Paul Gauguin

"It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block."
-- Paul Gauguin

Before the invention of photography, the only way you could preserve your mother-in-law’s image for posterity was to get someone to draw or paint her. People also did death masks where they put plaster on the face of the dead person, but that’s a little grotesque. Painting, then, had a very important function—it was one of the chief ways of preserving an image.

Over four or five hundred years, western European painters had created some effective means for translating a three-dimensional landscape, still life, or face into the two dimensions of the canvas. This function ended as soon as the first photograph was taken. Now one’s second cousin twice-removed could be photographed and her image retained forever. But what were painters to do, since they were no longer in charge of visual memory?

Over the last part of the nineteenth century and well into the early twentieth century, painters began to explore the nature of light, of paint, and of representation. Paul Gauguin’s art was a footstep along this path. He was considered post-Impressionist—his art came after that of Monet who explored light and color through hazy patches of paint. Gauguin’s art explores color and his way of painting anticipates Matisse and the other Fauve (“wild beast”) painters of the modernist period. He also explored nontraditional subjects for his painting, particularly when he moved to Tahiti to get away from the problematic western culture in France.

Like many artists, Gauguin paid an emotional price for his art and he also made his art despite emotional and financial struggles. Gauguin suffered from depression and anyone who has ever had this condition knows that it is extremely difficult to motivate oneself to do something while feeling depressed. So the fact that he actually did a lot of painting is a personal triumph. To top it off, they didn’t exactly have effective medications for depression at the end of the nineteenth century (although they did have some interesting legal choices for recreational drinking and drugs such as cocaine and absinthe).

Being a depressed artist is not easy on a family, and Gauguin eventually left his wife and kids in Denmark and returned to France to paint. Two of his children died in his lifetime and he had many struggles trying to support his wife and children financially. Although the Romantic idea of giving everything up for one’s art was likely still the watchword of the day, it is also likely there were times when Gauguin felt guilty for the sacrifices he demanded of family members.

Gauguin died at a young age — 54 — from the effects of syphilis, which was incurable in those days before antibiotics, and also from the effects of alcoholism. Yet he left an incredible oeuvre behind, paintings that guided the modernist movement in its exploration of the properties of image, dimensionality, and paint.

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."
-- Gauguin

 

This Lemonade Profile was written by Carolyn Osborne,
an Artistic Lemonade contributing writer.

The image featured with this article is Paul Gauguin's 1896 painting Poor Fisherman. The painting is in the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in Brazil.

 

This article's permanent location is
http://www.artistic-lemonade.com/archive/011.htm


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