Tour: Paul Gauguin
Overview
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Gauguin began collecting works by the impressionists in the 1870s. A successful stockbroker, he studied painting under Pissarro and soon abandoned his middle-class life to be an artist, participating in the impressionists' last four group exhibitions. By the late 1880s, however, impressionism's preoccupation with visual effects no longer satisfied him. Like contemporary symbolist writers, he sought to express interior states rather than surface appearances.
In 1886 Gauguin went to Pont-Aven in Brittany, a rugged land of fervently religious people far from the urban sophistication of Paris. There he forged a new style. He was at the center of a group of avant-garde artists who dedicated themselves to synthétisme, ordering sensory data and simplifying it to its fundamentals. Gauguin's greatest innovation was his use of color, which he employed not for its ability to mimic nature but for its ability to communicate intangibles through its inherent emotive qualities. He applied it in broad flat areas outlined with dark paint, which tended to flatten space and abstract form. This flattening of space and symbolic use of color became influential for early twentieth-century artists.
In Brittany Gauguin had hoped to tap the expressive potential he believed rested in a more rural, even “primitive” culture. Over the next several years he traveled often between Paris and Brittany, spending time also in Panama and Martinique. In 1891 his rejection of European urban values led him to Tahiti, where he expected to find an unspoiled culture, exotic and sensual; instead, he was confronted with a world already transformed by Western missionaries and colonial rule. In large measure Gauguin had to invent the world he sought, not only in paintings but with woodcarvings, graphics, and written works. As he struggled with ways to express the questions of life and death, knowledge and evil that preoccupied him, he interwove the images and mythology of island life with those of the West and other cultures. After a trip to France in 1893 and 1894, Gauguin returned to spend his remaining years, marred by illness and depression, in the South Seas.
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