Post-Impressionist Artists Were Interested in the Ideas

Post-Impressionist artists were interested in the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in his concept of the Ubermensch, a superman who would be capable through intense struggle of surmounting the lower forces that would limit his ability to achieve. The idea that man could evolve beyond his present capacities influenced the relationship of European man to previous cultures and to contemporary but less "civilized" societies. This paper explores the ways in which Paul Gauguin applied the Ubermensch concept to his art and to his life, and examines parallel motifs in the oeuvres of his contemporaries.

The Artist Gauguin: Man, Nature, Ubermensch and God

At the beginning of the Renaissance, Massacio painted The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and initiated a new view of humanity: an intensely personal and emotionalized struggle against fate. In spite of the Neo-Classical return to the formal norms of the past, the human agony on the face of Masaccio's Eve heralded a new view of the personalized man in art.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Modernist movement sought to establish new innovations, which would radically transform the staid concepts of Victorian art. Dividing into two movements, both of which eschewed the sentimental and classicized views of humanity, Modernism was as radical a departure from the artistic standards of the day as Masaccio's masterpiece from the Gothic tradition. The Abstractionist side of Modernism sought order in the aesthetic arrangement of colors, shapes and forms; the Expressionist manipulated formal elements to convey intense, highly personalized feelings.

The Impressionists built on these concepts to convey the importance of the individual's experience, and fractured reality to convey the emotions that the viewer might have as his personal situation merged with the external world.

The Post-Impressionists built upon the concepts established by the Impressionists. Gauguin and Van Gogh were their most important representatives, with Toulouse Lautrec, Seurat and Cezanne amplifying their contribution.

Seurat and Gauguin both were also referred to as Avant-Garde artists, a term that originated in 1825 French socialist thought as a designation for propagandist philosophy, and which suited those artists' commitment to social change through their oeuvre.

Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin was born in 1848 to a middle-class family, and until his thirties showed no inclination to stray from his position as head of a happy family and a successful stockbroker. However, he became influenced by Impressionist art and began first to collect it and then to attempt to create it. He went through a series of stages, from Impressionist to Independent, and finally developed his own form, which he called Synthetic Symbolism. It used simplified, unrealistic, bright colors, along with bold, sketchy forms owing derivation to the Japanese tradition as well as to the linear outlines of stained glass windows. Also, the forms of people and objects underwent a flattening of perspective that translated them into bold, iconic figures laden with highly personalized symbolism.

In 1888, after a prolonged period of correspondence that led them to believe that their goals and ideologies were sympathetic, he went to stay with Vincent Van Gogh. However, the few months that they shared proved to both that they were incompatible personalities and after Van Gogh had a violent episode and sliced off his ear, Gauguin left, never to return. In 1891 he left his family, managed to get sponsorship from the French government and moved to Tahiti, where he created an astonishing body of work.. In 1897 his autobiography Noa, which roughly translated means "The Fragrance of Experience," was published; in 1901, he moved to Atuana where he died in 1903.

Before his dramatic relocation to the South Seas, he had experimented with rejecting bourgeois society before, moving to Brittany where he lived among the peasants. By so doing, he hoped to discover a less hypocritical and more genuine society; he may also have enjoyed the sensation of being more "advanced" than the indigenous members of Breton society.

In addition to landscape scenes, which celebrated the beauty of the pastoral countryside as seen through his evolving aesthetic, he painted a number of works depicting the peasants. One of note is The Yellow Christ. In this painting, a rather wispy Christ is crucified, with bulky forms of peasant women performing the lamentation. Their vigor and animal heft contrasts with the thin, almost boneless figure of Christ, and their garments are in vivid primary colors. The unusual color of Christ may have been inspired by the same color philosophy as Matisse's, who believed that yellow was the color of life and inspiration. Certainly it is an unusual work, and prefigured a development in Gauguin's thought in which he would explore the relationships of man, the natural world and the world of the supernatural.

The thoughts of Darwin had profoundly affected civilized Europe's view of the essential nature of man. The whole notion of original sin and the Fall of man had been somewhat alleviated at the dawn of the Renaissance by the idea of civic humanism. This philosophy believed that individual man was capable of great achievement and worthy of development, and that having developed his innate abilities, he had a duty to the state and to the world to improve it insofar as possible. In the eighteenth century, the French and American Revolutions contributed a muscular element of social revolt to the mix: man needed to break what could not be mended. By the end of the nineteenth century, a concern for appearances and niceties threatened to stifle individual freedoms of expression as Victorian repressiveness invaded bourgeois society.

Then Darwin's theories suggested that man had in fact managed to improve himself physically from a former, more primitive state. The impact of this idea, and its challenge to conventional religious belief, cannot be underestimated. Now all of the natural world was seen to be in a perpetual, gradual, inexorable state of flux. Man, the intelligent animal, could presumably improve himself - direct his evolution intellectually. While human potential could now be seen to have been significantly bolstered, the importance of God was diminished. Man's claim to the title of Creator no longer was exclusive or perhaps even appropriate; man could be the Creator.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, proposed that man had the potential to progress beyond his current capabilities into the next, more glorious version of humanity, the superman or ubermensch. This more perfect specimen would carry mankind forward into an era of achievement hitherto undreamed of.

The appeal of this idea to a personality that had felt stifled by conventional society is obvious. Many artists, writers and thinkers who were drawn to the idea of the ubermensch turned to primitive societies, either past or present, and studied their customs and art. The value of this exploration was to establish where we had been, and from that to see where we might now go. There was a tendency for some schools of thought, such as the Fauvists, to glorify the norms of primitive cultures and to seek ubermensch's directions from them. They studied African and Oceanic artifacts, and in their simple, direct yet spiritual forms found inspiration for their future-oriented works.

Nietzsche believed that the nature of mankind was inner conflict, as the psyche struggled to subordinate lower, bestial drives and to give rein to higher aspirations. The ubermensch achieves supremacy by ruthlessly driving down animal elements. Thus, the dark side of the ubermensch idea was there to be exploited by marginalized personalities. Adolf Hitler, of course, seized upon it as a rationalization for his notion of an Aryan master race, and as a justification for ethnic cleansing. The sexualization of the ubermensch led to the fantasy of the superman and his temptation by women of a lower order, with whom copulation would almost amount to bestiality. One of Hitler's favorite artists was Franz von Struck, who painted women, serpents entwining their breasts and thighs, seductively attempting to soil the ubermensch. Sado-masochistic personalities such as Hitler's found such art highly erotic.

Gauguin, when he relocated to Tahiti, had come to an unspoiled paradise, one of the few left in his known contemporary world. His relationship to the natural beauty, to the Tahitians and their culture, and to his self-view as he lived among them shows that the idea of the ubermensch and its religious and sexual connotations were central to his art.

His paintings of the natural world of jungle, streams and shores celebrate the lush tropical beauty of the uncultivated Eden-like island. He was free to experiment with vivid, unrealistic color and to simplify the forms of trees, clouds and other natural phenomena into bold, flat masses. Most of his paintings incorporate figures, whether of the natives or of animals, goats or horses. Tellingly, these animals are often white, their pale shapes standing out starkly from the brilliant verdure that surrounds them.

Gauguin experienced this natural world in an intensely personal, violent way that had to do with an anarchic, repressed personality. He describes himself chopping down trees as committing an act of aggression against the unspoiled world: "I struck furiously and, my hands covered with blood, hacked away with the pleasure of sating one's brutality and of destroying something." (Noa, p. 28) Whether he saw himself as following a cultural destiny - the European raping the virgin land - or working off a purely personal frustration, we cannot know. Nietzsche had written about an apocalyptic event for which the ubermensch needed to prepare; perhaps, Gauguin, far away from societal pressures, was attempting to precipitate his own apocalypse. The notion of a crisis born of blood and self-mutilation relates to the masochism that had been experienced in European religious tradition as a symptom of repressed sexuality, for example, the practices of flagellation and stigmatization. It would seem less than healthy that Gauguin chose to brutalize and destroy Tahiti, rather than to celebrate its abundance.

His relations with the natives are also problematic. He seems to have given rather scanty attention to their customs and beliefs; for him, they existed in relation to himself, so that he could indulge himself in a form of social darwinism. In spite of the great beauty of his paintings of the Tahitian women, there is a patronizing element to his view of them. They are child-like even as they are sexual; their faces and bodies are iconic and hence interchangeable.

Gauguin had always been a sexual adventurer, having affairs with his models and other women during his life in Europe with his family. Now he had left his European wife behind and was free to indulge his sexual fantasies with the permissive natives. By taking a series of "savage mistresses," he could explore a here-to-fore forbidden, dark side of his nature. He experimented with girls as young as thirteen and with a variety of partners, and even explored a homo-erotic relationship, how fully we are not told. Describing his attraction to a young Tahitian man, he toyed with the idea of role reversal, of being the passive "female" side - "[I experienced] weariness of the male role, having always to be strong and protective." (Noa, p.25) Just how strong and protective he usually was is a matter for debate. He had impoverished and then abandoned his family, and gone on a sexual rampage with the Tahitians in spite of having syphilis.

He seems to have indulged his fantasy of himself as the aggressive male, as well as of the patient sufferer, when the young man failed to respond to his advances - "I alone carried the burden of an evil thought." (Noa, p. 28) He cast himself in the role of the more evolved ubermensch, or the more civilized European, (either way, the top of the human evolutionary ladder).

Sexual sadism played a role in his view of his relations with the native women - "I wanted them [the women] to be willing to be taken without a word, taken brutally. In a way, a longing to rape." (Noa, p. 23) By placing them in a subordinate class, he was able to justify his perception of brutal toward them as his natural right - the subjugation of the animalistic primitive to the domination of the superior ubermensch. There is a Hefnerian whiff of self-justification to his autobiography. Noa reads at times like a late nineteenth-century Playboy Philosophy, as Gauguin explores the psychology of sexual license.

The aspect of Tahitian culture that interested him most was their belief in the supernatural and in ghosts and spirits. These spirits might be both benign and dangerous; they might guard the sleeping natives or victimize them in an incubus-like manner. In the 1892 painting Manoa Tupapau (The Specter Watches Over Her), a sleeping woman, her nude body curled into a fetal position, is watched over by a tupapau, a spirit of the dead. His appearance is not promising, but it is impossible to tell if he is protecting her or preparing to assault her as she sleeps. Like the ubermensch, the supernatural tupapau is able to have it both ways; the innocent yet abandoned woman can be taken brutally or protected by the powerful male.

Gauguin's urge to appropriate and experience the world through himself is expressed in his many self-portraits. He generally painted himself slightly turned from the viewer, and looking sideways toward him. As time went by, he exaggerated his hooked nose, high cheekbones and lank black hair until he achieved a rather Satanic effect. Paradoxically though he also introduced Christ-like iconography, as if the duality of his sexual experiences extended to his religious ideas as well. If he saw himself as the ubermensch, he could express this heightened humanity as divinity, and as dual as good and evil, Christ and Satan in one.

1893 self-portrait shows Gauguin wearing the clothes and hair style of a Breton peasant. He gestures toward a sketch of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden - the Fall of mere man, which poses no threat to the ubermensch. The superman can put on any role from the primitive past as he has evolved from a natural man and now embodies in himself all that has gone before.

An 1896 self-portrait shows the artist dressed in a simple white blouse similar to that which Christ is normally portrayed as wearing. His beard and mustache are in keeping with the usual portrayal of Jesus, and his brown hair falls to his shoulders. In spite of this, there is nothing Christ-like about his expression; he glares out disapprovingly at the viewer.

In other portraits he becomes bulkier and more solid, although no less threatening in expression. An attenuated, rather jaundiced Christ, similar to The Yellow Christ, appears over his shoulder in one painting, a robust terra cotta idol over the other shoulder. Another painting of a similar Gauguin portrays a rather Hinduistic-looking idol beside him, its face bisected and only half expressed. In both of these paintings, the artist is the main and most powerful element, and the religious figures are reduced to putti-like accessories.

The most enigmatic of his self-portraits is one of his 1889 ones, his now familiar features reduced almost to a caricature. His powerful body, hawk-like nose, slanted eyes and high cheekbones give him the appearance of a Mongol conqueror, and the gorgeous reds and golds of the paints create an exotic atmosphere. Two apples dangle over his shoulder, and a sinuous serpent meanders across his chest. Over his head, a halo hovers. He is now a Magus, a powerful supernatural being with divine powers - the realization of the full potential of the ubermensch. Inasmuch as he will be dead in 1901, it may well be that his syphilis had progressed by 1889 to an extent that he was delusional. Certainly the ego and the violent personality that had been developing in Tahiti and later in Atuana reached their culmination in a belief in self that seems excessive, even for an artistic personality.

Another 1889 portrait shows Gauguin as Jean Valjean, a Les Miserables hero, his demonic yet tortured face leering out at the viewer from a background of stylized Japanese floral wallpaper. The dual roles with which he was fascinated, sufferer and brute, artist and destroyer, hero and villain, are embodied in this strange picture.

Theories abound that Gauguin suffered from a bipolar disorder of some kind. Whatever the cause of his strange life and personality, he produced a wealth of gorgeous paintings, capturing a dream-like world of lush beauty. His influence on writers such as Conrad was enormous, and even more so on artists such as Die Brucke and the modernists in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Van Gogh, who represented the Arles Studio of the South (as Gauguin did the Brittany side of it) was equally influential on these later schools. Also thought to be bipolar, Van Gogh created a vibrantly colored world in which reality was fractured and remolded to express an intense and personal emotion. The natural world and inanimate objects, the furniture in his room, the night sky, the haystacks became powerful icons saturated with meaning. Van Gogh's ubermensch fought the inner forces of madness and sought to subjugate the inferior human by mortifying the flesh - cutting off his ear. His self-portrait show a gaunt and tragic man with rumpled hair and pitiful, mad eyes. Nietzsche charged the ubermensch with responsibilities above and beyond those of the common herd of mankind. The "last man" is the complacent hedonist as well as the conformist to puritanical bourgois ideals; the ubermensch transcends this mundane level and enters into a personal relationship with God. Van Gogh's approach to this raising of experiential goals is no less iconoclastic than Gauguin's, but relies less on interaction with other cultures or persons.

The Die Brucke artists acknowledged a debt to Van Gogh, with Max Pechstein expressing their view as "Van Gogh is the father of us all" (Norris) They believed that twentieth century art, to be valid, needed to arise from intense personal experience, and that man was the true subject of man. Thus, egocentricity is justified as a means of expanding human knowledge and perfecting the ubermensch.