Gauguin and Van Gogh

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Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh—whose brilliant coloring and radically individualized symbolism changed the way we view art—each painted portraits of themselves as Christ. Although Gauguin the Frenchman (1848–1903) and Van Gogh the Dutchman (1853–1890) were contemporaries and even lived together for a time, their self-portraits as Christ have vastly different meanings.

In his “Self-Portrait with a Halo,” the hedonistic and egotistical Gauguin exploited the iconography of the Christ figure to emphasize his own sense of divinity and lordship over others. In his “Pietà,” the severely ascetic and humble Van Gogh identified in a profoundly personal way with Christ, the Man of Sorrows. Thus, although both artists employ similar religious symbolism, their different personalities and views of the world resulted in two very distinct and unique paintings.

Both paintings were executed in the same year, 1889. The previous year Gauguin and Van Gogh had lived together briefly at the famous yellow house in Arles, in the south of France near Marseille. Van Gogh had already been living there when Gauguin arrived on October 23, 1888. Van Gogh had hoped to establish a brotherhood of artists, committed to the principles of a new art; but differences in temperament, as well as in artistic vision, led to frequent quarrels. Within two months Van Gogh’s dream of an artistic community in his “studio in the south” was shattered. After one of his quarrels with Gauguin—on December 23 and 24, 1888—Van Gogh cut off a portion of his own ear. He apparently severed an artery and nearly bled to death. Gauguin and the local police found Van Gogh the next day in his room in the yellow house, unconscious and barely 027alive. Gauguin telegraphed Van Gogh’s brother, Theo, to come immediately to Arles. Gauguin himself left for Paris.

Gauguin then moved to the quiet, idyllic Breton village of Le Pouldu, where he established a colony of disciples to whom he preached the “new art.” There, in 1889, he created his “Self-Portrait with a Halo.”

Van Gogh, on the other hand, suffered repeated indignities. Because he had cut off his ear, the towns-people of Arles came to view him as a dangerous lunatic and eventually convinced the police to have him evicted from the yellow house. Only with the help of a dedicated friend, the postman Roulin, was Van Gogh able to return and retrieve his paintings before the house was boarded up. His dream of the artistic community shattered and his health failing, he voluntarily submitted to confinement in the cloisters of the St. Rémy asylum in the hope of recovery and regeneration. It was here, also in 1889, that he created his “Pietà,” in which he depicts himself as Christ.

Gauguin’s “Self-Portrait with a Halo” is a major work of the symbolist art movement, of which Gauguin was the undisputed master. It brilliantly displays many characteristic aspects of a symbolist work: The division of the picture plane into large areas of flat intense color, the arbitrary use of color, the exaggeration of the portrait-figure and the complex, even contradictory symbolism.

Critics have made various suggestions as to Gauguin’s identity here. Some say he has portrayed himself as Christ, perhaps ironically; others, that he is Satan; still others, that he should be seen as a “saint of symbolism.”¹ The ambiguity is intentional: Many symbolists, writers and artists alike, advocated the notion that to perceive the ultimate truths of genuine art, one had to possess a mystical kind of gnosis, or secret knowledge; that only the truly spiritual could see the hidden message within. Gauguin thus compared his art to a biblical parable, which uses a simple story to illustrate a complicated truth:

“In a way, I work like the Bible, in which the doctrine announces itself in a symbolic form, presenting a double aspect, a form which first materializes the pure idea in order to make it better understandable … this is the literal, superficial, figurative, mysterious meaning of a parable; and then the second aspect which gives the spirit of the former sense. This is the sense that is not figurative any more, but the formal, explicit one of the parable.”²

The “Self-Portrait with a Halo” was part of the dining room of the inn at Le Pouldu owned by Mlle. Henri where Gauguin, along with several of his followers, including Paul Sérusier, Charles Filiger and Jacob Isaac Meyer de Haan, had set up a small community.³ The painting was executed on one of the cupboard doors of the dining room, which served as a kind of shrine of symbolist art. The other cupboard door contained Gauguin’s portrait of Meyer de Haan. The entrance was decorated with two paintings that Gauguin had done on wood (“Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin’—a self-portrait as the artist-wanderer—and “La Femme Caraïbe”—the Tahitian Woman). Just over the door of the dining room, Gauguin inscribed the words, “Le Paradis Terrestre” 028(The Earthly Paradise).⁴ M. Mothéré, later to become Mlle. Henri’s husband, tells us that Gauguin considered Le Pouldu and his community of disciples to be his “first Tahiti, his French Tahiti.”⁵

On the ceiling of the dining room, Gauguin painted a highly stylized rendition of the myth of Leda and the swan, in which Zeus comes to Leda, wife of the king of Sparta, in the form of a swan and impregnates her.⁶ Here, the swan, which was Gauguin’s personal symbol, caresses the hair of Leda, whose face appears as that of Mlle. Henri.⁷ Zeus, disguised as the swan, is also a representation of Gauguin himself, and reveals the artist’s identification with the all-powerful god in the creative act. The ceiling mural thus refers figuratively to Gauguin’s attraction to Mlle. Henri and symbolically to his self-perception as creator and master of symbolist art. How he perceived himself is reflected in a letter he wrote to his daughter:

“I created this new movement in painting, and many of the young people who have profited are not devoid of talent, but once more it is I who have shaped them, and nothing in them comes from themselves, but through me.”⁸

At Le Pouldu Gauguin created his own earthly paradise, where his “artist-disciples,” Filiger, Meyer de Haan and Sérusier, observed and learned at the foot of the master. Sérusier wrote to Maurice Denis, another symbolist painter, that he had come to Le Pouldu to seek atonement, ‘to ask the master’s forgiveness for not having understood him right away.”⁹ Denis described Gauguin as:

“the undisputed Master, the one whose paradoxical pronouncements were collected and spread, whose talent, eloquence, gestures, physical strength, biting irony, inexhaustible imagination, capacity for alcohol, and romantic bearing were 029generally admired. The mystery of his ascendence can be explained by the fact that he furnished us with one or two simple and obviously true ideas at a moment when we were completely at a loss for guidance.”¹⁰

In the words of Henry Moret, an impressionist painter who worked with Gauguin at Le Pouldu.

“If he [Gauguin] had been allowed to create the universe, he obviously would have given the human species the organization of a huge convent where the painter would have occupied the summit of the hierarchy and all the others would occupy different levels according to the services they could render the master in the completion of his work.”¹¹

Gauguin’s “Self-Portrait with a Halo” (p. 25) reflects his self-perception as leader of this group of symbolist disciples. The portrait occupied the right cupboard door in the dining room and constituted one-half of a diptych; traditionally, the right half of such double works is considered the dominant portion. The painting is replete with symbolism underscoring Gauguin’s dominance. The undulating plant in the forefront of the painting is a stylized grapevine which then becomes a black swan, Gauguin’s personal symbol. The vine recalls not only the Garden of Eden, the divinely created paradise for which Le Pouldu was Gauguin’s earthly counterpart, but also the metaphorical representation of Jesus as the vine, whose disciples are the branches emanating from him. In the words of the evangelist: “I am the Vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for apart from Me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

With the symbolic reference to Eden, Gauguin proclaims his role as messiah of the new art, the Final Adam, Lord of the Earthly Paradise. Thus, Gauguin’s identification with Christ, who St. Paul designated “the Final Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), demonstrated Gauguin’s concern with portraying his own ascendancy, the messiah of the new Eden.

Gauguin’s preoccupation with his sense of lordship is also apparent from the other half of the diptych, painted on the adjacent cupboard door. Here we see Gauguin’s portrait of his patron-pupil, Meyer de Haan. Gauguin represents his disciple as Pan-like beast with red hair turned up like horns protruding from his cap, crouching behind a table, his chin resting on a gnarled, twisted hand. On the table Gauguin placed a basket of apples and two popular 19th-century books: Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. These objects symbolize Eden and the human pursuit of wisdom. The hero of Sartor Resartus, Teufelsdröckh, pursues spiritual knowledge above all else; Milton’s Paradise Lost proclaims the hope of a new messiah who will come to reclaim for man what he lost in Eden.

Now let us turn to Van Gogh. In contrast to Gauguin’s egotism and hedonism, Van Gogh was recognized by his contemporaries for his extreme personal humility and severe asceticism. Gauguin exploited the iconography of the Christ figure to emphasize his own sense of divinity and lordship; Van Gogh, on the other hand, identified in a profound personal sense with the Man of Sorrows, the crucified Christ. Whereas Gauguin lived his life in search of an earthly paradise, Van Gogh’s paradise was other-worldly. Van Gogh clung tenaciously to the hope of a “life beyond the grave,” viewing the earthly life as an arduous sojourn toward a heavenly goal. He wrote from Arles.

“I always feel I am a traveler, going somewhere and to some destination … I know nothing about it, but it is just this feeling of not knowing that makes the real life we are actually living now like a one-way journey on a train.”¹²

Unlike Gauguin’s “Self-Portrait with a Halo,” Van Gogh’s “Pietà” was never publicly displayed in his lifetime.

The “Pietà” was executed during Van Gogh’s illness and confinement at St. Rémy. Although most of Van Gogh’s biographers have “diagnosed” his illness as a psychological disorder, such as schizophrenia, the symptoms of his illness—the experience of an aura prior to his attacks; lapse of consciousness, and therefore, lack of memory of the attacks; visual and auditory hallucinations; self-mutilation; and particularly, spiritual and religious visions associated with the attacks—are symptoms entirely consistent With the physiological disorder known as temporal lobe epilepsy. True, Van Gogh was ill, but he was not insane, as he has so often been portrayed.

The contrast between Gauguin and Van Gogh is highlighted by their experience together at Arles. Van Gogh, like Gauguin, had hoped to establish a community of artists. However, Van Gogh envisioned a brotherhood of equals; Gauguin, on the other hand, egotistically insisted on his position as an artistic master among disciples.

When Gauguin arrived at Arles, he tried to convince Van Gogh to abandon his Realist style of painting from nature to pursue the world of the abstract. Gauguin found Van Gogh’s technique of building up the canvas with layers of paint to be distasteful and messy. Gauguin preferred rather to apply a thin wash of color. Van Gogh briefly experimented with Gauguin’s style, but soon returned 030to his own method of painting.

Their different approaches are evident in the two self-portraits even though they both portray themselves as Christ figures. Gauguin’s “Self-Portrait with a Halo,” produced entirely from his imagination, is a thin film of color, covering the canvas. Van Gogh’s “Pietà,” which he reproduced after a lithograph of Delacroix’s “Pietà,” is a thick mass, built up in numerous layers of oil, carved on the canvas.

Van Gogh painted his “Pietà” in the quiet setting of the French asylum at St. Rémy, originally an Augustinian monastery, whose nurses were now Catholic nuns. Here Van Gogh painted a series of works based on biblical iconography: “The Resurrection of Lazarus,” The Good Samaritan, as well as the “Pietà.” Each painting depicts an individual in extreme pain being delivered from his suffering. In “The Resurrection of Lazarus” and the “Pietà,” Van Gogh depicted the afflicted subjects with his own face. It is clear that he identified profoundly with the tormented Samaritan, the decaying Lazarus and the dying Christ, all symbols of his own anguish. These are not images of despair, however. 031Since each painting depicts both sufferer and savior, they are images of hope.

Van Gogh was deeply affected by the humility and self-sacrifice exemplified in the person of Jesus Christ. He had originally intended a life as a minister of the gospel but could not pursue his goal because of lack of financial support. While a missionary to the coal miners in the Belgian Borinage, he taught the following lesson:

“Jesus Christ is the Master who can comfort and strengthen a man, a laborer and working man whose life is hard—because he is the Man of Sorrows who knows our ills, who was called carpenter’s son though he was the son of God. And God wills that in imitation of Christ man should live humbly and go through life not reaching for the sky, but adapting himself to the earth below, learning from the Gospel to be meek an simple of heart.”¹³

Because Van Gogh left the church to pursue art as a career, most historians of his art and life fail to see any connection between his former calling and his later work, but he continued to be deeply religious and fascinated with the Christ figure, described Jesus as “the supreme artist, more of an artist than all others, disdaining marble and clay and color, working in the living flesh.”¹⁴ Long after leaving the church, he wrote to his brother:

“First he [Jesus] was an ordinary carpenter, raised himself to something else, whatever it may have been—a personality so full of pity, love, goodness, seriousness that one is still attracted by it.”¹⁵

During his years of preparing for the Christian ministry, Van Gogh’s favorite devotional work was Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi. The “Pietà,” a self-portrait of the artist as the crucified Christ, is Van Gogh’s Imitatio Christi in oil.

During the time that he painted the “Pietà,” Van Gogh was preoccupied with the problem of pain and suffering and with the hope of future deliverance.

“I am not in different, and even when suffering, sometimes religious thoughts bring me great consolation. So this last time during my illness, an unfortunate accident happened to me—that Lithograph of Delacroix’s pietà along with some other sheets, fell into some oil and paint, and was ruined. I was very distressed—then in the meantime, I have been busy painting it, and you will see it some day … I hope it has feeling.”¹⁶

What distinguishes Van Gogh’s “Pietà” from Delacroix’s lithograph, from which it was recreated, is its tormented pathos and its portrayal of the artist’s personal sorrow. Although he was resigned to his suffering, Van Gogh never viewed it as meaningless, believing that it would someday be alleviated and its purpose revealed, in a “life beyond the grave.”

“It is Just in learning to suffer without complaint, in learning to look upon pain without repugnance, that you risk vertigo and yet, it is possible, you may even catch a glimpse of a vague likelihood that on the other side of life, we shall see good reason for the existence of pain, where seen from here seems to so fill the horizon that takes on the proportions of a hopeless deluge….”¹⁷

Although Gauguin and Van Gogh both chose to portray themselves as Christ figures in their work, their dissimilar personalities, as well as the different contexts of the works resulted in two uniquely distinct paintings. In the “Self-Portrait with a Halo,” Gauguin used the symbolism of the Garden of Eden and the halo to represent himself metaphorically as the Final Adam, Lord of the Earthly Paradise he had established in the picturesque village of Le Pouldu and later found in Tahiti, As part of the dining room of Mlle, Henri’s inn, the painting serves as a self-proclaimed tribute to Gauguin, who perceived himself not only as master of the artist-disciples who lived with him at Le Pouldu, but as creator and messiah of a new art.

In the “Pietà,” by contrast, Van Gogh was not concerned with the lordship of Christ but with his suffering and resurrection. Painted during his period of recuperation at St. Rémy, Van Gogh portrayed his own profound identification with the sorrow and anguish of Jesus, crucified and languishing in the arms of his devoted mother. His constant hope for his own regeneration, as well as his profound belief in a life after death that would end his present sorrow, informed his metaphorical presentation Christ with the features of his own face. Rather than a proclamation of his divinity, it is a portrayal of identification with the savior in his most intense experience of humility and pain. The painting reveals the centrality of the idea of suffering in Van Gogh’s life as well as his ultimate faith in a “life beyond the grave” that would bring deliverance from the sorrow of earthly existence, and otherworldly paradise on the other side of the deluge pain.

Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh—whose brilliant coloring and radically individualized symbolism changed the way we view art—each painted portraits of themselves as Christ. Although Gauguin the Frenchman (1848–1903) and Van Gogh the Dutchman (1853–1890) were contemporaries and even lived together for a time, their self-portraits as Christ have vastly different meanings. In his “Self-Portrait with a Halo,” the hedonistic and egotistical Gauguin exploited the iconography of the Christ figure to emphasize his own sense of divinity and lordship over others. In his “Pietà,” the severely ascetic and humble Van Gogh identified in a profoundly personal way with Christ, […]