Paul Gauguin

"Why should a man become a 'count' if he could be a painter?" — Toulouse-Lautrec.

Our subject was born in the year 1851.

Three years later he took ship with his family. From that time on he loved dangers, and sailing the seas pleased him; he ventured and never drew back or hesitated.

In the last years of the past century — that century distinguished by absolute artistic liberation and a mad rush after emotions and passions — on a rainy day whose naked sun hid itself for shame behind clouds that thickened until they darkened and their color turned black, while the tall trees danced in the unruly winds and their leaves scattered, yellow and sickly — in the early morning of that day a man not yet stepping into his forties boarded a small, wretched cart, his direction the south.

The cart set off, scattering into the cold air a thick spray of dark brown mud, and wound through the intersecting streets of the city without anyone paying heed to the harsh sound of its wheels, without a stray dog or a wayward hen or a lost rooster starting up before it.

Yes. No one noticed this cart but one woman. And who would turn to look at a cart carrying a lone man, if not a woman? But this woman was not like other women. There at her window at the head of the street she stared at the cart as though she saw the past in its minutest details, and glimpsed from where she stood no gleam of light; beside her four children, most of them heedlessly at play, the eldest standing at his mother's side, staring with her as though he had lost something grave — say rather, lost life itself... And on her arms a little girl, silent, quiet save for a faint sound, or half a sound, that she sent up now and again out of pleasure in life... or the semblance of pleasure.

In the mother's eyes there was a deep wideness and a vague, frightening emptiness such as no human being had ever known in a woman's eyes before, and over them hovered two great tears, wavering... Would they pour down in grief for the one whom the rain had wrapped away, or flow to ease a choking anguish and care, or stay where they were, trembling for fear of a chance glance from a merry child, secure and easy of mind?...

Her daughter asked her, staring like her at the cart as it vanished into the mist of the falling rain:

— Where is father going, and when will he come back?

And does the mother know where her husband is going?... He has set out many times like this... and come back, without her expecting it of him or awaiting it...

Nay, is there anyone in the whole city who knows where that strong man has gone, gambling his own life and the life of his family? Does anyone in the world know where he is bound — he who was wealthy in his youth, then divorced the banks out of passion for painting, and grew poor and made his family poor?... Does anyone know where an artist is headed once he has started on his way?

No... No man ever knew it, and no man ever will... not even that young dawn-farer in the small, wretched cart trundling shabbily through the pouring rain, the drops scattering over its roof, laughing, guffawing... in every direction.

Where are you bound, Paul Gauguin?

Let us gather up the memories as they slip from his imagination one by one — perhaps we may learn his past, or divine his destination.

At seventeen he was a hand on a steamer plying between Le Havre and Rio de Janeiro, but he soon gave up this work, and his family placed him in a bank when he was on the verge of twenty.

At twenty-four marriage overtook him, and he married a Danish girl who took to accompanying him on Sundays, sitting beside him, following with loving glances the movement of his brush and the appearance of the colors playing over the canvas... She thought his life would never go beyond that amusement and play, and she did not know it was the beginning of the struggle and the first of the preparation. His life stayed as it was until his twenty-ninth year, when he began to exhibit his canvases with his friends the Impressionist artists. For until that time he was still drawing from the bank money enough to keep a comfortable house and a fine, spacious studio.

At thirty-two Paul Gauguin realized that there was nothing in the banks to draw him to them, and no pleasure or delight in that work of his; and he realized, too, that painting is an art worthy of a man's vowing to it his self and his life. So he forsook the banks and gave himself up to his passion, repeating his saying: "From now on I shall paint a picture every day."

And it is nothing strange or wonderful if I tell you that his private life began to decline rapidly — indeed more than that. He moved with his wife and children to Denmark, where the wife began to work to feed her children and her husband and drive hunger and famine from them. But Paul had not the strength to remain so; he resolved to depart for Paris with his eldest son. He reached it — and behold, the child fell ill; he nursed him and went on painting. He was forced to sink lower in his manner of living, and moved to an inn outside Paris which the artists of the past century had made their headquarters, leaving his son behind him. In that inn Gauguin took his place among the artists and created his own school. Afterward he was driven out to the islands of Martinique, then returned once more to Paris... yes, to Paris again... or rather to those who "live in Paris in dissipation"... to the Moulin Rouge and Montmartre... to Cézanne and Van Gogh and Georges Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec... to Zola and Émile Bernard... to the nineteenth century entire, concentrated in a single glass of absinthe...

Yes, the nineteenth century, which shattered the shackles with a single blow, by a single band, around a single table... and in the embrace of one and the same abject poverty!

Mankind has never known a company of men stronger of will, tougher of fiber, and firmer of soul than these...

But the band was not to stay in Paris while the world stretched out in all its spaces; the sun is a blazing torch moving slowly everywhere, and the artist in the nineteenth century was a blazing torch too — so it is no wonder and no marvel that he followed the sun and walked in the light.

So Seurat died,
and Zola grew rich,
and Van Gogh departed for Arles,
and Cézanne withdrew into the hills and fields of Aix-la-Chapelle,
and Toulouse-Lautrec stayed on in the Moulin Rouge and its haunts — and Paris grew desolate, and Montmartre stood empty.

There reached him from Arles an invitation from his favorite friend Vincent van Gogh, and he went there, where he passed with "the red-haired madman" a time divided between painting and quarreling and...

In Arles there is a hot sun, its color the color of lemons, its light a yellow that splits the head and shatters the nerves; if you would make its acquaintance, go back to Van Gogh.

And in Arles there are women, of whom Paul Gauguin will tell you...

And there are other things in it... and Rachel... and the tale of Rachel is difficult; its telling is forbidden here. But I will tell you that she cost Van Gogh his reason — or rather helped him lose it — so that he began to suspect all those around him and think ill of them; and the first of his victims was the luckless Paul...

For Paul remembers, no doubt, that evening when Vincent hurled at his head a glass full of absinthe.

And he remembers the night he woke suddenly, driven by a strange feeling, and saw Vincent standing erect in the pitch darkness beside his bed, staring at his head with a frightening stare; he asked him what was the matter, and the poor fellow retreated at once.

And he remembers the following night too, when he woke in dread, feeling the very same strange feeling, and found him in the darkness as on the night before, and said to him reprovingly:

"Go to your bed, Vincent."

In the morning Gauguin found some paints in his soup, and he rebuked Vincent and scolded him.

In the evening, as he was crossing the square in front of the house on his way to the café, he heard behind him the fall of heavy feet in which he recognized the steps of his friend Vincent; the feet drew nearer and nearer, suspiciously near, and the strange feeling came over him again. He turned round — and there he saw the red-headed madman, an open razor in his hand. He stood where he was, casting at him burning, reproving looks, under which Vincent froze; then he hung his head and turned and hurried away.

Gauguin went on to a hotel, where he took a room to himself, bolted its door, and lay down to sleep.

On the morning of the next day he went out to see his friend, and was appalled to see a knot of people gathered at his door. And behold, one of them said to him:

"What have you done to your friend, sir?"

"I do not know."

"Yes, you do know... He is dead."

Gauguin climbed — the world reeling about him — to the room where he had passed many days with his comrade, to find him stretched on his bed without movement, the people crowded around him and the police at his hand, as though he hung suspended in a void. He touched his friend's body and found it warm, and breathed a sigh of relief. He felt his feet touching the void as hard, firm, solid rock... Then he turned to the chief of police and said:

"Try to wake him gently, sir; and if he asks for me, say that I have gone back to Paris — for the sight of me might cost him his life!"

And he went back to Paris, alive. And from there, on his first voyage to the islands of Tahiti, in 1891... Then he returned to Marseille in his long, strange, gaudily embroidered garments... then Paris... then a short visit to his wife and children... then...

"Where are you bound, Paul Gauguin!"

1895

Paul, hungry and worn out, looked about him and found in all France not a morsel of palatable bread nor a shaded, restful spot... So he resolved to depart, and the ship carried him to the islands of Tahiti once more — those islands he had loved from the first time. He set out through their fields, painting and making merry, living in their huts and on their shores the life of their people; and the people of those lowlands loved him — "where woman is naked as Eve was, or like her, without shame or bashfulness."

Here he is in the open country before his canvas. Let us draw near him and hear him repeating to himself, criticizing the Impressionist school, which was infatuated with the use of pure, bright, broken and divided colors:

"A meter's expanse of green looks greener than the expanse of a single centimeter, if it is green you wish to express... How does that tree look to you? Is it green? Then use green — the greenest of the colors you have laid on your palette,(1) and that shadow? Does there seem to you a tinge of blue in its folds? Never mind: paint it with the bluest color you can."

For that reason his pictures were decorative panels; and for his naive, simple feeling and his primitive subjects they named him the primitive artist.

Sickness added to his torment, for leprosy struck him, and he withdrew from the world — except for a half-naked wife whom he took as his partner from among the girls of those islands, brilliant of color, gay, dancing — islands whose people he stood beside against the European colonizers and the missionary missions. He built himself a small house like the houses of the first inhabitants, eating of their food and their fruit, until the hand of death knocked at his door and he opened it to her smiling, in his forty-eighth year — for the brides to bear him away to where the processions of Seurat and Van Gogh had gone before him.

But his mortal body fell prey into the hands of the Europeans, who feted it and made ceremony over it, and carried it on their shoulders to a deserted, solitary corner among graves whose neighborhood I do not think he rests easy in — the graves of the missionary missions!

(1) We mean Palette — on the pattern of mindadah and minfadah (mif'alah).