Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin (born June 7, 1848, Paris, France—died May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia) was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who sought to achieve a “primitive” expression of spiritual and emotional states in his work. The artist, whose work has been categorized as Post-Impressionist, Synthetist, and Symbolist, is particularly well known for his creative relationship with Vincent van Gogh as well as for his self-imposed exile in Tahiti, French Polynesia. His artistic experiments influenced many avant-garde developments in the early 20th century.

Beginnings

Gauguin’s father was a journalist from Orléans, and his mother was of French and Peruvian descent. After Napoleon III’s coup d’état in 1848, Gauguin’s father took the family to Peru, where he planned to establish a newspaper, but he died en route, and Gauguin’s mother stayed with her children on the Lima estate of her uncle for four years before taking the family back to France. At age 17 Gauguin enlisted in the merchant marine, and for six years he sailed around the world. His mother died in 1867, leaving legal guardianship of the family with the businessman Gustave Arosa, who, upon Gauguin’s release from the merchant marine, secured a position for him as a stockbroker and introduced him to the Danish woman Mette Sophie Gad, whom Gauguin married in 1873. Gauguin’s artistic leanings were first aroused by Arosa, who had a collection that included the work of Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and Jean-François Millet, and by a fellow stockbroker, Émile Schuffenecker, with whom he started painting. Gauguin soon began to receive artistic instruction and to frequent a studio where he could draw from a model. In 1876 his Landscape at Viroflay was accepted for the official annual exhibition in France, the Salon. He developed a taste for the contemporary avant-garde movement of Impressionism, and between 1876 and 1881 he assembled a personal collection of paintings by such figures as Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Johan Barthold Jongkind.

Gauguin met Pissarro about 1874 and began to study under the supportive older artist, at first struggling to master the techniques of painting and drawing. In 1880 he was included in the fifth Impressionist exhibition, an invitation that was repeated in 1881 and 1882. He spent holidays painting with Pissarro and Cézanne and began to make visible progress. During this period he also entered a social circle of avant-garde artists that included Manet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Gauguin lost his job when the French stock market crashed in 1882, an occurrence he saw as a positive development, because it would allow him to “paint every day.” In an attempt to support his family, he unsuccessfully sought employment with art dealers, while continuing to travel to the countryside to paint with Pissarro. In 1884 he moved his family to Rouen, France, and took odd jobs, but by the end of the year, the family moved to Denmark, seeking the support of Mette’s family. Without employment, Gauguin was free to pursue his art, but he faced the disapproval of his wife’s family; in mid-1885 he returned with his eldest son to Paris.

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Gauguin participated in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, showing 19 paintings and a carved wood relief. His own works won little attention, however, being overshadowed by Georges Seurat’s enormous A Sunday on La Grand Jatte—1884 (1884–86). Frustrated and destitute, Gauguin began to make ceramic vessels for sale, and that summer he made a trip to Pont-Aven in the Brittany region of France, seeking a simpler and more frugal life. After a harsh winter there, Gauguin sailed to the French Caribbean island of Martinique with the painter Charles Laval in April 1887, intending to “live like a savage.” His works painted on Martinique, such as Tropical Vegetation (1887) and By the Sea (1887), reveal his increasing departure from Impressionist technique during this period, as he was now working with blocks of color in large, unmodulated planes. Upon his return to France late in 1887, Gauguin affected an exotic identity, pointing to his Peruvian ancestry as an element of “primitivism” in his own nature and artistic vision.

Early maturity

In the summer of 1888 Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven, searching for what he called “a reasoned and frank return to the beginning, that is to say, to primitive art.” He was joined there by young painters, including Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier, who also were seeking a more direct expression in their painting. Gauguin achieved a step towards this ideal in the seminal Vision of the Sermon (1888), a painting in which he used broad planes of color, clear outlines, and simplified forms. Gauguin coined the term “Synthetism” to describe his style during this period, referring to the synthesis of his paintings’ formal elements with the idea or emotion they conveyed.

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Gauguin acted as a mentor to many of the artists who assembled in Pont-Aven, urging them to rely more upon feeling than upon the direct observation associated with Impressionism. Indeed, he advised: “Don’t copy too much after nature. Art is an abstraction: extract from nature while dreaming before it and concentrate more on creating than on the final result.” Gauguin and the artists around him, who became known as the Pont-Aven school, began to be decorative in the overall compositions and harmonies of their paintings. Gauguin no longer used line and color to replicate an actual scene, as he had as an Impressionist, but rather explored the capacity of those pictorial means to induce a particular feeling in the viewer.

Late in October 1888 Gauguin traveled to Arles, in the south of France, to stay with Vincent van Gogh (partly as a favor to van Gogh’s brother, Theo, an art dealer who had agreed to represent him). Early that year, van Gogh had moved to Arles, hoping to found the “Studio of the South,” where like-minded painters would gather to create a new, personally expressive art. However, as soon as Gauguin arrived, the two volatile artists often engaged in heated exchanges about art’s purpose. The style of the two men’s work from this period has been classified as Post-Impressionist because it shows an individual, personal development of Impressionism’s use of color, brushstroke, and non-traditional subject matter. For example, Gauguin’s Old Women of Arles (Mistral) (1888) portrays a group of women moving through a flattened, arbitrarily conceived landscape in a solemn procession. As in much of his work from this period, Gauguin applied thick paint in a heavy manner to raw canvas; in his rough technique and in the subject matter of religious peasants, the artist found something approaching his burgeoning “primitive” ideal.

Gauguin had planned to remain in Arles through the spring, but his relationship with van Gogh grew even more tumultuous. After what Gauguin claimed was an attempt to attack him with a razor, van Gogh reportedly mutilated his own left ear. Gauguin then left for Paris after a stay of only two months. Although this version of the story has been accepted for more than 100 years, art historians Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans examined contemporary police records and the artists’ correspondence and concluded, in Van Gogh’s Ohr: Paul Gauguin und der Pakt des Schweigens (2008; “Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence”), that it was actually Gauguin who mutilated van Gogh’s ear and that he used a sword, not a razor. They concluded that the artists had agreed to give the self-mutilation version of the story to protect Gauguin.

For the next several years, Gauguin alternated between living in Paris and Brittany. In Paris he became acquainted with the avant-garde literary circles of Symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. These poets, who advocated abandoning traditional forms in order to embody inner emotional and spiritual life, saw their equivalent in the visual arts in the work of Gauguin. In a famous essay in the Mercure de France in 1891, the critic Albert Aurier declared Gauguin to be the leader of a group of Symbolist artists, and he defined his work as “ideational, symbolic, synthetic, subjective, and decorative.”

After finding Pont-Aven spoiled by tourists, Gauguin relocated to the remote village of Le Pouldu. There, in a heightened pursuit of raw expression, he began to focus upon the ancient monuments of medieval religion, crosses, and calvaries, incorporating their simple, rigid forms into his compositions, as seen in The Yellow Christ (1889). While such works built upon the lessons of color and brushstroke he learned from French Impressionism, they rejected the lessons of perspectival space that had been developed in Western art since the Renaissance. He expressed his distaste for the corruption he saw in contemporary Western civilization in the carved and painted wood relief Be in Love and You Will Be Happy (1889), in which a figure in the upper left, crouching to hide her body, was meant to represent Paris as, in his words, a “rotten Babylon.” As such works suggest, Gauguin began to long for a more removed environment in which to work. After considering and rejecting northern Vietnam and Madagascar, he applied for a grant from the French government to travel to Tahiti.