the Second World War that he became a full-time painter. The war sparked his need to paint the harsh reality of these postwar conditions. He distinguished himself from his contemporaries through his lifelike portraits, often using his friends as models, and nudity, this of the non-erotic kind.
In his mature phase, Freud used different types of paint brushes, saturating them in heavier and thicker paint. Although he continued to experiment as an artist, Freud never abandoned his mundane but generally bright colours. In The Man with the Blue Scarf , art critic Martin Gayford deconstructs his experience as a sitter for a Freud portrait.3 The resultant piece captures the fullness of the man with vibrancy and verve. If you get the opportunity to see the work, examine the brilliance of the blue. Breathtaking!
Still later, Freud was introduced to Leigh Bowery, a performance artist of whom he painted an entire nude series. As it transpired, Freud painted many nudes, including many nudes of women. Freud eschewed painting perfection or the “ideal” woman, however. Instead, he created heavily impastoed, very real paintings that forged an air of beauty. The figures he painted were consistently “real” figures. In his nude painting of the English supermodel Kate Moss, for example, she has a rounded belly and wider legs and darker hair than one usually sees in her fashion photographs.
The fact that Freud didn’t glamourize his subjects does not mean that he was misanthropic. Rather, he wanted to portray the real, not the fanciful. Susie is a powerful example of Freud’s talent in portraiture and one could spend hours plumbing the depths of that visage.
One of the greatest figurative painters of the last half-century, Freud died in 2011.
SG
10. Where Do We Come From? What Are We?
Where Are We Going? (1897–98)
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903)
Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897–98
Oil on canvas, 139.1 x 374.6 cm
Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund (36.270)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
At some point in your artistic journey, you must come to terms with Gauguin. I find him complex and somewhat disturbing. I like best his pastoral rural scenes of Brittany farmers with white caps harvesting wheat. But he is best known for his Tahitian works. He lived there from 1891 to 1893 and fell in love with the place.
He wrote to Theo van Gogh on November 20, 1889:
You know I have Indian blood, Inca blood in me, and it’s reflected in everything I do. It’s the basis of my personality. I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on savagery.
Gauguin was a complicated man. He was an avid self-publicist yet claimed to loathe the society in which he promoted himself. He gave many press interviews about his work, his desire for seclusion, and his contempt for Europe, yet he strove for its approval and its money. Even in Tahiti you need money.
In 1897, he was profoundly depressed. One of his daughters had died and his Danish wife had stopped writing him. He felt death was imminent. He worked on what he viewed as his last and largest painting (4.5 m x 1.70 m) at the end of 1897 and finished it in January 1898. By his account, when he finished this huge painting he went into the hills to kill himself with arsenic. He tried it, but did not take enough. He survived six more years.
Well, what of his painting?
In his work, Gauguin always strove for simplicity, using large sections of strong colour, virtually no shadows, and giving the figures in his paintings boundaries almost as strongly defined as those found in the panels of a stained-glass window. No real depth — just patterns.
This work fits with that pattern. At first it is painfully flat. Sit down, take a deep breath, slow down, this will be work. In this broad, rough, sack-cloth of a canvas there is a gentle sweep of mellow blue with hints of thunder. To the right, three bodies representing life — relaxing, maybe curious, perhaps drifting. The body in the middle, perhaps an Adam reaching for the apple, spelling death. But Gauguin believed in mystery and that “colour which like music is a matter of vibrations reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature, colour being enigmatic in itself, we use it to give the musical sensations that flow from it.”
The complaint was put to him, “There is nothing in the work that reveals to us the meaning of the allegory.”
He replied, “Well, my dream cannot be apprehended, it requires no allegory; being a musical poem; it needs no libretto, the essential quality of a work consists precisely in what is not expressed.” Indeed, the canvas does have a musical feel, a strumming, a vibrato. The sweep of the blues, the green, the off-citron yellow are like parts of a musical Beethoven cello riff.
Gauguin’s comments help one to understand the painting. The Buddha-like figure is make-believe; the moon goddess Hina, based on Asian prototypes.
The old lady on the left is death. Gauguin says, “This woman appears to accept everything, to resign herself to her thoughts. She completes the story! At her feet, a strange white bird holding a lizard in its claws.”
Gauguin agitated over the painting’s reception at home. He repainted parts of it separately and sent them to Paris for sale.
The avant-garde critics praised it. Critics today are mostly appreciative of it. Sister Wendy — a nun and famous author of thirty-five art books — thinks this a triumph.
The work is certainly a challenge to what went before. Gauguin’s sweeping statement may apply, “Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” Strange, three disturbed personalities created new forms of art: Cézanne — Cubism; Van Gogh — Expressionism; Gaugin — Primitivism, the Fauves.
JP
11. The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882)
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882
Oil on canvas, 221.9 x 222.6 cm
Gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Julia Overing Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Florence D. Boit in memory of their father, Edward Darley Boit, 1919 (19.124)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
Sargent is not mentioned in some of the art books that survey highlights. I’m not sure why — perhaps because he was a “popular” painter, bridging the gap between the Old Masters and Impressionism. He spent much of his youth in Europe. His first success was in the Paris Salon in 1879. That year he spent weeks copying Velázquez’s Las Meninas in the Prado. A friend of Monet, whom he admired, Sargent didn’t do Impressionism, however. His painting is lush, in the tradition of Delacroix. He spanned generations of art styles, starting in 1878, finishing in 1925. His works had a sense of flamboyant theatre. Henry James, another friend, said of him that “he was a knock down insolence of talent.”
