Post impressionism

A term first used by Roger Fry and adopted by Clive Bell to describe
modern art since Impressionism. The 1910 and 1912 exhibitions of French
art organized by them were confusingly entitled 'Manet and the Post-
Impressionists', although they included the work of Matisse, Picasso and
Braque. The term is now taken to mean those artists who followed the
Impressionists and to some extent rejected their ideas. They include van
Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat, Signac and Toulouse-Lautrec. Many were
involved with the Societe des Artistes Independants established in Paris in
1884. Generally, they considered Impressionism too casual or too
naturalistic, and sought a means of exploring emotion in paint.

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a leading
French Post-Impressionist artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist and
writer. His bold experimentation with colouring led directly to the Synthetist
style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the
subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved
the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an
influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

Biography

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, France to journalist Clovis Gauguin and
Aline Maria Chazal, daughter of the half-Peruvian proto-socialist leader
Flora Tristan, a feminist precursor. In 1851 the family left Paris for Peru,
motivated by the political climate of the period. Clovis died on the voyage,
leaving three-year old Paul, his mother and sister to fend for themselves.
They lived for four years in Lima, Peru with Paul's uncle and his family. The
imagery of Peru would later influence Paul in his art. At the age of seven,
Paul and his family returned to France. They moved to Orléans, France to
live with his grandfather. He soon learned French and excelled in his studies.
At seventeen, Gauguin signed on as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine
to fulfill his required military service. Three years later, he joined the French
navy where he stayed for two years. In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris
where he secured a job as a stockbroker. In 1873, he married a Danish
woman, Mette-Sophie Gad. Over the next ten years, they had five children.

By 1884 Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he

pursued a business career as a stockbroker. Driven to paint full-time, he
returned to Paris in 1885, leaving his family in Denmark. Without adequate
subsistence, his wife (Mette Sophie Gadd) and their five children returned to
her family. Gauguin outlived two of his children. Like his friend Vincent
van Gogh, with whom in 1888 he spent nine weeks painting in Arles, Paul
Gauguin experienced bouts of depression and at one time attempted suicide.
In 1891, Gauguin, frustrated by lack of recognition at home and financially
destitute, sailed to the tropics to escape European civilization and
"everything that is artificial and conventional". (Before this he had made
several attempts to find a tropical paradise where he could 'live on fish and
fruit' and paint in his increasingly primitive style, including short stays in
Martinique and as a labourer on the Panama Canal construction; however, he
was dismissed from his job after only two weeks.)

In 1903, due to a problem with the church and the government, he was
sentenced to three months in prison and fined. At that time he was being
supported by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard He died of syphilis before he
could start the prison sentence. His body had been weakened by alcohol and
a dissipated life. He was 54 years old. Gauguin died on 8 May 1903 and is
buried in Calvary Cemetery (Cimetière Calvaire), Atuona, Hiva ‘Oa,
Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.

Artistic career

Gauguin began painting in his free time. He also visited galleries frequently
and purchased work by emerging artists. Gauguin formed a friendship with
artist Camille Pissarro, who introduced him to various other artists. As he
progressed in his art, Gauguin rented a studio, and showed paintings in
Impressionist exhibitions held in 1881 and 1882. Over two summer
holidays, he painted with Camille Pissarro and occasionally Paul Cézanne.

In 1887, after visiting Panama, he spent several months near Saint Pierre in
Martinique, in the company of his friend the artist Charles Laval. At first,
the 'negro hut' in which they lived suited him, and he enjoyed watching
people in their daily activities. However, the weather in the summer was hot
and the hut leaked in the rain. He also suffered dysentery and marsh fever.
While in Martinique, he produced between ten and twenty works (twelve
being the most common estimate) and traveled widely and apparently came
into contact with a small community of Indian immigrants, a contact that
would later influence his art through the incorporation of Indian symbols.
Gauguin, along with Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Emile Schuffenecker
and many others frequently visited the artist colony of Pont-Aven in
Brittany. By the bold use of pure color and Symbolist choice of subject
matter the group is now considered a Pont-Aven School. Disappointed with
Impressionism, he felt that traditional European painting had become too
imitative and lacked symbolic depth. By contrast, the art of Africa and Asia
seemed to him full of mystic symbolism and vigour. There was a vogue in
Europe at the time for the art of other cultures, especially that of Japan
(Japonism). He was invited to participate in the 1889 exhibition organized
by Les XX.

Cloisonnism and Synthetism

Under the influence of folk art and Japanese prints, Gauguin evolved
towards Cloisonnism, a style given its name by the critic Édouard Dujardin
in response to Émile Bernard's method of painting with flat areas of color
and bold outlines, which reminded Dujardin of the Medieval cloisonné
enamelling technique. Gauguin was very appreciative of Bernard's art and of
his daring with the employment of a style which suited Gauguin in his quest
to express the essence of the objects in his art.

In The Yellow Christ (1889), often cited as a quintessential Cloisonnist

work, the image was reduced to areas of pure colour separated by heavy
black outlines. In such works Gauguin paid little attention to classical
perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of colour, thereby
dispensing with the two most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance
painting. His painting later evolved towards Synthetism in which neither
form nor colour predominate but each has an equal role.

Mataiea Village in Tahiti, he painted "Fatata te Miti" ("By the Sea"), "Ia
Orana Maria" (Ave Maria) and other depictions of Tahitian life. He moved
to Punaauia in 1897, where he created the masterpiece painting "Where Do
We Come From" and then lived the rest of his life in the Marquesas Islands,
returning to France only once, when he painted at Pont-Aven. His works of
that period are full of quasi-religious symbolism and an exoticized view of
the inhabitants of Polynesia. In Polynesia, he sided with the native peoples,
clashing often with the colonial authorities and with the Catholic Church.
During this period he also wrote the book Avant et après (before and after), a
fragmented collection of observations about life in Polynesia, memories
from his life and comments on literature and paintings.
Historical significance

Primitivism was an art movement of late 19th century painting and

sculpture; characterized by exaggerated body proportions, animal totems,
geometric designs and stark contrasts. The first artist to systematically use
these effects and achieve broad public success was Paul Gauguin. The
European cultural elite discovering the art of Africa, Micronesia, and Native
Americans for the first time were fascinated, intrigued and educated by the
newness, wildness and the stark power embodied in the art of those faraway
places. Like Pablo Picasso in the early days of the 20th century, Gauguin
was inspired and motivated by the raw power and simplicity of the so-called
Primitive art of those foreign cultures. Gauguin is also considered a Post-
Impressionist painter. His bold, colorful and design oriented paintings
significantly influenced Modern art. Gauguin's influence on artists and
movements in the early 20th century include Vincent van Gogh, Henri
Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Fauvism, Cubism
and Orphism, among others. Later he influenced Arthur Frank Mathews and
the American Arts and Crafts Movement. John Rewald, an art historian
focused on the birth of Modern art, wrote a series of books about the Post-
Impressionist period, including Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to
Gauguin (1956) and an essay, Paul Gauguin: Letters to Ambroise Vollard
and André Fontainas (included in Rewald's Studies in Post-Impressionism,
1986), discusses Gauguin's years in Tahiti, and the struggles of his survival
as seen through correspondence with the art dealer Vollard and others.

Gauguin and Van Gogh -Gauguin's relationship with Van Gogh was rocky.
Gauguin had shown an early interest in Impressionism, and the two shared
bouts of depression and suicidal tendencies. In 1888, Gauguin and Van
Gogh spent nine weeks together, painting in the latter's Yellow House in
Arles. During this time, Gauguin became increasingly disillusioned with
Impressionism, and the two quarreled. On the evening of December 23,
1888, frustrated and ill, Van Gogh confronted Gauguin with a razor blade. In
a panic, Van Gogh fled to a local brothel. While there, he cut off the lower
part of his left ear lobe. He wrapped the severed tissue in newspaper and
handed it to a prostitute named Rachel, asking her to "keep this object
carefully." Gauguin left Arles and never saw Van Gogh again. A few days
later, Van Gogh was hospitalized.

Legacy- The vogue for Gauguin's work started soon after his death. Many of
his later paintings were acquired by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin.
A substantial part of his collection is displayed in the Pushkin Museum and
the Hermitage. Gauguin paintings are rarely offered for sale; their price may
be as high as $39.2 million US dollars.

Gauguin's posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in

Paris in 1903 and an even larger one in 1906 had a stunning and powerful
influence on the French avant-garde and in particular Pablo Picasso's
paintings. In the autumn of 1906, Picasso made paintings of oversized nude
women, and monumental sculptural figures that recalled the work of Paul
Gauguin and showed his interest in primitive art. Picasso's paintings of
massive figures from 1906 were directly influenced by Gauguin's sculpture,
painting and his writing as well. The power evoked by Gauguin's work lead
directly to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907.

According to Gauguin biographer David Sweetman, Picasso as early as 1902

became an aficionado of Gauguin's work when he met and befriended the
expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramist Paco Durrio (1875–1940), in Paris.
Durrio had several of Gauguin's works on hand because he was a friend of
Gauguin's and an unpaid agent of his work. Durrio tried to help his poverty-
stricken friend in Tahiti by promoting in Paris. After they met, Durrio
introduced Picasso to Gauguin's stoneware, helped Picasso make some
ceramic pieces and gave Picasso a first La Plume edition of Noa Noa: The
Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin. In addition to seeing Gauguin's work at
Durrio's Picasso also saw the work at Ambroise Vollard's gallery where both
he and Gauguin were represented.

The 1906 exhibition of Gauguin's work left Picasso more than ever in this
artist's thrall. Gauguin demonstrated the most disparate types of art—not to
speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible,
classical myths, and much else besides—could be combined into a synthesis
that was of its time yet timeless. An artist could also confound conventional
notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing his demons to the dark
gods (not necessarily Tahitian ones) and tapping a new source of divine
energy. If in later years Picasso played down his debt to Gauguin, there is no
doubt that between 1905 and 1907 he felt a very close kinship with this other
Paul, who prided himself on Spanish genes inherited from his Peruvian
grandmother. Had not Picasso signed himself 'Paul' in Gauguin's honor.

Both David Sweetman and John Richardson point to the Gauguin sculpture
called Oviri (literally meaning 'savage'), the gruesome phallic figure of the
Tahitian goddess of life and death that was intended for Gauguin's grave,
exhibited in the 1906 retrospective exhibition that even more directly led to
Les Demoiselles. Sweetman writes, "Gauguin's statue Oviri, which was
prominently displayed in 1906, was to stimulate Picasso's interest in both
sculpture and ceramics, while the woodcuts would reinforce his interest in
print-making, though it was the element of the primitive in all of them which
most conditioned the direction that Picasso's art would take. This interest
would culminate in the seminal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."