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Paul Gauguin
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
In full Eugtne-Henri-Paul Gauguin French painter,
printmaker, and sculptor who sought to achieve a “primitive”
expression of spiritual and emotional states in his work.
The artist, whose work has been categorized
asPost-Impressionist, Synthetist, and Symbolist, is
particularly well known for his creative relationship with
Vincent van Gogh, as well as for his self-imposed exile in
Tahiti, French Polynesia. His artistic experiments
influenced many avant-garde developments in the early 20th
century.
Beginnings
Gauguin was the son of a journalist from Orléans and a mother of
Peruvian descent. After Napoleon III's coup d'état, Gauguin and his
family moved in 1851 to Lima, Peru; four years later, after the death of
his father, the family returned to France. At age 17 Gauguin enlisted in
the merchant marine, and for six years he sailed around the world. His
mother died in 1867, leaving legal guardianship of the familywith the
businessman Gustave Arosa, who, upon Gauguin's release from the merchant
marine, secured a position for him as a stockbroker and introduced him
to the Danish woman Mette Sophie Gad, whom Gauguin married in 1873.
Gauguin's artistic leanings were first aroused by Arosa, whohad a
collection that included the work of Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix,
and Jean-François Millet, and by a fellow stockbroker, Émile
Schuffenecker, with whom he started painting. Gauguin soon began to
receive artistic instruction and to frequent a studio where he could
draw from a model. In 1876 his Landscape at Viroflay was accepted for
the official annual exhibition in France, the Salon. He developed a
taste for the contemporary avant-garde movement of Impressionism, and
between 1876 and 1881 he assembled a personal collection of paintings by
such figures as Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Claude
Monet, and Johan Barthold Jongkind.
Gauguin met Pissarro in about 1875 and began to study under the
supportive older artist, at first struggling to masterthe techniques of
painting and drawing. In 1880 he was included in the fifth Impressionist
exhibition, an invitation that was repeated in 1881 and 1882. He spent
holidays painting with Pissarro and Cézanne and began to make visible
progress. During this period he also entered a social circle of
avant-garde artists that included Manet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste
Renoir.
Gauguin lost his job when the French stock market crashed in 1882, an
occurrence he saw as a positive development, because it would allow him
to “paint every day.” In an attempt to support his family, he
unsuccessfully sought employment with art dealers, while continuing to
travel to the countryside to paint with Pissarro. In 1884 he moved his
family to Rouen, France, and took odd jobs, but by the end of the year,
the family moved to Denmark, seeking the support of Mette's family.
Without employment, Gauguin was free to pursue his art, but he faced the
disapproval of his wife's family; late in 1885 he returned with his
eldest son to Paris.
Gauguin participated in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in
1886, showing 19 paintings and a carved wood relief. His own works won
little attention, however, overshadowed by Georges Seurat's enormous A
Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte—1884 (1884–86). Frustrated
anddestitute, Gauguin began to make ceramic vessels for sale, and that
summer he made a trip to Pont-Aven in the Brittany region of France,
seeking a simpler and more frugal life. Aftera harsh winter there,
Gauguin sailed to the French Caribbean island of Martinique with the
painter Charles Laval in April 1887, intending to “live like a savage.”
His works painted on Martinique, such as Tropical Vegetation (1887) and
By the Sea (1887), reveal his increasing departure from Impressionist
technique during this period, as he was now working with blocks of
colour in large, unmodulated planes. Upon his return to France late in
1887, Gauguin affected an exotic identity, pointing to his Peruvian
ancestry as a element of “primitivism” in his own nature and artistic
vision.
Early maturity
In the summer of 1888 Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven, searching for what
he called “a reasoned and frank return to the beginning, that is to say,
to primitive art.” He was joined there by young painters, including
Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier, who also were seeking a more direct
expression in their painting. Gauguin achieved a step towards this ideal
inthe seminal Vision After the Sermon (1888), a painting in which he
used broad planes of colour, clear outlines, and simplified forms.
Gauguin coined the term “Synthetism” to describe his style during this
period, referring to the synthesis of his paintings' formal elements
with the idea or emotion they conveyed.
Gauguin acted as a mentor to many of the artists who assembled in
Pont-Aven, urging them to rely more upon feeling than upon the direct
observation associated with Impressionism. Indeed, he advised: “Don't
copy too much after nature. Art is an abstraction: extract from nature
while dreaming before it and concentrate more on creating than onthe
final result.” Gauguin and the artists around him, who became known as
the Pont-Aven school, began to be decorative in the overall compositions
and harmonies of their paintings. Gauguin no longer used line and colour
to replicate an actual scene, as he had as an Impressionist, but rather
explored the capacity of those pictorial means to induce a particular
feeling in the viewer.
Late in October 1888 Gauguin traveled toArles, in the south of France,
to stay with Vincent van Gogh (partly as a favour to van Gogh's brother,
Theo, an art dealer who had agreed to represent him). Early that year,
van Gogh had moved to Arles, hoping to found the “Studio of the South,”
where like-minded painters would gather to create a new, personally
expressive art.However, as soon as Gauguin arrived, the two volatile
artists often engaged in heated exchanges about art's purpose. The style
of the two men's work from this period has been classified as
Post-Impressionist because it shows an individual, personal development
of Impressionism's use of colour, brushstroke, and non-traditional
subject matter. For example, Gauguin's Old Women of Arles (1888)
portrays a group of women moving through a flattened, arbitrarily
conceived landscape in a solemn procession. As in much of his work from
this period, Gauguin applied thick paint in a heavy manner to raw
canvas; in his rough technique and in the subject matter of religious
peasants, the artist found something approaching his burgeoning
“primitive” ideal. Gauguin had planned to remain in Arles through the
spring, but his relationship with van Gogh grew even more tumultuous.
After what Gauguin claimed was an attempt to attack him with a razor,
van Gogh mutilated his own left ear. Gauguin then left for Paris after a
stay of only two months.
For the next several years, Gauguin alternated between living in Paris
and Brittany. In Paris he became acquainted with the avant-garde
literary circles of Symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur
Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. These poets, who advocated abandoning
traditional forms inorder to embody inner emotional and spiritual life,
saw their equivalent in the visual arts in the work of Gauguin. In a
famous essay in the Mercure de France in 1891, the critic Albert Aurier
declared Gauguin to be the leader of a group of Symbolist artists, and
he defined his work as “ideational, symbolic, synthetic, subjective, and
decorative.”
After finding Pont-Aven spoiled by tourists, Gauguin relocated to the
remotevillage of Le Pouldu. There, in a heightened pursuit of raw
expression, he began to focus upon the ancient monuments of medieval
religion, crosses, and calvaries, incorporating their simple, rigid
forms into his compositions, as seen in The Yellow Christ (1889). While
such works built upon the lessons of colour and brushstroke he learned
from French Impressionism, they rejected the lessons of perspectival
space that had been developed in Western art since the Renaissance. He
expressed his distaste for the corruption he saw in contemporary Western
civilization in the carved and painted wood relief Be in Love and You
WillBe Happy (1889), in which a figure in the upper left, crouching to
hide her body, was meant to represent Paris as, in his words, a “rotten
Babylon.” As such works suggest, Gauguin began to long for a more
removed environment in which to work. After considering and rejecting
northern Vietnam and Madagascar, he applied for a grant from the French
government to travel to Tahiti.
Tahiti
Gauguin arrived in Papeete in June 1891. He came with a romantic image
of Tahiti as an untouched paradise, derived in part from Pierre Loti's
novel Le Mariage de Loti (1880). Disappointed by the extent to which
French colonization had actually corrupted Tahiti, he attempted to
immerse himself in what he believed were the authentic aspects of the
culture. He employed Tahitian titles, such as Fatata te miti (1892;
“Near the Sea”) and Manao tupapau (1892; “The Spirit of the Dead
Watching”), used Oceanic iconography, and portrayed idyllic landscapes
and suggestive spiritual settings. In an attempt to further remove
himself from inherited Western conventions, Gauguin emulated Oceanic
traditions in his sculptures and woodcuts from this period, which he
gave a deliberately rough-hewn look.
Gauguin returned to France in July 1893, believing that his new work
would bring him the success that had so long eluded him. More so than
ever, the outspoken artist affected the persona of an exotic outsider,
carrying on a famous affair with a woman known as “Anna the Javanese.”
In 1894 he conceived a plan to publish a book of his impressions of
Tahiti, illustrated with his own woodcuts, titled Noa Noa. This project
and a one-man exhibit at the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel met with little
acceptance, however, and in July 1895 he left France for Tahiti for the
final time.
Before the 1890s Gauguin flattened his imagery with sometimes
unsuccessful results, but throughout that decade his “primitivism”
became less forced. The influences of J.-A.-D. Ingres and Pierre Puvis
de Chavannes led him to create increasingly rounded and modeled forms
and a more sinuous line; as a result, Gauguin's images became more
luxuriant and more naturally poetic as he developed marvelously
orchestrated tonal harmonies. He achieved the consummate expression of
his developing vision in 1897 in his chief Tahitian work, Where Do We
Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897). An enormous
contemplation of life and death told through a series of figures,
beginning with a baby and ending with a shriveled old woman, the work is
surrounded by a dreamlike, poetic aura that is extraordinarily powerful.
Increasingly disgusted with the rising Western influence in the French
colony, Gauguin again sought a more remote environment, this time on the
island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, where he moved in September 1901. He
purchased land there and, with the help of his neighbours, he built a
home that he called “the house of pleasure.” Conceived as a total work
of art decorated with elaborately carved friezes, the house was possibly
inspired by Maori works he had seen in Auckland, New Zealand. By 1902 an
advanced case of syphilis restricted his mobility, and he concentrated
his remaining energy on drawing and writing, especially his memoir,
Avant et après. After a quarrel with French authorities, he considered
moving again, this time to Spain, but his declining health and a pending
lawsuit prohibited any change. He died alone in his “house of pleasure.”
Assessment
Gauguin's influence was immense and varied. His legacy rests partly in
his dramatic decision to reject the materialismof contemporary culture
in favour of a more spiritual, unfettered lifestyle. It also rests in
his tireless experimentation. Scholars have long identified him with a
range of stylistic movements, and the challenge of defining his oeuvre,
particularly the late work, attests to the uniqueness of his vision.
Along with the work of his great contemporaries, Cézanne and van Gogh,
Gauguin's innovations inspired a whole generation of artists. In 1889–90
many of the young followers who had gathered around him at Pont-Aven
utilized Gauguin's ideas to form the Nabis group. The Norwegian painter
Edvard Munch owed much to Gauguin's use of line, and the painters of the
Fauvegroup—Henri Matisse in particular—profited from his use of colour
in their own daring compositions. In Germany, too, Gauguin's influence
was strong in the work of German Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner. Gauguin's use of Oceanic iconography and his stylistic
simplifications greatly affected the young Pablo Picasso, inspiring his
own appreciation of African art and hence the evolution of Cubism. In
this way, through both his stylistic advances and his rejection of
empirical representation in favour of conceptual representation, Gauguin
helped open the door to the development of 20th-century art.
Douglas Cooper
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