The new Gauguin exhibition opening at London’s Tate Modern gallery tomorrow demonstrates the value of the artist’s earlier career as a stockbroker, says our Culture Editor.
Received wisdom tells us that certain career paths work out much better if the practitioner has done something else beforehand and managed to build up a bank of life experience.
Writing is one example; novelists lucky enough to have their first work published in their teens or twenties are routinely scoffed at and dismissed as precocious. The same is true of politicians. How can they possibly give us any interesting insights on life, ask journalists, when they haven’t done anything apart from being a politician?
For some reason, artists seem to be immune to this criticism. In Britain at least, all the successful artists of recent years appear to have emerged from the same handful of art schools. Of course there are exceptions; Marc Quinn studied history at Cambridge. Ron Mueck began his career as a puppeteer for children’s TV, and over in the US Jeff Koons worked as a commodities broker on Wall Street before establishing himself as an artist.
All three of these are great artists and arguably, each of them draws on their wide range of life experiences in their work, albeit in often subtle ways. But they are very much exceptions to the rule, particularly in the UK.
Most artists enjoying any kind of success from the end of the 20th century onwards move in the same social set, are represented by the same few galleries and came to prominence shortly after emerging from art school.
More than any other art form, the visual arts are obsessed with cool. And most people in the art world look down on more mature artists launching themselves after leaving behind first careers in other sectors of society. The general consensus seems to be that if you’re truly, passionately committed to your work, why would you want to spend time doing anything else? But this view hasn’t always prevailed. Van Gogh was a teacher and missionary before he became an artist, Caillebotte was an engineer and Gauguin was a stockbroker.
Interestingly, the ten years Gauguin spent working as a stockbroker are usually omitted from potted biographies of his life. But, as art critic Waldemar Januszczak explained to me recently, this period was incredibly important to his development as an artist. “Because he spent ten years as a stockbroker, people think this was independent to his work as an artist. Of course that’s not true in human terms. Stockbroking earned him enough money to buy pictures; he was a great collector of Cezannes, Pisarros and great Impressionist art. It gave him chance to look at art, gave him a pause and a ten year breathing space to assimilate what was happening in French art. And I think it was very productive and fruitful that period.”
Working as a stockbroker seems a million miles away from the heavily-mythologised version of Gauguin’s life many people think they know well. But thankfully, it isn’t erased from the new exhibition Gauguin: Maker of Myth, which opens at London’s Tate Modern tomorrow. Far from it. As well as the big-hitting Tahitian works, examples of much earlier pieces are included. And it’s fascinating to see how Gauguin’s creative voice gradually emerged during his time in Paris.
It’s certainly true that he didn’t truly fulfil his true potential as an artist until he’d moved away from Paris, quit his job as a stockbroker and distanced himself from the Impressionist movement that dominated the city at the time. But if his career progression from stockbroker to artist hadn’t been possible, the great work he went on to produce might never have been happened. And, with an influence that extends from Matisse to Picasso, without this work the history of 20th century art might have been very different.