Gauguin [antikvár]

Introduction Our great interest in Gauguin today has come about not only because of the value of his work and its influence on modern art, but also because he had one of the most colourful lives of any artist in the nineteenth century. The impression which we receive from him is of a powerful nature struggling to fulfil its destiny, a man driven by himself to extremes and to self-destruction. On the one hand, the cultured European involved in the most sophisticated art movements of his time; on the other, the man who turned his back on western civilisation in order to become a savage, a Maori. Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848. His father was a journalist of liberal tendencies, and his mother, Aline Ghazel, was the daughter of Flora Tristan, a political speaker and follower of Saint-Simon, of Peruvian-Spanish extraction. In 1849, a few months after the election of Louis Napoléon as President, the family left for Peru, where Aline had influential relations, the father dying en route. Although they only remained -there for six years, it may well be that the boy retained impressions of that strange and remote land which, in later years, stirred his wanderlust, for in 1865 he enlisted in the merchant service and made voyages between Le Havre and South America. In 1871, however, he left the sea and entered the Bertin bank in Paris as a stockbroker. By 1873 he was in a financial position to marry Mette Gad, a young Danish girl, and in the following years made a very comfortable income. He seems to have begun to paint in the summer of 1873, shortly before his marriage, encouraged perhaps by his guardian Gustave Arosa, who owned a fine collection of pictures by Corot, Delacroix, Courbet and the artists of the Barbizon School. Arosa's daughter, Marguerite, herself a painter, gave him instruction in the technique of painting in oils and went with him on Sundays to paint on the outskirts of Paris. At Berlin's he found that another employee, Emile Schuffenecker, had also developed an enthusiastic interest in painting. The two of them soon began to take their hobby so seriously that they went in the evenings to the Atelier Colarossi, one of the ateliers libres where artists could work freely without the discipline of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, to draw from the model and receive a certain amount of tuition. Gauguin's early paintings were in the tradition of Dau-bigny, Corot, Jongkind and Courbet. Maturing rapidly, he exhibited a landscape at the Salon of 1876, but apparently never mentioned this to Arosa or to his wife. The turning-point in his career was his meeting with Camille Pissarro, which seems to have taken place about 1877. The two became good friends and Pissarro gave Gauguin a great deal of useful advice; they even worked side by side, painting from the same motif, as Pissarro and Cézanne had done a few years before. With the older artist's encouragement, Gauguin began to form a fine collection of Impressionist paintings, including important works by Cézanne, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley, Guillaumin, Monet and Renoir; he also contributed to the last five Impressionist exhibitions of 1879-86. His works of this period show the typical Impressionist handling and broken colour similar to Pissarro, but without much personal quality. As Gauguin said later of Pissarro: 'He looked at everybody, you say? Why not? Everyone looked at him, too, but denied him. He was one of my masters and I do not deny him.' Gaining confidence, Gauguin began to tackle the human figure, getting his wife Mette and the maid to pose for him, or making studies from one or other of his children. By all accounts, however, he was still not taken seriously as an artist, and probably himself felt uncertain of his powers. His first true success came when he exhibited Study of a Nude (plate 3) at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881 and earned the enthusiastic praise of the naturalist novelist and critic J. K. Huysmans: 'I don't hesitate to state that among the contemporary painters who have depicted the nude, none