Vision after a Sermon, 1888 2.
The Symbolist Aesthetic
| In the famous words of Maurice Denis’ in 1890: ‘Remember that a picture-before being a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote-is essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.’1. It was this new conception of art as not an imitation of nature but an autonomous form of language and representation which firmly emphasized the importance of the subjective over the objective. In the 1880's the Symbolist were forefront in the movement which was to change the direction and 'intention' of art for many generations to come | They went beyond nature in their search for plastic equivalents of emotions and sensations, drawing the spectator into an imaginary world no longer dependent on externals. In both subject matter and form painting became an expression of the 'idea'. In order to grasp and relate that which was abstract, an emotion, idea, sensation, new forms of signifying were found. The physical properties and sensuous qualities of colour and its suggestive and expressive effects became a central medium in the expression of the subjective state. The meaning and power of colour for the Symbolists also went beyond its emotive value. As one of the fundamental elements of life it was believed to hold the key to a certain underlying 'universal' order, the ‘essential’ they wished to define in their art. | ||
| Gauguin was one of the leaders of the Symbolist movment in the 1880’s and 90’s. His symbolist language was not allegorical in the traditional sense, but was born out of personal experience and emotion which he felt would communicate to the viewer a wider message about human experience. Albert Aurier's famous article 'Le symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin’(1891) begins with a descriptive interpretation of Gauguin's 'Vision after a Sermon'(1888). This painting is a good place to start in an analysis of the ways Gauguin employed colour as it represents, in the most powerful light, his use of colour as a vehicle of mystery and as an independent expressive force. Gauguin's title gave Aurier his first clue. He emphasised that, rather than being a scene observed in nature, this is an interpretation of an idea- a vision. The Breton peasants in the foreground are experiencing the biblical scene described to them in a Sunday sermon. The figures of Jacob and the Angel are set in an unreal vermillion-red ground which rises to the top of the canvas and comes forward to flatten the space. | Vision after a Sermon, 1888 2. |
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| This lack of depth is employed as a tool for making apparent that the scene witnessed is not from observed reality but a creation of the imagination, a subject which has been imagined and interpreted in visual metaphor. Colour has been used as a means of projecting an inner experience rather than describing real forms and space. The large unmodulated areas, with no broken colours to suggest light or intervening atmosphere, relates a sense of the unreality of the scene. The simple faith of the peasant, the purity and sincerity of which captured for Gauguin the ideal he search for, was rendered through simplified forms and colour. The strength of emotion felt by both the peasants and by the artist himself was captured by the boldness of colours. | |||
| Blanc’s theory of the moral, as well as the emotional and mysterious, force of colour corresponded perfectly with Gauguin's expression of religious experience through the use of 'moral harmonies'. In a letter to the painter Schuffenecker in 1885 Gauguin describes the 'character' of colour: ‘There are noble tones, others that are more common, harmonies that are quite, consoling, others that excite by their boldness’. The idea that colour had a direct, unmediated effect on the emotions and that these effects had a universal underlying order had first been theorized by the early 19th.century poet and philosopher Goethe(1749-1832). Goethe’s ‘Farbenlehre’ (1810) (Theory of Colour) had not attracted very much interest during his lifetime, but found a much more receptive audience in late 19th.century France. His interest in the aesthetic power of colour, rather than its physiological effects which had been the bases to Newton's theory, led to him developing a theory in which the mystical and symbolic power of colour was central. Goethe placed great importance on painting as a medium through which the inherent power of colour would be realised. In an unpublished essay he wrote: "Painting is truer for the eye than reality itself. It presents what man would like to see, not what he habitually sees"3. For him it was the aesthetic intent of the artists which gave meaning and value to our experience of colour. | |
| The idea that the artists had an intuitive command of colour and a deeper insight into the messages it relayed corresponded with the image of the artist that developed alongside the symbolist emphasis on inner experience. The profound unconscious nature of the artist was seen to be capable of transcending the everyday and communicating something about the essential nature of the world. Gauguin certainly felt this calling. He felt that the aim of his art was to rise above banal imitations of nature and to translate by means of metaphor a more profound experience. Colour for him became a central medium with which to describe his deepest mystical beliefs. "Colour, which is a vibration just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal yet at the same time most elusive in nature: its inner force"3. |  Blue Trees, 1888 4. |
1. Denis- quoted in Gage 'Colour and Culture' p.205
2. The Vision After the Sermon, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,1888 Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm (28 3/4 x 36 1/4 in), National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Downloaded from www.artchive.com
3.Gauguin- in Letter to Fontainas- in Art in Theory Harrison and Woods(eds.)-p.23-26
4.Blue Trees, 1888, Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm (36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in),The Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen. Downloaded from www.artchive.com