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Paul Gauguin (1848-1903),
French postimpressionist painter, whose lush color, flat two-dimensional forms,
and subject matter helped form the basis of modern art.
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris into a liberal
middle-class family. After an adventurous early life, including a four-year stay
in Peru with his family and a stint in the French merchant marine, he became a
successful Parisian stockbroker, settling into a comfortable bourgeois existence
with his wife and five children. In 1874, after meeting the artist Camille
Pissarro and viewing the first impressionist exhibition, he became a
collector and amateur painter. He exhibited with the impressionists in 1876,
1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886. In 1883 he gave up his secure existence to devote
himself to painting; his wife and children, without adequate subsistence, were
forced to return to her family. From 1886 to 1891 Gauguin lived mainly in rural
Brittany (except for a trip to Panama and Martinique from 1887 to 1888), where
he was the center of a small group of experimental painters known as the school
of Pont-Aven. Under the influence of the painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin turned
away from impressionism and adapted a less naturalistic style,
which he called synthetism. He found his inspiration in the art of indigenous
peoples, in medieval stained glass, and in Japanese prints; he was introduced to
Japanese prints by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh when they
spent two months together in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888. Gauguin's
new style was characterized by the use of large flat areas of nonnaturalistic
color, as in Yellow Christ (1889, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New
York).
In 1891, ruined and in debt, Gauguin sailed for the South
Seas to escape European civilization and “everything that is artificial and
conventional.” Except for one visit to France from 1893 to 1895, he remained in
the Tropics for the rest of his life, first in Tahiti and later in
the Marquesas Islands. The essential characteristics of his style
changed little in the South Seas; he retained the qualities of expressive color,
denial of perspective, and thick, flat forms. Under the influence of the
tropical setting and Polynesian culture, however, Gauguin's paintings became
more powerful, while the subject matter became more distinctive, the scale
larger, and the compositions more simplified. His subjects ranged from scenes of
ordinary life, such as Tahitian Women, or On the Beach (1891,
Musée d'Orsay, Paris), to brooding scenes of superstitious dread, such as
Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892, Albright-Knox Art Gallery). His
masterpiece was the monumental allegory Where Do We Come From? What Are We?
Where Are We Going? (1897, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), which he painted
shortly before his failed suicide attempt. A modest stipend from a Parisian art
dealer sustained him until his death at Atuona in the Marquesas on May 9,
1903.
Gauguin's bold experiments in coloring led directly to the
20th-century fauvist style in modern art. His
strong modeling influenced the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch and
the later expressionist school. |
