Critics have dismissed Paul Gauguin as an artist who could not draw well, and knew it, who therefore turned to a more primitive style of expression. Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin was the never published companion catalogue to Gauguin’s French exhibition of 60 paintings and block prints completed in Tahiti. The public of Gauguin’s day judged his work harshly, the same work that later left Pablo Picasso in Gauguin’s thrall and fetches millions in today’s market.
These strains of a master’s tortured past were the stuff of two mini-lectures last night in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ingalls Library. As I listened, I remembered Stephen Colbert pointedly asking Tom Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art what makes art “art.” Who decides what’s worthy? Campbell explained that trained experts determine the authenticity and significance of older works, but he had no words for what makes art good, or bad.
Last night, surrounded by a tacto-visual repast the librarians had laid out for us - clippings, postcards, prints and the like - we heard muffled cheers erupting from adjoining offices. Who knew, the CMA staff watches Wednesday night football?
Our hosts explained later that the museum had just learned of a much hoped for acquisition for its collection. “What is it?” we asked. “Can’t tell you,” they answered, beamingly mysterious. We’d have to wait, like everyone else, for the morning paper.
My mother would have loved this story. Then again, she most likely listened in, her beneficent ghost haunting us calmly in that still space. Jane Sylvia Hewes Weber was painter, librarian and mother. She plied shelves at home with art books and dragged her kids and grandkids to museums, including this very Cleveland museum. Thanks to the librarians and Gauguin’s fragrant works, I now know where to find my mother when I miss her too much to ponder. She is there, on the walls, in the spaces of art she found worthy even as she found her own efforts wanting. Undaunted as the wild Gauguin, she painted on canvas and upon her progeny’s lives with a certain brave innocence. She let us be seers and seekers; she bade us be air.
Her ghost, with a nod to Monsieur Gauguin, inspired these lyrics once:
Watercolor on my shoulder. Watercolor in my hair.
Watercolor on the border, water in the air.
Promise me to be the water. Promise me to be the air.
Susan Weber, Air
Public Domain painting, Paul Gauguin, In the Waves 1898
- Susan Weber's blog
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Gaugin couldn't "draw well" and so worked around that.
Sounds like a thoughtful and effective solution, and this he is criticized for. I think it's very telling of the critics, who after all are representative of their time and culture, that they are more concerned with his ability to manipulate his materials in a prescribed, correct way than with his process, solutions, and most importantly his end result.
I was in a group discussion last night in which we considered singers who "were lousy singers." The subject of your previous post, Maestro Dylan, came up, as did others, Tom Waits, Billie Holiday. Again, we have here three masters who, for whatever reason physical or habitual, did not manipulate their material in a precise and pristine manner. Yet they, like Gaugin, created an art that has been accepted as canon and has communicated deeply with millions of souls.
It would be silly to think that making a line in tune or representative of a physical object are unimportant for artists. However, the above strongly suggests that something else is what makes art fine. Something indefineable yet obvious, all around yet elusive. Something like air.
Maestro Dylan
In the concert I blogged about previously, I realized how much of Dylan's presentation of song is drama. Had he delivered his work the way he did that night, but in French, Hebrew, Pashto, etc., the emotion of his words would come across.
I once sang a few songs outside Talkies in Ohio City, after which a listener came up to me, thanked me for the music and told me about a time he was drawn to a stage by the emotion in a singer's voice. I realized later he was giving me a gentle nudge to let go more, forget about playing my voice to perfection, give myself permission to sound ugly, but more true.
It's interesting how the passage of time and word of mouth sometime redeem a 'failed artist's' reputation. Then again, what exactly is a 'failed artist'? Maybe the only failure is to give up creating because no one's paying attention. Now that's a suffocating thought.