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Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848 - May 9, 1903) was a
leading
Post-Impressionist
oil painting artist. Best known as a 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 oil 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 woodcuts as art forms.
Born in Paris, he was descended from Spanish settlers in South
America and the viceroy of Peru, and spent his early childhood in
Lima. He was, through Alina María Chazal, the grandson of Flora
Tristan, a founder of modern feminism. After his education in
Orléans, France, Gauguin spent six years sailing around the world
in the merchant marines and then in the French navy. Upon his
return to France in 1870, he took a job as a broker's assistant.
His guardian Gustave Arosa, a successful businessman and art
collector, introduced Gauguin to Camille Pissarro in 1875.
A successful stockbroker during week-days, Paul Gauguin spent
holidays painting with Pissarro and
Paul Cézanne.
Although his first efforts were clumsy, he made rapid progress. By
1884 Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he
unsuccessfully pursued a business career. Driven to paint
full-time, he returned to Paris in 1885, leaving his family in
Denmark. Without adequate subsistence, his wife (Mette Sophie Gadd)
and their five children returned to her family. Paul Gauguin
outlived two of his children.
Like his friend
Vincent Van
Gogh, with whom he spent nine weeks painting in Arles, Paul
Gauguin experienced bouts of depression and at one time attempted
suicide. Disappointed with
Impressionism, he
felt that traditional European oil painting had become too
imitative and lacked symbolic depth. By contrast, the art of Africa
and Asia seemed to him full of mystic symbolism and vigour. There
was a vogue in Europe at the time for the art of other cultures,
especially that of Japan (Japonisme). He was invited to participate
in the 1889 exhibition organized by Les XX.
Under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, Gauguin
evolved towards Cloisonnism, a style given its name by the critic
Édouard Dujardin in response to Emile Bernard's cloisonne
enamelling technique. Gauguin was very appreciative of Bernard's
art and of his daring with the employment of a style which suited
Gauguin in his quest to express the essence of the objects in his
art. In The Yellow Christ (1889), often cited as a quintessential
Cloisonnist work, the image was reduced to areas of pure colour
separated by heavy black outlines. In such works Gauguin paid
little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated
subtle gradations of colour?thus dispensing with the two most
characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting. His
painting later evolved towards "Synthetism" in which neither form
nor colour predominate but each has an equal role.
In 1891, Gauguin, frustrated by lack of recognition at home and
financially destitute, sailed to the tropics to escape European
civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional."
(Before this he had made several attempts to find a tropical
paradise where he could 'live on fish and fruit' and paint in his
increasingly primitive style, including short stays in Martinique
and as a worker on the Panama Canal). Living in Mataiea Village in
Tahiti, he painted "Fatata te Miti" ("By the Sea"), "La Orana
Maria" (Ave Maria) and other depictions of Tahitian life. He moved
to Punaauia in 1897, where he created the masterpiece painting
"Where Do We Come From" and then lived the rest of his life in the
Marquesas Islands, returning to France only once. His works of that
period are full of quasi-religious symbolism and an exoticized view
of the inhabitants of Polynesia. In Polynesia he clashed often with
the colonial authorities and with the Catholic Church. During this
period he also wrote the book Avant et Après (before and after),
that is a fragmented collection of observations about life in
Polynesia, memories from his life and comments on literature and
oil paintings.
He died in 1903 and is buried in Calvary Cemetery (Cimetière
Calvaire), Atuona, Hiva ?Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.
Please visit our gallery of
Paul Gauguin Oil Painting Reproduction.
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