Gauguin, Paul (1848-1903)
Baigneurs en Bretagne (Bathers in Brittany)
1887
Oil on canvas, 97.5 x 130 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
Two Bathers – as Gauguin called this painting when it was first exhibited – was probably painted in the winter of 1886–87 in Paris on the basis of studies made in Brittany the previous summer. For stylistic reasons, some authors suppose that the artist must have retouched the painting on his return from Martinique in November 1887, but this is only a hypothesis. With this large-scale painting of nude figures in a natural setting, Gauguin emulated Puvis de Chavannes and Cézanne, while at the same time referring to the anatomies and poses used by Degas.
In March 1888, Félix Fénéon wrote a detailed commentary that is still relevant today. He contrasted the two figures, speaking of “the architecture of an opulent bourgeoisie” for the figure on the left and describing the bather on the right as “a frisky little servant, with short, hard hair and a dazed face.” He noted that the tree separates these two figures and “divides the canvas into two squares.”
The landscape painted has been identified as a seaside resort at the foot of Mont Saint-Guénolé facing the port of Pont-Aven. The background is treated in a homogeneous and compact manner evoking a tapestry and is linked to Cézanne‘s late Château-Noir paintings. The vertical trunk of the tree, which develops a sinuous shape at the top of the image, separates a narrower portion containing the figure on the left from a larger portion centred around the figure on the right. The two bathers could not be more different: while the plump woman touches her long red hair with her right hand and seems to be entering the water, the young girl or child, with short black hair, a large head, long torso, short legs and a small bottom, seems to hesitate about entering the water, resting her left hand on her knee and her right hand on a large rock. This contrast is highlighted by two different points of view: the red-haired woman is seen from above and the other from the side.
The younger bather is based on a large drawing to which Gauguin later added pastel (Breton Bather, The Art Institute of Chicago). The same figure, accompanied by another bather playing in the waves, reappears in a coastal setting in the zinc engraving Bathers in Brittany from the Volpini Suite of 1889. However, other versions can be found on ceramics, notably in the Vase with Bather, ca. 1888 (Kelton Foundation, Santa Monica). As for the red-haired woman, she refers to Ondine throwing herself into the water (In the Waves, 1889, Cleveland Museum of Art), a figure to which Gauguin turned on several occasions. He also made an abbreviated version of the composition with the two figures in his Bather Fan, 1888 (Kelton Foundation, Santa Monica). These variations are typical of the artist’s working method and indicate that Two Bathers introduced significant prototypes for him beyond this specific combination in this painting.
Fénéon explained the difference between the figures according to social class and age, while Charles F. Stuckey has suggested that the women in the zinc engraving Bathers in Brittany could also represent two sisters. The contrast between a tanned face and a white body, which may refer to a life of outdoor rural work, is stronger in the case of the standing figure. Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski compared this opposition to Gauguin‘s pair of programmatic nudes in Life and Death, 1889 (Mahmoud Khalil Bey Museum, Cairo), where Life has red hair and Death black. For Sylvie Crussard, Gauguin here began a reflection that would culminate in more explicit scenes such as The Loss of Virginity, 1890–91 (Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia).
Emphasizing the sexual connotations of the bathing scenes and the “metaphorical implication of a spirited plunge into the waves,” Stuckey relates the “physical clumsiness, emotional trepidation, and adolescent timidity” of the younger figure to Gauguin’s ideal of the Androgyne. Henri Dorra has gone even further in formulating these metaphors, defining Two Bathers as a “psychosocial essay” on the themes of temptation and the Fall. The presence of the pig, an “ancient emblem of lasciviousness,” makes it clear to him that bathing is “a metaphor for carnal sin”; the poses of the bathers exemplify two contrasting attitudes toward the Fall: the “older matron” is an early instance of the “rectifying Eve,” who may have fallen from grace but is able to mend her ways, while the “vacillating servant” is the prototype of the “fallen Eve who cannot overcome social and religious convention.” It would not be amiss to admit a level of implicit meaning. In 1888 Gauguin used the device of a tree dividing the plane to distinguish horizontally between the natural and supernatural (or mental) planes in The Vision of the Sermon (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh). Here the tree separates – and transitions between – before and after, following a vertical or oblique axis. The topographical movement of the landscape, to which the leaning attitude of the younger bather conforms, is downward from right to left, and the advance of the pig lends it a note of moral decay. We must not forget, however, that this level of meaning is only implicit and that the picture can be seen as a costumbrista scene painted from nature. Indeed, one of the results of the overall treatment of the background is that individual forms are unclear or ambiguous; the pig, for example, is barely distinguishable from the rocks behind. Conversely, the rocks tend to include zoomorphic and anthropomorphic suggestions, especially where they are covered by the bathers’ clothing. The “potential images” of grotesque faces are like a visual game often found in bathing scenes and may refer to the theme of Susanna and the old men. In this work, it contributes to generating an anxiety that belies the apparent serenity of the scene. (Dario Gamboni | MNBA)