Paul Gauguin | Autograph manuscript draft article 'Huysmans et Redon', [1889]

 Paul Gauguin

Autograph manuscript draft article, here untitled but published as "Huysmans et Redon"

responding to Huysmans's writing on visual arts ("...Many painters would like to be musicians or men of letters. [Huysmans] would like to be a painter..." [trans]), criticising the terms on which he has written about Odilon Redon ("...In all [Redon's] work I see only a language of the heart, quite human and not monstrous..."), and disputing Huysmans's understanding of other artists ancient and modern including Francesco Bianchi ("...Bianchi, like all ancient painters, found around him in nature a mode in which he incorporated himself..." [trans]), Gustave Moreau ("...His impulsive movement is very far from his heart and he loves the richness of material wealth..." [trans]), and Puvis de Chavanne, with some unconnected notes at the end including on the sea coconut ("...Coconut in two parts which open like the female genitalia, from which emerges an enormous phallus which embeds itself in the earth to germinate. The inhabitants have long considered it as the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'..." [trans]), in French, 4 pages, 4to, n.d. [late 1889], small marginal chips

"...I do not see how Odilon Redon creates monsters - they are imaginary beings. He is a dreamer, a man of imagination [...] Nature has mysterious infinities, a power of imagination [...] The artist himself is one of her means of creation and for me Odilon Redon is one of her chosen ones for this continuation of creation..." [trans]

GAUGUIN CRITICISES THE ART CRITICISM OF THE "DECADENT" WRITER KARL-JORIS HUYSMANS. These typically combative notes, attacking the taste of the great literary champion of the Impressionists, were written when Gauguin was back in Paris after his fraught sojourn with Van Gogh in Arles, and was beginning to turn his mind to Tahiti. At the heart of his argument is the figure of Odilon Redon, who was in fact a friend of both men. Huysmans had written some of the first positive reviews of Redon's art, which had played a vital role in establishing him in the art world. Both Redon and Gauguin had exhibited in the 8th Impressionist exhibition of 1886, and by the late 1880s Redon was one of the few artistic contemporaries of whom Gauguin spoke with unambiguous respect. Gauguin is responding to a chapter of Huysmans's Certains on Redon entitled "Le Monstre" (1889). To Huysmans, Redon was an artist of fantasy, creating distorted monsters to express modernity - a visual equivalent of contemporary decadent and symbolist literature. Gauguin refutes this, claiming that Redon's imagination is an expression of nature. This article was dated by Guérin, who notes that it was first published in Les Nouvelles littéraires, 7 May 1953. The manuscript shows significant differences from the published text, with a number of sentences silently omitted or re-ordered. 

LITERATURE

Gauguin, Oviri: Ecrits d'un sauvage, ed. Daniel Guérin (1974), pp. 59-61