Painting. World artists. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

Paul Gauguin, a French painter, sculptor and printmaker, was a founder of modern art. A successful businessman without any artistic training Gauguin began painting as an amateur while working as a stockbroker. He soon met Pissarro and Cezanne, as well as the Impressionists. Gauguin absorbed their ideas and techniques and from 1879 to the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886 showed regularly with this group.
Paul Gauguin lived a life that reads like a classic tale of the misunderstood, and uncompromising artist, searching for verities against all odds. He was born in Paris and four years of his childhood lived in Peru (he was partly of Indian origin); six years of his youth he spent as a sailor and was incurably drawn to the exotic and the faraway.
For Gauguin painting itself became identified with his wanderlust and drew him away from all his daily associations. In 1883 he gave up his business career and his bourgeois existence to devote his life to art. Gauguin was convinced that European urban civilisation was incurably ill. His life was nomadic; he moved back and fourth between villages in Brittany and the island of Martinique. Impoverished, deadly ill, and in trouble with the law, Gauguin died on the Marquesas Islands.

Gauguin's departure from Western artistic tradition was prompted by the rebellious attitude that impelled his break from middle-class life. But Gauguin, too, was not an Impressionist at heart. He sought art using ideas rather than the tangible world as a starting point. In this he was influenced by the artist Emil Bernard and by the Symbolist poets Rimbault and Baudelaire. Joining him in renouncing naturalism were the Symbolists, and van Gogh.

Gauguin renounced the formlessness of Impressionist vision and recommended a return to the "primitive" styles as the only refuge for art. What he sought was immediacy of experience. Gauguin did this in his brilliant Vision After the Sermon or, alternatively, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, painted in 1888, during his second stay in Brittany. This painting marked Gauguin break with Impressionism to follow his own style. He rejected realism in favour of the imagination, and through his expressionist means he made one of the most influential impacts on Western art. In the background Jacob is depicted wrestling with the angel. This event forms the lesson in the Breton rite for the eighth Sunday aflei Trinity. On the preceding day the blessing of horned beasts took place, followed by wrestling contests and a procession with red banners, and at night fireworks, a bonfire that turned the fields red with its glow, and an angel descending from the church tower. In the foreground Gauguin has shown at the right the head of a priest and next to it praying women in Breton costumes. Although the figures are outlined with the clarity that Gauguin derived from his study of Oriental, medieval, and primitive arts, the contrast between the large foreground heads and the smaller groups in the distance still presupposes Western perspective, and is drawn from theatre subjects developed by Duamier, Degas, and Renoir.

In Oceania Gauguin was influenced only to a limited degree by the art of the natives with whom he lived. He took his flattened style with its emphasis on brilliant colour to the South Seas with him, and fitted into it the people whose folkways and personalities attracted him. The attitudes in which he drew and painted them still derive from Impressionist vision. In The Day of the God, of 1894, a happy nude woman and her two children rest at the water's edge below the towering image of the god in the background. But while the poses are free in the Western tradition, the contours have been restored, as continuous and unbroken as in Egyptian or Archaic Greek Art.
Before his death Gauguin said, "I wanted to establish the right to dare everything... The public owes me nothing, since my pictorial oeuvre is but relatively good; but the painters who today profit from this liberty owe me something." So indeed they did, especially Matisse, but no more than Cubism and abstract movements owe to the pioneer researches of Cezanne.

Literature: Book "Western European art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva