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Home / How Did Paul Gauguin Use Art to Express His Rejection of Modern Society?

How Did Paul Gauguin Use Art to Express His Rejection of Modern Society?

"I am trying to put into these desolate figures the savagery that I see in them and which is in me too... Dammit, I desire to consult nature equally well but I don't want to leave out what I encounter at that place and what comes into my mind."

one of 6

Paul Gauguin Signature

"Culture is what makes you ill."

2 of half-dozen

Paul Gauguin Signature

"In art, all who take done something other than their predecessors accept merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters."

3 of half-dozen

Paul Gauguin Signature

"There is e'er a heavy need for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated gustatory modality has the largest appetite."

4 of 6

Paul Gauguin Signature

"Don't pigment too much directly from nature. Art is an abstraction. Written report nature and so brood on it and treasure the creation which volition effect, which is the only mode to ascend towards God - to create similar our divine master."

5 of six

Paul Gauguin Signature

"He's physically stronger than we are, and then his passions must also exist much stronger than ours. Then he'southward the father of children, and so he has his wife and his children in Denmark, and at the same time he wants to go right to the other stop of the globe to Martinique. It'southward horrifying, all the vice versa of incompatible desires and needs which that must cause him."

Summary of Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin is one of the most pregnant French artists to be initially schooled in Impressionism, but who broke away from its fascination with the everyday earth to pioneer a new style of painting broadly referred to as Symbolism. As the Impressionist movement was culminating in the late 1880s, Gauguin experimented with new color theories and semi-decorative approaches to painting. He famously worked one summer in an intensely colorful mode alongside Vincent Van Gogh in the south of France, before turning his back entirely on Western guild. He had already abandoned a former life as a stockbroker by the time he began traveling regularly to the due south Pacific in the early on 1890s, where he developed a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a manner strongly influenced by the pop, so-called "primitive" arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. Gauguin'south rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris fine art world for a life apart, in the land of the "Other," has come up to serve as a romantic instance of the artist-as-wandering-mystic.

Accomplishments

  • Later mastering Impressionist methods for depicting the optical feel of nature, Gauguin studied religious communities in rural Brittany and various landscapes in the Caribbean area, while also educating himself in the latest French ideas on the subject of painting and color theory (the latter much influenced by recent scientific report into the various, unstable processes of visual perception). This background contributed to Gauguin's gradual development of a new kind of "constructed" painting, one that functions every bit a symbolic, rather than a merely documentary, or mirror-similar, reflection of reality.
  • Seeking the kind of direct relationship to the natural earth that he witnessed in various communities of French Polynesia and other non-western cultures, Gauguin treated his painting as a philosophical meditation on the ultimate meaning of homo existence, as well as the possibility of religious fulfillment and answers on how to alive closer to nature.
  • Gauguin was 1 of the key participants during the last decades of the nineteenth century in a European cultural movement that has since come to be referred to as Primitivism. The term denotes the Western fascination for less industrially-developed cultures, and the romantic notion that non-Western people might be more genuinely spiritual, or closer in bear upon with elemental forces of the cosmos, than their comparatively "artificial" European and American counterparts.
  • Once he had virtually abandoned his married woman, his four children, and the entire fine art world of Europe, Gauguin's name and work became synonymous, as they remain to this twenty-four hours, with the idea of ultimate artistic freedom, or the consummate liberation of the artistic individual from one'south original cultural moorings.

Biography of Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin Photo

"Civilization is what makes you sick." he said. An ordinary life was not for Gauguin - he gave it all up to be an artist, an innovator, and the searcher of the pure and the fundamental.

Of import Art past Paul Gauguin

Progression of Fine art

Still-Life with Fruit and Lemons (c. 1880)

c. 1880

However-Life with Fruit and Lemons

Composed while Gauguin was still working total time as a stockbroker and painting was picayune more than a hobby to him, this still-life reveals the artist's natural technical skill with castor and canvas. The subject matter is as well standard Impressionist fare, and is a clear indicator of Gauguin'southward early influencers, which included Monet, Pissarro and Renoir. Gauguin's rendering of the tablecloth in particular also shows the strong influence of Cézanne, whose ain notwithstanding lifes used similar effects of outline and shading.

Oil on canvass - Museum Langmatt, Baden, Switzerland

Four Breton Girls (1886)

1886

Four Breton Girls

Different others who painted rural French subjects in the 1880s, Gauguin chose to draw iv Breton girls in a field in no simple documentary, or realist manner. Much of the landscape visible in this piece of work suggests Gauguin'due south roots in Impressionism and its attendant ideal to capture the visual dalliance of a mural on the artist's eye, or retina. But Gauguin pushes that contempo heritage to new purposes, placing the girls in dance-similar formation; emphasizing the massive flow of their dresses; creating profiles and silhouettes of portraits and figures suggesting newspaper dolls...these and other artistic manipulations of the subject brainstorm to serve a symbolic purpose, suggesting that deeper meanings are hidden behind the superficial appearances of reality. In this "synthetic" work, Gauguin thus fuses elements of visual accuracy with distortions of pattern and limerick that speak of the girls' mystical wedlock with nature; indeed, they collectively assume the formation of a grove of botanical specimens, a lively school of fishes, or a flock of birds in an unseen, overhead canopy. Faces, figures, habiliment, and mural each assume equal importance in this democratic arena, in which girls interlock their limbs every bit effortlessly as if they had originally grown that way.

Oil on canvas - Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Federal republic of germany

Self-Portrait 'Les Miserables' (1888)

1888

Self-Portrait 'Les Miserables'

Just prior to Gauguin's departure for Arles in tardily 1888, Gauguin and the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh sent each other examples of their respective work, including a number of self-portraits. This composition by Gauguin was included among the exchanges. In this work, Gauguin includes a likeness, in full contour, of the fictional character Jean Valjean, the morally upright but perpetually socially persecuted hero of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (1862). Sporting a solemn look, tousled hair, and tired eyes, Gauguin clearly intends to draw a parallel between himself and Valjean, whose little offense of the by (he once stole a loaf of staff of life) forever brands him a criminal, no affair of his subsequent virtues. Van Gogh later recalled being deeply impressed by Gauguin's exceptionally bold applications of colour.

Oil on canvas - The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Vision After the Sermon (Jacob's Fight with the Angel) (1888)

1888

Vision Afterwards the Sermon (Jacob's Fight with the Affections)

Vision after the Sermon represents a significant departure from the subject matter of Impressionism, namely the city or rural landscape, which was still quite prevalent in Europe and the United states of america during the terminal ii decades of the 19th century. Instead of choosing to pigment pastoral landscape or urban entertainments, Gauguin depicted a rural Biblical scene of praying women envisioning Jacob wrestling with an angel. The conclusion to paint a religious subject was reminiscent of the Renaissance tradition, yet Gauguin rendered his subject field in a incomparably modern style derived in role from Japanese prints, his own experiments in ceramics, stained-drinking glass window methods, and other popular and "high art" traditions, finally emphasizing assuming outlines and flat areas of color.

Oil on sheet - National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

The Yellow Christ (1889)

1889

The Yellowish Christ

The Xanthous Christ is a strong example of both Cloisonnism (a manner characterized by dark contours and bright areas of color separated by assuming outlines) and Symbolism (in which subject matter is arcadian or romanticized in some fashion). The painting's predominant imagery, the crucified Christ, is evident, only Gauguin places the scene in the north of France during the peak flavour of Autumn leaf, indeed as women in nineteenth-century garb gather at the foot of the cross. Information technology remains for the viewer to decide whether the vision is conjured in the minds of the pious or physically manifest in the contemporary mural.

Oil on canvas - The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch) (1892)

1892

Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Spotter)

One of Gauguin's most famous works, Manao Tupapau is an fantabulous example of how Gauguin relished combining the ordinary with suggestions of the boggling in a single sheet, thus leaving all concluding interpretation open to fence. As he relates in a flow diary, the actual scenario was inspired by his return home belatedly one dark and finding his wife, depicted here naked in the tropical heat, suddenly startled by his strike of a friction match in the all-enveloping darkness. Gauguin captures the luminous, unreal wait of the sub-equatorial interior, here decorated by floral textiles, or batiks, along with other bawdy materials, all suddenly illuminated by a momentary chemical combustion. At the same time, Gauguin introduces a ghostly depiction of a "watching" female spirit, seemingly harmless, at the human foot of the bed, a directly reference to a local sociology describing how such spirits roam the night and forever share the world of the living.

This aforementioned painting too illustrates well how Gauguin remained forever a child of the xixthursday century, while nonetheless operation as a bellwether, or buoy, to a younger generation. Most of his work remained rooted in the natural world around him, a legacy of his roots in Impressionism. Simply in some instances, Guaguin even speaks to the work of a former chief, such as in this work, which for many eyes continues a precedent of the everyday, un-idealized nude set past Édouard Manet'southward Olympia (1863). Yet Gauguin'southward work finally suggests, like that of his even more Symbolist contemporaries Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau (both were more closely aligned than Gauguin with French Symbolist poetry of the day), that underneath the world of "rock solid" appearances lies a parallel realm of eternal mystery, spiritual import, and poetic proffer.

Oil on canvas - The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897)

1897

Where Do We Come From? What Are Nosotros? Where Are Nosotros Going?

Gauguin'south late-century magnum opus, painted in Tahiti, communicates a story in 3 stages from right to left, each phase corresponding to a question in the painting'southward title, which Gauguin inscribed, notably without question marks, in the upper left corner. The first stage of life, on the far correct, is that of childhood; the second phase of immature adulthood; the last stage of life's impending closure, hither found at the far left, where, co-ordinate to the artist, "an sometime woman budgeted death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts." Unlike earlier attempts past Gauguin, this g composition, derived partly from a long tradition of "phase-of-life" painting in Western societies, is not explicitly religious but, rather, more personal and obscurely spiritual. This is much in keeping with Gauguin's late-in-life retreat from European order into a culture native to what was then French Polynesia.

In employing such an evocative, yet oblique title, Gauguin alludes to his own increasingly philosophical and mystical tendencies of his mature years. He had e'er been linked by his contemporaries with a Symbolist motility in painting that was closely allied to French poetry of the 1880s and 90s, but rarely did he, himself, attach overtly philosophical or literary references to his canvases. In Where Practice We Come From?, then, Gauguin is apparently looking back on a life spent largely apart from his own social and geographic wellsprings, and possibly seeking mental, spiritual, and physical grounding in a earth he consciously elected to serve equally his "alternative reality."

Oil on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Two Tahitian Women (1899)

1899

Ii Tahitian Women

Equally Gauguin's time in Tahiti was coming to a close, he departed from his usual Symbolist style in social club to paint portraits of Tahitian women, whose beauty, form, and lack of shame at their partial nudity (decidedly unlike many 19th-century European women's regard of the naked body) at in one case fascinated, attracted, and inspired him. This double portrait is typical of Gauguin'south later piece of work, much of which reflected the artist'southward deep love of nature. Equally learned from the benefit of retrospect, information technology should perchance be noted that Gauguin's painterly vision of the islands was, in large measure, a romantic one, the identify and its people in plow exoticized, sexualized, and otherwise exaggerated by a painter in search of a viable culling to what he perceived to exist Western society'south own cultural shortcomings.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Paul Gauguin

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Useful Resource on Paul Gauguin

manufactures

  • Gauguin: Maker of Myth Our Option

    Past Laura Cumming / The Observer / October three, 2010

  • Gauguin Uncovered

    Past Michael Glover / The Independent / September 28, 2010

  • Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: De Young's post-Impressionist follow-up defies packaging, giving Van Gogh a minor role

    Past Kenneth Baker / SFGate.com / September 24, 2010

  • Art Review; Gauguin's Paradise: Only Part Tahitian And All a Fantasy

    Past Kingdom of the netherlands Cotter / The New York Times / March five, 2004

  • The Colors of Paradise As Imagined by Gauguin Our Pick

    By Alan Riding / The New York Times / October 14, 2003

  • A New York Bouquet of Gauguin

    By Kingdom of the netherlands Cotter / The New York Times / June 21, 2002

  • A Testify Equal to an Artist Larger than Life

    By John Russell / The New York Times / May 8, 1988

  • Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism Our Option

    By Abigail Solomon-Godeau / Art in America / July 1989

  • Paul Gauguin and the Complexity of the Primitivist Gaze Our Option

    By Ruud Welten / Journal of Art Historiography / June 2015

Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

"Paul Gauguin Artist Overview and Analysis". [Cyberspace]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf
Edited and published past The Fine art Story Contributors
Available from:
First published on 01 December 2010. Updated and modified regularly
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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/gauguin-paul/