see A Small List of Great Artists: Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903)
Paul Gauguin had been painting for nearly twenty years when, around 1891, it looks like he wasn’t having much success as an artist or husband, and so he maybe convinced himself that if he could get out to Tahiti (then a French colony), away from the bustle and artificiality of modern society, he would find an enchanted paradise of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration, and from it, could produce a body of work that was bound to captivate buyers and sell his paintings and make him rich. And with this plan, he threw a banquet and convinced friends and benefactors to help him raise money to get out to Tahiti, including the French government, who – since they had colonized the area – also wanted to promote this positive and tourist-attracting view of it.
To Gauguin’s disappointment, he found there a harsh reality of poverty and sickness and invading industrialization, but this didn’t stop him from bringing to life a very specific, new, romanticized, mythological body of work from his imagination (exploitative and culturally appropriating), by depicting this region as a fictitiously “exotic” and “primitive” tropical paradise where lovely island women lay all about seductively and voluptuously bare-breasted – as starkly opposed to the modestly-dressed community of Christian missionaries wearing conservative missionary gowns that he found. Many of his finest paintings were produced at this time.
I feel conflicted about my love of this art, but it’s just so seductive and alluring to the eye.
Gauguin was interested in conveying symbolism over realism, often infusing the supernatural into his day-to-day images. Adding elements of his imagination and emotion, he sought to make the subject more “pure.” In pursuing these goals, Gauguin was a pioneer of the use of non-representational and impossibly unrealistic, bright colors, often in large flat swathes.
His work inspired the next generation of European artists (especially Fauves and German Expressionists) to examine and push these ideas even further.
In a letter to his close friend, Émile Schuffenecker, Gauguin wrote, “Art is an abstraction. Derive it from nature as you dream in nature’s presence, and think more about the act of creation than the outcome.”
He returned to France and continued producing this style of work, but sales weren’t great. He wound up receiving charity from friends to buy passage back to Tahiti, where he spent the rest of his days until his death from syphilis. Unlike Van Gogh, he was able to sell some paintings and scrape up a living, but like Van Gogh, Gauguin’s work didn’t become popular until after his death.
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
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