Symbols, colors and brushstrokes
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism. Toward the end of his life, he spent ten years in French Polynesia, and most of his paintings from this time depict people or landscapes from that region. His works became crucial for Symbolist movement and influence of the cloissonist style paved a way to primitivist art. Apart from his sculptures and paintings Gauguin was an influential figure in wood engraving.
Gauguin was born in the family of the liberal journalist during the time when revolutionary upheavals were raging in Europe. He was growing up in Peru, where his family moved in order to support his father’s career, who died on the way to Peru. During the civil cnoflicts in Peru, Paul’s family had to return back to France, where he started attending school. At the age 14 Gauguin started attending naval school and enlisted the French navy to serve there for two years and returned to Paris, where he started a job of a stockbrocker. Gauguin remained a successful businessman for the next 11 years.
The Mother of an Artist (1889)
He started painting around the time when he began his career as a stockbrocker. He befriended a few impressionists, including Camille Pissaro and frequentÅŸy attended galleries. Gauguin began showing his paintings at the Impressionist exhibitions. After the stock market crashed, couple years later he moved back to Paris from Rouen where he lived with his wife and children to reduce living costs since he dedicated his life fully to painting. At first he produced a very little art. his Baigneuses à Dieppe ("Women Bathing") introduced what was to become a recurring motif, the woman in the waves. He produced a few more pastel paintings up till 1887.
The Market Gardens of Vaugirard (1879)
Winter Landscape (1879)
Gauguin, along with Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Émile Schuffenecker and many others, re-visited Pont-Aven after his travels in Panama and Martinique. The bold use of pure color and Symbolist choice of subject matter distinguish what is now called the Pont-Aven School. He considered that art requires more symbolic depth. At first his decline from the traditional school was shown through the experiments with cloissonism, where he employed unnatural shapes and colors, evolving his style to what has been named Synthetism.
Four Breton Women (1886)
The Yellow Christ (1889)
Gauguin spent some time on Martinique where he produced 11 landscape paintings. Matrtinique made a huge impression on the artist with its nature, rural population and indigenous culture. This trend preserved in his work a years after his visit.
Bord de Mer II (1887)
Gauguin was also known to work with other artists such as Van Gogh and Degas. He had a warm friendship with Van Gogh and even visited him during the latter’s stay in Arlene, where they had a chance to paint together. However their friendship ended abruptly after a conflict, presumably over money that Van Gogh’s brother Theo owed to Gauguin.
The Painter of Sunflowers: Portrait of Vincent van Gogh (1888)
Man in a Red Beret (1888)
In 1891 Gauguin headed to Tahiti in seek an escape from everything artificial and conventional. At the beginning his art failed to succeed. However, when later drawing indigenous people as his models, delineating Polynesian features. A lot of his finest paintings were drawn in Tahiti. There, impressed by the local mythology and symbols, he started employing them in his art. In Tahiti Gauguin had married a 13-year old girl Teha'amana, whom Gauguin called Tehura. She became a subject of many of his paintings such as The Seed of the Areoi and Spirit of the Dead Watching.
Arearea (1892)
The Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892)
In 1893 Gauguin returned to France. There he lost Durand-Ruel’s patronage due to low success of his exhibitions. He was often dressing in Polynesian costume and starting a public affair with a half-Indian half-Malayan girl who became a subject of one of his paintings (Anna the Javanese). As his career was coming to its end, he tried to arrange a fundraiser for his next visit to Tahiti but failed which made him accept charity from his friends. This stay wasn’t as successful as the previous one, however ha managed to produce one of his famous paintings 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?'. Later he moved to Marquesas, where he produced some art, and had married twice.
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897)
In March of 1903 Gauguin was fined and imprisoned for 3 months for trying to campaign against island’s gendarmes. However, due to his weak health and pains he resorted to using morphine which lead to his death in May of the same year.