Art: Unforgettable Self-Delusion

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"It's odd that Vincent feels the influence of Daumier here," he wrote from Aries in 1888, where he was living with Van Gogh. "I, on the contrary, see Puvis subjects in their Japanese colorings. Women here with their elegant coiffure have a Greek beauty. In all events, here is a fountain of beauty, modern style." These are not the sentiments of a primitive. What Gauguin exalted as "primitivism" really meant two things: rejecting illusionism in favor of abstract, decorative color and flat pattern, and a distrust of bourgeois morals and technology. This distrust produced in him a deep nostalgia for a vanished and largely imaginary Paradise. The voyage to Tahiti, like Gauguin's earlier trip to Panama and Martinique, was an attempt to find that Eden in real life.

But the style he took with him was far from primitive. In Aries and Pont-Aven, Gauguin was already flattening his images completely against the picture plane. The colors of In the Garden of the Hospital at Aries, 1888, butt against each other like glowing pieces of tile; and one has only to compare the pot of yellow blooms in Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, 1888, with Van Gogh's own sunflowers to see the contrast between Gauguin's taste for generalization about shape and Van Gogh's obsessive vision of spiky, unfolding life in the flowers themselves. Reacting to the interest in mysticism that reigned in Symbolist circles in Paris (and probably to the curiosity about drugs and trances that had survived in French intellectual life since Baudelaire), Gauguin painted Nirvana around 1889. The sinuous line turned his dwarfish friend Meyer de Haan into a curiously uncertain footnote to Art Nouveau. But The Ham is one of the supreme moments in French still life; not even Cezanne could have surpassed the truth of its firm, dense patterning, the gray table top and smoky red meat held in parentheses between two swathes of orange wall.