Paul Gauguin

French painter

• Born: June 7, 1848
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: May 8, 1903
• Place of death: Atuana, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia

Gauguin epitomized a rejection of nineteenth century realism and its final phase, Impressionism, in favor of a new approach to painting based on primitive art; a simplification of lines, colors, and forms; and a suppression of detail, all intended to enhance the intellectual-emotional impact of a work of art. His program amounted in fact to a deliberate overthrow of the primacy of the optical sensation that had dictated all art since the Renaissance and is therefore the single most revolutionary thought introduced by a nineteenth century artist.

Early Life

An extraordinary childhood and youth preceded the entry of Paul Gauguin (goh-gahn) into the bourgeois world of business and finance. His parents, Clovis and Aline, active in liberal circles, felt forced to flee Paris (after the coup d’état of Napoleon III in 1851) and to seek refuge in Peru, where Aline’s uncle, Don Piot Tristán y Moscoso, who would soon adopt her as his daughter, lived a life of leisure and luxury. Clovis died during the ocean voyage, but Aline, with children Marie and Paul, arrived in Lima to remain there for four years. Although only a small child during his stay in Lima, Gauguin was never to forget that country. Indeed, his persistent longing for the faraway and exotic no doubt had its roots in his rich, unencumbered childhood years in Peru.

Mother and children returned to France in 1855, and Paul spent the next seven years as a solitary, morose, and withdrawn schoolboy who learned “to hate hypocrisy, false virtues, tale-bearing, and to beware of everything that was contrary to my instincts, my heart, and my reason.” In his seventeenth year, he hired on as a seaman on a ship sailing to South America, beginning a career that would keep him at sea for six years, part of that time as an enlisted man in the French navy.

Aline, who died at the age of forty-two in 1865, had appointed a business friend as guardian to her children, and it was through him that Gauguin in 1871 became a stockbroker, sufficiently successful to offer marriage to a Danish woman, Mette Sophie Gad, in 1873. In his financial career, he met Émile Schuffenecker, a Sunday painter who persuaded Gauguin to take up the same hobby; his interest in art, together with a reasonable affluence that enabled him to become an art patron, brought him into contact with Camille Pissarro, the paterfamilias of the Impressionist group, whose influence is readily detected in Gauguin’s early, still-hesitant paintings. In 1883, by now the father of five children, he resigned as a stockbroker to devote all of his energy to the arts.

Life’s Work

Gauguin’s first official entry into the art world took place in 1876, when he exhibited a canvas in the Impressionist style at the annual Parisian Salon. From 1879 until 1886, he showed in the last five exhibits of the Impressionists. Shortly thereafter, with his family settled in Copenhagen, he set out for Central America, working for a time on the construction site of the Panama Canal, then stopping in Martinique, where he produced his first canvas depicting a tropical paradise, a view of the Bay of Saint-Pierre, still in the Impressionist spirit, yet with a color vibrancy that reflects his emotional reaction to the subject.

Back in France in 1888, Gauguin took up residence in Pont-Aven, Brittany. “I love Brittany,” he said in a letter to Schuffenecker. “I find here the wild and the primitive. When my clogs ring out on its granite soil, I hear the low, flat, powerful note I seek in painting.” Joining him in Pont-Aven were Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin, young experimental painters whose ideas were close to Gauguin’s. All three felt moved by the rich colors of medieval enamelwork and cloisonné, and favored reducing visual phenomena to abstract lines and flat colors, a pictorial method clearly employed by Japanese printmakers, whose works were then much in vogue.

Gauguin’s Brittany paintings, such as The Vision After the Sermon (1888), must be seen as an affirmation of these ideas, with its use of receding planes of flat primary colors enclosed by angular, dark lines and dramatized by a drastic perspective. The result is an overall effect far removed from any visual reality. This intense concentration on the visual and emotional totality of the subject rather than on its separate components, the synthetic view, would characterize the majority of Gauguin’s paintings. The landscape and people of French Polynesia, where he spent most of his creative life, tended to mellow his temperament and turn his pictures into vibrantly colorful, sinewy linear, often mysteriously muted paeans to primitive nature.

On his return to Paris from Pont-Aven in the summer of 1888, Gauguin met Vincent van Gogh . During the autumn, he joined van Gogh in Arles in the Midi of France. In spite of turbulent conflicts during the three months they spent together, the Arles experience left its positive impact on both artists, as seen in canvases of closely related subjects produced during their joint outings in the fertile Provençal countryside.

In 1889, during the World’s Fair in Paris, Gauguin and his friends from the artist colony in Pont-Aven arranged a private exhibit of one hundred of their works in an Italian bistro within the fairground, Café Volpini. Hardly taken seriously by the public at that time, the Volpini Exhibit is today considered one of the milestones in nineteenth century art. Although the exhibitors called themselves “Impressionists” and “Synthetists” they had clearly abandoned the gracefully textured, retinally oriented approach of Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Pissarro. Instead, they presented pictures with large patches of contrasting colors separated by dark lines, minimal emphasis on depth and perspective, and, in Gauguin’s case, a steady procession of peasants at their melancholy tasks or in worshipful contemplation.

During his stay in Brittany, and more so after his return to Paris in 1890, Gauguin continually toyed with the idea of settling in a more exotic part of the world, preferably with fellow painters in a new “Barbizon” of primitive nature, but if necessary he would go alone. Prior to his departure for Tahiti in the spring of 1891, his Paris friends—and by now there were many of them, artists, writers, government officials—eased his transition, helping him with an auction of his works, which brought a substantial amount of money, and arranging a farewell banquet presided over by Stéphane Mallarmé, the avant-garde poet.

During the two years of his first stay in Tahiti, Gauguin produced some of his most stunning canvases depicting the landscape, the people, and a civilization of beauty and innocence in the process of vanishing. A Tahitian landscape with a village surrounded by wildly exotic, swirling trees, backed up by mountains in sharp, receding planes and surmounted by white clouds against a cerulean sky, is reminiscent of his landscapes in Brittany, except that the dark, angular lines separating the color surfaces in the Brittany scenes have yielded to softer, more undulant patterns in this new, exotic setting. Similarly, his depiction of people of Tahiti, though in form and color resembling his efforts in Brittany, has something new and mysterious in it, close-up views mostly of women, singly or in clusters, with guarded, secretive mien and in hushed poses of ritual solemnity. “Always this haunting silence,” Gauguin wrote in a letter to his wife. “I understand why these individuals can rest seated for hours and days without saying a word and look at the sky with melancholy.”

Despite Gauguin’s enchantment with the Polynesian ambience, he felt confined and out of touch with the art world. Besides, he was financially destitute, incapable of providing for his daily bread. He decided to return to France and succeeded in finding a lender to advance his travel expenses. During the early fall of 1893, he was back in Paris with his Tahitian paintings, preparing for an exhibit and hoping for wide acceptance. His display of more than forty canvases generated few sales, and even his presentation to the French state of the magnificent Ia Orana Maria (1891; we hail thee, Mary) was rejected. A few close supporters, Edgar Degas and Mallarmé among them, helped Gauguin—Degas by making a purchase and Mallarmé by praising the Tahitian works.

Such signs of approval, however, were scarce, and Gauguin soon regretted his return to the insensitive, overcivilized world he had once abandoned. An unfortunate altercation during a visit to Brittany left him hospitalized and maimed, and an encounter with a Parisian prostitute resulted in syphilis. All of this resulted in a life of creative stagnation and physical agony, and as soon as he was able to move about he began to prepare for his second and final journey to Tahiti.

A major sale of Gauguin’s paintings and belongings was arranged to finance the venture, and, planning to issue a catalog of the items on view, he asked a new acquaintance, the dramatist August Strindberg, to write a preface. In a long and detailed letter, Strindberg enumerated the reasons for his refusal to do so.

It appears that Strindberg understood Gauguin’s creative impulse, sensed its depth. Gauguin, detecting a positive note in Strindberg’s rejection, printed the letter as the preface. The sale, however, was a failure. In fact, in a letter to his wife, he records a detailed account showing a net loss of 464 francs. Nevertheless, with the assistance of several picture dealers and a guarantee that they would market his subsequent works, he was able to raise a sum sufficient for the voyage and his immediate subsequent needs; he left France in June of 1895, never to return.

In his second Tahitian period, Gauguin produced one hundred paintings, more than four hundred prints, and numerous pieces of sculpted wood. In addition, he wrote hundreds of letters, an intriguing journal, and reworked text and illustrations in his Noa Noa (English translation, 1919), published in France in 1900.

During Gauguin’s first stay, his works, like his visual reactions to life in Brittany, had reflected the primal quality of the Tahitian landscape, the natural innocence of a people still close to the beginnings of time, and the legendary quality of Tahitian spirituality. Thus, desiring to share his experiences with the art audience at home, he had attempted to serve as a messenger from a remote world and a civilization still unspoiled yet inevitably doomed.

In Gauguin’s second stay, he found these subtle links with the past already severely eroded through Western colonization. His works from this final period are therefore more introspective and deliberately ponderous. Typical of this approach is his monumental masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-1898), “designed to embody a total philosophy of life, civilization, and sexuality.” As in early Renaissance altar panels, it is a work whose imagery transcends time and place, a composite of ritual episodes moving from the outer perimeter toward a central, all-embracing Godhead. A significant and influential aspect of his last Tahitian stay is found in a series of tropical woodblocks carved and hand printed in 1898-1899. Viewed in sequence as in a frieze, they seem to constitute a summary of his visual and spiritual experiences in the land and society he had adopted.

Gauguin never denied his admiration for certain other artists of the nineteenth century, and among his last works are paintings reminiscent of Eugène Delacroix’s epochal depictions of women of Morocco, nudes and horses clearly indebted to Degas, and still-lifes of fruits and flowers echoing those of van Gogh painted in Arles.

Still on his easel at the time of his death was his final work, Breton Village Covered by Snow . Painted in feverish, death-conscious agony, it is a profoundly melancholy dream evoking the beginnings of a career devoted to a futile search for an earthly paradise.

Significance

Paul Gauguin was the first nineteenth century artist to move away from naturalism to a world of visual dreams inspired by the primitive magic of the medieval past and intensified by a direct exposure to societies less marred by Western civilization. From childhood experiences in Latin America and a turbulent youth at sea and in the Caribbean, he was irresistibly drawn to the untamed and the exotic, finding part of it in a Brittany still steeped in its past and more in the faraway islands of the South Seas. With their purity of line and surface, vibrancy of color, and subtle evocation of the human condition in a tenuous state of innocence, his paintings opened up entirely new vistas in the world of the arts, through the depiction of rare and exotic subject matter. They also paved the way for equally bold strivings among artists of future generations.

I wanted to establish the right to dare everything. My capacity was not capable of great results, but the machine is none the less launched. The public owes me nothing… but the painters who today profit from this liberty owe me something.

Bibliography

Andersen, Wayne. Gauguin’s Paradise Lost. New York: Viking Press, 1979. An American scholar’s attempt at reaching an understanding of the artist’s psychological development through a parallel probing of his works and writings.

Brettell, Richard, et al. The Art of Paul Gauguin. Boston: New York Graphic Society Books, 1988. This catalog, accompanying an exhibit jointly sponsored by the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago, is so comprehensive, so authoritative, and so richly illustrated that it supersedes all previous efforts in that direction. Drawn from collections in North and South America, Europe, and Asia, the exhibit included 280 separate items, nearly all described in terse but excellent articles.

Druick, Douglas W., et al. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South. Chicago: Thames and Hudson and Art Institute of Chicago, 2001. Catalog accompanying an exhibit of the two artists’ work that was displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Van Gogh Museum in 2001-2002. Contains 510 reproductions of the artists’ works, 300 of which are in a sensuously beautiful color. Also contains essays examining the artwork, character analysis of the two men, some of their correspondence to each other, and a description of their inspiring yet antagonistic relationship.

Eisenman, Stephen. Gauguin’s Skirt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Gauguin traveled to Tahiti in search of a tropical paradise, but instead found a French colony divided by race, sex, and class. Eisenman analyzes the artworks Gauguin created in Tahiti, describing how they represented the complexities of the island’s social conditions.

Gauguin, Paul. The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin. Translated by Van Wyck Brooks, with a preface by Émile Gauguin. London: Heinemann, 1923. The original manuscript, finished in 1903, has the title Avant et après and was published in facsimile editions in 1913 and 1953. The English edition was endorsed by Gauguin’s son, who in his preface says, “These journals are the spontaneous expression of the same free, fearless, sensitive spirit that speaks in the canvases of Paul Gauguin.”

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Paul Gauguin: Letters to His Wife and Friends. Edited by Maurice Mallinge. Translated by Henry F. Stenning. Cleveland: World, 1949. This collection sheds much light on the strained relationship between Gauguin and his estranged wife, Mette Gad, who at the time of Gauguin’s first stay in Brittany returned with their five children to her childhood home in Copenhagen. Characterized by Gauguin’s continual quest for understanding and her pervasive bitterness, the letters also contain much information on his creative activities.

Gauguin, Pola. My Father, Paul Gauguin. Translated by Arthur G. Chater. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937. Written by Gauguin’s youngest son, an artist and art historian who lived in Norway, this biography draws much of its information from family letters and documents whose content up to that time had been unavailable to the public. Remarkably dispassionate in its narration, it tends to counterbalance the relentless bitterness of Gauguin’s wife.

Gray, Christopher. Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963. Gray’s volume spans Gauguin’s entire career and shows how his early efforts in ceramics foreshadowed the three-dimensional works produced in Tahiti. An appendix twice the size of the principal text contains a detailed catalog of the artist’s known works in these media.

Rewald, John. Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin. 3d rev. ed. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979. This magnificently illustrated work by a principal authority in late nineteenth century European painting presents the total fabric of the post-Impressionist movement in which van Gogh and Gauguin occupied center stage, with many others playing supporting roles.

Sweetman, David. Paul Gauguin: A Complete Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. In the best Gauguin biography yet published, Sweetman unearths facts and presents them in an original way. Attention is paid to the importance of Gauguin’s early life in Peru and its effect on his self-image, his relationships with unconventional women, and more.