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Historical Artist - Paul Gauguin (1843 - 1903)
Paul Gauguin was a leading Post-Impressionist 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. He was also an influential exponent of wood
engraving and as art forms.
Paul Gauguin worked as a prosperous stockbrocker in Paris and Copenhagen until the financial
crash in 1883. At the age of 35 he abandoned his business career, separated from his family and
took up painting full-time.
Paul Gauguin traveled to Panama and Martinique and in 1888 met Emile Bernard in Brittany. He
passed through an Impressionist phase but became dissatisfied with the limitations of the style
and advanced beyond it. Symbolism was a reaction to Courbet's Realism and came out of an urge to
extend Impressionism by seeking new expressive powers. Paul Gauguin used intense, unnatural
color without any indication of a light source in the scene.
Paul Gauguin left Paris to live among the peasants of Brittany in Western France where he
noticed that religion was still a large part of their lives. He painted pictures about faith The
Vision after the Sermon, 1888 is in a style inspired by folk art and medieval stained glass. By
now modeling and perspective had given way to fleet, simplified shapes outlined heavily in black
with unnatural, brilliant colors. Two years after moving to the countryside, he sailed to Tahiti
in 1891 and lived in a native hut. He spent the rest of his life in the South Pacific and his
paintings show the influences of the native art of the South Pacific and other non-European
styles.
Paul Gauguin believed that the renewal of Western art and civilization must come from native
cultures. His art took on its final, simplified form with its intensified color and backgrounds
reduced to rhythmically curved shapes. Paul Gauguin traveled between Britanny, Martinique,
Arles, and Tahiti in his final years, using the native women of the islands as his primary
subject matter. Paul Gauguin died from a terminal illness in the Marquesas Islands, broke and
wanted by the law.
Quotes by Paul Gauguin on Art
" What is sweeter to an artist than to make perceptible in a bunch of roses the tint of
each one? Although two flowers resemble each other, can they ever be leaf by leaf the same?
"
" Seek for harmony and not contrasts, for what accords, not for what clashes. It is the
eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this
stumbling-block. "
" Go from dark to light, from light to dark. The eye seeks to refresh itself through your
work; give it food for enjoyment, not dejection. It is only the sign-painter who should copy the
works of others. If you reproduce what another has done you are nothing but a maker of
patchwork; you blunt your sensibility and immobilize your coloring. Let everything about you
breathe the calm and peace of the soul. "
" Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its
freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow
cool and turn boiling blood into stone. Though it were a ruby, fling it far from you. "
" A critic at my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My
Drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets. The public man - the private man. "
Contemporary French Artists
Art Galleries in France
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