Paul Gauguin, His Life and ArtFletcher, John Gould
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Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art
Fletcher, John Gould
Gauguin, Paul, 1848-1903
"I am on the ground but I am not beaten. The Indian, who smiles while he
is being tortured, is not conquered. You are mistaken if you meant that
I am wrong in calling myself a savage. I _am_ a savage, and the
civilized feel this, for there is nothing in my work which could produce
bewilderment save this savage strain in me, for which I am not myself
responsible. It is therefore inimitable. Every human work is a
revelation of the individual. Hence there are two kinds of beauty; one
comes from instinct, the other from labor. The union of the two, with
the modifications resulting therefrom, produces great and very
complicated richness. Art-criticism has yet to discover the fact....
Raphael's great science does not for a moment prevent me from
discovering the instinct of the beautiful as the essential quality in
him. Raphael was born with beauty. All the rest in him is modification.
"Physics, chemistry, and above all the study of Nature, have produced an
epoch of confusion in art, and it may be truly said that artists robbed
of all their savagery have wandered into all kinds of paths in search of
the productive element they no longer possess. They now act only in
disorderly groups and are terrified if they find themselves alone.
Solitude is not to be recommended to every one, for a man must have
strength to bear it and to act alone. All I have learnt from others has
been an impediment to me. It is true I know little, but what I do know
is my own."
Yet civilization, after all, had the last word. The very bishop, whom
Gauguin in life had hated and caricatured, intervened when he lay cold
and lifeless and the body of the painter was interred with full Catholic
rites in the cemetery of the Church at Atuana. And, by a concluding
stroke of irony, the grave was left unmarked. Thus one of the greatest
painters of the later nineteenth century, and one of the bravest men the
world has ever seen, mingled his dust with that of the humblest
natives, in the same way as Blake, one of the greatest painters of the
early nineteenth century, had been buried before him in an unmarked
grave among the paupers, at Bunhill Fields.
IV
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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