Gauguin - History of Modern Art, H.H. Arnason

Gauguin advised a fellow painter not to "copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, but think more of creating than the actual result."　In these statements may be found many of the concepts of twentieth-century experimental painting, from the idea of color used arbitrarily rather than to describe an object visually, to the primacy of the creative act, to painting as abstraction. Gauguin's ideas, which he called Synthetism, involved a synthesis of subject and idea with form and color, so that his paintings are given their mystery, their visionary quality, by their abstract color patterns. His purpose in creating such an anti-Realist art was to express invisible, subjective meanings and emotions. He attempted to free himself from the corrupting sophistication of the modern industrial world, and to renew his spirit, by contact with an innocence and sense of mystery that he sought in non-industrial societies. He constantly described painting in terms of an analogy with music, of color harmonies, of color and lines as forms of abstract expression. In his search he was attracted, to a greater degree even than most of his generation, to so-called"primitive" art. In his work we find the expression of modern primitivism, the tendency to understand non-Western or pre-industrial societies as more pure, more authentic than those of the West. Primitivism simultaneously valorizes and denigrates pre-industrial cultures, because their appeal rests in their perceived simplicity and resistance to progress.

Only by casting these societies as relatively naive and ineffectual could their potential as sources for aesthetic as well as economic exploitation be justified. Such notions were, of course, forged at a time when European countries were aggressively colonizing the very societies Western artists sought to emulate. For Gauguin, primitivism held appeal as a means of relieving himself of the burden of Western cul-ture, industrialization, and urbanization. Attracted not only to primitive-seeming motifs, Gauguin also cultivated a deliberately naive style. Like the paintings of Henri Rousseau, Gauguin's works convey an immediacy and authenticity that is generally absent in academic art.

History of Modern Art, H.H. Arnason  page 59

From Academic Emulation toward Romantic Originality

History of Modern Art, seventh edition, H.H. Arnason Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Chapter 1, page 4

The emphasis on emulation as opposed to novelty begun to lose ground toward the end of the eighteenth century when a new weight was given to artistic invention. Increasingly, invention was linked with imagination, that is to say, with the artist’s unique vision, a vision unconstrained by academic practice and freed from the pictorial conventions that had been obeyed since the Renaissance. This new attitude underlies the aesthetic interests of Romanticism. Arising in the last years of the eighteenth century and exerting its influence well into the nineteenth, Romanticism exalted humanity's capacity for emotion. In music, literature, and the visual arts, Romanticism is typified by an insistence on subjectivity and novelty. Today, few would argue that art is the simply the consequence of creative genius. Romantic artists and theorists, however, understood art to be the expression of and individual’s will to create rather than a product of particular cultural as well as personal values. Genius, for the Romantics, was something possessed innately by the artist: It could not be learned or acquired. To express genius, then, the Romantic artist had to resist academic emulation and instead turn inward, toward making pure imagination visible. The British painter and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) typifies this approach to creativity.