Evans is a place on Earth: Fragments of a Common Task:Gauguin and the Post-Impressionists at the RA?

"Civilization is what makes you sick" - Paul Gauguin.

Paul Gauguin - Tahitian Women On The Beach (1891)

I wonder what Paul Gauguin would make of the times we're now living in. In 1895 his dislike for modernity saw him depart France, permanently, for residence in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. He wanted a simpler life but he also, it seems to me, wanted one free of responsibility. His exoticisation of the locals he met would be considered problematic by today's standards. His sexual escapades far more so. I think it's safe to say Paul Gauguin would not be a comfortable man in 2020.

While his behaviour may not have stood the test of time, his art very much has. I was at the Royal Academy (well I wasn't, I was viewing their exhibition online - this is the world we live in) to see Gauguin and the Post-Impressionists. The RA did open briefly between lockdowns but, with fixed time slots and social distancing, tickets were rare as hen's teeth and I had no luck sourcing one. I did manage to get a ticket to see the Andy Warhol show at Tate Modern (with my friend Darren) and one for Electronic:From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers at the Design Museum (with Mark and Stedge, friends I've not seen all year) but both have those have been cancelled. The second lockdown seems to me to be 'business as usual' but pleasure and leisure? Only in the comfort of your own home.

Luckily, I've grown to quite like my own company so I'm not really struggling mentally. Though how good it is to look at videos, or photos, of paintings rather than the actual paintings I'm still not sure. It's obviously not quite as good but I still enjoyed it. I missed going for a pint afterwards but, instead, I was able to nurse a San Miguel while taking in the exhibition. Swings and roundabouts.

Claude Monet - The Chailly Road Through The Forest Of Fontainebleau (1865)

With Gauguin and the Post-Impressionists:Masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection (to give it its full title) the curators had created a video in which they chose how long, and in how much detail, we got to ponder each painting and, in a way, I quite liked that. I operate on an almost permanent level of low anxiety and even in galleries, some of my favourite places and places I have been going for a long time now, I find myself wondering if somehow I'm not looking for long enough, not looking properly.

It's one of the reason I write these blogs - to really ponder the art (or the music, the film, the television, the walk) I've just experienced. To teach myself what I think about it. If some of that rubs off on others that'd be great. If not, that's out of my hands. In 1916, in Ordrupgaard near Copenhagen, the insurance magnate Wilhelm Hansen began to collect then modern French art. Starting with artists like Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley and then going back to their influences and on to those they inspired, it wasn't long before the Ordrupgaard Collection became known as one of the most prestigious in Europe.

Alfred Sisley - Line Of Chestnut Trees At La Celle-Saint-Cloud (1865)

Alfred Sisley - The Flood Bank Of The Seine, Bougival (1873)

With a mildly irritating soundtrack of light classical, the 'visitor' is gently wheeled around several empty rooms of the Royal Academy and presented with images, many images, of boats, barges, trees, and cityscapes. Some may contend that the art is a little bit 'chocolate box', a bit too tasteful, but I still like it. I love the sense of longing, and even longueurs, that pervades Sisley's lines of chestnut trees and Monet's forest roads. Sisley and Eugene Boudin's riverine and maritime scenes have a stillness to them that belies the probable urgency of life on the water.

Alfred Sisley - Barges At Billancourt (1877)

Alfred Sisley - The River Boat Garage (1885)

Eugene Boudin - The Pier At Trouville (1867)

Claude Monet - Seascape, Le Havre (c.1866)

Claude Monet - Waterloo Bridge, Overcast (1903)

You can almost feel the gentle breeze or the heat of the afternoon sun as you ponder either the contentedness or the agitation of the few individuals that appear in these paintings. People, in the work of many of these artists, not only play second fiddle to nature and to the elements, they play second fiddle to architecture and engineering.

While Monet's moody seascape at Le Havre could almost be a still from Jaws, his overcast view of traffic filing over Waterloo Bridge to a backdrop of towers belching out their fumes into the smog filled London sky is so grey as to leave you feeling bereft. The flickers of light from the vehicles on the bridge the only note of optimism as commuters, seemingly, escape a London that, much like now, is all business and no pleasure.

Camille Pissarro - Morning Sun In The Rue Saint-Honore Place Du Theatre Francais (1898)

Edgar Degas - Courtyard Of A House (New Orleans, Sketch) (1873)

Pissarro's Paris looks much brighter. Hansen didn't want to simply celebrate modern French art. He wanted to see, and show, where it had come from. He believed Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and others from the Barbizon school to have been hugely influential and he went even further back in time to collect work from Ingres and Delacroix at the same time as he looked beyond the impressionists towards Matisse, Cezanne, and Gauguin.

But you wait a long time on your virtual tour before you get to those names. Gauguin, the headliner and the man the exhibition is named for, doesn't appear until the final room. That's not a bad thing at all, though. It shows how revolutionary his art must have looked at the time, compared to what had come before and inspired him, and it gives us a sense of the shock of the new. Or, now, the shock of the old.

Eugene Delacroix - Ugolini And His Sons (1860)

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - The Bridge At Mantes (1850-1854)

Charles-Francois Daubigny - Boat On The River Oise (1868)

Jules Dupre - A Clearing In The Forest (after 1875)

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - The Windmill (c.1835-1840)

Jules Dupre - The Sea (after 1875)

Gustave Courbet - The Wiremaker's Workshops On The River Loue, Near Ornans (1861)

Jean-Augustue-Dominique Ingres - Dante Offering The Divine Comedy To Homer (c.1827)

Eugene Delacroix - George Sand (1838)

The historical paintings, and portraiture, of Delacroix and Ingres give way, in the story of French art, to the realistic depiction of nature that Courbet, Corot, and Jules Dupre popularised. Inspired by the British arts Turner and Constable as well as, to my mind, Dutch landscape painting, these artists, Corot and Courbet most famously, changed the game just enough to lay fertile ground for the likes of Manet, Monet, and Renoir and from there it was a short leap to the post-impressionism of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Movements that eventually begat the fauvism of Derain, Vlaminck, and Matisse and the expressionism of Munch, Modigliani, and Kirchner.

It wasn't until Picasso and Braque ripped up the rule book with Cubism and Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky (not to mention Pollock and Rothko) pioneered a new and powerful form of abstraction that the art world would have its direction so dramatically altered. Courbet's picaresque winemaker's workshops, Corot's windmills, and Daubigny's restful boats don't look revolutionary to our modern eyes but art revolutions were different then. These quiet pastoral paintings inched away from academia and told later artists they were free not to follow the rules. It wasn't a lesson Cezanne or Matisse needed having twice.

Berthe Morisot - Young Girl On The Grass, The Red Bodice (1885)

Eva Gonzales - The Convalescent (Portrait Of A Woman In White) (1877-1878)

Edgar Degas - Woman Arranging Her Hair (1894)

Paul Cezanne - Women Bathing (c.1895)

Henri Matisse - Flowers And Fruits (1909)

While Edgar Degas' Woman Arranging Her Hair makes great use of green and auburn, it's a quiet riot of colour, Cezanne's Women Bathing from around the same time goes somewhere quite different. Degas, despite the colour, shows you what stuff looks like. Cezanne shows you what stuff is. He paints from many angles at the same time and in that way, as has long been established, he paved the way for cubism.

To me, Cezanne's quiet innovations were more revelatory than Matisse's beautiful explosions of colour and even Gauguin's fantastical scenes of paradise (a paradise he described as 'primitive' but one the curators have obediently fact-checked and found to be incorrect or at the least partial) but there's a little bit more work involved when appreciating them. Gauguin's easy to dig. His paintings are so in your face. Flashes of gold, purple, orange, and pink cannot fail to catch you attention and his love of nudity, preferably in the form of lithe and young dark skinned South Sea islanders, is certainly eye catching too.

The reason Paul Gauguin chose these young women, so often, as his subject matter is open to many interpretations, none of which put Gauguin in a particularly positive light, but the way he chose to make these paintings and the raw emotion he managed to distill on to his canvas cannot be denied. Looking at his paintings online it's impossible to take in their full and raw majesty but it's still possible to understand it. When Paul Gauguin didn't like the way the world was going he ran away to a distant land but, luckily for us, he sent back these excerpts from his life so that now, when we are forced to postpone almost all of our social lives, we are reminded that the world, even a virus ridden world, was, is, and always will be full of beauty.