Still life with compotier FWN 780 1879/80 46 cm x 55
“Now here, without the slightest doubt, we’re in the presence of an unspoiled creature with the instincts of a wild beast: (for him) blood and sex have the edge over ambition.” So it is that Van Gogh describes his fellow artist, staying with him for the summer in Arles. The man in question, like so many men of a particular age, had seized the crisis moment of losing his well-paid job in high finance, to become a savage again, and expend his life painting.
He used to be a stockbroker, on the Paris Bourse, the Stock Exchange. It was a job he happened upon by fortune, connections within connections: his maternal grandmother was the mistress of an aristocratic family in Peru. While in positions of powerful leadership, the members of the family had lived a privileged life. But when he was just six, civil war ended the family’s fortunes; he and his mother fled to France. When he had completed his education, a close family friend secured him a job on the Paris Stock Exchange. And there he worked happily providing for his family; and with his six-figure salary, he was able to indulge in his favourite pastime – art. He was bowled over by one particular painting, by Paul Cezanne: still-life with compotier; so he bought it.
But then, crisis struck: the first ever stock market crash in the world happened when a major Regional bank, L’Union Generale, failed, and in 1882, the crash brought the Paris Bourse to its knees. The young man lost his job. After some months looking for work, he wrote to Pissarro saying “I have decided to make my living from painting, at whatever cost; and therefore I write to ask for your help, signed Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin”.
Everywhere he went, the young man took with him his prized painting by Cezanne: “the whites are blue, and the blues are white” Gauguin used to repeat this phrase to himself as he marveled at the painting: “the whites are blue, and the blues are white”. Later, when he would himself become more established as a painter, he would bring the Cezanne with him, and start his ‘lecture’ in the cafes of Montmartre to his young followers and admirers: “the whites are blue, and the blues are white. That which constitutes a work of art: it’s not the artist’s taste; it’s his willpower, his life; the life he puts into it. This effort must not be brought to bear solely on the totality of the painting, on the general arrangement, the game of brushstrokes, the distribution and so on, but on each part so that there is no place lost or unemployed by emotion. So that the rapport amongst all the parts, and between each part of the parts, must be the same: one, and exactly realized” (noted by Maurice Dennis).
“Woman in front of a still-life by Cezanne” was painted by Paul Gauguin in 1890.
Meanwhile, back in 1882, as Gauguin was with Pissarro and Cezanne in Auvers, Zola was down a coal mine in the mining area of northwest France researching his next book in the series portraying the effects of the Second Industrial Revolution on the fictional family Rougon Macquart. He was accompanied by a certain Emile Basly, who was a miner in Anzin, and the leader of the union of mine workers: the first job, hard, underground and dangerous, the second, underground and illegal, and just as dangerous. 10,000 miners had been on strike for two months: the mining company had introduced new working conditions that meant the miners could not achieve their payments by results, and there was no longer any work for older miners. The company sought to cut costs because the regional bank had called in its loans: the Union Generale was a Catholic Bank, which did not support the Republic. The bank’s shares had risen from 750 francs to 2000 francs in just 18 months, and in its newfound success, it had overreached its finances, made investments in Egypt and North Africa, a railway in Serbia, and utility companies at home. The bank folded, causing a run on shares, and the Paris Bourse crashed.
The mining company did not budge; the miners were eventually forced back down the mine; the Stock Exchange was rescued.
What was the meaning of the revolution? What did it mean to live now in a Republic of freedom, equality and fraternity? Zola gave his answer: he entitled his book: ‘Germinal’; and ended it with these determined words:
“Again, again, more and more distinctly, as if they had come close to the ground, the comrades were tapping. To the flaming rays of the star, on this morning of youth, it was from this seed that the campaign was growing. Men were pushing, a black, vengeful army, which germinated slowly in the furrows, growing up for the harvests of the future century, and whose germination would soon break through the earth.”
For the working class, and industrial poor, the stock market, the bourgeoisie, the Republic; the landed gentry, church and peasants; science, art and narrative too - it was a time of germination. The categories of traditional understandings – the whites are blue, and the blues are white - are like seeds which must be cracked open for new life and growth to begin.
The seeds planted then, would indeed break through in the next century.
And furnish for our millennium the decisive choice between a thriving earthly garden or an extractive global wasteland.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used
when we created them.” Albert Einstein