Gauguin, an Arrangement without Belonging

One

Two women are seated.

They are seated on the ground.

The bodies are large.
The arms and legs are thick.

The clothing is red or white cloth.

Look at the background.

It is flat.

There are trees and they do not stand like trees.
They are set down like pattern.

The ground is pink.

Real ground is not pink.

The grass has red running through it.

There is no depth.

The figures in front and the trees behind are on the same plane.

Thick outlines surround the forms.

Between one color plane and the next there is a black or blue line.

It resembles Picasso's surface in the last chapter.

Outline and plane.

But there is a difference.

Picasso split the form.

Here nothing was split.

The form is whole.
It is simply flat.

Look at the bearing of the figures.

One faces front.

She looks at us.

The eyes are large and there is no expression.

There is no telling what she is thinking.

The other looks to the side.

Both are still.

They do not move.

Time might have stopped.

Two

Paul Gauguin was born in 1848 in Paris.

His father died early.

He spent some years of childhood in Peru.

There were relatives on his mother's side.

He returned to France and grew up there.

He went to sea when young.

He was in the merchant marine and the navy.

After that he worked in stocks in Paris.

He earned money, married, and had several children.

He bought paintings and painted as a pastime.

In his thirties he gave that work up.

He decided to do only painting.

That the economy worsened and the position became unsteady was also a reason.

He grew distant from his family.

He went to Brittany.

The countryside of western France.

Painters had gathered in a village called Pont-Aven.

His manner was made there.

This must be remembered.

Flat color planes, thick outlines, color unlike the real.

This grammar came out of Brittany.

Before he went to Tahiti.

For a time he stayed with Van Gogh in Arles.

About two months.

It did not end well.

In 1891 he went to Tahiti.

He was forty-three.

He stayed about two years and returned to France.

Back in France it did not go well.

In 1895 he left again.

This time he did not return.

Later he moved to a more distant island.

He died there in 1903.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

He was in that land.

And that land did not beget his grammar.

Why is this a problem.

This book says that fūdo begets form.

Gauguin lived in the South Pacific more than ten years.

He died there.

By length of stay it is enough.

And his grammar did not come out of there.

It was already made in Brittany.

Flat color planes and thick outlines.

He carried it with him.

Tahiti gave that grammar new subject matter.

It did not give the grammar.

This distinction is the heart of the chapter.

Subject and grammar come apart.

Paint a palm and the subject is the tropics.

But how the palm is placed is another matter.

In the Prologue we divided local color from form.

Local color, we said, is a matter of subject.

Gauguin shows why that distinction is needed.

He changed the subject and did not change the grammar.

Why did he not change it.

Because he did not endure.

This is the second argument of the chapter.

He went looking for that land.

One who goes looking has a choice.

He went because he wanted to go, returned because he wanted to return, went again because he wanted to go again.

He came and went twice.

Endurance has no choice.

Someone who lives where the wind blows does not choose the wind.

What cannot be chosen changes the body.

What can be chosen does not change the body.

Care is needed here.

The Tahiti he painted was not the actual Tahiti.

By the time he went it had long been a colony.

There were churches and there were government offices and disease had spread.

The untouched paradise he was looking for was not there.

He painted what was not there.

Or he painted what he wished were there.

So his surface is not a picture of that land but a picture of what he wanted.

This book is not the place to rule on it.

It is a ground still under discussion.

Only the structure can be set down.

What is looked at and what is undergone are not the same.

A land looked at comes out beautiful and a land undergone comes out dry.

Three things follow.

First, subject and grammar separate.

Subject can be moved.
Grammar is hard to move.

But the reverse also holds.

One can carry a grammar and lay it over a new subject.

Then it looks like a picture of that land and is not.

Second, residence is not endurance.

Not the length of time but the presence or absence of choice decides endurance.

Live ten years and, if one can leave at any time, one has not endured.

Third, great form comes out without belonging.

This must be said clearly.

His grammar is a true achievement.

Flat color planes and thick outlines changed the painting that came after.

Picasso, in the last chapter, saw it too.

Without him the painting of the next generation would have been different.

Great form comes out without fūdo as well.

Chusa in Part Two stood in the same place.

Only the manner differs.

Chusa went by cutting fūdo off.
Gauguin went by moving from fūdo to fūdo.

One closed inward and the other opened outward.

Both roads hold outside the proposition of this book.

Knowing there is an outside is the honest part.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

This encounter is the sharpest in this book.

Both men went to an island.

Both went in middle age.

Gauguin went to Tahiti at forty-three.
Byun Shi-Ji went to Jeju at forty-nine.

Both had been painters elsewhere before that.

And the result is the exact opposite.

First, another's island and one's own island.

Gauguin went to another's island.

His ancestors were not there.
He did not know all of the language there.

Byun Shi-Ji came back to his own island.

He was born there.
He left at five and came back forty-four years later.

He returned; he did not go.

Second, going to look for and going to accept.

Gauguin went to look for a paradise.

He went looking for something that was not there.

One who looks is disappointed.

If what he sought is not there, he leaves again.

So he moved to a more distant island.

Byun Shi-Ji did not go looking.

That was where he had to return.

One who accepts is not disappointed.

Because there is no expectation.

Without expectation, what is there becomes visible.

Third, the color is opposite.

Gauguin's Tahiti is bright.

Pink and red and green are strong.

Byun Shi-Ji's Jeju is low.

It is the color of dried grass.

The same island, and why so different.

One is an island wished for and one is an island lived in.

An island wished for is brilliant in color.

A place not yet seen is always brilliant.

An island lived in is low in color.

What is seen every day cannot be brilliant.

This is the most important contrast in the chapter.

Fourth, the direction of the figure is opposite.

Gauguin's figures look at us.

They sit facing front with their eyes open wide.

It is a position set to be looked at.

Who looks.

The people of Paris who would buy the picture.

Byun Shi-Ji's old man shows his back.

Or lowers his head.

He is not looked at.

It is a position set without thinking of a viewer.

A figure shown and a figure turned away.

That difference states where the two painters stood.

One had to send paintings from that island.

The other had nowhere to send them.

Fifth, the ending differs.

Gauguin meant to return and could not.

He died on a distant island.

Byun Shi-Ji returned and stayed.

He died on the same island.

One did not get back and the other had come back.

Now it must be said without hierarchy.

That Gauguin did not belong to that land is fact.

It was not his fault alone.

Belonging does not happen at will.

If it is not the place one was born, belonging is hard.

And painting comes out of a place one does not belong to as well.

Only a different painting comes out.

A painting of what was looked at.

There is truth in a painting of what was looked at too.

It is the truth of one who did not find.

That is also a human matter.

Five

Two women are seated.

The ground is pink and the trees stand like pattern.

One of them looks at us.

The eyes seem to ask something, and to ask nothing.

The man who painted it died on that island.

He meant to go back and could not.

On the surface of a distant island an old man shows his back.

The man who painted it died on that island.

He came back and stayed.

Both men ended on an island.

One stayed because he could not return and the other stayed because he had returned.

What is placed where.

Whether the hand that places belongs to that land settles the grammar.

The fourth gate closes this way.