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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. Though less well known today, he was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.[1] [2]
Life
Born in Paris, he was descended from Spanish settlers in South America and the viceroy of Peru, and spent his early childhood in Lima. He was the grandson of Flora Tristan, a founder of modern feminism. After his education in Orléans, France, Gauguin spent six years sailing around the world in the merchant marines and then in the French navy. Upon his return to France in 1870, he took a job as a broker's assistant. His guardian Gustave Arosa, a successful businessman and art collector, introduced Gauguin to Camille Pissarro in 1875.
A successful stockbroker during week-days, Gauguin spent holidays painting with Pisarro and Cézanne. Although his first efforts were clumsy, he made visible progress. 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 vigour. 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.
Under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, Gauguin evolved towards Cloisonnism, a style the critic Édouard Dujardin had baptized Emile Bernard's cloisonne enamelling style with. Gaugin was very appreciative of Bernard's art and of his daring with the employment of a style which suited Gaugin in his quest for the expression of the essence of the objects in his art stripped of unnecessary aesthetic. In The Yellow Christ (1889), often cited as a quintessential Cloisonnist work, the image was reduced to areas of pure colour separated by heavy black outlines. In such works Gauguin paid little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of colour — he dispensed with the two most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting. His painting later evolved towards "Synthetism" in which neither form nor colour 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). He remained in Tahiti and later in the Marquesas Islands for most of the rest of his life, 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. In Polynesia he clashed often with the colonial authorities and with the Catholic Church. During this period he also wrote the book Avant et Après (before and after), that is a fragmented collection of observations about life in Polynesia, memories from his life and comments to literature and paintings.
He died in 1903 and 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.
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 colour, the wreathing outlines, the desire to make symbolic statements about fate and emotion, the interest in 'primitive' art, and the thought that colour could function as a language - were assembled in France before 1891. (Robert Hughes)
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