Dead letters (3)

I am posting this week’s Dead Letter a little late as I was away this past weekend. Here we have Paul Gauguin’s response to August Strindberg’s not altogether congratulatory take on Gauguin’s work, wherein he lightly upbraided Gauguin:

“I cannot grasp your art, and I cannot love it. I know that this avowal will neither astonish nor wound you, because you seem to be only strengthened by the hatred of others; your personality, careful to remain intact, is pleased by the antipathy that it arouses.”

Strindberg and Gauguin were fellow travelers of a sort, living on the radical fringes of an Ancien Régime that would soon perish beneath the weight of its own inconsistencies. There are so many perspectives from which to view the slight, but important, interactions between these two artists, and for my part, I must side with Strindberg, at least as he judges Gauguin’s motivations and intellect. The paintings, of course, stand on their own merits.

One can sense in Strindberg’s letter (not excerpted below) a certain revulsion at Gauguin’s art, and yet also a kind of grudging admiration, which was apparently good enough for Gauguin, as he used Strindberg’s letter (plus his own response to the letter) as the prefatory text to his 1895 exhibition’s catalog.

With two such interesting personalities as Strindberg and Gauguin, it is forever tempting to substitute biography for criticism, but I'll resist the temptation here. After all, Gauguin's paintings survive his unflattering demise, and such dissolution-- after Oscar Wilde, after Death in Venice, after countless examples of appetites gone astray and imagined paradises not living up to their real-world counterparts--simply isn't very interesting. Without further ado, here is Gauguin's response to Strindberg...

I have received today your letter; your letter, which is a preface for my catalog. I had the idea of asking you for a preface, when I saw you the other day in my studio playing the guitar and singing, your blue northern eyes gazing attentively at the pictures on the walls. I had then the presentiment of a revolt, of a shock between your civilization and my barbarism.

You suffer from your civilization. My barbarism is to me a renewal of youth.

Before the Eve of my choice, which I have painted in forms and harmonies of another world, your remembrances have perhaps evoked a sorrow of the past. The Eve of your civilized conception makes you and the rest of us almost always misogynists; the old Eve, which in my studio frightens you, will perhaps smile at you less bitterly some day. This world of mine, which neither a Cuvier nor a botanist can find, will be a Paradise which I shall have only sketched out. And from this sketch to the realization of the dream is very far. What matter? To envisage happiness, is that not a foretaste of Nirvana?

The Eve that I have painted, she alone, logically, can remain naked before one’s eyes. Yours in that simple state could not walk without shame and too beautiful (perhaps) would be the evocation of an evil and a sorrow.