22. PAUL GAUGUIN - A SPACE BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND SUBCONSCIOUSNESS.
After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, The National Gallery - LONDON.
THE colourist of the Symbolist movement Paul Gauguin forever and immediately recognised for his idiosyncratic palettes of sorrow. Colour combinations so precise that you can almost taste them and certainly feel them - the colours of heartache, painted over and over again. And just as in Edgar Allen Poe's poem, The Raven; which concludes most of it’s 18 stanzas with 'Nevermore'- The French artist and American poet share a relentless search within their mysterious works - but what was Gauguin searching for and did he ever find it?
Gauguin lived a life of such turbulence and restlessness that many clues in his biography pose more open-ended questions than answers. From a boyhood spent between France and Peru to joining the French Merchant Navy and then back to Paris to become a financial broker. A bourgeois family life followed when he lived with his five children and wife in the well-heeled 9th arrondissement. Gauguin was a collector of art before he started painting, amassing an avant-guard collection of impressionist works, many of which were painted by Paul Cézanne, whose holistically escapist Aix-en-Provance based lifestyle, must have inspired Gauguin to dream of a world not ruled by stocks and shares, rather by nature and the sensual shift of the seasons.
Pahura rests her head on a pillow the shade of Oenothera biennis - or evening primrose, which glows in a bedroom the atmospheric hue of the gloaming. Skin too hot to be covered or touched, toes outstretched, searching for cool - in air humid and still - feet which long for the damp of midnight grasses in a cold garden.
Behind the bed, Gauguin's brushstrokes are bolder, a stage set scenery created to be viewed from afar - tertiary-hued open flowers and fungi undulate with discordant rhythms, melding with the overheard conversations and tapping of Poe's stately raven, a space between the conscious and subconscious. A scene whose players are abstracted, heard but not seen, bar Pahura, whose in focus gaze diagonally rests on a space she alone can see, and we can only imagine, a space of unrest. 'Nevermore'- the title itself is caught in time, not the ticking hours of a clock, more the beating of a heart.
The painting's gilded frame further adds to a sense of manipulation and misinterpretation within the work, Gauguin's Tahitian paintings were mainly unvalidated in his lifetime, and so the elaborate golden frieze of resplendent abundance feels at odds with the artist's impoverished state while creating the work. His own relationships with his subjects and colonised Tahiti are also fraught with contradictions and controversies.
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) Nevermore, 1897
Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 116 cm The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust).
After Impressionism: Inventing Art - Until 13 August 2023.
The National Gallery Trafalgar Square, London.
Thank you: Neil Evans and Alexandra at The National Gallery.