Gauguin, Nietzsche, and the Ubermensch in Post-Impressionism

The Modernist Context and the Rise of Post-Impressionism

At the beginning of the Renaissance, Masaccio 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 individual in art.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Modernist movement sought to establish new innovations that 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 had been from the Gothic tradition. The Abstractionist side of Modernism sought order in the aesthetic arrangement of colors, shapes, and forms; the Expressionist side manipulated formal elements to convey intense, highly personalized feelings.

The Impressionists built on these concepts to convey the importance of the individual's experience, fracturing reality to communicate the emotions that the viewer might have as his personal situation merged with the external world. The Post-Impressionists built further upon those foundations. Gauguin and Van Gogh were their most important representatives, with Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Cézanne amplifying their contribution.

Seurat and Gauguin 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 work.

Gauguin's Life and the Turn Toward Synthetic Symbolism

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. The forms of people and objects also underwent a flattening of perspective that translated them into bold, iconic figures laden with highly personalized symbolism.

In 1888, after a prolonged correspondence that led both men to believe their goals and ideologies were sympathetic, Gauguin went to stay with Vincent Van Gogh. However, the few months they shared proved to both that they were incompatible personalities. After Van Gogh suffered a violent episode and sliced off his ear, Gauguin left and never returned. In 1891, he left his family, secured sponsorship from the French government, and moved to Tahiti, where he created an astonishing body of work. In 1897 his autobiography Noa — which roughly translates as "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, Gauguin had already experimented with rejecting bourgeois society, moving to Brittany to live among the peasants. By doing so, 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 celebrating the beauty of the pastoral countryside as seen through his evolving aesthetic, he painted a number of works depicting the peasants. One notable example is The Yellow Christ. In this painting, a rather wispy Christ is crucified while bulky forms of peasant women perform the lamentation. Their vigor and animal heft contrast with the thin, almost boneless figure of Christ, and their garments are rendered in vivid primary colors. The unusual color of Christ may have been inspired by the same color philosophy held by Matisse, who believed that yellow was the color of life and inspiration. It is certainly an unusual work, and it prefigured a development in Gauguin's thought in which he would explore the relationships among man, the natural world, and the supernatural.

Darwin, Nietzsche, and the Ubermensch Ideal

The theories of Darwin had profoundly affected civilized Europe's view of the essential nature of man. The 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 — the philosophy that individual man was capable of great achievement, worthy of development, and, having developed his innate abilities, had a duty to improve the world insofar as possible. In the eighteenth century, the French and American Revolutions contributed a muscular element of social revolt to that mix: man needed to break what could not be mended. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a concern for appearances and social niceties threatened to stifle individual freedom of expression as Victorian repressiveness invaded bourgeois society.

Darwin's theories then 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. All of the natural world was now seen to be in a perpetual, gradual, and inexorable state of flux. Man, the intelligent animal, could presumably improve himself — direct his own evolution intellectually. While human potential could now be seen to have been significantly bolstered, the importance of God was correspondingly diminished. Man's claim to the title of Creator was no longer exclusive, or perhaps even appropriate; man himself 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 personalities who 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 humanity had been, and from that vantage point to see where it 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 the Ubermensch's directions from them. They studied African and Oceanic artifacts and, in their simple, direct, yet spiritual forms, found inspiration for future-oriented works.

Nietzsche believed that the nature of mankind was inner conflict, as the psyche struggled to subordinate lower, bestial drives and give rein to higher aspirations. The Ubermensch achieves supremacy by ruthlessly driving down these animal elements. Thus, the dark side of the Ubermensch idea was available 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 Stuck, who painted women with serpents entwining their breasts and thighs, seductively attempting to soil the Ubermensch. Sado-masochistic personalities found such art highly erotic.

Conclusion: Nietzsche and the Legacy of Post-Impressionism

Thus, the philosophy of Nietzsche powerfully influenced the Post-Impressionists. In their works, and perhaps most explicitly in the work of Gauguin as documented in his autobiography, the idea of the Ubermensch led to an exploration of the potential of man to dominate nature and to preempt the role of God.

References

Biography of Gauguin. http://www.abcgallery.com/G/gauguin/gauguinbio/html (November 14, 2002).

Dillon, John K. (1997). The Death of Tragedy: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche's Ubermensch. (November 14, 2002).

Gauguin, Paul. (1897). Noa: The Tahitian Journal. 1985 ed. Dover Publishing.

Norris, George. (1996). Expressionism: Its Spiritual and Social Voice. (November 15, 2002).

Schwarz, Daniel R. (Spring/Summer 1996). "Reconfiguring Deliverance: James Dickey, the Modern Tradition, and the Resistant Reader." Weber Studies, Volume 13.2. College of Art and Humanities, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah. (November 15, 2002).

Stokstad, Marilyn. (1999). Art History, Revised Edition. New York: Abrams.