To see a picture by
Gérard Gachet is at once to feel the urge to put its effect
into words — to capture its unique combination of the romantic,
the fantastic and the realistic.
His work carries, as he himself sensed, the landscape and rhythms
of the old, Germanic Rhine. Its serried firs seem to loom darkly
behind his writhing figures, whose flowing beards and streaming
tresses are fanned, twisted and tossed by its relentless current.
But matter in ail its states — grainy, scale, smooth, stickly,
tufted — holds equal fascination for this great artist.
Under a stormy light — dark and dazzling by turns —
his women bare themselves to his clinical and yet tragic gaze. But
the morbid element in Gachet’s eroticism is balanced by a
sensual feeling for bodily form, for smooth contours caressed by
the eye of a painter who may start with abstractions or deal overtly
in symbols, but who cannot conceal his own desire, his own voluptuous
delight. His fear of provoking a too openly sexual response probably
explains his reptiles and batracians — not, as he unnecessarily
warned, to be read anthropomorphically. His women, in their naked
intimacy, may be as unsettling and provocative as Courbet’s,
but there is something enigmatic about them — something that
repels while it attracts.
He could, of course, be compared with the surrealists and with Bosch,
but his artistic personality lies in obsessions which are deeply,
irrevocably private and served by secrets of composition and technique
which he, like some indefatigable alchemist, discovered for himself.
But the essential lies beyond the words 1 have used to evoke his
forms and colours. A picture by Gachet is utterly distinctive.