I had booked early
for this show, hoping to transform my indifference
to Gauguin into enthusiasm. I've seen his
paintings in museums here and there and of
course in reproductions - his art
seems made for high-tech printing, looks
great in coffee-table
books and on posters, cards, scarves, bags
and baubles such as those currently adorning
the Tate Modern shop. But I don't think I
ever saw a comprehensive collection of his
work gathered in one place so this was an
opportunity to lose my immunity to his universal
appeal.
Keeping eyes wide
open, I amble respectfully through the galleries,
stopping for long reflective pauses. The
background story I'm familiar with so I ignore
the big wall-captions and never ever opt
for portable audio-guide - no matter how
informative, I don't want somebody's voice
interrupting my own impressions.
I need to have silence
in my head to allow the work itself to speak
to me, unmediated, if it's going
to speak at all.
One thing immediately
creates a barrier between the painting
and the viewer: those frames! Those
ornate, overwrought, overweight, overprotective
gold frames - why why why do museum
curators still think they must burden modern
paintings with these antiquated trimmings?
Do they think that art
won't seem like great art to the public unless
it's got ten inches of baroque chocolate
box icing around it?
Never mind
the frames, what about the work? Am I dazzled,
excited, inspired? Well...yes and no.
Gauguin's prints, woodcuts and wood-carvings
are marvellous - the craftsman-artisan in
him is at ease in solid media, materials
he can cut and gouge and smoothe and polish.
In many of his drawings there is the
same sense of inhabiting the medium, neither
dominated by or dominating it. Noa-Noa is
a masterpiece. But put him in front of
a canvas and Gauguin becomes self-conscious:
he's got a message, he is an illustrator,
a decorator, he makes pretty
patterns out of a pretty setting. I
go back and forth in the rooms, absorbing
different periods of his work, but only four
or five paintings escape the shocking
conclusion forming in my mind that, underneath
the bohemian runaway rogue artist with
his hat and cape and exotic teen-age vahine, a
conventional, bourgeois banker is trying
to get out.
Compare Gauguin to
Van Gogh - I'm sorry but I have to make that
comparison - and the difference is obvious.
Vincent loses himself in the subject he chooses
to paint, he is entranced by it, his technique
is entirely at the service of it. All that
he has learned about colour and form sits
before a tree, a field or a person and humbly
offers itself, like a lover. I'm yours, he
says. Every drawing and painting is for Van
Gogh a love affair and the pen or brush
caresses the love-object, coaxes it to reveal
itself.
For Gauguin painting
is not such a visceral, intuitive experience.
He's attracted to the picturesque, the exotic,
and uses elements of it to construct
a mythical scenario. He has an agenda. 'Maker
of Myth' is an apt description of the man
as well as the artist. I think that when
Paul came to Arles, finally giving in to
Vincent's lonely and hero-worshipping entreaties,
he must have been stunned by the work Vincent
had produced. Gauguin was sensitive enough
to realise that this work was something unprecedented
and perhaps he knew in his heart that it
was far beyond anything he himself could
have created. Of course this is just conjecture,
but my feeling is that his pride couldn't
allow him to admit this and the famous Gauguin/Van
Gogh fight and ensuing ear-slicing incident
was an explosion of these undercurrents -
Paul's envy and competitiveness, Vincent's
disappointment that Paul had not expressed
the appreciation of his work that he had
hoped for.
So, am I glad I saw
Gauguin at Tate Modern? Absolutely. Do I
recommend this show? Definitely. Did I lose
my immunity to Gauguin? No, apart from the
prints and wood-carvings.
I'm about to make sweeping statements
but this is my blog and I'm allowed to sweepstate as much
as I like. You are encouraged to refute, agree, elaborate,
contradict, and I hope you will do one or more of these things
because, frankly, comments are few and far between over here
lately and I'd like to boost the participatory factor. So,
here goes.
There are two types of creatives: receptives and obsessives.
Receptive-creatives have
hyper-sensitive antennae which are continually picking up
visual, verbal and subliminal information and sensations
from the surroundings. Receptive-creatives are easily distracted
because of the abundance of stimuli bombarding them. When
an object or subject captures their attention, they will
give it total concentration but only until the next
stimulus becomes impossible to ignore. The variety and intensity
of input vibrating their antennae is such that the degree
of success (in worldly terms) which their creativity achieves
depends on the amount of time they are able and willing to
give to any particular message the universe sends. A state
of readiness to absorb, combined with uncertainty about whether
the material really merits absorption, is the
receptive-creative's normal modus vivendi. I, ahem, am among
those who fit into this category.
Obsessive-creatives are driven
by a compulsion which demands single-minded focus
on a chosen path and the avoidance of anything which might
disturb, distract or question this choice. They too are receptive
but in a one-track way and they arrange their lives so as
to feed their compulsion and insist that anyone who comes
close should either support it or stay out. Dedicated, opinionated,
blinkered, uncompromising, workaholic, eccentric,
egocentric, extraordinary, are some of the adjectives
frequently used in describing them. I would prefer
to be an o-c rather than an r-c but I have
never succeeded in remodelling myself. Lucian
Freud is among those who are probably born into this
category.
I have not been one of the many admirers
of Sigmund's grandson's painting (or of his grandad for
that matter - don't let me get distracted!) but
I didn't want to miss this
exhibition because I hoped to be goaded
into pursuing a completely contrary path. So
I took my lethargic body to the Pompidou -
nowadays ressembling a decaying community centre designed
by committee - and escalated, via a bird's eye view
of the Rue Beaubourg, to the sixth floor galleries where
Freud's Atelier paintings were impressively hung.
Pompidou Centre entrance hall.
View from sixth level
of the Pompidou Centre.
I did not expect to be impressed. But
I was. Not impressed as in awestruck but as in, this
is important stuff - must sit down and take it in slowly.
First of all, his colours.
They are greys, browns, ochres, meat-red, black
and the occasional dusty yellow-green. They are Old Master-ish,
museum-ish colours, destined for posterity and weighty
gold frames, defiantly academic, you could even say anti-modernist.
Then there's the light. The grey
light of London bed-sitters in lonely winters and sweaty
summers. The cold light of dawn, post-coitum triste.
The sleepless night light of regret, apathy, desperation.
The merciless light of hospitals, morgues and bus stations
at 4 am.
Then there's the flesh,
his subject. Passive flesh
offered up to be penetrated by his dominant, hypnotic
gaze. Naked but not erotic bodies splayed in apparent abandon
on the bed, sofa or floor, seemingly obeying the master's
stage-instructions to "be themselves" but, in truth, being
only what he requires them to be. He
says that what interests him in people is their animal side
and that he likes seeing his subjects "as naturally and physically
at ease as his dog." However, far from
being at ease in their theatrical set-up, Freud's actors
are more like tranquilised laboratory animals, their vitality
suppressed, coerced by the painter's will into becoming still-life
- even the dog must relinquish all doggy energy if he's to
play a part
in a Freudian tableau. But in the coruscating
self-portraits, perhaps the only time the artist allows his
model to confront him as an equal, Freud achieves magnificent,
courageous insight.
I understand the necessity
of establishing rules of engagement when absorbed in
the intensely difficult process of looking at
and transcribing a human presence. The artist may be
inwardly
saying to his subject: go away! I mean stay,
but don't talk, don't move, don't interact, just be still
so I can observe you without being observed. So it makes
sense that Freud prefers his models to be asleep
or in a kind of trance induced by long hours of posing,
but his determined focus on flesh as meat, to the exclusion
of any other aspect of identity (as far
as he's concerned, the matiére of his portrait
of a person is that
person) must be the reason I left Lucien Freud's Atelier
very impressed, but ultimately disappointed. The old
Peggy Lee song ran through my mind..........Is
That All There Is?
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