Paul Gauguin, life and works of the artist between France and Tahiti

Paul Gauguin (Paris, 1848 - Hiva Oa, 1903) was a French painter and sculptor, famous for the constant presence in his works of both very bright pure colors used in a bold manner and scenes depicting unspoiled and exotic nature, in which Breton and Polynesian female figures are often placed. In addition, Gauguin’s works are distinguished by the very sharp outlines of the figures and an aura of mystery and solemnity that permeates many of the scenes reproduced.

Gauguin spent many years of his life in the pursuit of a true and authentic primitivism, and this led him in the first instance to dissociate himself from the urban lifestyle typical of Paris, preferring to move to environments that were at first rural (the Breton countryside) and then exotic (Polynesia, Haiti), while on an artistic level it led him to reject any academic dictates and to experiment enthusiastically with innovative techniques. Initially, Gauguin was very close to the Impressionist group; soon, however, he felt the need to find more expressive modes in his art. For this reason, he is referred to as a “Post-Impressionist,” more specifically “Synthetist,” a term used to define artists who in their works combine together natural forms, the feelings that the subjects arouse in the artist, and the purity of lines, shapes and colors.Lastly, his name is very much linked to the figures of Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo, with whom he experienced a deep and impetuous artistic and personal closeness. Adventure, travel, nature, research, existential hardships and alternating economic fortunes are the hinges on which Gauguin’s entire biography, which was celebrated only posthumously, revolves.

Life of Paul Gauguin

Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin was born on June 7, 1848, from the union between Aline Marie Chazal, daughter of renowned South American writer Flora Tristan, and Clovis Gauguin, a journalist.In the first year of Gauguin’s life, France was experiencing moments of great political tension because of the coup d’état that Napoleon III was preparing to restore the empire, a tension that touched Gauguin’s family closely: his father was exiled for the pro-Republican ideas in his writings. The whole family left for Lima, Peru, awaited by relatives on his mother’s side. His father, unfortunately, died during the trip, but despite the tragic event, Gauguin nevertheless spent the early years of his childhood in Peru, until his mother wanted to return to France in 1855. The stay in South America, rooted in Gauguin’s earliest memories, greatly influenced the future artist and his sincere interest in pristine landscapes and animist cultures.

Upon returning to France, Gauguin, his mother and sisters were initially housed in Orleans by a paternal uncle, and here Gauguin attended schools, which he finished with lackluster results. Undecided and confused about his professional career, at age 17 Gauguin joined his mother in Paris, where a job as a seamstress had led her and where he had begun a new relationship with businessman and art enthusiast Gustave Arosa. The situation, however, made Gauguin very restless and despondent, so he decided to embark on a merchant ship.Through this experience Gauguin returned to Peru and visited Rio de Janeiro and India, finding new stimulation. However, the trip was abruptly interrupted by the news that his beloved mother had passed away shortly before. Back home, grief-stricken and finding himself in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War, at the age of 23 Paul Gauguin ended up enlisting and leaving. Returning from this experience as well, Gauguin found Gustave Arosa, appointed his guardian by his mother, waiting for him. Arosa proved decisive for Paul Gauguin’s future, both professionally and artistically. In addition to finding him employment as a stockbroker (Arosa himself was an important name in French finance), he introduced him to his own collection of contemporary art, studded with paintings by Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, and Pissarro. During this prosperous period of his life, Gauguin was succeeding well in his work, had found a wife (a Danish girl named Mette Gad, with whom he had five children) and settled into a bourgeois lifestyle. He even accumulated a fair amount of money with which, following in his mentor’s footsteps, he wanted to buy a small collection of contemporary paintings, preferring the Impressionists.

The more time passed, the more Gauguin found in painting a growing passion with which to feel fulfilled, to the point of wanting to try his hand at some works himself. Also complicit in this shift were close acquaintances with Emile Schuffenecker and Camile Pissarro, the latter in particular fueling Gauguin’s more nonconformist streak with his freedom from all canons. Pissarro put Gauguin in direct contact with the Impressionists, so much so that he befriended Cézanne and Degas. The two proposed that he participate in their exhibitions in 1879 and he accepted. At this time, Gauguin’s art was not yet totally untethered from objectivity, consider, for example, The Painter’s Family in the Garden (1881), and he won tentative critical acclaim. Gauguin felt strong about these good feedbacks and began to concretize the idea of leaving his employment to devote his life to art. Very few years later, in 1883, as chance would have it, the company where Gauguin worked had to fire him because of the financial collapse of Union Generale. Gauguin was convinced that he could make a good income by selling his paintings, but unfortunately he did not get anything, soon sinking into financial straits. Tormented by economic problems, but still convinced that he wanted to continue painting, Gauguin tried his luck again by moving to Denmark to his wife, who had left him because of the poor standard of living. However, he did not find satisfaction here either, either economic or homely, and he once again returned to France and to the Impressionists, participating in the group’s last exhibition in 1886. This was the year in which Impressionism itself would be overtaken by new interpretations within the movement(Georges Seurat had just made A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte) that decreed its gradual demise.

After a period in which Gauguin dabbled inhandicrafts, enthusiastically producing (“Let’s say I was born to be a craftsman and I couldn’t do it,” he told Daniel de Monfreid in 1892) several ceramic works, which, by the way, interestingly reflect reminiscences of the pre-Columbian manufactures seen in Peru, the artist decided to take a big step that had been teasing him for some time. He wanted to move to Pont-Aven, Brittany, a place completely foreign to Parisian modernity. Also greatly influencing this decision was the possibility of being taken in at the boarding house of Mrs. Marie-Jeanne Gloanec, which charged favorable prices to artists. By frequenting the boarding house, he created a fair amount of success among young pupils, who considered him a reference (a young Emile Bernard and Charles Laval are among them). But it was during a brief return to Paris that the most crucial meeting in Gauguin’s life occurred, that with Theo Van Gogh. The brother of the famous Vincent was an art dealer, and he was impressed by Gauguin’s paintings (generally Theo Van Gogh was sensitive to those artists who were not much appreciated by the general public but were definitely avant-garde) and bought a couple of them. He remained in contact with Gauguin even when the latter, still tormented by the dissonance between his financial means and the wasteful life in Paris, decided to finally head for exotic places. He chose Panama, where a brother-in-law of his lived. Here Gauguin found himself immersed in a kind of “paradise on earth,” long longed for. It was a time of great inspiration: the works became intense, vibrant, rich in colors that recall tropical vegetation. See Landscape in Martinique (1887). Theo Van Gogh was also enthusiastic, who bought two more canvases when Gauguin was forced to return to France due to some health problems.

At this point Gauguin returned to his beloved Pont-Aven, where he found his disciples and friends Bernard and Laval. These introduced him to an innovative painting technique called cloisonnisme, inspired by Gothic and medieval stained-glass windows and characterized by the use of solid colors set within sharply defined contours by bold black lines. Gauguin’s first markedly cloisonnisme work is the famous The Vision after the Sermon (1888). That same year saw Gauguin’s fateful entry into Vincent Van Gogh’s atelier in Arles at Theo’s explicit request. Van Gogh cared maniacally about this project, which he called “The Yellow House,” where he wanted to bring together artists moved by the same unity of purpose to share everyday life in a rigorous and chaste manner (as in a kind of convent) and thus produce “better” art. Gauguin, at first skeptical, changed his mind in exchange for an economic pact (one painting a month for a fixed financial contribution) with the hope of scraping together enough money to depart for the tropics. The experience in Arles was the source of major clashes between the two artists over divergent views on painting and a strong incompatibility, despite the fact that Van Gogh highly esteemed Gauguin and cherished his friendship. Gauguin finally decided that the financial contribution provided by Theo did not at all compensate for the strong discomfort and difficulty he felt, thus preparing to leave the yellow house. It was in this context that the episode occurred in which Vincent Van Gogh severed his earlobe, despairing at the imminent departure of the one he believed to be his friend. Gauguin unceremoniously left Arles to return to Brittany, yet his relationship with Van Gogh was never severed, there being at its foundation a sincere esteem and affection for each other despite everything.

In 1889, Gauguin took advantage of the renowned Universal Exhibition, where the Eiffel Tower was presented, to try to exhibit and sell his works and those of his friends and pupils who remained close to him (the already well-known Bernard, Laval, Schuffenecker). But even this attempt failed, and he even attracted the wrath of Pissarro and the other Impressionists for calling this exhibition “Impressionist and Synthetist,” while the works featured were objectively far removed from the Impressionist style. Only a year after these umpteenth disappointments, a certain idealist sensibility was developing in French cultural circles, and in this fervor Gauguin began to enjoy greater popularity, thanks in part to his contacts with the Symbolists (Redom, Mallarmé...). At this time, Gauguin thus believed that he had finally reached artistic maturity, the main expression of which is The Yellow Christ (1889). But France continued to be too narrow for him to be able to continue to seek the full expressiveness of his stylistic signature, and this time he set his sights on Tahiti. He felt comfortable financially, after an auction of his paintings in 1891 had earned him nine thousand francs (with which he could have created a very comfortable life for himself in Polynesia) and after he had received a financial grant from the French government. He succeeded in obtaining it because the government saw Gauguin’s request as an opportunity to go out and test the waters from a colonialist perspective, officially classifying it as the “artistic mission” of one of its painters. Upon arriving in Polynesia, Gauguin toured among several villages before finding the essence of the “uncivilized” Maori culture he sought, succeeding in integrating and assimilating the customs and traditions of the people. He felt inspired again, ushering in a flourishing period of production that includes such celebrated masterpieces as La Orana Maria and Manao tupapau (1892).

The Tahitian sojourn, which had given Gauguin inspiration and serenity, did not last long. Economic resources again began to run short and the distance from his affections soon made itself felt. In yet another return to his homeland, Gauguin brought much of the Polynesian experience with him, both in the form of paintings and through the display of exotic taste in clothing and furnishings, so that he would be more easily noticed by his countrymen for this extravagant lifestyle. This was the last time Gauguin spent time in his native country: when a nostalgic visit to Brittany took a totally unfortunate turn (his pupils no longer wanted to follow him to pursue individualistic paths, the locals had not welcomed his Javanese companion and both suffered an assault that forced Gauguin into the hospital, finally the same companion fled with the artist’s money, making him lose his tracks), Gauguin made up his mind to move permanently to Polynesia in 1895.The very last part of his life is marked by an initial restlessness that he continued to experience as in his homeland, despite being in his favorite environment, due to increasingly persistent health problems and the disappearance of his daughter Aline. These events and the ultimate withdrawal from any news about the family led Gauguin in 1898 to the extreme limit of a suicide attempt, shortly after finishing Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? (1897-1898), a large canvas in which somber tones reign supreme. Having come to his senses from the episode and recovered somewhat, Gauguin moved to Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands. Here he found an inner peace that fortunately accompanied him in the last years of his life, also giving him a fighting temper and the ability to recount his misfortunes with irony. He transferred this newfound vigor into balanced paintings and writings of various kinds. Gauguin was even denounced for slander by a gendarme, accused by the artist of contributing to the slave trade, and sentenced in 1903 to several months in prison. He never served his sentence, however, because a few months later, on May 8, 1903, he was found lifeless in his bed, due to the repercussions of the syphilis from which he was ill.

Gauguin’s works and style

Permeated in the early years of his artistic production by his contact with the Impressionists, Gauguin certainly assimilated their need to reproduce nature after having full experience of it en plein air, but on a technical level he soon distanced himself from the group. Indeed, he could not find in Impressionism an alignment with respect to the inherent need to bring landscape to the canvas in a more personal and emotional interpretation. Gauguin’s own brushstrokes came across as much more “rigid” and immobile than the rapid, iridescent strokes of his colleagues. An example of this poetics is The Vision after the Sermon, a painting where some of Gauguin’s typical characteristics stand out, beginning with the broad color fields and sharp outlines, the two-dimensional appearance of the surface, the elements borrowed from Japanese art, and even the co-presence of the real and the unreal (in this case the two worlds are clearly separated by the log between the women and the vision). “For me in this painting,” Gauguin had written about the painting to Van Gogh, “the landscape and the struggle exist only in the imagination of the people: that is why there is contrast between the people, which is real, and the struggle in the landscape, which is unnatural and disproportionate.” Gauguin’s primitivism also turns to ancient art: the Yellow Christ, for example, is inspired by the medieval crucifix in the church of Trémalo, near Pont-Aven.

Those who were really influential on the intense and marked style that characterized Gauguin’s works were rather Delacroix and, as anticipated, the authors of the Japanese prints. The former for the vivid hues and dramatic tone of the scenes reproduced, while from the prints he took the aspects that flowed into the cloisonnisme technique, such as the very marked Japanese calligraphy and the bold framing that dwells on the characters rather than the environment.

A happy encounter in the Breton countryside with the early exponents of cloisonnisme determined the definitive direction of Gauguin’s painting: through this technique he was able to find a way to sublimate sharp colors to the fullest by enclosing them in very delineated backgrounds. Gauguin never painted in the immediate what he saw, but he would save the memory of it to take it up again later, listening to his emotions and enhancing them. Very often his works have been compared to musical poems, rich in rhythm and capable of arousing emotions that are also in sharp contrast to each other and each time different, but always strong and authentic.

During the years he spent in Polynesia, immersed in pristine landscapes far from modernity, Gauguin found inexhaustible source of inspiration and, with the passage of time, achieved a progressive balance between forms and colors, simplicity and mystery, stillness and softness. Initially, however, the inspiration is always the primitivist one, as is also the case in Ia orana Maria, where the two figures of the two young women are modeled on the relief of an Indonesian temple, in Java (Gauguin possessed a photograph of the relief and would use it as a source of inspiration for other paintings as well). Gauguin succeeds, in this painting, in blending elements of the Christian tradition with suggestions from distant cultures, with a desire to aspire to a painting devoted to simplicity. Paintings featuring local women abound in Gauguin’s Tahitian production: these are works devoted to essentiality, both compositional and chromatic, often in classical poses, and where exoticism is neither decorative nor descriptive. Rather, Gauguin’s exoticism pervades the atmosphere of his works in order to restore to the viewer the essence of the encounter between two different cultures, a situation that allows the artist to be no longer constrained by his own culture and thus imagine another.

Gauguin’s stay in exotic Polynesian paradises also translates into an existential question that emerges bursting forth in one of his last masterpieces, Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?", a reflection by the artist on the meaning of life rendered through a painting that, in the artist’s own words, was meant to look like a "fresco ruined at the corners and applied to a gold-colored wall. The painting depicts, according to a typical topos in Western art, the three stages of life (childhood, maturity, old age), represented by the little girl, the woman picking a fruit, and the one with her head in her hands, and appearing together with several other characters, such as the women walking in the background or the group on the right, readable as figures reflecting in turn on their existence, which will end with death to be followed perhaps by a beyond, symbolized by the statue of the Polynesian goddess Hina. Interpretation of the work is facilitated by a text by Gauguin himself, which guides the viewer to read the individual characters. A mysterious and enigmatic painting in which the exoticism of Gauguin’s art emphasizes the philosophical dimension of the composition and reflection underlying the work.

Where to see Gauguin’s works

Gauguin’s paintings are preserved in museum halls around the world. In Europe, some works can be seen in France (the main nucleus is kept at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where masterpieces such as View of the Alyscamps, The Schuffenecker Family, La belle Angèle, Two Seated Tahitian Women andSelf-Portrait are housed, while other works are at the Louvre), in Switzerland (the Kunstmuseum in Basel where Ta matete and Nafea faa hypoipo are kept), and at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Other paintings are also kept in Russia (at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where Aha oe feii? is kept), in Scotland (at the National Gallery in Edinburgh are The Vision after the Sermon and Landscape in Martinique) in England (Courtauld Institute Galleries in London).

A good portion of Gauguin’s paintings can also be found in the United States of America, in several cities (New York, Buffalo, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland). One can admire his masterpieces at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo(The Yellow Christ and Manao Tupapau), the Metropolitan in New York(Ia Orana Maria), the Chryslter Art Museum in Provincetown(The Loss of Virginity), the Chicago Art Institute(Marana no atua) and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston(Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?). There do not appear to be any works permanently present in Italian museums, which occasionally host exhibitions dedicated to him, such as the Gauguin, Tales from Paradise exhibition that was mounted in Milan’s Mudec in 2016.

Paul Gauguin, life and works of the artist between France and Tahiti

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