Of the many modern artists who have sought refuge from the
encroachments and commercialism of modern civilization in primitive,
out-of-the-way places of unspoiled natural beauty, the French painter Paul
Gauguin (1848-1903) is probably the most legendary. The story of his
life-quitting a profitable job on the Paris stock exchange and then abandoning
his wife and five children for the unfettered freedom and exoticism of Tahiti-has
long served as an archetype of the modern artist’s alienation from bourgeois
society. His declaration, in a letter to his abandoned wife, that “I am a great
painter and I know it. It is because I am that I have endured so much
suffering,” has similarly become part of the mythology of the modern artist.
Before he settled in Tahiti, where he produced his most
celebrated pictures, Gauguin sought refuge in Provence, and it was there that
he had his famous quarrel with Van Gogh in Arles. He then traveled to Brittany,
going first to Pont-Aven, where he worked with Émile Bernard, and then to the
seaside village of Le Pouldu in 1889. It is for this reason that Le Pouldu is
sometimes referred to as Gauguin’s “first Tahiti in France.”
It is of this latter,
short-lived period in Gauguin’s career that the exhibition called Gauguin’s “Nirvana”: Painters at Le Pouldu,
1889-90 , currently on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, offers us
a vivid account. Although arrogant and quarrelsome by nature, Gauguin made a
point of gathering an assortment of lesser talents around him in his places of
retreat. At Le Pouldu, the most important of these followers was a Dutch
painter and patron, Jacob Meyer De Haan (1852-95), who also served as a subject
for some of the most memorable works Gauguin created in this period.
De Haan, whose work many visitors to this exhibition are
likely to be seeing for the first time, was born in Amsterdam into an Orthodox
Jewish family that made its money producing bread and matzoh. He was a man of considerable
esoteric learning; he was also a hunchback. Early on, he gave up his interest
in the family business in exchange for a stipend to study painting, and his
early work shows him to have mastered the academic conventions of Dutch genre
and portrait painting. It was his contact with Gauguin that turned him into a
modernist of the Symbolist school.
Inevitably, then, it is Gauguin who is the dominant spirit
in this show of Painters at Le Pouldu .
Yet, though he was never to be Gauguin’s equal as a painter, de Haan also looms
as a strong presence in this exhibition-both in Gauguin’s Symbolist portraits
of the Dutch artist and in de Haan’s own remarkably successful attempts to
paint in a Gauguinesque style. Uniting the master and his disciple, moreover, was
a strong but by no means unequivocal bond of mutual dependency.
Gauguin was dependent
upon the money de Haan paid him for instruction in the mysteries of the
Symbolist aesthetic, while de Haan remained dependent upon Gauguin’s artistic
leadership. Both, of course, were exiles from the world of bourgeois
respectability, and their relationship was further complicated by the fact that
they were sexual rivals for the favors of the woman who operated the inn at Le
Pouldu, where they lived and had their studio space. De Haan is known to have
been the father of her child.
Exactly what Gauguin thought of de Haan is itself something
of a conundrum. In de Haan’s own Self-Portrait
(circa 1889-91), one of his most beautifully painted pictures, there is nothing
in the least exotic or demonic in the depiction of his facial features. On the
contrary, he looks rather solemn, grave and careworn. Yet in virtually all of
Gauguin’s portraits of de Haan, those same features-especially the eyes and the
ears-are transformed into something fierce, lascivious and animalistic. Indeed,
the eyes and ears in these Gauguin portraits of de Haan are almost identical to
those of the symbolic fox that presides over the pale body of the prostrate
naked girl in Gauguin’s The Loss of
Virginity (1890-91), a painting set in the Le Pouldu countryside.
It has been suggested, by the way, that Gauguin’s distorted
depiction of de Haan in these portraits may have exerted an important influence
on the conception of the figures in Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907), for there had been a huge
retrospective of Gauguin’s work in Paris in 1906 which Picasso is known to have
seen.
Be that as it may, it is certainly beyond doubt that the
visage of Jacob Meyer de Haan remained fixed in Gauguin’s imagination as some
sort of symbol, even after both had been obliged to make their separate
departures from Le Pouldu. When de Haan’s family stipend ran out in 1890,
neither could afford to remain in their Brittany retreat. De Haan returned to
Amsterdam, and Gauguin soon departed for Tahiti. In the last painting that we
see in the Hartford exhibition-Gauguin’s Contes
Barbares , or Primitive Tales ,
painted in Tahiti in 1902, when de Haan had been dead for seven years-Gauguin’s
student reappears with his fox-like demonic features in the company of two
bare-breasted Tahitian girls. Similar images of de Haan can be seen in other
later works that are not included in the present exhibition.
In the end, of course, it is as a chapter in the development
of Gauguin’s art-a Symbolist, Post-Impressionist art that would influence a
great deal of early 20th-century modernist art-that the Painters at Le Pouldu exhibition makes its principal claim on our
attention. In this respect, certainly, this show beautifully succeeds in recalling
us to a time and place and to the strange friendship that proved to be crucial
to the tragic finale of Gauguin’s tumultuous career. This is the first
exhibition to be devoted to this brief period in
Gauguin’s development, and it is unlikely that it will be done again
anytime soon. It remains on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum through April 29,
and will not travel.