Information About ™Paul Gauguin |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT PAUL GAUGUIN | |
| french painters | |
| french printmakers | |
| french sculptors | |
| post-impressionist painters | |
| fauvism | |
| french sailors | |
| 1848 births | |
| 1903 deaths | |
|
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin ( June 7 , 1848 – May 9 , 1903 ) was a leading Post-Impressionist Painter . His bold experimentation with coloring 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 . Born in Paris , he was descended from Spanish settlers in South America and the Viceroy of Peru , and spent his early childhood in Lima . He was the grandson of Flora Tristan , a founder of modern Feminism . After his education in Orléans , France , Gauguin spent six years sailing around the world in the Merchant Marine s and then in the French navy. Upon his return to France in 1870 , he took a job as a Broker 's assistant. His guardian Gustave Arosa, a successful businessman and art collector, introduced Gauguin to Camille Pissarro in 1875 . '' 1897, oil on canvas Boston Museum Of Fine Arts , Boston, MA, USA]] A successful stockbroker during week-days, Gauguin spent holidays painting with Pisarro and Cezanne . Although his first efforts were clumsy, he made visible progress. By 1884 Gauguin had moved with his family to Copenhagen , where he unsuccessfully pursued a business career. 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 children returned to her family. Gauguin outlived almost all of his children. Like his friend Vincent Van Gogh , with whom he spent nine weeks painting in Arles , Paul Gauguin experienced bouts of Depression and at one time attempted Suicide . 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 (Japonisme). , Buffalo, NY, USA]] Under the influence of '' ( 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 — he dispensed 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. 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 attemtpts 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 worker on the Panama Canal). He remained in Tahiti and later in the Marquesas Islands for most of the rest of his life, returning to France only once. His works of that period are full of quasi-religious symbolism and an exoticized view of the inhabitants of Polynesia. In Polynesia he clashed often with the colonial authorities and with the Catholic Church. He died in 1903 and is buried in Calvary Cemetery (Cimetière Calvaire), Atuona , Hiva ‘Oa , Marquesas Islands , French Polynesia . QUOTES BY GAUGUIN In order to do something new we must go back to the source, to humanity in its infancy. I have tried to make everything breathe in this painting: belief, passive suffering, religious and primitive style, and the great nature with its scream. How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible. To me, barbarism is a rejuvenation. Art is either plagiarism or revolution. QUOTES ABOUT GAUGUIN He put so much mystery in so much brightness. (Mallarme) Gauguin's paintings always seemed to me cruel, metallic and lacking in general emotion. He is always absent from his own work. Everything is there except the painter himself. (Vlaminck) For Europeans the romantic strangeness and eroticism of his paintings of the islanders, the festivities with their unknown symbolism, are inherently attractive, and this has tended to obscure Gauguin's real contribution. The quality of his art does not reside in revelations of another culture but in the aesthetic position he arrived at. (Trewin Copplestone) Portentous allegories about the destiny of mankind. (John Russell) The popular fancy that Gauguin 'discovered himself' as a painter in Tahiti is quite wrong. All the components of his work - the falt patterns of colour, the wreathing outlines, the desire to make symbolic statements about fate and emotion, the interest in 'primitive' art, and the thought that colour could function as a language - were assembled in France before 1891. (Robert Hughes) 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 . Gaugin influenced many other painters, but one especially notable connection is his imparting to Arthur Frank Mathews the use of an intense color pallet. Mathews met Gaugin in the late 1890s while both were at the Academie Julian . Mathews took this influence in his founding of the California Arts And Crafts or California Decorative movement. In 2003 , the Paul Gauguin Cultural Center opened in Atuona in the Marquesas Islands . Paul Gauguin's life inspired Somerset Maugham to write '' The Moon And Sixpence ''. LIST OF PAINTINGS ]]
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|