The Wonder and the Beauty

Gauguin and the Sound of Painting

When my wooden shoes echo on this granite ground, I hear the dull, muted, powerful sound I am looking for in painting.

—Paul Gauguin, writing of Brittany

And he succeeded, Gauguin did. Oh, yes, he took that sound and set it down in paint. In fact, he made it the sound of Tahiti, pressing it onto and into his canvas in pastels as flat, muted, and powerful as any of the great Byzantine ikons and every bit as unforgettable— so that to think of the South Seas today is to think not only of swaying palms and the blue water and gold beaches of paradise, but of gentle Gauguin maids guileless in their red and blue sarongs. Yet I for one can never look at such paintings— that soft rich color, those attitudes of innocence— without hearing, faint but distinct, the sound of a man walking away from wife, children, and job toward a vision as elusive as the horizon, a man carrying the disease that would destroy him even as he imagined his feet were taking him into a paradise magically free of the voice of One walking in the garden in the cool of day and asking, “Where art thou?”

On the Mystery of Great Art

The deepest art speaks in the voice of the inevitable. You hear it in Beethoven’s immensities, the shouts of Lear, the storms of soul and ocean in Conrad’s mighty tales. It is never what might not have been. Consider that masterpiece, Vermeer’s View of Delft. Has he not somehow, like Joshua, stopped sun and sundial, captured that day and all others in a single time-kept moment? Those spires and towers, that shadowed river, that sparkle of rooftop raindrops taking the sun under the easy clouds, that little knot of black-clad Puritans in the foreground having a riverside chat about market or the weather— what is all that but their eternity and ours rendered by the brush and paint of an artist pushed and pulled by some almighty Must? One sees him there, catching and sketching the absolute in the mundane, all the time knowing he’ll know no rest until, after the last feathery stroke, he can stand back, ponder this new response of his to the imperative within, and once again thank his possessor for showing no mercy.

Ariel and Prospero

First, set down the wonder and the beauty. (So the wise and celebrated poet explained.) That’s the Ariel part—of his bones are coral made, the milk of paradise, lilacs out of the dead land. Yes, lines that delight and as many as you wish. (But, the poet stressed, don’t leave it there.) No, you’ve got to bring in Prospero, the wizard and seer, and wind it up with something more— a home truth or a bit of wisdom. That is, give the reader something to hang on to and ponder. For example, those lines by Miss Millay: Pity me that the heart is slow to learnWhat the swift mind beholds at every turn.

Agreed. But now if I may put in a word of my own: also pity us lesser and drudging ones that the heart is slow to learn why the great and only the great succeed at every turn. Yet learn we do—that no Ariel/Prospero formula, however rightly and relentlessly followed, can make words live if the divine flame, passing over and choosing among, has chosen to touch down elsewhere.

Maurice Utrillo

Oscar Wilde said it: Every human being Should be the fulfillment of a prophecy. With Utrillo the prophecy might have been this: “In 1883, a painter shall be born in Montmartre, The natural child of a pretty trapeze artist; He shall be unhappy, a drinker, half-lost, But he shall paint the world of Paris With such freshness and terrible innocence That anyone beholding his lost-child buildings, Chimney-tops, lampposts, and windblown trees Will be touched to the very depths.”

His was a talent too deep for fashion, Too familiar for novelty, a...