Gauguin, Paul

views updated

GAUGUIN, PAUL

GAUGUIN, PAUL (1848–1903), French artist renowned for his development of symbolism in painting.

Paul Gauguin traveled the globe under the French flag. In his youth he was a sailor in the merchant marine, traveling from Paris to India to Peru; in his maturity, he was a stockbroker, an insurance executive, a tarpaulin salesman, and then, finally, a professional artist, moving from Paris to Copenhagen to Brittany to Martinique before finally traveling to French Polynesia. In his worldwide reach, he was an instrument of imperial France, seeking out the exotic and carrying with him the banner of la mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission). Yet in his actual rejection of bourgeois norms of behavior, and in his embrace of one exotic art style and then of another, he was an antagonist of nationalism and imperialism.

Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848 but lived the first seven years of his life in Lima, Peru. The artist's parents, Clovis Gauguin and Aline Chazal, were committed republicans (she was the daughter of the great feminist-socialist, Flora Tristan [1803–1844]) and fled France in anticipation of the coming Empire. Gauguin's early years in Peru, although spent in the confines of family and local elites, nevertheless allowed the adult artist to claim an exotic identity.

After a period of education in Orléans and Paris, Gauguin entered the merchant marines in 1865. Two years later, upon the death of his mother, he came under the influence of his wealthy guardian, Gustave Arosa, a collector of modern French painting, especially the work of Eugene Delacroix (1798–1863) and the Barbizon School. By 1874, Gauguin—now married to the Danish Mette Gad and working as a stockbroker—was an amateur painter. He visited the first impressionist exhibition held that year in the former studios of the photographer Felix Nadar (1820–1910), and met Camille Pissarro (1830–1903). By 1878, Gauguin was a professional artist. He exhibited with the impressionists in 1880, and attracted the attention of no less than Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) in 1881 for his unidealized, nude portrait of Suzanne Sewing (1880).

In 1882, Gauguin's fortunes fell. A stock market crash led to the artist's firing from the brokerage firm for which he worked. Seeking an inexpensive place to live as well as the company of fellow artists, Gauguin traveled to Pont Aven, in Brittany, in the summer of 1886. There he developed—partly in collaboration with Emile Bernard (1868–1941)—a style of painting that critics would label "cloisonnism," so called because it recalled medieval, cloisonné enamel. Gauguin's first cloissonnist painting is Vision After the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888), a work that was singled out in 1891 by the critic Albert Aurier. In his article "Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin," the young critic heralded the arrival of a new art that paralleled the idealist school of poetry associated with Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), and Stephane Mallarmé (1842–1898). The non-naturalist colors and the dream-like character of the scene (the Breton women in the foreground imagine the biblical scene visible at right) combine to convey an abstraction far removed from Impressionist norms. After a short but turbulent stay with Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) in Arles in late 1888 (ending with the self-mutilation of the younger Dutch painter), Gauguin returned to Brittany. His fortunes, however, could not be reversed, and by 1890 he was resolved to leave the metropolis for the distant colony of Tahiti.

Gauguin departed from Paris without his wife or children in May 1891 in order to establish what he called a "Studio of the Tropics … where material life can be lived without money." There he would occupy a hut, he said, in a state of "primitiveness and savagery." Yet the circumstances of his departure from France and arrival in Papeete were not primitive. His second-class passage was paid by the Colonial Ministry, and he possessed official letters of introduction. At first, he was well received by the Governor of Tahiti, but his hopes to secure lucrative portrait commissions were quickly dashed. Soon thereafter, he retreated to Mataiea, a small town some thirty kilometers to the south, where he rented a little house that faced the bay. There he remained for nearly two years, devoting himself to representing the faces and bodies of native women.

Gauguin's paintings of women constitute the core of his Tahitian work. In Mana'o Tupapa'u

(The Specter Watches Over Her) from 1892, Gauguin painted a young native woman lying on her stomach on a bed, her feet crossed and her face directed at the spectator. She lies on yellow-white sheets shaded in green, blue, and pink; below that is a bedspread or opened pareu with orange blossoms and leaves on an indigo field. Above and to the left is seen an ominous, hooded woman, a tupapa'u or ancestor figure in profile. Though the subject and composition of Mana'o Tupapa'u may be compared with popular and sexist nudes painted by the popular Salon artists Jean-Leon Gerome (1824–1904), Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825–1905), and Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889), it also challenges that tradition. It is indebted both to the notorious Olympia of Edouard Manet (1832–1883) and the antique marble Hermaphrodite in the Louvre. That uncanonical Hellenistic sculpture was the subject in 1863 of a poetic homage of the same title by Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) that helped launch a school of "decadent" poets and artists whose psychologically intense and formally vivid works undermined the established hierarchies of lyric poetry, and helped lead to the Symbolism of Verlaine and Mallarmé. In the summer of 1893, Gauguin returned to France in the hope of renewing ties to his friends and estranged family. He quickly arranged with the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel to exhibit his Tahitian works, but was disappointed that only eleven of forty-four works found buyers. The following year, he returned to the Pacific, never to come back to France.

Gauguin's ambitions at this time are summarized in his large Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?, completed in 1897. Here Gauguin jettisoned academic procedures; nearly every figure or group of figures occupies a different pictorial space and time. The picture invokes Byzantine mosaics, the pan-Athenaic frieze from the Parthenon, The Seven Acts of Mercy of Caravaggio (1573–1610) and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat (1859–1891). Its iconography is derived from Tahitian cosmogony, the Book of Genesis, and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834).

In 1901, Gauguin sailed for Atuona in the Marquesas Islands. There he built and decorated a native-style house—which he called "the House of Pleasure"—just a stone's throw from a police station, a Catholic church, and a Protestant mission. The house no longer exists, but its lintel, doorjambs, and base survive in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris; these are boldly carved in shallow relief and represent a female nude, and a number of heads whose style suggests Marquesan tiki figures.

In the Marquesas, Gauguin invited scandal: he displayed pornographic prints, pursued liaisons with native women, and spread rumors. He was personally flamboyant, wearing a pareu around his waist and carrying a walking stick shaped like a dildo. He wrote letters of protest to administrators in Tahiti and Paris, sometimes deploring police brutality toward native people, and at other times pitching invectives at colonial officials. Although in poor health, he undertook to assist Marquesan men and women in their efforts to resist the forced internment of native children in convent schools.

On 30 May 1903, Joseph Martin, vicar of the Marquesas, issued the following bulletin: "The only recent noteworthy event has been the death of a contemptible individual named Gauguin, a reputed artist, but an enemy of God and everything that is decent." Gauguin had died of syphilis three weeks earlier and was buried in the grounds of Calvary cemetery—represented in the background of The White Horse (1902)—overlooking Atuona. Thus concluded the life of an artist celebrated in the early twenty-first century for his sophistication and independence, and yet derided for his sexism and colonialism. In its almost relentless focus upon the vulnerable, nude bodies of Maohi women, his art conforms to the widespread racism of an age of imperialism; yet in its rejection of Salon tradition and openness to indigenous forms, it represents a rebuke to that very order.

See alsoFrance; Huysmans, Joris-Karl; Modernism; Painting; Pissarro, Camille; Primitivism; Tristan, Flora; Van Gogh, Vincent.