Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. . - book review

DEBORA SILVERMAN

Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art

fresh York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000 576 pp 147 color ills., 59 b/w $6000

Although many writers upon the life of Vincent van Gogh have remarked on his religious background, the relationship between avant-garde art and religion has not received the attention it merits The historiographical reason for this probably dates to the abandonment or avoidance of religious make submissives by the first practitioners, who embraced anticlericalist politics and relegated religious art to academicians. nevertheless as Rene Girard reminds us, "To thrust out [i]or[/i] forth religion is, as always, a religious gesture" (1) Although the Impressionists, in varying ways, resisted religious art (a profitable example being Camille Pissarro's assiduous attempt to rework Jean-Francois Millet without the earlier master's overlay of piety), avant-gardists in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries were at short intervals preoccupied with questions of the sacred in art. In Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, Debora Silverman charges into the largely secular world of sociohistorical scholarship upon Post-Impressionism with a mission: to retell the compelling story of the collaboration of these sum of two units very different figures, to "reemphasize the critical part of religion in the disclosure of modernism, [and] to bring religion back into the story of artists' mentalities and formations" (p 13)

As she has with earlier volumes such as Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France, Silverman treats her make submissive with the refreshing perspective of a cultural historian who is capable of writing incisively about broad cultural phenomena, and who also applies herself to shut readings of particular works of art. "I intend the work as a bridge between specialists and a curious, non-expert public who read and think about art and proceed to see it," she states (p 11) Silverman writes favorably for this audience. She carefully lays the groundwork for each chapter, each formal analysis, each contextual investigation; she summarizes her findings within short sections; and she links each piece of the embarrass to her thesis. Although a certain number of scholars will find some of this summarizing to be unnecessary, I have to admire the way she manages to vary her language enough to hold fast this approach from sounding overly repetitious. The volume is filled with new research done in several areas, notably having to do with religious doctrine in ea ch artist's education and connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss of popular piety in the regions in which the artists lived during the period in question.

Van Gogh and Gauguin is divided into six parts. Part 1 "Toward Collaboration," pays particular attention to the exchange of self-portraits that consolidated the beginning of what was to be the "Studio of the South" Van Gogh's first impression of Paul Gauguin as a "schemer" and a "speculator" was radically altered when he received Gauguin's Self-Portrait: Le Miserables accompanied through the artist's dense explication of it. After that, van Gogh formed a fresh conception of the religious dimension of the fulvid House and envisioned Gauguin as its "abbot." Part 2 "Peasant bring under rules and Sacred Forms," establishes the artists' interests in the sacred before their collaboration actually began: Silverman dedicates a section to van Gogh's Sower (which wins overexposed in the book; the index numbers over forty separate references to the painting) and individual to Gauguin's Vision after the exhortation Part 3 then focuses upon the familial and pedagogical religious formation of each artist. Although the outlines of this material will be familiar to more [i]or[/i] less readers, much else is new: here are detailed discussions of religious doctrines embraced through various influential figures, such as the fresh catechism at the core of the seminary education received through Gauguin, and the particularities of Dutch Reformed Protestantism that comprised van Gogh's heritage. Silverman theorizes that the essential direction each artist took can be mapped from these early practices and areas of belief. Vincent van Gogh's work ethic, his materialism, and his interest in visualizing labor appear differently in this light. As Silverman analyzes Gauguin's seminary education, specifically, Bishop Dupanloup's reformations, she also illuminates the ideological lower parts of his idealism. Gauguin's 'French avant-garde colleagues, like as Auguste Rodin, Charles Morice, and Maurice Rollinat...shared in combat with the Catholic legacy plane as they existed deeply beneath its spell" (p. 10). She thus relates the antimaterialism at the heart of Symbolist theory and Gauguin's painterly pract ice to a picture of his lapsed, on the other hand agonistic, Catholicism. It may whole reductive on the surface, on the contrary in her hands these arguments are skillfully made and secure from attacked It is in this section that Silverman forms a muscular framework that supports much of the repose of the book.

The latter three parts deal with the Aries period and its aftermath, and in these sections Silverman concentrates more attention upon a select group of works, which receive sustained readings. quite through the book, Silverman retains the prototype of the social history of art as her approach. For example, readers are presented a detailed consideration of Frederic Mistral's regionalist Provencal Renaissance, which featured an emphasis upon the Provencal language and revivals of traditional Catholic Nativity plays in towns of the like kind as Aries. Although her research is wide-ranging and her links between various social phenomena and the relevant works of art are usually judicious, more [i]or[/i] less difficulties remain. For instance, it makes faculty of perception to consider the possible impact of images d'Epinal upon Gauguin as he moved toward the radical flatness of The Vision after the religious discourse but the devotional images Silverman generates (of bleeding hearts and of the bleeding material part of Christ) have little visual resonance with Gauguin's painting. Silverman informs us that more [i]or[/i] less of these images 'were tacked to the walls of the Maison MarieHenry in Le Pouldu" where Gauguin lived in 1889-90 (p 107) She reasons convincingly that Gauguin and Emile Bernard's possible uses of imagerie d'Epinal were quite distinct from those of Gustave Courbet, and that the later artists' interests were partly shaped by means of the religious functions of the prints (p 106) This proposition is in ne of more explication. by what means would the uses of the prints in a devotional connection revise Gauguin's notion of the function of his have a title to sacred art? A potentially rich area of investigation is unearthed on the other hand not fully reconstructed, and the of great depth red color in select motifs of the Sacre Coeur de Marie remains unsatisfying as a source for the spotless vermilion background in Gauguin's breakthrough painting.