Prophets of an Archaic Past

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Toronto, a major exhibition of Van Gogh and cloisonism

When did modern art begin? It is impossible to fix a date; the roots are too tangled in the subsoil of the 19th century. But one can point to some crucial events of its growth. One of them happened in France in the late 1880s, within a group of painters--some now familiar to us as secular saints or movie heroes, others still relatively ill-known --who kept venturing out of Paris toward more "primitive" places. Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard ranged among the megaliths, the cold heather and the gaunt folk-Christs in Brittany. Vincent van Gogh pursued what he called "the gravity of great sunlight effects" in Aries.

The pattern of these escapes was of great importance to modernism. It meant that artists, impelled by curiosity, were in a sense mimicking the colonial pattern of expansion and appropriation. They were becoming tourists in other ethnic realities, seizing on the distant world and its exotic contents as raw material. Aries in 1888, the year Van Gogh began work there, was more foreign to a Parisian than Tunis is today.

As in travel, so in art: the painters looked to foreign sources, inside and outside France, for inspiration--Breton carvings, the crude popular woodcuts known as the images d'Epinal and, above all, the Japanese wood-block prints that had been arriving in France in a steady trickle for the quarter of a century since Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay. What these influences produced, in the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin and the various painters who were, at one moment or another during the late '80s, linked to their work (among them, Maurice Denis, Louis Anquetin, Emile Bernard, Paul Serusier and Toulouse-Lautrec) was a style known as cloisonism. The French cloison means "division" or "partition," and it was applied to a kind of enamelware whose patches of bright color were separated by fine metal lines. Largely because of the intensity of Van Gogh's genius, cloisonism became one of the key modernist styles, the sign of a new concern with the semantics of art (which were being explored in a totally different way by Cezanne in Aix and by Seurat with his light-filled dots), indicating a degree of aesthetic fundamentalism that had not been seen since Ingres's day.

The five seminal years of this style (1886-91) are the subject of "Vincent van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism," an exhibition on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto until March 22, when it moves to the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam. (It will not come to the U.S.) The exhibition includes a large group of major paintings by Van Gogh, mostly from his time in Aries and St.Remy. They are backed up with an extraordinary selection of some 30 Gauguins and many remarkable paintings by the "disciples"--including Bernard, who turns out, like Anquetin, to have been a painter of real originality who can now be seen without Gauguin's shadow across him. This ambitious curatorial effort is the work of the Canadian art historian Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, and it is without doubt the most visually ravishing and intellectually satisfying museum study of early French modernism to be seen on the American continent in recent years--the Museum of Modern Art's great Picasso retrospective being the lone exception.

The Van Goghs by themselves, of course, are worth the ticket to Toronto.

Dr. Welsh has assembled many of the best-known paintings, from the burning and writhing Sunflowers through the spiky lateen-rigged boats on the Camargue beach at Stes.-Maries; from the bedroom in the Yellow House at Aries to the tiny, dense icon of The Sower, a stubborn black lump distributing flakes of seed under the vast Apollonian wheel of the setting sun. Yet although these images have joined the noble cliches of art history, they can be seen afresh through their relationship with the work of other artists. The service this show does for Van Gogh is to place him in a clear but somewhat unfamiliar cultural context, so that he is seen not as an inspired half-madman working out his obsessions in isolation, but as an artist in constant dialogue with his comrades.

Thus Van Gogh's painting of the cafe terrace on the Place du Forum in Aries (1888), with its harsh contrasting color --deep nocturnal blue against yellow lamplight under the awning, streaks of orange opposing the absinthe green of the cafe tabletops--was both a direct act of natural vision and a tribute to Louis Anquetin's Avenue de Clichy: Five O'clock in the Evening, 1887. Anquetin, drawing on childhood memories of seeing his parental garden through stained-glass lozenges in the front door, had suffused his view of a Paris street in a deep luminous blue, relieved only by the harsh yellow-orange flare of gas lamps on the charcutier's awning.

Such "radical" developments were underwritten by an appeal to older systems of art, not only to the Japanese print-makers, whose cutting into the wooden block provided the essence of division between line and patch, but also to French masters like Ingres, with his steadfast differentiation between color and drawing.

"Outline expresses that which is permanent, color that which is momentary," wrote the critic Edouard Dujardin, in the article that gave cloisonism its name.

"The work of the painter will be something like painting by compartments, analogous to cloisonne ..." If impressionism had banished the boundary line from art, Gauguin, Van Gogh and their colleagues put it back with a vengeance.

Obviously, these early modernists were formalists; what artist, at some level, is not? But their ambitions went beyond that, into the realm of symbolic meaning. This was particularly true of Van Gogh and of Gauguin, who eventually went to Tahiti in order to paint huge allegories of human fate. One sees this interest already in Brittany paintings like Woman in the Hay, an image drenched in anonymous sexuality, whose half-nude peasant woman sprawled on the hay is quoted directly from one of the female slaves in Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. These early modernists were not, after all, deeply concerned with the future, as the avant-garde would be 30 years later. They saw themselves as prophets but obsessed, as prophets often are, with a past they wanted art to recover: a way of visual speech that was archaic, direct and sacramental. If some of the formal reductiveness of modern art begins with cloisonism, so does its hope for "primitive" eloquence about the deepest appetites of the self. The achievement of this marvelous show is to suggest how the two were entwined.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.