Paul Gauguin: A Guide to Gauguin’s Life and Paintings

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who, though he never achieved acclaim during his life, was an influential figure for the modernist art movement in the early twentieth century. Classified as a post-Impressionist, Synthetist, and Symbolist, Gauguin created art that spanned many artistic styles. During the final decade of his life, Gaugin exiled himself in French Polynesia, where he laid the foundation for the Primitivism aesthetic in modern art through his depiction of Tahitian imagery.

Paul Gauguin was a mostly self-taught painter who never received formal artistic training but formed a legacy as one of the most important artists of his generation.

• Early life: Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848, to French journalist Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal, who was half-Peruvian. When Gaugin was three years old, Clovis moved the family to Lima, Peru due to suppression of the press in France. Unfortunately, Clovis had a heart attack and died during the journey. When Gaugin was 7 years old, he returned to France with his mother and sister and moved in with his grandfather in Orleans, where he began school.
• Artistic beginnings: In 1873, after serving in the French Navy and working as a stockbroker, Gaugin began to paint as a hobby. Gaugin collected numerous works of Impressionist art, including paintings by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne, and he became friends with the latter two. In the early 1880s, he showed paintings at several of the annual Parisian Impressionist exhibitions, though at the time his work received middling reviews. After the 1882 French stock market crash, Gaugin decided to pursue a career as an artist full-time.
• Pont-Aven artists colony: In 1886, Gaugin spent the summer at the Pont-Aven artists colony in Brittany, France, where he painted landscapes, created pastel drawings in the style of Edgar Degas, and developed a Synthetist and Symbolist painting style. During this time, much of his artistic subject matter portrayed local Breton peasant life, including his 1886 piece Four Breton Women, showcasing Gauguin's transition away from his earlier Impressionist-style works. Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven in 1888 with fellow artists Charles Laval and Émile Bernard, and he painted one of his most famous works, The Yellow Christ in 1889.
• Time in Martinique: In 1887, Gauguin sailed to Martinique, where he lived in a hut with Charles Laval for six months. There he observed the indigenous culture, which inspired 11 paintings. Martinique was an extremely influential period for Gauguin, as he developed his signature brightly-colored, loose painting style.
• Collaboration with van Gogh: In the late 1880s, Vincent van Gogh took a liking to Gauguin's art. The two painters began a correspondence and regularly traded paintings and self-portraits. At the suggestion of van Gogh's brother Theo, a notable art dealer, Gaugin spent nine weeks living and working at van Gogh's rented house in Arles, France, where both men experimented with painting styles that deviated from the more traditional Impressionism of Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir. Unfortunately, van Gogh's bouts of depression and violent outbursts led to Gauguin’s departure from Arles.
• Exile in French Polynesia: In 1891, Gauguin moved to French Polynesia to fulfill his desire to escape European culture for a more natural environment. He spent the later years of his life in Tahiti, where his paintings, sculptures, and woodcuts portraying Polynesian culture paved the way for the Primitivism art movement. Gaugin chronicled his time in Tahiti in an illustrated journal titled Noa Noa. On May 8, 1903, at the age of 54, Gauguin died from syphilis while living in Atuona, Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas Islands.

Gaugin's style changed throughout his career, but many of his notable works feature the following characteristics:

1. 1. Bold brushstrokes: Gaugin used thick, expressive brushstrokes and frequently added wax to his paints to make them smoother.
2. 2. Expressive use of color: During Gauguin's Synthetism period, he often painted vibrant areas of color surrounded by thick, dark outlines. His color tones became more muted in his later life.
3. 3. Unprimed hessian canvas: During his years in Tahiti, Gauguin mostly painted on a canvas made of unprimed hessian or sackcloth. This rough material made the weave of the fabric visible through the paint. Gauguin partially chose this material since he couldn't afford a nicer canvas, but he found that it gave his paintings a texture that added to his desired aesthetic.

The following paintings exemplify the characteristics that made Gauguin a pioneer of the Synthetist, post-Impressionist, and Primitivist art movements:

1. 1. Vision After the Sermon (1888): Gaugin painted this biblical scene of Jacob wrestling an angel while he was at the Pont-Aven artists’ colony. Biblical scenes were traditionally associated with Renaissance-style painting, but Gauguin painted Vision After the Sermon in a modern style inspired by Japanese art prints.
2. 2. The Yellow Christ (1889): One of the most noteworthy paintings of the Symbolism art movement, The Yellow Christ depicts Jesus Christ's crucifixion taking place in nineteenth-century northern France. Surrounding Jesus is a group of praying Breton women, and the painting's background features rolling hills and trees painted in an autumnal color palette.
3. 3. Tahitian Women on the Beach (1891): Painted shortly after Gaugin first arrived in Tahiti, this piece portrays two Tahitian women sitting in the sand—one wearing a traditional sarong and the other wearing clothes with some Western influence.
4. 4. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897): Regarded as one of Gauguin's masterpieces, this philosophical work depicts three Tahitian women, each representing one of the questions in the painting's title. The right section of the painting depicts childhood, the middle section adulthood, and the left section old age and death.

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