P GAUGUIN QUOTES “I AM A GREAT ARTIST AND

P GAUGUIN QUOTES “I AM A GREAT ARTIST AND




PAUL GAUGUIN (1848 – 1903)

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Gauguin Quotes

“I am a great artist and know it. It is because I am that I have endured such suffering.”

“Civilization makes you sick”

“I shut my eyes in order to see”

“It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable colour to every object”


AUL GAUGUIN (1848 – 1903)

1848 – born the son of a liberal newspaper editor and a Mother of Spanish-Peruvian descendance


1848-53 – For Political reasons, Gauguin family lived in Peru


1872-83 – successful wealthy Stockbroker and family man


1883 –concentrates on painting. Starts to live apart from wife and family


1886 – starts painting in Brittany with Pont-Aven group, Moves away from Impressionist to Synthetist style.


1887 – lives and paints on French colonial Island of Martinique


1888 – lives and works alongside Van Gogh in Arles for a turbulent 9 weeks


1891-93 – 1st trip to Tahiti


1893 – returns to Paris but has little commercial success or critical acclaim


1895 – Back to Tahiti


1897 – with little money, limited success, suffering from Syphilis and following the death of 2 of his children, tries and fails to commit suicide


1901- financial security at last – contract from Parisian Art Dealer

- Leaves Tahiti for more remote Marquesas Islands


1903 – Dies of natural causes



While working as a Stockbroker, Gauguin’s interest in Art developed into a passion which was to see him leave his job and his family. Inspired by the Impressionists, most influentially Camille Pissaro, Gauguin’s paintings of the late 70s and early 80s are very much Impressionist in style. He regularly exhibited his work with the Impressionists between 1877 and 1886.


Four Breton Women Dancing (1886) shows an increased flattening of forms and a lack of spatial depth that shows the influence of Japanese prints. The choice of peasant women as subject matter also makes a stark contrast with the wealthy boating parties of Monet and Renoir.


While in Brittany, and working with the Pont-Aven Group, Gauguin’s style moved away from Impressionism. Gauguin described his new style as Synthetism, by which he meant a style of art in which the form (colour planes and lines) is synthesized with the major idea or feeling of the subject. Breaking away from the Impressionist preoccupation with the study of light effects in nature, Gauguin sought to develop a new decorative style in art based on areas of pure colour (e.g., without shaded areas or modeling), a few strong lines, and an almost two-dimensional arrangement of parts.


In Vision After the Sermon (1888) Gauguin attempts to combine in one setting two levels of reality, the everyday world and the dream world. The lower figures are reduced to areas of flat patterns, without modeling or perspective. The large areas of colour are intense and without shadows. The design is so strong that the two realities fuse into one visual experience.


Gauguin shared a close and tempestuous friendship with Vincent Van Gogh. They were equally devoted to a life absorbed in painting, and the time they worked together in Arles in the South of France in 1888 was highly productive for both artists.


Gauguin boasted of the “great rustic and superstitious simplicity” of the figures in his paintings. Gauguin saw in peasant and “primitive” people an honesty and a connection to spirituality which lent itself perfectly to his particular brand of Symbolist painting.


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Influence of Gauguin

  • The Nabis – group of French painters of 1890s (Denis, Bonnard, Vuillard) were highly influenced by Gauguin’s Sythetism

  • The Fauves – group of French painters of 1900s (Matisse, Derrain etc) influneced by Gauguin’s bright, bold palette.

  • Primitivism – Gauguin was the first western artist to allow tribal and folk art to influence his work so much. “Primitive” art was to have a huge influence on early 20th Century artists as diverse as Picasso, Brancusi and the German Expressionists of Die Brucke. Gauguin’s significance as a pioneer of Primitivism cannot be underestimated

roud of his Peruvian heritage, Gauguin saw himself as a modern day “primitive”; he drew heavily on non-western art for influence and famously moved to live and work in Tahiti. In Tahiti he found a richness of colour and shapes in the landscapes which he had only imagined before. The Tahitian society was a strange mingling of paganism and Christianity and many of Gauguin’s paintings displayed the fusing of cultures both in their subject matter and in his use of modern western art ideas and ancient imagery. For example, his Ia Orana Maria (1891) has the Madonna and Child as Tahitians, attended by Buddhist angels derived from an ancient Buddhist temple frieze, so combining Christian, Buddhist and Oceanic religions. In many ways, Gauguin’s paintings became less “primitive” in the South Seas. His colour palette remained unnaturalistic but became more harmonious and sophisticated. He brought on his travels a stock of photographs and reproductions, from ancient Egyptian and Greek sculpture alongside examples from European painting, and his later work shows the breadth of these references.


Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892) depicts Gauguin’s teenage lover, Teha’amama, struggling to sleep for fear of Tupapau (the Spirit of the dead) lurking in the shadows. Gauguin’s version of Manet’s Olympia, makes use of a number of symbolist devices, from unnaturalistic colour to the presence of a supernatural being. Gauguin wrote that the purple of the background was used to create a mood of “terror” and the yellow cloth was designed to be “unexpected”. The real and the imagined coexist, resulting in a highly emotionally charged image.





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