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).
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