The Right To Dare Everything : ‘ Paul Gauguin : The Art of Invention ’ By James D . Balestrieri AntiquesPublished : August 13 , 2019 “ Portrait Vase ” by Paul Gauguin , 1887 – 88 . Unglazed stoneware decorated with slip , glaze and gold , 10 ¼ by 6 - 5 / 16 by 4 - 5 / 16 inches . Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek , Copenhagen . ST LOUIS – French art historian Jean Leymarie , in his short , perfect essay on Paul Gauguin , published in the gorgeous dusty columns of the 1962 Encyclopedia of Art , sums up the birth of Modernism : “ Painters no longer attempted to represent the external world by creating the illusion of an image , but rather to suggest their interior dreams through allusive symbols and the multiplication of decorative forms ; line and color were invested with the role of expressive vehicles and became the abstract equivalents of sensation . This change , amounting to the overthrow of the empirical and optical vision that had come down from the Renaissance , was perhaps the most violent about - face in modern art . The way , from that time , was open , and we know how boldly Gauguin proceeded . ” Comprising 55 Gauguin masterworks on loan from Copenhagen ’ s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek , as well as some 35 objects from the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum , “ Paul Gauguin : The Art of Invention , ” now on view in St Louis , offers a superb overview and deep insight into the life , thought and art of this quasi - mythological being whose shadow looms large not only over artistic Modernism but over the very romantic notion of the artist who sacrifices everything for art . Along with many other artists in every discipline , Gauguin has been reappraised in recent years . His freedom and devotion to art above all came at a steep cost to others : the wife and children he left behind in Europe , the Native child brides he took in the South Seas and the children they bore him and hosts of friends – Van Gogh and Pissarro among them – who felt the sting of his wrathful restlessness . Along with this reconsideration of his approach to life , his art , which for a very long time has been seen as visionary and ahead of its time , has been studied in light of currents of thought in fin de siècle Europe – notably , the resurgence of mysticism , Kabbalistic practice and the Manichean duality of good and evil that finds its greatest ｅxpression in Nietzsche . Albert Boime ’ s book , Revelation of Modernism , is one recent example of attempts to locate Gauguin and his contemporaries as seekers of new ways of living life and making art in a culture whose ideas they saw as exhausted . Gauguin ’ s own life , which has been the subject of a host of books and films , is still worth a skim . Born in France in 1848 into a family with socialist sympathies , Paul Gauguin emigrated with his parents to Peru when he was young , his mother having ancestral connections to a wealthy Peruvian family . His father died en route , and Gauguin , just a few years later , was sent back to France to be educated . He became a very successful stockbroker whose first interest in art was as a collector . He began to paint , and his work attracted the attention of artists he had met in the course of his collecting , especially Camille Pissarro . When the Paris Bourse crashed in 1882 , Gauguin turned his full attention to art , even as his haute bourgeois life – and his family – fell apart . After having settled his wife and children in Copenhagen , Gauguin determined that he would abandon middle - class morality – and his family – and go to Brittany , where he hoped to find inspiration , and a style of his own , in the traditional culture and wilder setting of the north of France . When that proved insufficient , Gauguin sailed first to Martinique and eventually to the South Seas , to Tahiti and the Marquesas , where he found a culture he saw as idyllic , prelapsarian , guided by desire and to natural law . After Martinique , he returned to France , where he painted and eventually came to blows with Van Gogh over the attentions of a prostitute – who would , the next day , be the recipient of the infamous ear , suspected of late to have been shot off by Gauguin in a duel rather than sliced off by Van Gogh himself ( one of the rickety pistols claimed to have been used in that duel recently came to auction ) . But perhaps Gauguin ’ s greatest influence came from Degas . The two were not only mutual in admiration , but also lifelong friends . And in looking at Gauguin ’ s work , the whole of his body of work , what you see of Degas in it – what I see , at any rate – is a restrained composure in both subject and treatment , a detachment and preoccupation that is never disdainful or even indifferent , as if the artworks themselves , not just their subjects , are lost – for the moment – in thought . They are everything that Gauguin seems not to have been in his life and mind : calm as opposed to turbulent . Somehow , in between the jagged dramas of his life , Gauguin managed not only to make a great deal of art but to encapsulate a great deal of what was going on as the academic gave way to the modern . Gauguin ’ s early works hearken back to the Barbizon , of Corot ’ s spindly , mist - hung trees and solemn figures . Then , as he begins to paint with Pissarro , they take on classic impressionist trappings where small daubs of paint in layers build a picture . In Brittany , one begins to see the influence of stained glass and Japanese woodblocks – heavily outlined shapes , flattened picture plane , limited palette . Critics note similarities between his work and cloisonné enamel work as he absorbs the late Nineteenth Century revival of interest in Medieval arts and the Gothic . His work loosens and brightens then as impressionism gives way to post - impressionism and symbolism and he sees what Van Gogh and Cézanne are up to . Then , at last , in Polynesia , Gauguin synthesizes all this and makes a leap to a personal style , becoming the Gauguin we recognize in major works such as the 1894 oil “ Reclining Tahitian Women , ” or “ The Amusement of the Evil Spirit ( Arearea no varua ino ) . ” As a guess at a theme , jealousy and envy – perhaps represented by the dark figure at left and the blue face winging in on two clouds or over two peaks – seems to be tempting the frowning woman at left . Is she envious of the woman who reclines in front of her , absent - mindedly stroking her hair ? Or is her frown directed at the men who seem to be dancing in the distance ? Is she in love with the man who loves the woman she sits beside ? Stories beg to be made up , but that ’ s all they are – made up – by us . Or does the fallen tree divide this world and another , a world one woman sees , while the other does not . These possibilities draw us in and keep us out . Despite Gauguin ’ s desire to express the new and to represent desire – the id , perhaps ? – this painting and others he did in the South Seas seem to have roots in classical mythology , where capricious gods toy with human emotion to their own advantage and for their own amusement . There are revelations in the exhibition , particularly in Gauguin ’ s ceramics and wood carvings . In an earlier essay for Antiques and The Arts Weekly ( Issue March 2 , 2018 ) , I wrote about Picasso ’ s transformative moment in June 1907 , when the artist wandered into the Musée d ’ Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris . But if you look at Gauguin ’ s stoneware works “ Portrait Vase ” and “ Portrait Head , ” you see an even earlier groping toward the forms of ancient and indigenous arts . Similarly , when you look at the open ｅxpression of the young woman and the flowing expressiveness that surrounds her in Gauguin ’ s woodcarving “ The Singer , ” you see an early incarnation of the unspoiled lightness that Matisse sought , in his dancers and elsewhere , throughout his career . Catholicism and the Modern Mind ( Esprit Moderne et Le Catholicsme ) , a diatribe against Christianity and Western Culture written and illustrated by Gauguin ( and gifted to the Saint Louis Museum by actor Vincent Price ) presents Gauguin ’ s strong feeling that dogma and institutional religion had stripped mystery , myth and true spirituality from the human mind and heart and that these could only be rediscovered in cultures that had not yet been tainted by the Church . Gauguin ’ s woodcuts and transfer drawings on the book ’ s covers and inside pages mix Polynesian and Western tropes , and you can see how the artist rubbed and wore away at the images to make them seem like something out of a lost manuscript . “ Reclining Tahitian Women ” or “ The Amusement of the Evil Spirit ( Arearea no varua ino ) ” by Paul Gauguin , 1894 . Oil on canvas , 23 - 5 / 8 by 38 - 9 / 16 inches . Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek , Copenhagen . The truth is , Gauguin would scorn our moral condemnation . He would relish being the poster boy for the difficulties we face as we attempt to reconcile ( or separate ) the failings of the artist as a human being with the beauty and influence of the artist ’ s work . If we dismissed him and his work , he would probably laugh . As Leymarie writes at the conclusion of his essay : “ Gauguin was largely responsible for all of the modern esthetic , with its direction rather toward suggestion than description – anti - naturalism , simplification and poetic and rhythmic effect in painting ; purity of line ; creative autonomy of color ; the break with the Greco - Latin and Renaissance tradition ; the appeal to the imagination , to dreams , to the unconscious and to Oriental and primitive sources . His immense influence on practice and theory was greater than his own creations . ” Gauguin ’ s own words , as Leymarie quotes them , confirm this and attest to the artist ’ s extraordinary knowledge of himself , his failings , his limitations and his fierce defense of his libertine choices : “‘ I wanted to establish the right to dare everything ; my capacities ( and the financial difficulties of my life have been too much for such a task ) were not capable of great results , but the machine is none the less launched . The public owes me nothing , since my pictorial oeuvre is but relatively good , but the painters who today profit from this liberty owe me something . '” Today , as a recent piece in The New York Times asserts , the artist as transgressive , as wild , instinctive , awful and awe - inspiring has been displaced in large measure by the artist as ascetic , as a solitary , nose - to - the grindstone , driven , sometimes haunted figure . You find versions of asceticism in three of the dominant strands of art : the politically charged ; the revivals and revisions of isms - real , surreal , and everything in between ; and even among those who see art primarily as fun . There have been ascetic periods in the past ; there will be transgressive periods in the future . The pendulum of morality swings between them . Art has a way of anticipating these swings . In the end , while you might find a certain kind of dark asceticism in Gauguin ’ s work , you would never find Gauguin the man among the ascetics . Tickets are $ 15 for adults , $ 12 for seniors and students , $ 6 for children 6 - 12 , free for children 5 and under , and members are always free . Exhibition hours are Tuesday - Sunday , 10 am to 5 pm ; Friday , 10 am to 9 pm ; closed Monday . The Saint Louis Art Museum is at 1 Fine Arts Drive , Forest Park . For more information , www . slam . org . “ Landscape from Tahiti ” by Paul Gauguin , circa 1893 . Oil on canvas ; 19 - 5 / 16 by 21 - 1 / 4 inches . Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek , Copenhagen . You might also like From The Schuylkill To The Hudson : Landscapes Of The Early American RepublicAugust 20 , 2019 MFA Reinstalls Islamic Art GalleryAugust 6 , 2019