Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin had one of the strangest careers in nineteenth-century art. For most of his twenties and early thirties he was a successful Paris stockbroker, a husband and father of five, and a weekend painter who collected Impressionism. After the financial crash of 1882 he gave that life up piece by piece. He spent the rest of his life chasing a new kind of painting in Brittany, Martinique, Provence, Tahiti, and finally the Marquesas Islands. That work used flat fields of intense color and heavy contours, and gave memory and myth equal footing with observation. It helped found Symbolist painting and prepared the way for the Nabis, Henri Matisse and the Fauves, and Expressionism. He lived in French Polynesia inside a colonial system whose power he drew on, and he had relationships there with adolescent girls. That record has also made him one of the most debated figures in modern art.

Lima, the sea, and the stock exchange

Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848, in a year of revolutions. His father, Clovis Gauguin, was a journalist whose politics put him on the wrong side of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's rise, and in 1851 the family sailed for Peru, where his mother had family connections. Clovis died on the voyage. Gauguin spent his early childhood in Lima, and the family stayed in Peru until 1855. He drew on those years for the rest of his life, eventually claiming Inca ancestry — the National Gallery in London notes that the family's connection was in fact to the Spanish colonial aristocracy. Turning biography into legend became a lifelong habit.[1]

As a teenager he went to sea, first in the merchant marine and then the French navy. His mother died in 1867, and the businessman and collector Gustave Arosa became his guardian. Arosa owned contemporary painting and knew Camille Pissarro; through his household Gauguin met art as something living people bought, discussed, and made. In the early 1870s Gauguin took a position connected to the Paris stock exchange and prospered. In 1873 he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad, and they had five children. He bought paintings — including works by Paul Cézanne, which he studied at close range — and he painted.

He was better than a hobbyist. The official Salon accepted a landscape of his in 1876, and through Pissarro, his most important early mentor, he joined the Impressionist exhibitions — the National Gallery records his participation in 1880, 1881, and 1882, and he showed through the group's final exhibition in 1886. His early pictures can look surprisingly conventional to anyone who knows only the Tahitian work: broken brushwork, outdoor light, Pontoise fields.[1]

The crash, Copenhagen, and the break

In 1882 the French financial market collapsed, and Gauguin's brokerage career collapsed with it. He treated the disaster as an opening and committed himself to painting full time. Painting paid nothing like finance. The family moved to Copenhagen in 1884, hoping Mette's relatives would provide stability; Gauguin tried other work, failed to settle, and in 1885 returned to Paris with one of his sons while Mette and the other children stayed behind.[2]

The separation became effectively permanent. They corresponded for years, but the household was never rebuilt, and his choice of art over the family he had made remains one of the defining facts of his biography. His material circumstances got worse from here. His most important work was about to begin.

Brittany and the invention of Synthetism

In 1886 Gauguin went to Pont-Aven, a small Breton town that had become a gathering place for artists. Brittany's traditional dress, Catholic ritual, and stone churches seemed to him an older, more spiritual Europe that industrial modernity had not erased — a selective reading, since Pont-Aven was already full of artists and tourists. He was not discovering an untouched culture; he was searching for one. The pattern would repeat.[3]

The decisive change came in 1888, through his exchange with the much younger painter Émile Bernard, who had been experimenting with flat zones of strong color separated by dark outlines — a manner drawn from stained glass, popular prints, and Japanese woodblocks. Gauguin saw what the idea could carry and turned it into an ambitious artistic language. The approach became known as Synthetism: a painting was to synthesize the appearance of a subject, the artist's memory of it, the artist's feeling about it, and the pure arrangement of color and shape. A field could be red because red made the picture stronger.

The declaration of the new manner is Vision after the Sermon, painted that year: Breton women in the foreground, and beyond them Jacob wrestling the angel on a field of pure red. Gauguin was no longer painting what he could see. He was painting an idea, a memory, and an imagined vision at once.[3]

Martinique, and nine weeks with van Gogh

The search for a life outside metropolitan France began before Tahiti. In 1887 Gauguin traveled with the painter Charles Laval to Panama and then Martinique. The trip was hard and earned nothing, but four months of tropical light and Caribbean color fed the idealized tropics he would later pursue far more aggressively in the Pacific.

In October 1888 he went south to Arles to live and work with Vincent van Gogh at the Yellow House. Van Gogh dreamed of a cooperative of painters in Provence and wanted Gauguin at its center; his brother Theo, an art dealer supporting both men, helped make the arrangement possible. For about nine weeks they painted the same subjects and argued about method — Gauguin pressing the case for memory and imagination, van Gogh committed to the motif in front of him. In December van Gogh suffered the breakdown in which he mutilated his own ear. Gauguin left Arles immediately, and the southern studio was finished. The encounter marked both men; more than a decade later Gauguin was still invoking van Gogh through sunflowers.[4]

The persona

At the 1889 Exposition Universelle — the world's fair that built the Eiffel Tower — Gauguin and his circle hung their own exhibition at the Café des Arts on the fairground, run by a Monsieur Volpini. The Volpini show sold almost nothing, but the zincographs Gauguin printed for it, on loud yellow paper, pushed his simplification further: contour and large shape doing the work that modeling used to do.

He was also, by now, constructing a public character. His self-portraits cast him as rebel, outsider, suffering artist, 'savage,' even Christ. Rejection could be read as proof of being ahead of the times; poverty as sacrifice; departure as pilgrimage. Modern scholarship treats the romantic legend of Gauguin cautiously for a simple reason — Gauguin was its principal author, and he understood that the story of Paul Gauguin could help sell the art of Paul Gauguin.[5]

Tahiti, as imagined and as found

The colonial pavilions of the 1889 fair had helped fix his imagination on the French Pacific, and in 1891 he sailed for Tahiti expecting an untouched paradise. Papeete, when he arrived, was nothing of the kind. Tahiti had been a French colony since 1880, and decades of missionaries, trade, disease, and colonial administration had transformed Tahitian society. Gauguin was disappointed, moved out to Mataiea on the southern coast, and began producing in paint the Tahiti he had failed to find in fact.[6]

That distinction matters for reading every canvas of the period. The Tahitian paintings are not documentary records of Polynesian culture. Gauguin gave pictures Tahitian titles his limited Tahitian sometimes rendered ungrammatically, and the 'ancient' Polynesian religion in them came largely from a European book — Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout's 1837 account of the islands — rather than from oral tradition. He carried photographs and reproductions with him and borrowed freely: figures in the Tahitian compositions derive from the Buddhist reliefs of Borobudur in Java, from Western classical art, and from Édouard Manet's Olympia. The result is a deliberate hybrid mythology, not ethnography.[7]

Tehamana

While living at Mataiea, Gauguin, then in his forties, took a Tahitian adolescent named Tehamana — Tehura in his own writings — as his companion, or, in the language of the colony, his vahine. The Art Institute of Chicago's record for its portrait of her states she was thirteen; the biographer Sue Prideaux, citing a newly located birth record, argues she was closer to fifteen. Either number describes an adolescent girl living with a middle-aged European colonist, inside a system that gave French men powers Polynesians did not have. Tehamana appears in several of the period's most significant paintings — surrounded, as his sitters usually were, with symbols invented or imported rather than observed.[8]

The same colonial record holds a complication. In his final years in the Marquesas, Gauguin attacked the Catholic missionaries and parts of the French administration, writing against the alliance of church and state and taking up disputes on behalf of his Marquesan neighbors. The National Gallery describes a late Gauguin increasingly at war with the authorities whose system had made his life there possible. Neither fact cancels the other, and a one-word verdict — romantic hero, colonial villain — describes him worse than the two facts side by side.

The problem of the word 'primitive'

Gauguin's project ran on a word that now needs explaining. He imagined that cultures distant from industrial Europe — Breton peasants first, Polynesians after — kept qualities the West had lost: instinct, spirituality, directness, sexual freedom, closeness to nature, artistic purity. The idea said at least as much about European dissatisfaction with Europe as about anyone it described. Actual Breton and Polynesian people were not remnants of an earlier stage of humanity; they lived in changing societies with their own histories, politics, and answers to modernity, and Gauguin repeatedly replaced that complexity with an ideal.

Museums accordingly now hang him inside two histories at once — modern art and colonial exoticism. The Berlin state museums built an entire exhibition, Why Are You Angry?, around the question his pictures raise. Neither history cancels the other.[9]

Noa Noa and the failed return

In 1893 he returned to France, expecting the Tahitian work to make his reputation and his living. The response was mixed — recognition in the avant-garde, hesitation from collectors. To explain the paintings, and to feed the legend, he began Noa Noa, a literary account of his Tahitian life, and cut for it one of the great woodcut series of the century. Like most of Gauguin's self-presentation, Noa Noa blends experience, borrowed information, and invention; it is indispensable and cannot be read straight.[10]

He wrote all his life — letters, notebooks, essays, manifestos, and at the end the sprawling memoir Avant et après — and the writing was part of the artistic project, not separate from it. It makes him unusually accessible and unusually difficult to trust in the same stroke: he exaggerated, contradicted himself, borrowed from other writers, dramatized his experiences, and manufactured legends, because he understood that the story of Paul Gauguin helped sell the art of Paul Gauguin. Historians lean on his writings constantly and check every sentence against other evidence.[11][12]

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

In 1895 he left France for good. The second Polynesian period was darker: failing health, chronic money trouble, deepening isolation. In 1897 came the news that his daughter Aline, the child he was most attached to, had died in Copenhagen at nineteen, and the loss fed a severe crisis.

Out of it he painted the largest and most ambitious canvas of his life, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Figures cross the stages of existence — infancy to old age, read from right to left at the painter's own instruction, with a blue idol standing beyond them. The title's questions are never answered inside the frame, and that refusal is the summary of his artistic philosophy: he wanted pictures that provoked meditation, not pictures that explained.[13]

One long-repeated biographical claim now needs a qualifier. Older accounts state that Gauguin suffered from syphilis. In 2014, teeth recovered from a well beside his last house — identified by DNA comparison as very probably his — were found to carry no trace of mercury, the standard treatment of the day. That does not prove he never had the disease, only that the once-settled diagnosis is now disputed.[14]

Hiva Oa

By 1901 even Tahiti was not remote enough, and he moved east to Atuona on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. He built a house there and named it, provocatively, the Maison du Jouir — the House of Pleasure — its doorframe carved with images mixing sexuality, Polynesian references, and satire. His legs pained him severely, he depended on morphine, and his quarrels with bishop and gendarmerie continued to the end. He died at Atuona on 8 May 1903, a month short of fifty-five, and was buried on the island.[6]

His reputation was already moving without him. The Salon d'Automne mounted a commemorative exhibition in 1906 — the year before its Cézanne retrospective — and the young painters of Paris took what they needed. Paul Sérusier had already carried The Talisman, the little landscape painted under Gauguin's direction at Pont-Aven in 1888, back to the friends who became the Nabis. Matisse and the Fauves pushed his liberation of color further; the Expressionists took the permission to distort. One of the founding principles of modern art is his: a painting does not have to look natural to communicate something true.[15]

What makes a Gauguin look like a Gauguin

Color is emotional rather than descriptive — grass need not be green if another color makes the feeling stronger. Space is flat: backgrounds climb the canvas, figures press close to the surface, and zones of color lock together like stained glass, an effect that gave the related manner its name, Cloisonnism, after cloisonné enamel. Forms are simplified, contours heavy, and the figures often silent, watchful, and psychologically distant. And reality and invention overlap without apology: a real sitter enters an imagined religious setting, a Breton field hosts a Bible story, a Polynesian landscape holds a figure from a Javanese temple relief.

Painting was only part of the output. He carved wood, made ceramics, cut woodblocks, printed zincographs and monotypes, and wrote constantly — letters, manifestos, Noa Noa, and the late memoir Avant et après. He rejected the hierarchy that put oil painting above the so-called decorative arts, and the carved box and the canvas belong to the same visual world. That refusal, too, the twentieth century kept.

Gauguin and Cézanne: two roads to modern art

He and Paul Cézanne are filed together as Post-Impressionists, and they pushed painting in opposite directions. Cézanne asked how sensation could be organized into durable structure; Gauguin asked how the visible world could be transformed by memory, emotion, symbol, and imagination. Cézanne's road leads hardest toward Cubism and structural abstraction; Gauguin's toward Symbolism, the Nabis, Fauvism, and expressive color.

Both taught the twentieth century that painting did not have to copy appearances. They simply demonstrated different ways of escaping the obligation — and Gauguin, who owned Cézannes and studied them closely, knew exactly whose road ran beside his.

The famous paintings, and where they hang

Five museums hold most of the canvases people cross oceans to see. In Paris, the Musée d'Orsay hangs Arearea, Tahitian Women on the Beach and the Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ; the others are in New York, Boston and Edinburgh.[16][17][18]

• Vision after the Sermon (1888) — National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Breton women watching Jacob wrestle the angel on a field of pure red
• Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ (1890–91) — Musée d'Orsay, Paris; painted on the eve of the first voyage to Tahiti
• Ia Orana Maria (1891) — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hail Mary restaged with a Tahitian mother and child
• Tahitian Women on the Beach (1891) — Musée d'Orsay, Paris; two seated women from the first months on the island
• Arearea (1892) — Musée d'Orsay, Paris; two women, a red dog, and worshippers before an invented idol
• Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98) — Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the mural-sized canvas he meant to be read from right to left
• Two Tahitian Women (1899) — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; in the museum since 1949

Why Gauguin matters

Cézanne showed modern artists that the structure of the world could be reconstructed. Gauguin taught them something different: the world inside the artist could matter as much as the world outside. A tree could be blue, a field red, a memory a landscape, a dream part of a portrait, a Bible story an event in Brittany, a real sitter a figure in an imaginary mythology. Painting no longer had to ask only what something looks like; it could ask what it means, what it feels like, what can be remembered, what can be invented.

That shift — from observation toward subjective expression — is one of the transformations that produced modern art, and it is why his influence runs through the Nabis, Matisse and the Fauves, and Expressionism. The innovation and the colonial record belong to the same life, and holding both together is the only honest way to understand him.