Heritage of Gauguin

                  By Leon Gard

The group known as of Bridge-Swallow-hole left entire this receipt of Gauguin: How do you see this tree? Green? Thus put the most beautiful green of your pallet; and this shade? rather blue? Do not fear to paint it as blue as possible. Various movements which succeeded still had as a starting point of the words of Gauguin: Do not copy too much according to nature. Art is an abstraction. And still: You for a long time know what I wanted to establish: right all to dare. One is confused to see that famous pictorial movements were caused by such summary remarks. But with the reflexion, one is astonished less; the formulas of Gauguin offer the kind of seduction which acts more on people: easy, grandiloquentes, childishly revolutionists, they flatter this leaning men for the mirific receipts, at the same time as their instincts of unchained young imps who saoulent indiscipline.

   I do not claim that Gauguin was not a large artist, nor that its ideas were absurd and charlatanesques. It was magnificiently gifted, and the majority of its works are beautiful. As for his ideas, I believe them remarkable and always containing a share of invaluable truth. Unfortunately, they were so poorly expressed that they create the ambiguity easily. They were especially awkwardly interpreted by follower who turned of them into to axioms at the same time pedants and limited and which one knows very well that at the bottom of the heart it made fun. Not, I do not make the lawsuit of Gauguin, and especially that of his masterpieces. But I want to stress that immense swirl of the noisy pictorial demonstrations of these forty last years, it remains of valid only one small number of individual works, i.e. which are the fact, not ideas, but of the gifts: because in fact the ideas on painting make good paintings, but the gift which one received to know to paint.

   That one does not misuse this profession of faith to make me say that I deny teaching: I respect it infinitely on the contrary. Nothing is more desirable than a healthy teaching.

   Admittedly, once again, the first condition is to be gifted, because what good is it to cultivate a sterile ground? Nevertheless, as gifted as one is, a judicious indication can avoid or make overcome a difficulty, or shorten the road. On the other hand, I am terrified with the idea of the devastations which causes an at the same time confused and subversive teaching. Le?ding to the ambiguity, it does not transmit to the true interested parties what it can contain of useful, while it becomes fallacious for the others and gives birth to from the presumptuous and insane ambitions in the the least organized spirits, sometimes, for the production of a work of art, in their making believe in a formula-key which opens all. Thus for only one man of talent, one sees proliferating beside the schools, of the groups, the tendencies which offer only one vain and afflicting tumult.

   Perhaps should not one be saddened in addition to measurement on the acquired errors and disorders: they carry their lesson, they show us what it is necessary to avoid.

It is obvious that if Gauguin had been more understandable in the statement of its principles and if, étourdiment acknowledge it, it had not proposed them like having to destroy the designs passed, including impressionism, us would not have known this long time when the tyranny of the absurd one reigned, i.e., according to the imprudent definitions of Gauguin: " right all to dare." I will not be delayed on the question of knowing if our critical direction with the spectacle of absurd experiments, if we were sharpened better needed this test to be inspired a sharper dash towards truth. What I know, it is that we were lengthily oppressed by an atmosphere of aberrations, and that we will be happy to leave there.

   We will thus need, good liking badly liking, to refute those which, on any subject, hold up Gauguin, its call with the transposition, the deformation, the right all to dare, etc.

   But let us come in to the famous theory from the colors. It is summarized as follows: if you have an average green, an average blue, put a sharp green, a sharp blue. What, is this all there? Yes, it is all. It is a question, all things considered, of assembling all the tone in order to obtain a larger sonority, but by maintaining the same harmony between them. The precept is of an easy application, too easy, alas! This is why so much of people adopted it, and why the results were bad: one assembled the tone well so much and more, but one seldom maintained the harmony between these tone, because for that it was necessary to be Gauguin, or the equivalent. Considered in the abstract, this precepte has this of Juste that he recalls us that there is a law of the harmony of the colors establishing that, some is the subject of a painting, it must be with the first access harmonious by its colors: thus, it is quite true that the stained glass, works of color by definition, takes all its eloquence at a distance where one distinguishes nothing any more but the play from the colors. But the precept has this of is necessary that it sees only sonority and neglects a considerable side of painting: the smoothness of the relationship between the tone very little coloured, and this kind of pleasure is destroyed if of a blue gray you make a blue; what would become with the theory of Gauguin, the marvellous gray of Corot? The precept still has this of is necessary that it lets believe too readily that it is enough all to smear colors sharp to make work of painter. Gauguin gave a licence without joining the method of control to it. Not only, it does not give it, but still it removes it, while issuing that one has the right, much more, the duty to deform nature, and that, consequently, the copy is condammable. There, the council becomes completely execrable. It is not any case, indeed, where it is not excellent to literally copy the nature, even for that which exerts an art not consisting in its reconstitution, for example, an architect, a decorator, a tapestry maker, a glassmaker, etc. It is not a piece of nature whatever it is which does not offer a perfect example of harmony of colors, lines, volumes. Therefore, more one artist has by his speciality not to make work of absolute imitation, more it is salutary for him to carry out copies according to nature, so that its memory is quite impregnated great laws that it will be necessary for him to apply with control. He must transpose and, to transpose, it is necessary for him to know initially perfectly "to play" in the original tone. As for the kind of painting which consists in imitating literally, it is certainly most difficult which is, because it hardly leaves place with the imagination, which is often synonymous with compromise.

   But when one imitates exactly, some will say, that becomes the personality? The personality, in this case, will answer, is at the very least in the technique, which varies with each artist as varies his writing. Scrupulously copy a piece of literature, sentence for sentence, word for word, without omitting an accent, nor a comma: won't one see however by your writing which the copy is you? Obviously, the comparison is valid with this close whereas the copy of the page of writing is easy and banal, it becomes on the contrary original and scientist to copy the work of God: extraordinary portraits of Memling, Fouquet, Van Eyck, Rogier Van der Weyden, were they yes or not exact copies? Are they yes or not original works?

   As for wanting to create a world with share, in margin or spite of reality, it is a proud company, as impotent as the Tower of Babel to be risen to the skies: that always finishes by the confusion of the languages.

   Instead of learning how to scorn and torture this reality from which we however draw all that we let us be, us should rather endeavour to better look at it, to better understand it. It is more generous than us: when we insult it, it makes us live; what would this be if we like it?

                                 (Paul Gauguin, "flowers in a vase")