The 'Primitive' and Emotive
| Gauguin interest in ‘primitive’ and oriental art
was deeply intertwined with his spiritual beliefs. In his later Tahitian paintings
Gauguin’s favoured more ‘mysterious’ close tones and subtle resonances
which more clearly reflected his feelings towards the culture and its forms of
spiritualism. |
The Loss of Virginity, 1890-11. |
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| In the flat, bold and clearly outlined colours of ‘Vision after the
Sermon’ the influence of both Japanese prints and medieval stain glass can be seen.
The luminescence of stain glass, which had interested a number of his contemporaries,
including Bernard and Augustin, caught the attention of Gauguin particularly for it
transcendental quality. Interest in oriental art was by no means particular to Gauguin or
even the symbolists. The exotic ‘other’ for along time had held a certain
fascination for European artists. With the opening up of trade with Japan in the
mid-nineteenth century, Japanese ‘curios’ began to flood the European market,
and among these curios the Japanese woodcut print was immediately appreciated for its
artistic merit. Van Gogh(1853-1890)alongside Gauguin admired these Japanese prints for
their ‘honesty’- their refusal to attempt to reproduce nature, and their
acceptance and control of their medium. The enclosed flat areas of unmodulated colour, the
abandonment of three-dimensional perspective, and a conception of painting as allegorical
or symbolic had a huge impact on many artist of the time, and can be seen most fully in
the painting of Van Gogh and Gauguin. Both wanted to create an equivalent from of art in
terms of oil painting that would reproduce particularly the expressive force and symbolic
power of the flat areas of pure colour. |
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| Van
Gogh’s feeling towards colour was less tied to symbolism and allegory than
Gauguin’s. Although he formed close alliances with the Symbolist group and
stylistically was greatly influenced by them, Van Gogh had an uneasy relation to the
symbolist aesthetic. His two compulsions, one grounded in naturalistic observation and the
other imaginative freedom, to a certain extent contradicted each other but also combined
to create emotionally charged works. His use of colour reflects most deeply the emotional
intensity that is so characteristic of his work. Van Gogh
was particularly intrigued with the dynamic of complementaries, which as Blanc had
visualised could act as both allies and as deadly enemies depending on how they were
mixed. ‘The Night Cafe’(1888) is perhaps his most ambitious attempt to convey an
emotional situation through colour. He wrote to his brother Theo: "I have tried to
express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red
and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four citron yellow
lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the
most disparate reds and greens....’2.
(Gage p.205). |
 Van Gogh 'The Night Cafe' 1888 3. |
| Here Van Gogh’s use of complementaries has
been to create an effect of disturbance and alienation rather than
‘enhancement’. In 'The Poet's Garden' (1988) the opposite effect can be seen,
where the mixture of colours soothes and relaxes. The sharply contrasting red and yellow
in 'The Night Cafe' relates an uneasy, disquieting experience. He uses texture as a means
of rhythmicizing and intensifying colour, the yellow light radiating from the lamps seesm
to vibrate around the room. The whole image is one of enormous intensity and expressive
energy in which the colour almost takes on a life of its own. Van Gogh’s symbolism
lies in the way his paintings heighten and generalise their expressive form and colour,
and so become something other than simply expressionist. His deeper impulses have been
externalised and fused in a work which now ‘expresses something in itself’. |
 The Poet's Garden, 1888 4. |
‘Colours
......indeed have something to say for themselves....Suppose I have to paint an autumn
landscape, trees with yellow leaves. All right-when I conceive it as a symphony in yellow,
what does it matter if the fundamental colour of yellow is the same as that of the leaves
or not? It matters very little....Colour expresses something in itself, one cannot do
without this. One must use it; what is beautiful, really beautiful, is also correct’5 In Van Gogh colour in
its purist form, as he found it in 'primitive' art, worked alongside his passion for
colour in nature. These seemingly contradictory interests provided the artists with a
means to create an art in which colour both spoke of the transitoriness and fleeting
beauty of nature at the same time as refering to the fixed, enduring laws which formed the
foundation of the natural world.
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| "....to express the love of two lovers by a wedding of two
complementary colours, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious opposition of
kindred tones"6. |
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1.Gauguin, The Loss of Virginity, 1890-91, Oil on canvas, 90
x 130 cm (35 x 50 3/4 in), The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia. Downloaded from
www.artchive.com
2. Van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo quoted in Gage p.205
3.Van Gogh, 'The Night Cafe, 1888, Oil on canvas, 70 x 89 cm, Yale
University Art Gallery. Scanned from Gage p196
4.Van Gogh, The Poet's Garden, October 1888, Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm,
Private collection. Downloaded from www.artchive.com
5.Van Gogh-letter to his Brother- in 'The Complete Letters of Vincent
Van Gogh', London : Thames & Hudson, 1999, p.113
6.Ibid. p.96