Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848 – May 9, 1903) was a leading Post-Impressionist artist. Best known as a painter, his bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of Modern Art, while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

Although he had a wife and five children, Gaugin became increasingly focused on his art, associating with such Parisian artists as Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne. Suffering from bouts of depression, Gaugin became enamored of the mystic symbolism and vigor in Asian and African art.

Life and Work

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, France to journalist Clovis Gauguin and half-Peruvian Aline Maria Chazal, the daughter of a socialist leader. In 1851, the family left Paris for Peru motivated by the political climate of the period. Clovis died on the voyage, leaving three-year old Paul, his mother, and his sister to fend for themselves. They lived for four years in Lima, Peru with Paul's uncle and his family. The imagery of Peru would later influence Paul in his art.

At the age of seven, Paul and his family returned to France to live to live with his grandfather in Orleans. He soon learned French and excelled in his studies. At seventeen, Gauguin signed on as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine to fulfill his required military service. Three years later, he joined the navy where he stayed for two years. In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris where he secured a job as a stockbroker. In 1873, he married a Danish woman Mette Sophie Gad. Over the next 10 years, they would have five kids.

Gauguin had been interested in art since his childhood. In his free time, he began painting and would also frequent galleries and purchase many of the new art coming out in Paris. Gauguin formed a friendship with artist Camille Pissarro, who introduced him to various artists through his connections. As he progressed in his art, Gauguin rented a studio, and showed paintings in Impressionist exhibitions held in 1881 and 1882. Over two summer vacations, he painted with Pissarro and occasionally Paul Cézanne.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
1897, oil on canvas
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA

By 1884, Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he unsuccessfully pursued a business career. Driven to paint full-time, he returned to Paris in 1885, leaving his family in Denmark. Without adequate subsistence, his wife (Mette Sophie Gadd) and their five children returned to her family. Gauguin outlived two of his children.

Like his friend Vincent Van Gogh, with whom he spent nine weeks painting in Arles, Paul Gauguin experienced bouts of depression and at one time attempted suicide. Disappointed with Impressionism, he felt that traditional European painting had become too imitative and lacked symbolic depth. By contrast, the art of Africa and Asia seemed to him full of mystic symbolism and vigor. There was a vogue in Europe at the time for the art of other cultures, especially that of Japan (Japonisme). He was invited to participate in the 1889 exhibition organized by Les XX.

The Yellow Christ (Le Christ jaune)
1889, oil on canvas. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA

Under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, Gauguin evolved towards Cloisonnism, a style given its name by the critic Édouard Dujardin in response to Emile Bernard's cloisonne-enamelling technique. Gauguin was very appreciative of Bernard's art and of his daring with the employment of a style which suited Gauguin in his quest to express the essence of the objects in his art. In The Yellow Christ (1889), often cited as a quintessential Cloisonnist work, the image was reduced to areas of pure color separated by heavy black outlines. In such works, Gauguin paid little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of color—thus dispensing with the two most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting. His painting later evolved towards "synthetism" in which neither form nor color predominate but each has an equal role.

In 1891, Gauguin, frustrated by lack of recognition at home and financially destitute, sailed to the tropics to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional." (Before this he had made several attempts to find a tropical paradise where he could "live on fish and fruit" and paint in his increasingly primitive style, including short stays in Martinique and as a worker on the Panama Canal). Living in Mataiea Village in Tahiti, he painted "Fatata te Miti" ("By the Sea"), "La Orana Maria" (Ave Maria), and other depictions of Tahitian life. He moved to Punaauia in 1897, where he created the masterpiece painting "Where Do We Come From", and then lived the rest of his life in the Marquesas Islands, returning to France only once.

His works of that period are full of quasi-religious symbolism and an exoticized view of the inhabitants of Polynesia, where he clashed often with the colonial authorities and the Catholic Church. During this period, he also wrote the book Avant et Après ("Before and After"), a fragmented collection of observations about life in Polynesia, memories from his life, and comments on literature and paintings. In 1903, due to a problem with the church and the government, he was sentenced to three months in prison and fined. At the time, he was being supported by an art dealer.

In 1903 at age 54, Gaugin died of syphilis before he could start the prison sentence. His body had been weakened by alcoholism and a dissipated life style. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery (Cimetière Calvaire), Atuona, Hiva ‘Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.

Quotations

Quotations by Gauguin

• In order to do something new we must go back to the source, to humanity in its infancy.

• I have tried to make everything breathe in this painting: belief, passive suffering, religious and primitive style, and the great nature with its scream.

• How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.

• To me, barbarism is a rejuvenation.

• Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

• I shut my eyes in order to see.

• Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

• Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

• How long have I been here? Hence, foreword, for I shall not know. For I have been traveling for too long. My bones too weary to remember my age. Hence, how long have I been here? Thou shalt never know.

Quotations about Gauguin

• He put so much mystery in so much brightness. (Mallarme)

• Gauguin's paintings always seemed to me cruel, metallic, and lacking in general emotion. He is always absent from his own work. Everything is there except the painter himself. (Vlaminck)

• For Europeans the romantic strangeness and eroticism of his paintings of the islanders, the festivities with their unknown symbolism, are inherently attractive, and this has tended to obscure Gauguin's real contribution. The quality of his art does not reside in revelations of another culture but in the aesthetic position he arrived at. (Trewin Copplestone)

• Portentous allegories about the destiny of mankind. (John Russell)

• The popular fancy that Gauguin 'discovered himself' as a painter in Tahiti is quite wrong. All the components of his work - the flat patterns of color, the wreathing outlines, the desire to make symbolic statements about fate and emotion, the interest in 'primitive' art, and the thought that color could function as a language - were assembled in France before 1891. (Robert Hughes)

File:Ta matete.jpg

We Shall Not Go to the Market Today (Ta Matete)
1892, oil on canvas

Legacy

The vogue for Gauguin's work started soon after his death. Many of his later paintings were acquired by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. A substantial part of his collection is displayed in the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage. Gauguin paintings are rarely offered for sale; their price may be as high as $39.2 million.

Gauguin influenced many other painters, but one especially notable connection is his imparting to Arthur Frank Mathews the use of an intense color palette. Mathews, who Gauguin in the late 1890s while both were at the Academie Julian, took this influence in his founding of the California Arts and Crafts (or California Decorative) movement.

The Japanese-styled Gauguin Museum, opposite the Botanical Gardens of Papeari in Papeari, Tahiti, contains exhibits, documents, photographs, reproductions, and original sketches and block prints of and by Gauguin. In 2003, the Paul Gauguin Cultural Center opened in Atuona in the Marquesas Islands.

Paul Gauguin's life inspired Somerset Maugham to write The Moon and Sixpence.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Barskaya, Anna. Paul Gaugin, Grange Books, 2005. ISBN 978-1840135657
• Dorra, Henri. The Symbolism of Paul Gaugin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity, University of California Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0520241305
• Flux, Paul. Paul Gaugin, Heinemann Library, 2002. ISBN 978-0431092164
• Gaugin, Paul. Gauguin Tahiti, MFA Publications, 2004. ISBN 978-0878466665

External links

• Noa Noa, by Paul Gauguin at sacred-texts.com
• Paul Gauguin's grave site

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