alone in a Night Landscape 16, 40–41, 43, 52, 53, 65, 240 The Pink Rock 156, 278, 279 public homage to Gauguin 369–70 There Was Perhaps a first vision Attempted in the Flower 15, 40, 45, 81, 167, 232, 331, 333, 356–7 transfer paper, use of 247–8 Yeux clos (Closed Eyes) motif 45 religion see Buddhism; Catholicism; Christianity; Hinduism; idolatry; Taoism Rembrandt 116, 163, 180 reversibility figure and ground, Above the Abyss 13, 128–37, 140–41, 147–8, 156–7, 159, 230 ontological, Manaò tupapaú 109–10, 128, 148, 264–5 Rio de Janeiro bay 177, 314, 315 Romanticism 118 Burn, H., The Spirit of Byron in the Isles of Greece 59, 128–9, 133, 143 water as image of human nature 145 Rurutu, A‘a statue 104, 200–201, 203, 229, 257, 261, 264 Schuffenecker, Emile, letters to 20–21, 26, 29, 31, 34, 155–6, 193, 271, 321, 358 Self-portrait (Les Misérables) drawing 12, 36, 38 Séailles, Gabriel 52, 260–61 Segalen, Victor 349–51, 352, 353, 361, 363, 364–5 Seguin, Armand 8, 135–6, 180, 286, 301, 352 ‘Parahi te Marae’ 174, 310–11 semiotics 21, 38, 108, 112, 182, 309 pansemiotism 22, 293 see also language

462

Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Index

serpents and temptation 212–19 Sérusier, Paul 309 Farewell to Gauguin 80, 156, 159–60 Grey Sea 82, 160, 161 sexuality and crouching posture 326–7 eroticism 112–14, 363 feminine sexuality and pig, link between 296, 326 homosexuality 326, 327 masculinity and horned head 152–3 natura naturans, generation and sexual act 303–9 of plants, anthrozoomorphic allusion to 303, 329–31 tiki sexualization 209, 327 Shiff, Richard 22 Shiva 102, 198–9, 339–40, 342, 360 Souriau, Paul 118, 261, 274 spatiality 115–16, 126–8, 157–8 Steinen, Karl von den 199, 203, 209, 236, 337–8, 367 Strindberg, August 53, 108 Stuckey, Charles 10, 32 suggestion 8, 11, 12, 16–19, 40, 50, 52, 61, 69, 82, 84, 85, 91, 92, 95, 99, 113, 133–5, 140, 147, 148, 157, 160, 173–5, 182, 187, 190, 201, 207, 213, 218, 225, 231, 232, 235–8, 245, 248, 253, 261, 265, 268, 273, 276, 278, 303, 308, 313, 323, 333–5, 339, 341, 358, 360, 363 symbolism androgyny cult 327 and metamorphoses 11 metaphysical dimension 30 mummy symbol 115–16, 238, 289, 306, 307, 308 and mystery 8–9, 17–18, 274 and Persian art 33–4 phallic 152–4, 198, 304, 341 and senses 358–60

and polysemy 108–9 Manaò tupapaú see Manaò tupapaú Mataiea 32, 102–4, 113, 315 pape ta¯ne (sperm) 139–40 153 and primitivism 258–9, 307–8 reasons for living in 58–9 true Tahiti, Gauguin’s depiction of 349–52 visual perception as source of pleasure 31–2 wood sculpture 193–4 wood sculpture, trees as sacred 194 Taine, Hippolyte 52, 83, 94, 102, 110, 178 ta¯manu wood 195, 209, 237, 257, 320 Taoism 110, 148 Teilhet-Fisk, Jehanne 312, 344 tiki statues, Marquesas Islands see Marquesas Islands, tiki statues tine (Norwegian wooden beer mug), use in paintings 41, 87, 91, 268–70, 271–2 U¯mete (wooden container) 96, 191 uncanny 72, 106, 274 unconscious absolute 119–20 and conscious, connecting link between 31, 118, 344 ‘u‘u (war club) 105, 191, 201–2, 207, 231, 261 see also Marquesas Islands Van Gogh, Theo 58–9, 132, 144, 164, 168, 171 letter to 30, 182 Van Gogh, Vincent 18, 58–9, 148, 273, 356 anthropomorphism 168–9, 175 flower-eye motif 167, 174 Gauguin, relationship with and influence of 162–75, 179, 180 Kingfisher 84, 163, 164 Landscape near Saint-Rémy 90, 175, 314 letters to 31, 92, 93, 95, 98 Memory of the Garden at Etten 8, 88, 170–71, 172, 173, 174 The Painter of Sunflowers (Gauguin) 85, 165–7, 172, 174, 355, 356 Portrait of Gauguin 63, 132, 133, 162, 164, 165, 172

Tahiti ‘arioi society 328–9, 334, 335, 350 Christianization, effects of 350–51 death, image of 334 flower planting and sunflowers 355–6 Head with Horns 153 language titles 17–18 language’s potential for ambiguity

463

Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

paul gauguin

Copyright © 2015. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Sunflowers in a Vase 86, 167–8, 355, 357 The Poet’s Garden 87, 169–70, 172, 173, 174 ‘veil of the soul’ metaphor 30–31 verbal language see language Vignoli, Tito, ‘Myth and Science’ 55–6, 135, 194, 274 The Vision of the Sermon 10, 43, 45, 48–9, 92–101, 103, 159, 258 background scene in imagination of people at prayer 88, 110 Breton coif, suggestive qualities of 99 Breton women, positions and attitudes 99–101 cow, wrestlers and struggle analogy 95–7, 102 eye motifs 98–9, 101 rejection by Trémalo chapel 284 tree, significance of 97–8, 243 see also Gauguin, Paul, paintings visions as subject of picture 92–101 see also hallucination

volcano, as phallic symbol 206, 304, 318 Willumsen, Jens Ferdinand 24, 152, 180, 203 Wirkungsgeschichte (effect on other visual works) 16 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 9, 39, 207 Wivel, Mikael 89 wood carvings see artistic techniques, wood and sculpture techniques; Gauguin, Paul, wood carvings woodcuts and prints 237–51 see also Gauguin, Paul, woodcuts and prints writing graphology 20–22, 38 pictograms and glyphs 21–2, 23 see also Gauguin, Paul, writings; language Zola, Émile 30, 67, 147

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Gamboni, Dario. Paul Gauguin : The Mysterious Centre of Thought, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,