Audio Stop 195

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A dark-haired, disembodied head of a haloed man with pale, peach skin floats against a red and yellow background in this vertical portrait. The man’s hair seems to be flattened against his forehead, and extends beyond his head at the back in a way that suggests it may become a cap or hood. His face turns toward us, and he looks down to our left under arched eyebrows. He has a prominent hooked nose and a brushy mustache. Behind his head, the background is divided into a tomato-red zone for the top half and a golden yellow field below, separated by a thin, pine-green line. Two red and green apples hang from a branch near the upper right corner. The thin yellow halo floats over his head to the left of the branch. A pine-green, stylized, vine-like form curves up from the bottom edge of the panel and ends with flat, sunshine yellow, square shapes, perhaps abstracted flowers or fruit. A hand near the lower right holds one end of the vine like a cigarette between fingertips. The vine seems to turn into a serpent’s head beyond the man’s fingers. Numbers and letters are painted in green in the lower left: “1889” and “P Go.”

Paul Gauguin

Self-Portrait, 1889

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 83

This self-portrait, painted on a cupboard door from the dining room of an inn in the Breton hamlet Le Pouldu, France, is one of Paul Gauguin’s most important and radical paintings. His haloed head and disembodied right hand, a snake inserted between the fingers, float on amorphous zones of yellow and red. Elements of caricature add an ironic and aggressively ambivalent inflection. Gauguin’s friends called it an unkind character sketch.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:
Paul Gauguin was 35 years old in 1883, when he gave up his job as a stockbroker to become a full-time painter. He would become one of the most radical and important artists of the 1880s. After experimenting with Impressionism, Gauguin moved quickly beyond an interest in the natural world to search for a deeper truth through simplified, or imaginary forms, and a style expressive in ways that painting had never been before.

In sharp contrast to an Impressionist work, every element of this Self-Portrait is filled with potential meaning. Against a striking background of red and yellow, Gauguin has portrayed himself, apples, a halo, and the simplified pattern of some kind of vine or foliage. In his hand, he holds a snake.

Philip Conisbee.

PHILIP CONISBEE:
The symbolism is fairly obvious—apples and snake refer to the Garden of Eden, temptation, sin and the fall of Man. Yet the halo suggests humanity at its best. This man considers himself both saint and sinner.

In the large, well-defined areas of flat colors, we see the influence of both Japanese prints and Cloisonnisme —a term borrowed from medieval cloisonné enamels, where areas of bright color were defined by heavy copper lines. The floating head is a recurrent motif of the Symbolists, a group of artists striving to create images of moods and emotions for which they felt there were no verbal equivalents.

The forms are done in a primitive way: Gauguin’s hair seems flat, almost like the wig of a pharaoh, and the stylized plant is reminiscent of ancient Egyptian reliefs. The yellow area rising on either side of his head has been compared to angel’s wings, yet the meaning is unclear —it could just as easily be identified as a tabletop, or a platter with Gauguin’s head resting on it.”

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