Gauguin’s Vision
Until October 2; RSA building, Edinburgh

Like the rest of the world, I watched images this week of Edinburgh’s riot police in direct combat with anarchists, wombles and clowns (the militant strategies of the latter, you may recall, failed to impress me at CCA’s recent RISK exhibition). As police lines edged the dangerous geranium-wielding protesters ever closer to the RSA, I remembered that I was supposed to be there, in a matter of hours, for a sneak preview of the National Gallery of Scotland’s summer exhibition of Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin.

You have to hand it to Edinburgh. By the time of the press view, evidence of the skirmish was nowhere to be seen. The flower-beds had been replanted magically overnight, and Princes Street Gardens had been reclaimed by their usual population of chilled-out sun-worshipers.

I wonder what Gauguin would have thought of the trouble, given that his grandmother was an anarchist, as was his first mentor, Camille Pissarro. But, more interested in his own immortal career than in the welfare of others, Gauguin would probably be cursing the protestors for steering press attention away from his latest show.

This show is in marked contrast to its nearest neighbour, upstairs. The Landseer exhibition (finishing today) was an exercise in ignorance, failing completely to contextualise a historically difficult painter. Gauguin’s Vision, on the other hand, is one big lesson in context. Freelance curator Belinda Thomson has conducted a thorough case-study into a single painting, revealing the fruits of her research as a detailed exhibition.
It’s not your average crowd-pleasing blockbuster. This is a show for people who like art history, as well as art itself. It is a four-room, 84-piece seminar on the genesis and legacy of one key painting.
If you’ve noticed that the painting in question has not been named yet, it’s because its title is a matter of scholarly dispute. Until now, the NGS have called it The Vision After The Sermon (Jacob and the Angel). Now, on the basis of documentary research, it is rechristened as Vision Of The Sermon: Jacob Wrestling With The Angel. Whatever it’s called, Gauguin’s landmark painting signalled a distinct turn in art, away from a science-based naturalism and towards the spiritual spires of 20th century abstraction.

Gauguin is always guaranteed to be the juiciest of subjects. A Paris stockbroker born into a family of anarchy, attempted murder, and “Inca” passion, he decided late in life to find fame and fortune as a painter. Abandoning his wife and five children he found freedom in Tahiti, where, arguably, he introduced syphilis via the local teenage virgins. Add to that his deeply intimate relationship with Vincent Van Gogh, involving the ear incident and ending in the Dutchman’s suicide, and you’ve got one sexy story.

One would wonder, given that material, how an exhibition about Gauguin could possibly be dry, but with the exception of the central conundrum – of whether the Vision was a flagrant case of plagiarism – this one is. Added to which, the artist’s Tahitian adventure is set to one side, in favour of his more pertinent Breton sojourns.

You’re not sure, in the first room, whether you’ve entered the exhibition yet. It’s dedicated to the popularity of Brittany amongst artists before Gauguin first set foot there in 1886. The images are largely Dutch in tonality – all browns and muted colours, as in the rustic interior of Paul Serusier’s Breton Weaver’s Workshop, and Van Gogh’s sturdy Head of a Peasant Woman.

The second room is dedicated to Gauguin in the context of his peers. His early landscapes employ a feathery style learned primarily from Pissarro, while they were still on good terms; Pissarro himself is only represented by a couple of etchings. Cézanne is represented by a landscape borrowed from Wales, which Gauguin had once owned.

Cézanne complained that the younger artist had stolen “his little sensation”, and this wasn’t to be the last accusation of stylistic thievery laid at Gauguin’s door. But viewing Cézanne’s Mountains, L’Estaque right next to Gauguin’s Martinique Landscape, it’s clear that Cézanne’s blocky technique was far more integral to the structure of his painting than Gauguin’s superficial surface pattern.

Perhaps the greatest clue of what is to come sits quietly in a small glass case at the exit of this room. In it are two pieces of pottery, the sinewy curves of Breton women shaped into them. On one, the contours are outlined in gold, and a tree reaches out in the Japanese style, breaking through the clear, unmodulated sky.

It’s only now, half way through the show, that you’re introduced to Vision Of The Sermon, and having worked up such an appetite for this giant of art history, it seems disappointingly small. Perhaps that’s down to the special spot-lit niche it’s given, like some devotional image. It usually seems larger in the boudoirish setting of the NGS’s Post-Impressionist collection.

Having come through the first two rooms, it’s evident that the Vision marks a sudden breakthrough in Gauguin’s work. The feathery shimmer of pastel-coloured brush-marks are gone, and in their place is bold, flat, stark colour, contained within dark blue contours. Where there was pure landscape before, and day-to-day images of Breton women going about their business, now there is spiritual mystery.

An arc of women in traditional Breton costume are at prayer, and before them appears a vision of Jacob wrestling with the angel. This biblical story comes straight from Genesis, and tells of Jacob wrestling with a stranger all night, refusing to stop until he is blessed. The stranger finally reveals himself as an angel and gives Jacob the name of Israel. The incident is often taken to represent an inner struggle with faith. For artists and writers of Gauguin’s time, it was seen as a metaphor for the artist’s struggle with nature.

Gauguin probably didn’t see himself as Jacob, because the priest figure, painted as an afterthought on the extreme right of the image, looks uncannily like the artist himself. He was always dishing out advice to his peers, and even to his elders where he could get away with it, so this patriarchal role would suit Gauguin down to the ground. Perhaps he felt that his role as artist-priest was to reveal life’s hidden mysteries to those who were willing to see.

Thomson’s research into the traditional Breton sport of wrestling reveals just how potent Jacob’s story must have been for devout locals. Religious ceremonies were bound up with the pagan rite of wrestling, and the prize – an animal – would be tethered to a tree. That explains the squirming cow attached to the tree, which – in Japanese style – cuts through the composition on a bold diagonal.

The Japanese influence is also present in other ways. The word “cloisonism” was to be coined in this same year to describe the use of dark contours dividing blocks of pure colour, much like the enamel process from which it took its name. This was made all the stronger in the Vision by Gauguin’s use of undiluted red for the colour of the earth.

Central to scholarly discussion of the Vision is Emile Bernard’s claim that it was plagiarised. Bernard, a young prodigy of Gauguin’s, worked closely with his hero during the time they spent together in Brittany. Bernard claimed that his painting, Breton Women in the Meadow, was painted to demonstrate his ideas to Gauguin, and a month later they were reproduced in the Vision.

For the first time in Britain, the two paintings are brought together. Given that this is the only chance we might ever get to make up our own minds on the argument, you would expect the paintings to be hung side by side. Strangely, they are separated by a protruding wall, by text, and by an empty doorframe.

With a bit of neck-craning and shuffling about, it’s possible to establish that the two paintings are remarkably similar. Bernard’s bold outlines are pronounced, and the women in Breton costume make a similarly decorative arrangement against a flat colour field. But the similarities stop there: Bernard’s colours remain naturalistic, and his painting lacks the new spiritual content of Gauguin’s.

In an otherwise immaculate hang, the stubborn separation of these two key paintings can only be a deliberate refusal to play into Bernard’s hands. It appears that on the age-old argument, the curator has made up our minds for us, and history sidelines Bernard yet again.

The exhibition goes on to explore the legacy of the Vision. Never has a show so methodically offered the whole picture – with beginning, middle, end, east and west. There is a Delacroix painting of Jacob’s struggle, and Japanese prints with bright red backgrounds. There is a piece of furniture which Gauguin made along with Emile Bernard before they fell out, and a display of traditional Breton costume.

Everything in the show is there to make a particular point, but it does require a lot of hard work on your part to keep up with the argument. This is pure art historical research laid bare, and dumbing down is definitely not the name of the game. Somewhere between Landseer and this, there must surely lie a happy medium.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 10.07.05