Artists are aware of their freedom in modern artistic making from the demands of liturgical or social use, and they value it and insist on its continuance. But they are also aware of the loss of the widespread social communicative function that once accompanied artistic making when it was more firmly embedded in contexts of liturgy and ritual. Nowhere is this loss more obvious than a depopulated island now dominated by wildlife.
For us, Schiller claims, "They are what we were; they are what we should become once more. We were nature like them, and our culture should lead us along the path of reason and freedom back to nature. Thus they depict ... our lost childhood, something that remains ever dearest to us, and for this reason they fill us with a certain melancholy.'
But for us - freighted with self-consciousness and aware of our lives as subjects within social roles, whose functioning and value not everyone can readily endorse and wherein work takes place apart from immersion in nature and ritual - there is no ready way to achieve serenity and a state of 'at homeness'. We represent this serenity as an ideal to be achieved rather than as participating in it as a lived fact.
Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, established a new sort of human interaction with dream islands. It was loosely based upon the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who, in conflict with his captain, elected to be marooned on a small Pacific island. Paul Zweigidentifies Crusoe as a turning point in the history of adventure literature in general. Island adventurers of antiquity are mortal mediators between human and magic worlds. In contrast adventurers like Crusoe test human adaptability to raw Nature and human conflict. In a wider context, James Joyce described Crusoe as 'the true prototype of the British colonist'.
Artists came later to islands in search of exotic images of plants and animals and later still to let their imagination escape from hidebound norms of European art. Paul Gauguin is the ideal escapee from mainland constraints. Like many artists of his generation, Paul Gauguin sought an antidote to the spread of rampant industrialization and urbanization of his day. His first island escape was in 1886 when he went to Pont-Aven in Brittany, a quiet isolated and rugged enclave-island of fervently religious people far from the urban turmoil of Paris. In the summer of 1888 Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven, searching for what he called "a reasoned and frank return to the beginning, that is to say, to primitive art." He was joined there by young painters, including Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier, who also were seeking an environment to activate a more direct expression in their painting. Gauguin achieved a step towards this ideal in the seminal Vision After the Sermon (1888), a painting in which he used broad planes of colour, clear outlines, and simplified forms. Gauguin coined the term "Synthetism" to describe his style during this period, referring to the synthesis of his paintings' formal elements with the idea or emotion they conveyed.
Glorified in this new freedom of imagination, Gauguin acted as a mentor to many of the artists who had found their dream island at Pont-Aven, urging them to rely more upon feeling than upon the direct observation associated with Impressionism. Indeed, he advised: "Don't copy too much after nature. Art is an abstraction: extract from nature while dreaming before it and concentrate more on creating than on the final result." Gauguin and the artists around him, who became known as the Pont-Aven school, began to be decorative in the overall compositions and harmonies of their paintings. Gauguin no longer used line and colour to replicate an actual scene, as he had as an Impressionist, but rather explored the capacity of those pictorial means to induce a particular feeling in the viewer. This owes much to the invention of compartmented colours arranged in the manner of clossonne enamels or stained glass, a style he evolved with fellow artist Emile Bernard. It grew out of Bernard's interest in medieval art and Gauguin's own fascination with Japanese prints. This flattening of space and symbolic use of colour became influential for early twentieth-century artists.
Denied critical and financial recognition in France, Gauguin dreamed of an "atelier of the tropics," where living was cheap and where new, even revolutionary, motifs awaited. He disembarked in Tahiti in 1891 and abruptly plunged into the uncharted gulf between dream and reality. French missionaries, merchants and colonial bureaucrats had long since left their mark on the "unspoiled paradise" that had been described in its native state by such 18th-century explorers as Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Prices were high, and even remote villages knew the ravages of alcoholism, syphilis and tuberculosis. He had unwittingly encountered the mainland "Europe - Europe, from which I believed I had freed myself!"
Yet by moving away from the overpriced francophile capital of Papeete, he eventually found at least the thatched hut and nubile maidens of his dream island.
But Gauguin learned his own severe lesson in the prudish heritage of missionary zealotry when he was arrested and fined for bathing in the nude at a remote beach. It was not his last contretemps with colonial authorities. During his second sojourn in Polynesia, from 1895 until his death in 1903, the painter produced anti-government pamphlets urging the locals to refuse to pay taxes to an exploitative regime. He was fined 500 francs and sentenced to three months in prison. Before his appeal could be heard, Gauguin died in the hut he had erected on the Marquesas island of Hiva Oa and dubbed "The House of Pleasures". He had succumbed at the age of 55 to a combination of syphilis, an infected leg wound, alcoholism and morphine abuse.
Long before his death Gauguin had become a legendary figure - an incarnation of the bohemian island rebel. "Don't come home!" a friend advised. "You already have the immunity of dead heroes. You are part of art history." Indeed, in seeking to bridge the painful schism between island dream and mainland reality, Gauguin had created a voluptuous body of work in which color was triumphantly liberated from representational restraints. 'A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up," Gauguin wrote in 1897, in a letter from Tahiti. He was a driven self-inventor, ever conscious of his theatrical effect. He freely mingled observations of local island flora and fauna with his own erotic fantasies and fragments of information on Tahiti's precolonial myths and rituals. His work is not entirely free of cliché and repetition or of compositional "borrowings" from classic European painting, but what triumphs, even against such odds, is the succulent, unorthodox coloration distilled from the tropical essence of Tahiti that literally seems to flood the canvases.