It is therefore more valuable to summarize the main lines of Gauguin's teaching than to quote this or that paradoxical remark. Gauguin was not a man holding a high-school debate on theory, but a creator. He refused even to be called a decorator, he preferred the title of artisan. He declared outright that he had no technique. "Or perhaps I have one, but very vagabond, very elastic, according to the way I feel when I awaken in the morning, a technique which I apply to my own liking in order to express my thought, without taking account of the truth of Nature, externally apparent. People think nowadays that all the technical means of painting are exhausted. I do not believe it, if I am to judge by the numerous observations which I have made and put into practice.... Painters have still much to discover." Gauguin therefore boldly called his pupils anarchists and left to them this remark: "Do what you please, so long as it is intelligent." This did not prevent him from having a great respect for art tradition. He knew that tradition is not a "recipe for making art," but the sum-total of collective human intelligence working in the past on the same problems that face the artists of to-day. He realized that the essential substance of art is always the same. Art is an eternal renewal of this substance. "The artist is not born of a single unity. If he adds a new link to the chain already begun, it is much. The artist is known by the quality of his transposition." The "transposition" that he himself strove for may be clearly read in his pictures. He strove incessantly for a renewal of the decorative art of the great Venetians, by blending the Venetian glow of color with the calm line of Primitive and especially of Egyptian Primitive design. His problem was essentially the same as that of Puvis de Chavannes, the problem of how to cover a flat wall space with design and color so as to leave it still essentially a wall and not, as Veronese and Tiepolo left it, an optically deceptive piece of stage-scenery. Puvis had solved the problem by the artificial means of lowering his scale of colors and by simplifying his drawing. Gauguin solved his by the elimination of modeling, and of graduations of tone, and by reducing his drawing to the strongest possible arabesque of outline. In everything he sought for the essential form, the form that contains all the other inessential forms. As Sérusier puts it: "The synthetic theory of art consists in reducing all form to the smallest possible number of component forms:--straight lines, arcs of a circle, a few angles, arcs of an ellipse." And to express this form he sought for the most harmonious balance of color. Maurice Denis says:--"Recall that a picture, before being a war-horse, a nude or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order." [Illustration: Tahitian Women.]