David Imbt - Paul Gauguin
French Post-Impressionist painter
1848 -1903
 Madame Gauguin in Evening
Dress
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Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848, into a liberal middle-class family. After an adventurous early life, including a four-year stay in Peru with his family (they moved back to France after his father's death) and a stint in the French merchant marine, he became a successful Parisian stockbroker, settling into a comfortable bourgeois existence with his wife, Mette Sofie Gad and five children.
In 1874, after meeting the artist Camille Pissarro and viewing the first impressionist exhibition, he became a collector and amateur painter. He exhibited with the impressionists in 1876, 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886. In 1883 he gave up his secure existence to devote himself to painting; his wife and children, without adequate subsistence, were forced to return to her family in Denmark. From 1886 to 1891 Gauguin lived mainly in rural Brittany (except for a trip to Panama and Martinique from 1887 to 1888), where he was the center of a small group of experimental painters known as the school of Pont-Aven.
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Under the influence of the painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin turned away from impressionism and adapted a less naturalistic style, which he called synthetism. He found his inspiration in the art of indigenous peoples, in medieval stained glass, and in Japanese prints; he was introduced to Japanese prints by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh when they spent two months together in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888. Gauguin's new style was characterized by the use of large flat areas of nonnaturalistic color, as in Yellow Christ. |
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In 1891, ruined and in debt, Gauguin sailed for the South Seas to
escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial
and conventional." Except for one visit to France from 1893
to 1895, he remained in the Tropics for the rest of his life, first
in Tahiti and later in the Marquesas Islands. The essential characteristics
of his style changed little in the South Seas; he retained the qualities
of expressive color, denial of perspective, and thick, flat forms.
Under the influence of the tropical setting and Polynesian culture,
however, Gauguin's paintings became more powerful, while the subject
matter became more distinctive, the scale larger, and the compositions
more simplified. His subjects ranged from scenes of ordinary life,
such as Tahitian Women on the Beach . . .
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His masterpiece was the monumental allegory Where Do We Come From?
What Are We? Where Are We Going?, which he painted shortly before
his failed suicide attempt.
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Gauguin's bold experiments in coloring led directly to the 20th-century Fauvist style in modern art. His strong modeling influenced the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch and the later expressionist school.
http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/departments/arthistory/baldwin/Textbook4Sale/Gauguin.doc
http://assets.cambridge.org/0521642906/sample/0521642906WSN01.pdf
http://www.geometry.net/artists/gauguin_paul_page_no_2.php
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/gauguin/where.jpg.html
http://painting.about.com/library/blgauguintechniques.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/internet15.htm
http://tiger.towson.edu/users/msheld1/Critique.html
http://www.msu.edu/course/ha/240/goldwater.htm
http://people.brandeis.edu/~kelli/contents.html