Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art

Nancy Locke

DEBORA SILVERMAN

Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art

New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000. 576 pp., 147 color ills., 59 b/w. $60.00

Although many writers on the life of Vincent van Gogh have commented on his religious background, the relationship between avant-garde art and religion has not received the attention it deserves. The historiographical reason for this probably dates to the abandonment or avoidance of religious subjects by the first practitioners, who embraced anticlericalist politics and relegated religious art to academicians. Yet, as Rene Girard reminds us, "To expel religion is, as always, a religious gesture." (1) Although the Impressionists, in varying ways, resisted religious art (a good example being Camille Pissarro's assiduous attempt to rework Jean-Francois Millet without the earlier master's overlay of piety), avant-gardists in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries were frequently preoccupied with questions of the sacred in art. In Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, Debora Silverman charges into the largely secular world of sociohistorical scholarship on Post-Impressionism with a mission: to retell the compelling story of the collaboration of these two very different figures, to "reemphasize the critical role of religion in the development of modernism, [and] to bring religion back into the story of artists' mentalities and formations" (p. 13).

As she has with earlier books such as Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France, Silverman treats her subject with the refreshing perspective of a cultural historian who is capable of writing incisively about broad cultural phenomena, and who also applies herself to close readings of particular works of art. "I intend the book as a bridge between specialists and a curious, non-expert public who read and think about art and go to see it," she states (p. 11). Silverman writes successfully for this audience. She carefully lays the groundwork for each chapter, each formal analysis, each contextual investigation; she summarizes her findings within short sections; and she links each piece of the puzzle to her thesis. Although some scholars will find some of this summarizing to be unnecessary, I have to admire the way she manages to vary her language enough to keep this approach from sounding overly repetitious. The book is filled with new research done in several areas, notably having to do with religious doctrine in ea ch artist's education and contexts of popular piety in the regions in which the artists lived during the period in question.

Van Gogh and Gauguin is divided into six parts. Part 1, "Toward Collaboration," pays particular attention to the exchange of self-portraits that consolidated the beginning of what was to be the "Studio of the South." Van Gogh's first impression of Paul Gauguin as a "schemer" and a "speculator" was radically altered when he received Gauguin's Self-Portrait: Les Miserables accompanied by the artist's dense explication of it. After that, van Gogh formed a new conception of the religious dimension of the Yellow House and envisioned Gauguin as its "abbot." Part 2, "Peasant Subjects and Sacred Forms," establishes the artists' interests in the sacred before their collaboration actually began: Silverman devotes a section to van Gogh's Sower (which gets overexposed in the book; the index counts over forty separate references to the painting) and one to Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon. Part 3 then focuses on the familial and pedagogical religious formation of each artist. Although the outlines of this material will be familiar to some readers, much else is new: here are detailed discussions of religious doctrines embraced by various influential figures, such as the new catechism at the core of the seminary education received by Gauguin, and the particularities of Dutch Reformed Protestantism that comprised van Gogh's heritage. Silverman theorizes that the essential direction each artist took can be mapped from these early practices and areas of belief. Vincent van Gogh's work ethic, his materialism, and his interest in visualizing labor appear differently in this light. As Silverman analyzes Gauguin's seminary education, specifically, Bishop Dupanloup's reformations, she also illuminates the ideological roots of his idealism. Gauguin's 'French avant-garde colleagues, such as Auguste Rodin, Charles Morice, and Maurice Rollinat...shared in combat with the Catholic legacy even as they existed deeply under its spell" (p. 10). She thus relates the antimaterialism at the heart of Symbolist theory and Gauguin's painterly pract ice to a picture of his lapsed, but agonistic, Catholicism. It may sound reductive on the surface, but in her hands these arguments are skillfully made and defended. It is in this section that Silverman forms a strong framework that supports much of the rest of the book.

The latter three parts deal with the Aries period and its aftermath, and in these sections Silverman concentrates more attention on a select group of works, which receive sustained readings. Throughout the book, Silverman retains the model of the social history of art as her approach. For example, readers are offered a detailed consideration of Frederic Mistral's regionalist Provencal Renaissance, which featured an emphasis on the Provencal language and revivals of traditional Catholic Nativity plays in towns such as Aries. Although her research is wide-ranging and her links between various social phenomena and the relevant works of art are usually judicious, some difficulties remain. For instance, it makes sense to consider the possible impact of images d'Epinal on Gauguin as he moved toward the radical flatness of The Vision after the Sermon, but the devotional images Silverman reproduces (of bleeding hearts and of the bleeding body of Christ) have little visual resonance with Gauguin's painting. Silverman informs us that some of these images 'were tacked to the walls of the Maison MarieHenry in Le Pouldu," where Gauguin lived in 1889-90 (p. 107). She reasons convincingly that Gauguin and Emile Bernard's possible uses of imagerie d'Epinal were quite distinct from those of Gustave Courbet, and that the later artists' interests were partly shaped by the religious functions of the prints (p. 106). This proposition is in need of more explication. How would the uses of the prints in a devotional context revise Gauguin's notion of the function of his own sacred art? A potentially rich area of investigation is unearthed but not fully reconstructed, and the deep red color in select motifs of the Sacre Coeur de Marie remains unsatisfying as a source for the pure vermilion background in Gauguin's breakthrough painting.

Since Silverman's recounting of the activities of each artist in the months before, during, and after their collaboration appears quite detailed, it is puzzling that some elements are missing. If the book is indeed aimed at a general reader, it would seem to serve the needs of that reader to touch on the role of Emile Bernard in the development of the cloisonnism Gauguin adopted in The Vision after the Sermon. Silverman does report on Gauguin's attendance of a Pont-Aven pardon festival (a religious celebration that included opportunities to earn pardons) "in the company of Emile Bernard and his sister, as part of their shared exploration of Breton religious culture and early Christian arts" (p. 103). But she neither reproduces nor discusses Bernard's Breton Women in a Meadow (or At a Pardon), with its monochrome background and silhouetted women, as a point of departure for Gauguin's painting. (Additionally, van Gogh would later copy the Bernard painting.) She is also at pains to argue, and rightfully so, that Gauguin's work aims for an experience of transcendence and is not overly involved with a literal representation of the Breton ceremony. Still, there is no reason why this argument could not be put forward against a comparison of Bernard's heavy-handed version of peasant naivete with Gauguin's synthesis of Bernard's innovative cloisonnism and a lighter conception of japonisme, the latter via the red background and the bold diagonal of the tree branch.

There are distinct differences between Silverman's version of the social history of art and a similar approach taken by an art historian. A minor but interesting example can be glimpsed in her discussion of the paintings made by van Gogh and Gauguin of the Roman and Early Christian necropolis in ArIes called Les Alyscamps. The influence of Paul Cezanne is a clear factor for both painters at this moment in their development. Yet to illustrate her point about Gauguin's debt to Cezanne, she chooses the 1882-85 L'Estaque and compares the strong vertical tree form at right with foliage forming a canopy over the figures in Gauguin's Les Alyscamps (Musee d'Orsay, Paris). (2) The Cezanne painting belonged to Ambroise Vollard, and Gauguin may well have known it. She could have made a comparison a bit closer to home, however: consider, for instance, Cezanne's Le Chateau de Medan (Rewald cat, no. 437), a work Gauguin purchased and took back to Denmark in 1884. Shortly before his death in 1903 and decades after he had la st seen the canvas, Gauguin described the picture in synesthetic terms that could be seen as evocative of his own technique in works like Les Alyscamps:

Cezanne paints sparkling countrysides of deep ultramarine, heavy greens, shimmering ochres; the trees are aligned, their branches interlace, allowing one to see, nevertheless, his friend Zola's house with the vermilion shutters that the chromes make orange as they sparkle on the whitewashed walls. The raucous viridian calls attention to the refined greenery of the garden, and in contrast the grave sound of the purplish nettles, in the foreground, orchestrate the simple poem. (3)

Gauguin's exaggerations of the wildness of the color in this brilliant Cezanne clue us in as to the Cezanne he had in his mind's eye. His painting Les Alyscamps is meticulously composed with the short, diagonally or vertically oriented brushstroke characteristic of Cezanne's constructive-stroke method. Gaugum's delicate handling of the distant trees intermingling with the St-Honorat tower remains but one of many Cezannesque moments in the picture. It is not my point that Silverman's comparison is implausible or feeble, but rather that the painter's indebtedness to Cezanne is a complex subject, and more attention to it would in fact open onto her interest in Gauguin's harnessing of sensory richness for transcendent ends.

Van Gogh's series of canvases on the theme of the woman rocking a cradle, La berceuse, must be seen as central to this artist's "search for sacred art." When van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about his ideas for the series, he described a painting of Mine Roulin as a modern Madonna in the center, surrounded by canvases of sunflowers on either side that would "form torches or candelabra beside them," "so the whole would be composed of seven or nine canvases" (p. 330). His letter contains a drawing of a triptych. Silverman's analysis of this project is crucial to the success of the book, and here, her research opens a new window onto van Gogh's pictorial thinking.

Silverman begins by considering van Gogh's interest in making La berceuse resemble "a chromolithograph from a cheap shop." This type of aim rings true for many avantgardists absorbed in the appeal of the popular, but van Gogh claimed that such popular prints were superior to his painting in the area of technical execution (p. 328). She moves from the image's resonances with contemporary popular art to its sources in 15thcentury Flemish painting, and from there to Flemish stained glass. Silverman looks in detail at the Mans Stella window at the church of St. Andries in Antwerp; van Gogh saw and described the 16th-century devotional work to Theo. The theme of the window is the Virgin as protectress of mariners in distress. This becomes an intellectually interesting source for La berceuse, for when van Gogh conceived of his painting, he was thinking about Pierre Loti's novel Pecheur d'Islande (An Icelandic fisherman), imagining that his work might be comforting to the fishermen in their isolation and vulnerabili ty. Although the window exemplifies the kind of devotional art that interested van Gogh, its potential as a visual source is limited, in my view, to its cloisonnism, and it would seem that by the time van Gogh came to complete any of the versions of La berceuse, he hardly needed specific stained-glass precedents.

Fortunately, Silverman moves from this relatively dry art historical material to more fertile terrain: she brings in ceramic santons (creche figures), provincial creches, and popular Nativity plays as source material for van Gogh's modern Madonna. This is fascinating material, and the high point of the book. The santons, a folk tradition in southern France, were carved, modeled, and painted by local artisans out of everything from wood to red clay to bread dough. These figurines of millers, bakers, and peasants played a special role in the Christmas season in Arles: by mid-century, Silverman informs us, "the santons attending the holy family were not little saints at all but representative local types distinctive to rural and municipal Provence" (p. 349). Van Gogh had begun La berceuse before Christmas 1888 and took up the project again as soon as he felt well enough in early 1889, after the famous ear incident and the split with Gauguin had interrupted his work. Silverman confirms that during this time of ye ar, Arles was awash in santons, creches, and performances of pastorales, Nativity plays. As she explains:

These plays were essentially the santons brought to life, unfolding their misadventures as they bumbled their way to greet the baby Christ in the manger. Mixing the story of the angels, the magi, and the holy family with local characters such as the miller, mayor, and farandole musicians, the Pastorales combined music and dance with serious interludes and comic relief. (p. 355)

Van Gogh attended a Provencal pastorale in January 1889, and he described it to Theo in the same letter in which he described La berceuse; he said the play was "reminiscent of the Christian theater of the middle ages" but also "mixed up with the burlesque of a family of gaping Provencal peasants" (p. 357). Silverman and her research assistants even located the text of the actual pastorale that was performed that day in Arles (researchers take note: the text was found not in the Arles municipal archives but in the New York Public Library). "Van Gogh was not comfortable with the Occitan dialect," she writes, "but the combination of music, pantomime, special effects, and spectacle made the story generally comprehensible" (p. 358). She also reproduces a sheet of music, a drawing, and photographs of some of the costumed actors playing the roles of "Pistachie, the inept lecher, and Barthoumieu, the simpleton whose love of drink outpaced his consideration for his fiancee, Margarido. These three alternated slapstick predicaments, from falling into a well to misleading the entire group journeying to Bethlehem," and so forth (pp. 355-56).

This material falls right into line with everything known about van Gogh's sympathy with common people, as well as with the aims he stated for La berceuse. The santon figures and the information about the pastorale are crucial discoveries that all scholars of van Gogh should cite in the future. If we turn our attention back to the picture itself, I believe we can take the implications of this material even further than does Silverman. Although the awkwardness in the drawing of the figure of Mine Roulin has usually been considered in terms of van Gogh's typical "naive" style or in terms of his linking the work with the cheap chromolithograph, we should remember, as Silverman points out, that he considered the chromos to be more correct in their drawing. The prints by Hubert Herkomer, Luke Fildes, Frank Holl, and other English artists associated with the British magazine the Graphic and admired by van Gogh (see, for instance, Herkomer's The Coast Guardsman, p. 329) are indeed highly competent in their execution . Van Gogh talks about the deliberately crude color accents in La berceuse, but not about the way he overdraws the contours of Mine Roulin's matronly figure: the stiffly undulating outlines of shoulder, sleeve, and bust, the great swell at the hips, and the overall thickness of the contour lines. These aesthetic choices, reminiscent of "the popular" as they are, turn out to be less reminiscent of popular prints such as Herkomer's Heads of the People and more attuned to the bumbling pantomime of the gap-toothed Pistachie and the long-suffering Margarido, with her ruddy face and stiff, bulky figure. The very form of La berceuse is infused with the spirit of these peculiarly regional folk traditions.

Van Gogh also wrote movingly of the music he heard at the pastorale, and that when he went home after the play, "it was the first time I slept without a bad nightmare" (p. 358). He strongly felt the consoling power of the music in the pastorale, and Silverman recognizes the (musical) ambiguity in the title, which means both "woman rocking a cradle" and "lullaby." Again, however, despite Silverman's attention, there is more to be said about the intersection of music, consolation, and religion around the painting. Kermit Champa, for instance, considers it significant that van Gogh executed several copies of La berceuse and quotes a passage from a letter to Theo in which the painter wrote: "I find that it [copying paintings] teaches me things, and above all it sometimes gives me consolation. And then my brush goes between my fingers as a bow would on the violin, and absolutely for my own pleasure." "Copying, he felt, was like musical interpretation and therefore something original in and of itself," writes Champ a. (4) His performative reading of the musical qualities in La berceuse would augment the devotional objects Silverman brings into relation with the work, and its absence from the book is noticeable.

Van Gogh and Gauguin nevertheless remains highly satisfying as a work of new research and as a freshly told, well-written narrative history of these two figures. In addition, the importance of the questions Silverman poses can be seen to go beyond the parameters of the book. Peter Burger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde, takes up the question of the avant-garde's critique of the bourgeois autonomy of art. (5) He discusses the development of bourgeois art, with its individualist modes of production and reception, out of the collective reception of courtly art and the collective production and reception of sacred art. For him, a consideration of the function of art is central to an understanding of the status of the avant-garde, and also to a judgment of its success in challenging the pure aestheticism of l'art pour l'art. Although Silverman introduces and explores many strands of van Gogh and Gauguin's art that have to do with religious matters--fragments of each artist's education, writings, source material, and of course the images themselves--less of the book is devoted to a consideration of the function of art as viewed by each artist (or as might be gauged from a project such as the Berceuse triptych). I think Silverman, and most readers, would agree that both van Gogh and Gauguin were at odds with a purely aesthetic view of art's function, even if they approached representation in quite different ways. But to my mind, more needs to be said on the subject of art's function. If van Gogh and Gauguin were in pursuit of sacred art, what were they hoping to do with it? Could we really apply Burger's terms and expect that the artists were thinking of works as cult objects, more like the Sacre Coeus de Marie and the santons than like a Monet landscape? This in turn raises more methodological questions. Social history can bring us the santons, but what method could be used to probe the meaning of triptychs by Erich Heckel and Max Beckmann, or Hinterglasmalerei by Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Munter? Finally, what are the special pressures of late 19th-century French culture that led some artists to expel religion and others to reinvest the work with the status of cult object? One real measure of the book's success lies in the extent to which new questions are raised that will ultimately lead to further reevaluations not only of these two artists, but also of other key figures in the development of modernism.

Notes

(1.) Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 32.

(2.) Although the caption on Cezanne's L'Estaque (p. 205) reads "Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge," the Rewald catalogue raisonne (cat. no. 531) indicates that the work still belongs in a private collection, on loan to the Fitzwilliam. See John Rewald, The Paintings of Paut Cezanne: A Catalogue Raisonne (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), vol. 1, 339.

(3.) Paul Gauguin, quoted in ibid., 293.

(4.) Kermit Champa, "Masterpiece" Studies: Manet, Zola, Van Gogh, and Monet (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 117.

(5.) Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 47-53.

NANCY LOCKE is the author of Manet and the Family Romance (Princeton University Press, 2001). She teaches modern European art at Wayne State University in Detroit, and her current research focuses on Cezanne's interests in the art of the past [Department of Art and Art History, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich. 48202].

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