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 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.
Separating from his wife and five children and suffering from bouts of depression, Gaugin became increasingly focused on his art, associating with such Parisian artists as Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne. The mystic symbolism and vigor he found in Asian and African art, along with his interest in cloisonne-enamelling, influenced his style. Destitute and seeking recognition, Gaugin left his native France, eventually settling in Polynesia. Full of quasi-religious symbolism and an exoticized view of the islanders, his intensely colorful paintings today command tens of millions of dollars among art collectors.
Life and Work
Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, France to journalist Clovis Gauguin and Aline Maria Chazal, the half-Peruvian daughter of a socialist activist. 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 Gaugin 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 17, 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 children.
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, including some 17,000 francs on works by Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir, and Guillaumin. He formed a friendship with Camille Pissarro, who introduced him to various artists through his connections.
In 1874, he saw the first Impressionist exhibition, which completely entranced him and confirmed his desire to become a painter. 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 with Paul Cézanne.
Pissarro took a special interest in Gaugin's attempts at painting, emphasizing that he should "look for the nature that suits your temperament," and in 1876, Gauguin had a landscape in the style of Pissarro accepted at the Salon de Paris. In the meantime, Pissarro had introduced him to Cézanne, for whose works he conceived a great respect—so much so that the older man began to fear that he would steal his "sensations." All three worked together for some time at Pontoise, the studio-residence of the L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, where Pissarro and Gauguin drew pencil sketches of each other.
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 and their five children returned to her family.
Like his friend Vincent Van Gogh, with whom he spent nine weeks painting in Arles, 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. Gauguin was invited to participate in the 1889 exhibition organized by Les XX, a group of 20 Belgian painters, designers, and sculptors, formed in 1883 by the Brussels lawyer, publisher, and entrepreneur Octave Maus.
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-enameling 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.
Gaugin 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) In 1891, frustrated by lack of recognition at home and financially destitute, Gauguin sailed to the tropics to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional." 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 for slander 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
- 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.
- Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
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)
- 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)
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.
ReferencesISBN 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
Notes
External links
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