GAUGUIN'S FREEDOM

...Gauguin, the artist, gained, but the man rotted away, like a disease-ridden dog...

...I have seen fashion photos of pretty models, most elegantly dressed, posed against a background of oils by Gauguin...

...It is significant that he chose to be tutored by Pissarro, the one Impressionist who had refused to abandon form...

...He termed their part a "purely superficial thing, full of affectations and only material...

...An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail...

...Hofmann lacks, or has chosen to throw overboard, the formal discipline of both Gauguin and Matisse, and the result is violence, explosion, in inch-thick whirling pigment devoid of any idea...

...To those who cannot read his pictures, or need further explanations, Gauguin offered clarification by insisting, in his writings, that he was not a painter after nature, that everything sprang from imagination, that in the end he always dispensed with the model...

...ALFRED WERNER, Vienna-born art critic, has written and lectured widely in the United States and Europe...

...for the "Gauguins" of today have that shrewd sense of business and publicity that the master threw to the winds when he turned his back forever upon Europe's corruption and wretchedness...

...Not content to be "only an eye" (as Cezanne called Monet), a mere recorder of the effects of light, Pissarro would not submit to the mercy of nature...

...Gauguin let himself be killed by his aesthetic adventure...

...The communications to his wife and his friends move one to admiration: amid all the repetitive complaints about poverty, sickness, the treachery of dealers, and the hostility of critics, the genuine artist breaks through...

...in this way you let the lava grow cool and turn boiling blood into a stone...

...I do not know whether that huge mural-like painting, Whence Come We...

...the no-longer-a-broker Gauguin announced to his wife one day, and he stuck to his decision for 20 years— years fraught with more tragedy, more disease, more frustration than any mortal can possibly be expected to endure...

...Must have painted it in 1901...

...The exclamations called forth by astronomical prices are no substitute for an appreciation of the true aesthetic qualities in Gauguin's now so fashionable work...

...Last year, an American correspondent found on Tahiti an elderly man, Oscar Nord-man, who recalled how, as a child, he had helped to get rid of the work Gauguin left when he moved from Tahiti to the Marquesas Islands: "We found three trunks of canvases and sketches and sculptured pieces...

...As was to be expected, consternation raged among the art lovers...

...Their edifice rests upon no solid base . . . they heed only the eye and neglect the mysterious centers of thought...

...Had works of art become commodities like stocks and bonds, to rise and fall in price according to "laws" having little to do with the ups and downs of human values...

...I was then sick with influenza most of the time on Tahiti, and was about to leave the place for the Marquesas where I might live more cheaply...

...Though it were a ruby, fling it far from you...

...Van Gogh might have become a success—in the most unworldly sense— as a spiritual reformer, had not the Brussels committee of evangelical clergymen stopped his endeavors to re-live the self-sacrificing life of Christ...

...that is now one of the treasures of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts would have been an abstract arrangement of colors and shapes, instead of a grouping of a dozen Polynesians amidst tropical trees and animals, had it been painted in 1957 instead of 1897...

...I can barely remember it...

...From Pissarro Gauguin learned how to filter the mass of visual material surrounding him through the fine screen of intellect, of temper...

...Were he alive today, Gauguin might apply almost the same words to much of the Abstract-Expressionism and Abstract-Impressionism being produced in America...

...Matisse learned from Gauguin, but he made use of Gauguin's flat and arbitrary color only to produce decorative arabesques...

...He did not go to Tahiti, thousands of miles from Paris, to cohabit with exotic females (as some of the "romantic" fiction written about him seems to claim...

...Gauguin's Freedom by ALFRED WERNER A tan auction in Paris last summer, an oil by Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Apples, was sold to a Greek shipping magnate for the not inconsequential sum of 104 million francs, $297,000, with taxes bringing the tab up to $340,000...

...It is ironic that the man who has so often been called cruel, criminally selfish, vain, commercial, and sensation-seeking, was, actually, the most ardent exponent of the anti-realistic, anti-materialistic metaphysical trend in modern art, the one—posthumously at least—most successful in freeing art from all the contaminants of the latter part of the Nineteenth Century...

...Were he only the grand decorator, the fascinating weaver of exotic tales many people still hold him to be, there would not be in his writing the repeated emphasis on the "soul" as the beginning and end of all painting, all life...

...His articles on modern art have appeared in a score of publications including Commentary, The American Scholar, and The Saturday Review...

...What Are Wet Whither Go We...

...While he did not go to an academy, he humbly took all the instruction the wise Pissarro could offer...

...America's Hans Hofmann, who studied with Matisse, also derives from Gauguin—yet the freedom that Gauguin preaches runs to a dead end in Hofmann, and even more so in his hundreds of followers...

...It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own: your sensation, your intelligence, and your soul will triumph over the eye of the amateur...

...Here he was unlike his friend Van Gogh, whose letters immediately open to us a deep shaft into the recesses of his soul, and whose self-portraits are as self-revelatory as Rembrandt's...

...He was among the first to use arbitrary color, and he did so "to convey the musical sensations which emanate from its very nature...

...Paul Gauguin would be the most surprised of all by this news: he might muse, "That little still-life...

...From now on I paint every day...

...There were days when I did not have even one franc to buy food...

...Would such fantastic prices drive collectors to buy the work of young, living artists for sums often less than one-thousandth of the price reached at the Galerie Charpentier auction—or would the mad rush for Post-Impressionist art increase even for mediocre left-overs ennobled by names like Gauguin or Van Gogh...

...Gauguin was one of the last great artists who have knocked at the doors of the world seeking answers...

...And the melodramatic retelling of his life-story by the Hansons, a fast-writing team of biographers, in Noble Savage (1954) must have had as restrictive an effect upon the expansion of America's aesthetic frontiers as that perennial best-seller about Van Gogh, Irving Stone's Lust for Life...

...His detractors called his works "posters" because of the broad flat color areas bounded by black outlines...

...For neither Tahiti, nor Hiva-Oa-— where he died most miserably in 1903—was the untouched paradise he had hoped to find...

...Matisse did not lack Gauguin's formal discipline, but he lacked his great ideas, his ability to encompass and convey the timeless poetry, the mythology of nature and man: see a room full of Matisses, and you will be bored by too many sensuous inanities...

...A curious defense-mechanism made Gauguin apply a protective armor to his literary utterances as well as to his paintings...

...When will the time come when we need speak of nothing but Art...

...Millions have yet to learn that a painting (or sculpture) has its own life, its independent existence as a creation, even if it happens to have been inspired by a phenomenon of the visual world...

...To emphasize that the physical and the metaphysical were two different things, he summed up his philosophy in these magnificent words: "I shut my eyes in order to see...

...But there would still be the same disciplined balancing of forms and hues that we admire, and there would still be a mystery expressed in symbols as difficult to decide today as were those in his work two generations ago...

...Balance, clarity of form, equilibrium—so alien to Van Gogh—came naturally to Gauguin...

...Abstract art, as we know, has many fathers, and Gauguin certainly is one of them...

...Nordman's Folly could not posn sibly recur...

...One hundred and four million francs...

...The prophet is still worth listening to after fifty-odd years: "In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music...

...Werner is the editor of a new edition of Gauguin's South Seas Journal, Noa-Noa, published by Noonday Press...

...Yet a new and deeper appreciation by the public of all the real values offered by what has been termed Post-Impressionism is long overdue...

...In his accomplishments he is not in the same class with Michelangelo, not even with Goya, but in his burning desire to free man from the suffocating prison of human society he was certainly close to them...

...But he could dare to shut them because he had a rich inner life, the inherent feeling for form that, if wedded to philosophical concepts, makes the great artist...

...For Van Gogh, one might say, painting was one outlet for reckless preaching, the writing of epistles to Dear Theo another...

...Nevertheless, art gained by this first contact of a truly modern man with whatever remnants of Oceanic culture had survived...

...In the informal notes from Tahiti, known as his Intimate Journals, Gauguin wrote: "Do not finish your work too much...

...My eye shifts, almost involuntarily, to Gauguin's masks, the symbolic cyphers in the "purely decorative" background, trying to penetrate them...

...Among dealers and collectors alike, one often finds those proverbial cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing...

...Several months after his death the pictures found in his shack on Hiva-Oa were sold in Papeete, capital of Tahiti, for anything from a dime to three dollars...

...Living today, Gauguin might have dispensed with most, if not all, realistic detail for this "musical poem...

...It was, perhaps, absurd to think that one had to flee to the realm of the primitive in order to return to the purity of style, to the kind of anti-naturalistic art, with its perfect sense of simplified design, that was practiced in the Middle Ages...

...From bis teacher Gauguin inherited a drive for order and organization, a feeling for design antipodal to the haphazard verisimilitude cherished by Monet (and, I might add, to the orgiastic fervor of Van Gogh...

...The models become insignificant, desperately silly...

...For me, they recall rather the stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals, sufficiently realistic and map-like to guide the onlooker into what Novalis called the "mysterious path that leads inward," and sufficiently abstract to prevent him from straying into seductive byroads...

...Art, through him, again became simple, straightforward, monumental—as though Giotto's frescoes had been painted southeast of Eden...

...Gauguin, who began as one of the Impressionists, turned against them by the end of his life...

...The rejuvenation he sought in the South Seas was not that of Ponce de Leon, but rejuvenation chiefly for his art which, he knew instinctively, would grow drab in the drudgery of Naturalism (Impressionism included...

...We didn't know what to do with it all, so one day we took the trunks out to the reef and dumped them into the water...

...Level-headed Paul Gauguin was more of an artist...

...So Gauguin ended a letter from Tahiti to his close friend in Paris, Georges Daniel de Monfreid...

...One little Gauguin—only 26 by 30 inches—for the price of two fairly large Rembrandts...