A Tale of Two Toby Jugs

Fig. 1: Paul Gauguin: Jug Self-portrait (1889)

Fig. 2: Friar Tuck character jug made in England (mid-20thC)

 

I. 

 

The 19th-century French artist, Paul Guaguin, was an interesting and influential figure who produced some astonishing work in a number of mediums, including ceramic; first during the period 1886-1888 (a couple of months of which he spent living in Arles with his friend Vincent Van Gogh) and then again from 1893-1895 (after returning to Paris from his first trip to Tahiti).  

Whilst there are thought to be around sixty of Gauguin's ceramic pieces still surviving, the one that is perhaps best known is a self-portrait in the form of a jug made shortly after his famous bust-up with Van Gogh, in early 1889. 

 

Whilst being threatened with a razor and then having to deal with a madmen cutting off part of his left lughole would undoubtedly be unsettling, Gauguin also witnessed a second traumatic event a few days later; the beheading of a notorious Spanish murderer, Prado, in Paris [1].

 

These two things clearly influenced his macabre and grisly ceramic self-portrait, in which coloured glaze is used to suggest blood running down the side of his face and congealing at his neck. If one looks closely, one sees that an ear is missing. The closed eyes, meanwhile, suggest a death mask. 

 

It's a brilliant - if brutal - work, reproductions of which largely fail to convey both the brilliance and brutality.

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, I still wouldn't swap the Friar Tuck Toby jug [2], pictured above, which was one of my mother's most treasured possessions and which she kept in the cupboard by the gas meter for over seventy years.  

 

For despite the fact that this object used to frighten me as a small child and lacks the artistic, cultural and finacial value of Guauguin's piece, it means far more to me. Walter Benjamin insists that a mass manufactured object lacks aura - but that, I find, is simply not true. 

 

Or, even if it is true, I don't care; my mother's Friar Tuck Toby jug has a magical presence for me (as well as sentimental value, which certain intellectuals like to sneer at and find indecent, although Roland Barthes appreciated its importance).        

 

Notes

 

[1] Prado had murdered a prostitute. Gauguin - like Nietzsche - thought his sentence unjust and the execution profoundly disturbed him; not least because, according to his account, it was botched and it took two attempts to decapitate the prisoner. 

      Prado was executed on 28 December, 1888. Van Gogh, with whom Gauguin had discussed Prado's case, mutilated his ear on 23 December. Thus, it was anything but a merry Christmas that year for Gauguin. 

 

[2] I'm sure a collector or an expert in this area will tell me that what I have is not, in fact, a traditional Toby jug, but rather a character jug - the difference being that the latter only features the head and face and not the full body. Be that as it may, my mother always called her piece a Toby jug and I grew up referring to it as such and don't intend to stop calling it a Toby jug now.  

 

 

Reflections on Gauguin's La Vague (1888)

Paul Gauguin: La Vague (1888)

Oil on canvas (60.2 x 72.6 cm)

 

"As they neared the shore each wave rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water 

across the vermillion sand. The sea paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper 

whose breath comes and goes unconsciously." [1]

The Little Greek is right: Gauguin's painting La Vague is an astonishing work ...

Painted whilst living in Brittany, Gauguin was as captivated by the primeval character of the North Atlantic coastline as D. H. Lawrence was during his time in Cornwall, from where he wrote the following magnificent passage:

"It is quite true what you say: the shore is absolutely primeval: those heavy, black rocks, like solid darkness, and the heavy water like a sort of first twilight breaking against them, and not changing them. It is really like the first craggy breaking of dawn in the world, a sense of the primeval darkness just behind, before the Creation. That is a very great and comforting thing to feel [...] I love to see those terrifying rocks, like solid lumps of the original darkness, quite impregnable: and then the ponderous cold light of the sea foaming up: it is marvellous. It is not sunlight. Sunlight is really firelight. This cold light of the heavy sea is really the eternal light washing against the eternal darkness, a terrific abstraction, far beyond all life, which is merely of the sun, warm. And it does one’s soul good to escape from the ugly triviality of life into this clash of two infinites one upon the other, cold and eternal." [2]

 

Having found himself an interesting vantage point from which to work [3] - one which could only be accessed during low tide - Gauguin probably made a number of preliminary sketches, before beginning the actual canvas at his lodgings. 

 

Whilst Guaguin's abiding fascination with Japanese prints is clearly evident in La Vague, he was also inspired by a young artist called Emile Bernard, who was working nearby and buzzing with creative ideas. Through his discussions with the latter, it became clear to Gauguin that it was vital to find a new (post-impressionistic) form of expression; one that was more subjective, more primitivist, more visionary, and, above all, anti-naturalist. He and Bernard would call their new conception synthétism. 

 

Gauguin was now free to experiment and to dream. No longer under any obligation to simply copy what he saw, he could reimagine the landscape as he deemed necessary; in La Vague, for example, the third rock (in the upper-left corner) is an invention added purely for visual effect. 

 

And, most outrageously of all in the minds of those who demand realism, Gauguin painted the sandy beach an unearthly shade of martian red, affirming his increasingly idiosyncratic sense of colour. Further to this, the bright redness of the beach also relates to an optical phenomenon that Gauguin cleverly introduced into his work:  

 

"Detectable in the surging, foamy surf, is a prismatic phenomenon, in which the water appears to separate the reflected sunlight into its component chromatic wavelengths - pale violet, blue, green, and yellow - which, completed by the vermilion sand, yields a curving, rainbow-like effect along the upper edge and right-hand side of the painting." [4]

 

Finally, perhaps the thing I most admire about Gauguin's picture (as an object-oriented philosopher) is the addition of two tiny female figures, fleeing the incoming waves which threaten to overwhelm them and possibly carry them out to sea. This just intensifies the brutal elemental power of the painting; the ancient rocks and crashing waters care nothing about human bathers, or the warm softness of their flesh. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] A slightly modified couple of lines from the beginning of Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves. 

      I don't know if Woolf borrowed the title of her book from Gauguin - just as he took the title for his canvas from Hokusai’s famous woodcut The Great Wave of Kanagawa - but I do know that Roger Fry's introduction to Britain of works by Post-Impressionist painters, including Gauguin, had a significant impact on Woolf's own thinking and that The Waves might best be regarded as a work of literary abstractionism; a synthesis of poetic myth and external realism. 

      For an interesting essay on this, see Bernadette McCarthy; 'Denying the Dichotomy: Word Images in The Waves', in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 64 (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, 2006): click here. 

      Readers might also be amused by a post entitled 'Virginia Woolf as Gauguin girl' (27 Dec 2013), published on Paula Maggio's blog - Blogging Woolf - which relays the tale of how Virginia and her sister, Vanessa Bell, attended a party thrown in conjunction with Roger Fry’s 1910 exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters at the Grafton Galleries, dressed as figures from Guaguin's Tahitian paintings: click here.

  

[2] These beautiful lines are in a letter written by Lawrence to J. D. Beresford, dated 1 Feb 1916. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 519-520. 

 

[3] Commenting on the peculiar nature of Gauguin's vantage point, an anonymous critic writing for the British auction house Christie's notes: 

      "Gauguin often composed landscapes from elevated and other unusual vantage points, allowing him to dispense with a stabilizing horizon [...] Instead of gazing into the typically broad expanse of the landscape format, the viewer in La Vague experiences a vertiginous plunge into vertical depth, the psychological effect of which is like peering into the inner recesses of one's own emotional self." 

      Readers who are interested, can click here to read the full essay on the Christie's website. 

 

[4] Lot Essay on the Christie's website: click here.

 

 

This post is for Maria Thanassa (MLG).

Here's to the Crazy Ones: In Praise of Emotional Intensity

Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh

Lust for Life (1956)

Austrian-American psychoanalyst Ernest Hartmann was famously interested in what he termed boundaries of the mind - particularly those that determine the degree of separateness or connection between mental functions and processes and help shape distinct personality types.

According to Hartmann and his followers, emotionally intense individuals with less robust boundaries between themselves and the world, should be valued by society rather than derided as thin-skinned drama queens who confuse fantasy and reality and obsess over things of little or no interest to most people.

These complex and often uniquely gifted individuals - who are frequently misunderstood even by their family and friends - feel more powerfully, think more poetically, and have uncanny powers of perception rooted in a rich inner life. It's not surprising then, that so many of them become artists, philosophers, religious visionaries, or daydream believers.

If it's difficult for those of us not blessed (or cursed) with their abilities to fully understand or appreciate them, it's often just as difficult for these rare spirits to fully accept themselves and they can be subject to strongly negative emotions of self-doubt and self-loathing as well as positive states of euphoria. 

Sometimes, they can feel disoriented or acutely pained even by everyday experience and their proneness to psychological stress or anxiety can physically manifest itself in the form of migraines, asthma, panic attacks, hallucinations, or seizures. Thus, it isn't easy living in a state of heightened sensitivity or being possessed by dreams, desires, and demons.

Nor is it much fun being reminded on a daily basis that one is odd and needs to calm down, grow up, and get real. Often, even those who say they celebrate neurodiversity still treat emotional intensity as a disorder or form of psychopathology akin to bipolarism and borderline personality.

But, in the end, are we not all defective in some manner and to a greater or lesser degree? Indeed, isn't it our imperfections and failings that not only give rise to creativity and comedy, but make us human?

I wouldn't go so far as to say that sanity is merely a form of disguised madness, but I'd accept that irrational and impulsive behaviour is an important component of who we are and that sickness, perversity and passion often serve to advance culture.      

In sum: we need our décadents, as Nietzsche would say; though, as Paul Gauguin discovered, dealing with friends who are as handy with a razor as they are with a paintbrush, isn't always easy ...

See:

Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality, (Basic Books, 1991).

Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries: A New Way to Look at the World, (CIRCC EverPress, 2011).

Imi Lo, Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2018).

Note that the author of the above work - who describes herself as a Specialist Psychotherapist and Arts Therapist who has trained in yoga and holistic health and practices in a manner that combines psychology with "other physical and spiritual healing modalities" - has a website devoted to Eggshell Therapy for those who identify as emotionally intense: click here.  

On Van Gogh's Ear and the Dangers of Sungazing

Picture by Phischer: Van Gogh's Ear (2007)

www.worth1000.com

Although the facts of the case were disputed in 2009 by two revisionist art historians looking to pin the blame on Gauguin, we all know the story of Van Gogh's mutilated ear and how he carefully wrapped the piece of severed lobe in newspaper before presenting it to his favourite prostitute, Rachel, at a nearby brothel, with instructions to carefully look after it.  

Very few of us, however, have bothered to place this story in a wider context of meaning; and no one has managed to do a better job of this than Georges Bataille in his 1930 essay on acts of sacrificial atrocity and solar-induced madness.

Bataille persuasively argues that Van Gogh's violent act of self-disfigurement was the result not of a tiff with Gauguin, but due to an inhuman and ultimately overwhelming relationship maintained with the sun; a fatal form of worship that is only fully revealed in the painter's canvases produced during his stay at the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy in 1889 (i.e. following the Christmas Eve ear incident).

Vincent's letters to his brother Theo written during this period, also indicate how his solar obsession had reached its peak; he felt that he and the sun - at which he stared for dangerously long-periods at a time as if he himself were a sunflower drawing nourishment directly from the latter - were burning with the same vital intensity and magnificence.

After his departure from Saint-Rémy in January 1890, the sun doesn't simply fade or set within his artwork, but, crucially, almost entirely disappears. Six-months later, Van Gogh takes his own life, aged 37.

The point is this: it is impossible to maintain a personal or safe relationship with the sun; the attempt to do so might promise enlightenment and a healthy tan, but it ends with death and dismemberment. For just as sun-gazers risk solar retinopathy, sun-lovers risk being proved fatally mistaken in their anthropomorphic conceit if they believe that the sun loves them in return.


Note: See Georges Bataille, 'Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh', in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, (University of Minnesota Press, 1985).