FREE ESSAY ON GAUGUIN

GAUGUIN

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 and a stint in
the French merchant marine, he became a successful Parisian stockbroker, settling into a
comfortable bourgeois existence with his wife 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 1879, 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.
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 centre of a small group of experimental
painters known as the School of Pont-Aven. Under the influence of the painter Emile
Bernard, Gauguin turned away from Impressionism and adopted 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
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
non-naturalistic colour, as in The Yellow Christ (1889, Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo, New York State). 
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 colour, denial
of perspective, and thick, flat forms. Under the influence of the tropical setting and
culture of Polynesia, however, Gauguin's paintings became more powerful, while his
subject-matter became more distinctive, the scale of his paintings larger, and his
compositions more simplified. His subjects ranged from scenes of ordinary life, such as
Tahitian Women, or On the Beach (1891, Musee d'Orsay, Paris), to brooding scenes of
superstitious dread, such as Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892, Albright-Knox Art
Gallery). His masterpiece was the monumental allegory Where Do We Come From? What Are We?
Where Are We Going? (1897, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), which he painted shortly before
his failed suicide attempt. A modest stipend from a Parisian art dealer sustained him
until his death at Atuana Hiva-Oa, in the Marquesas Islands, on May 8, 1903.
Gauguin's bold experiments in coloring led directly to Fauvism. His strong modeling
influenced the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch and the later Expressionist school