Technique and Meaning in the Paintings of Paul Gauguin by Vojtêch Jirat-Wasiutyński, H. Travers Newton, Jr (review)

280 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 brought in to clarify James=s, and while her domesticated mysticism B >a refined and honest perception of what is really the case= B makes itself at home, we might have preferred it had she left sooner. This study will make slow going for non-specialists, even those who can tell their doxastic evidentialism from their noetic fideism. Brown has done extensive research, but its benefits are not always self-evident. Left undeveloped, many of the topics he opens (metaphor in rationality, the special givenness of theistic belief, the virtues of eccentricity, and so on) provide more questions than answers. But while specialists will be able to pick up the slack, a familiarity with James=s religious writing brings its own liability. This may be just the place to forget what you already believe. (ADRIAN BOND) Vojtêch Jirat-Wasiuty½ski and H.Travers Newton, Jr. Technique and Meaning in the Paintings of Paul Gauguin Cambridge University Press. xvi, 12 colour plates, 286. US $74.95 Vojtêch Jirat-Wasiuty½ski and H.Travers Newton, Jr, have written a case study on how technical information can contribute to art historical knowledge. Even in an area as heavily worked on as Gauguin studies, they have been able to add new information, although for the most part the authors confirm the results that other scholars have arrived at. This team, made up of an art historian and a conservator, is not interested in tracing Gauguin=s formal development, but rather in demonstrating that the technical and material choices made by the artist were invested with cultural meaning. As they explain, =Gauguin=s technique deliberately evoked comparison with older, non-oil media of Western art, such as wax painting, tempera, and fresco. These techniques appeared primitive both technically and culturally B they were associated with the painting of Italian artists working before Raphael, called Athe Primitives@ in the nineteenth century B and, could therefore, paradoxically be constructed as signs of artistic modernism by vanguard artists and critics.= They stress that Gauguin=s choices of canvas, ground, paint, finish, brush work, and colour B parallelling the role of subject matter and style B had become signifiers of originality and self-expression for artists during the second half of the nineteenth century. Studies of technique, as distinct from style, have been almost totally ignored within art history since its inception. This book goes a long way towards pointing out that art historians with no knowledge of artistic techniques are missing out on a level of information. The authors demonstrate that technical analysis should be taken into account along with other methodologies in order to achieve a better historical understanding of works of art. One of the lessons we learn from Technique and Meaning in the Paintings of HUMANITIES 281 Paul Gauguin is that Gauguin was as experimental in his use of media as he was in his subject matter and style. This is especially true in his search for more >primitive effects= through trials with chalk (non-oil) grounds, rough canvas, thin paint, unvarnished surfaces, and medieval painting procedures. Here Jirat-Wasiutynski and Newton further complement our knowledge of the artist=s primitivizing tendencies. Gauguin, they explain, rejected illusionistic painting techniques for a manner that looked naïvely decorative and unsophisticated. He may have added wax into the paint, for example, in the Vision after the Sermon, to create the effect of a Byzantine painting. One of the strongest contributions of this book is the addition of information to well-known debates. An example of this is their nuanced enhancement of Merete Bodelsen=s argument (>The Missing Link in Gauguin=s Cloisonism,= Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6: 53 [1959b] 329B44) that Gauguin was working towards a Cloisonist style well before Emile Bernard. While Bodelsen has argued that Gauguin=s stylistic inventiveness was inspired directly by his ceramic work of 1886, Jirat-Wasiuty½ski and Newton also see evidence of a simplification of style in his painting of that period. Their careful observation of his early works allow them to note a wider stylistic pattern. They conclude that the artist=s move towards Cloisonism began in 1886, when he started using...