Meaning in Moment: Gaston La Touche’s Pardon In Brittany

To a freshman college student in a beginners’ art history class, the Art Institute of Chicago seemed to represent an intellectual, artistic, and cultural achievement beyond my small understanding. My conception of real artists and their art included a language that I could not understand, spoken while sporting berets and consistently paint-stained clothing. Something in such conversations would usually be said about feeling, and color, and line, and many other things that were meant to say that the piece communicated something meaningful. That something meaningful was the one thing I couldn’t seem to grasp in class. To me, viewing art as a layperson meant simply appreciating prettiness, the fact that I couldn’t have painted it, and the historical significance, while allowing the meaning to remain the secret of the artist. Visual art, after all, was something that no one really understood anyway.

Comfortable in this understanding, Pardon in Brittany by Gaston La Touche blindsided me completely.

They had hidden it on a half wall flanking the doorway through which I had entered. I had scanned the room already, filling my eyes with the bright, mottled flecks of Monets and other Impressionists. I liked them all; I had seen most on postcards and my grandmother’s art-print purses, and so I was not left breathless, though I was impressed. Overwhelmed by the light of Monet, I turned toward the door to leave and was stunned to a stop by Pardon in Brittany.

Perhaps it was so striking because of its contrast to the inundation of daylight my eyes had just absorbed from the others. In any case, the twilight scene struck me with its somber emotions. Along with its depiction of sunset instead of daylight, it differed from everything else I had yet seen in its purposeful lack of scenery. The foreground consisted entirely of an indistinct mass of people, crowded together, their faces illuminated by the dim light of sunset and the occasional brightness of a candle. Many of the faces looked excited and the indistinct figures appeared to be having conversations, but the color and light were blurred, obscuring the details of their expressions, personalities, and individual identities. Their emotions contrasted with the stoic serenity of a woman on horseback in their midst, holding a child in front of her as she sat silhouetted against the pale pink sky, looking out into the unseen space beyond the crowd. Like a ghost, the figure of a man who looked to be a priest stood beside her horse in a white robe. The darkness of the plain, Puritan-like garb of the crowd contrasted with this lone priest, the dim though still distinct light of the sky above their heads, and the shadowy white mass of the women’s hats.

I felt that until I had seen it, I had not understood art.

It took many more visits to the Institute to explain what change had occurred, exactly. All I knew is that in my trips to the Institute afterwards, I found traces of Pardon in Brittany in every painting to which I was drawn. A touch of light, the turn of a face, a sense of mystery communicated through a contrast of dark and light. The best way to sum it up, perhaps, would be to use a cliché and say that I had encountered a piece of art, that I had really seen art, for the first time when I met the painting and that I was looking for that experience again in other pieces. Pardon in Brittany had drawn me into itself while remaining nothing more than a two-dimensional work of art on a wall, and it had accomplished this without me knowing what it “meant.” Now anything could happen.

More astonishing in my change was my own continuing reaction, or lack of reaction, to the story of the painting. On every visit I would sit with the painting, stare at it, let myself be absorbed into the moment and the light and the never-ending pink sunset. Only on occasion would a question come into my head concerning the story of the work: Who was Gaston La Touche? Why did he paint this? Who is the woman on the horse? Why is the crowd gathered and where are they going? When these questions would appear, they seemed to ruin something about the painting, and so I never sought the answers.

The plaque beside it read only “Gaston La Touche, French, 1854-1913, Pardon in Brittany, 1896, oil on canvas.” The lack of background left me to imagine grand tales about the story of the painting. The crowd could be leaving a hanging that had taken place at sundown, and the woman on the horse with her child was the widow of the man who had been hanged. Or, she was the one being led to her death, holding her child for the last time before being burned at the stake for some unknown heresy. In all these imaginings, however, the painting never once had to become anything more than a painting for me. I did not imagine its story in a longing to know the real truth behind the captured moment. It was flat and soundless and always would be. It gave my imagination a window to look through.

After all, the mystery of the work itself was one of the things about the painting that continued to fascinate me. The only piece by Gaston La Touche in the Institute, it stood alone without the context of the overall style or the more famous works of the artist. In other words, it was free to be itself without comparison or being lumped into a bigger group. The curators moved it constantly, so that during each visit I might find it in a new and unexpected place, surprised by its effects yet again. It was itself, one captured moment, both the same and never the same at second glance.

In my previous understanding of art, all I would have wanted was the story behind the painting, either of the painter’s relationship to the subject or the story surrounding the subject. The only paintings I would examine for long were the pieces with plaques detailing all there was to know about the painter and the work. I felt that the plaques handed me the meaning of the painting otherwise known only by the artist, the secret that could be imparted to the ignorant viewer only through detailed explanation. If it could not give me the meaning, the information on the plaques could at least give me some helpful information about the history of the work or fame of the painter so I would not have to feel like a total failure whenever I could not even appreciate the aesthetics of the piece.

Strangely, and guiltily, I felt I knew the “secret” of Pardon in Brittany without knowing the background or context of its creation. We had a connection, this painting and I. Still, I did not want to assume that my artistically ignorant mind could possibly grasp all that the painting meant without really “knowing” anything about it. So I conducted research.

Gaston La Touche was a rich Frenchman who taught himself to paint from the age of ten and was never formally trained, though he did find a mentor in the prestigious Manet. He was most famous for his paintings that looked most Impressionistic: sunlit scenes of well-dressed men and women, gardens and flowers and fountains, lots of bright color. Well-known in his time, his fame has been absorbed by the work of artists like Monet and few others beyond groups of avid art collectors recognize his name (Brindley).

The painting, though different in its tone than the rest of his work, gets grouped along with his other post-Impressionistic, bright and sunshiny pieces. It is insignificant within his collection of work, as he has become insignificant within a collection of Impressionistic and post-Impressionistic French artists.

A “pardon” in Brittany, Brittany being a region in the northwest of France, is a festival or solemn parade celebrating the life of a saint. Participants pay a visit to the grave of the saint, afterwards attending a mass for said saint. The white hats worn by the women in the painting were in style among the women of Brittany in the time period that the painting was created (“Brittany”).

In other words, my painter is not famous, radical, or otherwise scandalous. My painting is not distinct even among the rest of its own painter’s work. The scene depicted is one of absolute, unexciting normality. No hanging. No burning. No intrigue.

I still love this painting. I love it more because the context does not matter. I love it because it is itself, nothing more and nothing less than a captured moment of beauty. Like the plaque helpfully explains: oil on canvas. In being a simply beautiful painting, it has given me a window into my soul.

At some point in time before I saw Pardon in Brittany I had come to think of life experiences as I had come to think of individual paintings: because I could not know the meaning that only the Artist knew, then the best I could do would be to try to glean as much information as I could about the history, the Artist’s identity, and the broader situation of the moment I had been given. If a certain experience seemed difficult to handle, I would simply try to skip over it quickly, pushing forward to times when I might have a detailed plaque to help guide me in a little understanding. But this view of time, as any wise person could have told me, does not satisfy. Nor is it living. There is no connection, no encounter with moments, whether beautiful or disagreeable, when we only seek to mine information from life.

A wise person could also have told me that I could not expect to only appreciate each moment fully if I knew the detailed drama, the wider story, behind the subject. I had been disregarding my own small experiences of beauty and change as insignificant because they were simply human, simply moments, not grand. Flat, like paintings. I could not see the rest of the story, and so I disregarded its pieces.

Pardon in Brittany showed me that there is a way to be present in moments without complete understanding. While there exists a larger context, a history, and a situation to the painting, these might not be things that are always readily available or even necessary. Rather, the meaning of this painting resides precisely in the fact that it is a painting, a rendering of beauty and feeling, a moment captured with simple oil and canvas. It is itself and it is beautiful and this is what matters most. I would like to say the same of each second, each minute, each hour, each day, each year that is given to me by God: it is itself and it is beautiful and this is what matters most.

The painting does have a larger context, as do our moments and our lives. We have one Artist that crafts all; He is painting the grand picture of history. But sometimes I wonder if we concentrate too much on this bigger story at the expense of missing the beauty of the individual experiences that make up the greater canvas. Even more troubling, I wonder if constant striving for our own definition of understanding might cause us to miss those moments in which we encounter not only life, but also God Himself.

We cannot always know the meaning of individual experiences, but this is not because the Artist is holding out on us or because we are too ignorant to discern it, but because this is not the point. The point is to encounter Meaning, to live in it, to experience the fullness of its beauty as it is. We are meant to be surprised when we turn the corner and see it hanging before our eyes. We should be expecting it to show up in a different place than expected every time we search for it. We should begin to see glimpses of it in other moments, calling us to pay attention. We should feel free to admire the beauty of a vision we can see but not fully grasp, allowing our imaginations to flow freely with all the possibilities it might offer. In short, we should unshackle ourselves from our insecurities, impatience, and pride and simply stand in awe and silence in the presence of a thing of beauty and light.

The last time I saw my painting it was hanging in a room with other work contributed by the same donor. Its side room was only a few steps away from the gallery with all the famous Monets, meaning that very few visitors stopped briefly to look at it as they travelled between that large Monet gallery and another, similarly artist-themed room. They had hung it against a wall painted mauve, effectually bleeding all the dim rosy hue from the sunset above the heads of the crowd and the lone female rider. Still, the mystery was there, and I felt the same thrill of what I can only label as appreciation. Love. Love might be a better word. Or even better: life. It was life.

Works Cited

Brindley, Roy and Selina Baring Maclennan. Gaston La Touche. Web. 3 Feb. 2010.

http://www.gastonlatouche.com/biography.htm

Brittany. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 2 Feb. 2010. Web. 3 Feb. 2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany