Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, 1889
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Gauguin sought to portray what could not be seen, to express interior states rather than surface appearances. He was at the center of a group of avant-garde artists who dedicated themselves to what they called synthétisme, ordering and simplifying sensory data to its fundamentals. Color, especially, was used for its inherent emotive qualities to communicate intangibles. Gauguin struggled with ways to express the questions of life and death, knowledge and evil, that preoccupied him.
He was the most influential and powerful artist associated with symbolism, but unlike many other symbolist artists, including Fernand Khnopff, for example, Gauguin avoided literary or narrative content. He "synthesized" his subject -- his idea -- with color and form, uniting them in an alchemical way. "Don't copy nature too literally," Gauguin advised, "Art is abstraction; draw art as you dream in nature's presence, and think more about the act of creation than about the final result."
This enigmatic self-portrait was painted in Brittany, to which Gauguin had retreated before he went to the South Seas, hoping to tap the expressive potential of its rural, fervently religious, and even "primitive" culture. In the six weeks after their arrival in late 1889, Gauguin and his colleague Meyer de Haan had made dozens of ceramic works, woodcarvings, and sculpture. They covered the walls of the inn where they were staying with paintings. This work may have decorated cupboard doors in the dining room.
Gauguin's likeness was described by friends at the time as an "unkind character sketch," but today it provokes a range of interpretations. Some see the artist casting himself in the role of Satan, others as Christ. What are we to make of the conflicting imagery -- the apples that prompted man's expulsion from Eden; the halo over Gauguin's disembodied head; the snake that is both tempter of Eve and the embodiment of knowledge; the bold division into vivid yellow and red, the latter a color evocative of both of hellfire and the heat of creation? All of these must have been in Gauguin's mind, and in his intention.
Perhaps it is most likely that Gauguin is revealing his conception of the artist as hero, and -- almost to challenge his colleagues -- of himself particularly as a kind of magician, a master who knows that he possesses the power of magic by virtue of talent and genius.
Learning Activities
Art
• Discuss the relationships of different colors with emotion.
• Compare Gauguin's painting with another symbolist canvas by Khnopff.
Social Science
• History tends to focus on urban life. Research the life of people in rural areas like Brittany in the late nineteenth century. What about that lifestyle would have attracted Gauguin?