He was also pondering the wider questions: what actually is painting, and what is its relationship to the other branches of art? This was the sort of thing he would have hammered out at the café table with the Manet gang over a glass of absinthe, or with Pissarro during their painting trips, but now he had to come up with the answers on his own. He found the writings of the composer Richard Wagner helpful on the nature and philosophy of culture. Unsurprisingly, Wagner named music as the supreme art. Music was not concerned with physical limitations, not busy creating images of the phenomenal world. Rather, it roamed the abstract, speaking the language of the Wille (soul, sensation or spirit) directly. Music was art as pure spirit, untethered from physicality. Only music could open the gate to complete spiritual experience; the gate to completeness, making all the senses vibrate in harmony.
This resonated with Gauguin, who (like Wagner) experienced synaesthesia: an interconnection of sensual experience. When Gauguin heard music he saw coloured images that vibrated. Seeing a painting containing the mysterious magic that was ‘art’, his thoughts appeared before his eyes, and he saw them written in sentences. In time, he would write words on his paintings, a forerunner of Modernist practice; his contemporaries often found this irritating.
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