Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903) was a French painter, printmaker, sculptor and ceramicist, and a leading figure of Post-Impressionism. [1] He abandoned a career as a stockbroker for painting and developed a style built on flat areas of non-naturalistic colour and heavy outline, which he called Synthetism. [3] He spent the last decade of his life in French Polynesia, where he produced the Tahitian and Marquesan paintings for which he is best known. [2]
Early life
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848. After the political upheavals of 1848 his family left for Peru, where his mother had relatives, and he spent his early childhood in Lima before returning to Orléans. [1] He attended school there and at seventeen joined the merchant marine, later serving in the French navy and travelling widely.
In 1871 he entered a Paris stockbroking firm and prospered, marrying the Danish Mette-Sophie Gad in 1873 and raising five children. He painted in his spare time, collected Impressionist works, and was encouraged by Camille Pissarro, exhibiting with the Impressionists from 1879. [2]
Turning to painting
The French stock market crash of 1882 ended his financial security, and in 1883 Gauguin resolved to paint full time. [1] The decision brought poverty and the breakdown of his marriage; his family settled in Copenhagen while he returned to France.
He worked in Brittany, where the artists' colony at Pont-Aven and what he regarded as the region's archaic character drew him repeatedly, and in 1887 travelled to Panama and Martinique. With Émile Bernard he developed Synthetism, simplifying forms into flat coloured shapes bounded by dark contours and painting from memory and imagination rather than direct observation. [3] The Vision after the Sermon of 1888, in which a Breton congregation sees Jacob wrestling the angel against a red ground, marks the break with Impressionist naturalism.
In late 1888 he joined Vincent van Gogh at Arles at the latter's invitation. The two painted together for nine weeks in a collaboration that ended in the crisis in which Van Gogh mutilated his own ear; Gauguin left immediately for Paris. [1]
Tahiti and the Marquesas
Seeking a life he believed to be simpler and less corrupted by European civilisation, Gauguin sailed for Tahiti in 1891. [2] He found a colony already substantially changed by French administration and missionary activity, and drew on his own reading and imagination as much as on observation in composing works such as Ia Orana Maria and Spirit of the Dead Watching. He returned to France in 1893, exhibited without commercial success, and sailed back to Polynesia in 1895, never to return to Europe.
In Tahiti he painted Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98), a large frieze-like canvas he intended as a summation of his work. [1] He also produced woodcuts, carvings and the illustrated narrative Noa Noa. In 1901 he moved to Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands, where he quarrelled with the colonial authorities and the church on behalf of the islanders while living in poor health. He died there in May 1903.
Gauguin took several Tahitian and Marquesan girls as young as thirteen or fourteen as companions, a fact documented in his own writings, and later scholarship has examined his work and conduct in the light of colonial power and sexual exploitation. [2]
Legacy
A retrospective in Paris in 1906 brought Gauguin's work to a wide audience and influenced Henri Matisse, the Fauves and Pablo Picasso. [3] His use of colour as an independent expressive means, rather than a description of appearances, is regarded as one of the decisive steps toward twentieth-century painting. [1]
