Paul Gauguin
Colour and the flight to Tahiti.
Gauguin left his job on the stock exchange and his family to paint in Brittany and later Polynesia. His flat, strong areas of colour influenced modernism.
Paul Gauguin was born in 1848 in Paris. His father was a journalist and died on a voyage to Peru when Paul was one year old. The family then lived for a few years in Lima with his mother’s relatives. Back in France, Paul went to sea, first in the merchant navy and then in the navy. He then became a stockbroker and earned well. In 1873 he married the Danish Mette Gad, and they had five children.
Gauguin began painting in his spare time and collected Impressionist art. Camille Pissarro became his teacher, and from 1880 he exhibited with the Impressionists. After a stock market crash in 1882 he decided to become a full-time artist. The family fell into financial crisis and moved to Copenhagen, but Gauguin left them and returned to France. He lived in Pont-Aven in Brittany, where together with Émile Bernard he developed a new style with flat fields of colour and clear outlines. Vision after the Sermon (1888) in Edinburgh shows Breton women seeing Jacob wrestling with the angel.
In the autumn of 1888 Gauguin stayed with Vincent van Gogh in Arles. The collaboration ended in a dramatic quarrel, after which Van Gogh cut off part of his ear. In 1891 Gauguin travelled to Tahiti in search of a primitive life far from European civilisation. He was disappointed to find the island already shaped by the colonial power, but painted pictures of an idealised paradise. After a period in Paris he returned to Polynesia for good in 1895.
His art is built on strong, unmixed colours, simplified forms and symbols. He drew inspiration from folk art, Japanese woodblock prints and Polynesian culture. His largest work, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98), is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He also made innovative woodcuts and wooden sculptures. Today his life on Tahiti, where he had sexual relations with very young girls, and his romanticised view of other cultures are criticised.
Gauguin died in 1903 on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands, ill and in conflict with the colonial authorities. After his death he became one of the most important models for modernism. The Fauves, the Expressionists and Picasso were influenced by his colours and his interest in art from outside Europe.