1848-1903 • French • Painter • Symbolist / Post-Impressionist
"From now On I will paint every day." - Gauguin
Gauguin's life was always unconventional: Though born in Paris, he lived with his mother's family in Peru and sailed with the French navy as a teenager. He was a stockbroker until the 1883 crash, at which point his employers had to fire him. It was then that he made the declaration quoted above, left his wife and children, and devoted himself to art. PISSARRO, whom he called his "professor," sponsored and encouraged him. At first Gauguin worked and exhibited with the IMPRESSIONISTS, then he traveled: In 1887 he stopped in Martinique, went on to Panama and worked on the canal, went to Central America and the Caribbean, then went back to Martinique. On returning to France, in Brittany during 1888 Gauguin began to attract a following, sometimes known as the PONT-AVEN school, as he forged the SYMBOLIST style for which he is known. Seeking a new intensity, and working closely with BERNARD, he began to evolve the theory of SYNTH ETISM, which, besides simplification of lines, colors, forms, and a suppression of detail, used the imagination to depart from reality, as in The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) ( 1888). Japanese prints (see U KI YO-E) contributed to his interest in using flat planes of primary colors en closed with dark contour lines (see CLOISONNISM). FLAXMAN and MANET had already exploited an outline style that rejects MODELING and notions of PERSPECTIVE, and it found new impetus in van G OGH, Bernard, and Gauguin-it suited their search for the "primitive," unsophisticated values they believed to be genuine. Yellow Christ (1889) exemplifies Gauguin's simultaneous reduction of forms while increasing the complexity of ideas contained in the picture: Christ is colored a golden yellow with green shading that harmonizes with the landscape behind him; three Breton women in local costume kneel at the foot of the cross while an ambiguous figure climbs over a distant stone fence. In his continuing efforts to penetrate "the mysterious centers of thought" and to escape the infringements of civilization on his creativity, on April 4, 1891, after a great and extravagant farewell party, Gauguin set off for Tahiti. The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and America ns Henry Adams (a historian) and LA FARGE, a painter, had recently returned from Tahiti. There were also French settlers on that beautiful, balmy island. "It is a mistake, however-a form of romanticizing like that which Gauguin himself sank into . . . to think that this artist cut himself off completely from his European background and consciousness and from the European artistic tradition (or that he ever really intended to)," the historian Mark Roskill writes. "He took with him to Tahiti a whole archive of photographs, prints, and other mementos . . . ." In La Orana Maria (Ave Maria; 1891), Gauguin introduced Christian themes, using native women in sarongs as stand-ins for biblical subjects. He combined Christian and Polynesian symbols and rituals. Gauguin never found the perfect, unspoiled world he was seeking. His personal dismay drove him to attempt suicide in December 1897, and it permeates his strange picture, painted on burlap, Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892). This is yet another unusual interpretation of the reclining female nude, the theme that had been given a new look by MANET's Olympia (1863) some three decades earlier. Gauguin's dark-sky pinned Tahitian woman lies on her stomach looking out at the viewer with an expression that is difficult to interpret. The watching figure-a servant in earlier representations-is now an ancestral spirit shrouded in black. Gauguin spent the last r o years of his life in Tahiti, returning to France only once. He wrote about his life there in the manuscript Noa-Noa, voyage de Tahiti (1897), and also recorded his thoughts in Avant et Apres (1903), published posthumously in 1918.
Discussion "the gaze" in ART HISTORY has to do with the dynamics of looking at art and asks questions such as: Who is the spectator presumed to be? How does he or she interact with the work? What is his/her reaction to it? The gaze is often considered in relation to images of female nudes, recognizing that a male spectator is the anticipated audience. The implication is of erotic looking that tends to treat the female as object of desire (and source of fear, as in FEMME FATALE), and the term "male gaze" evolved to designate that kind of looking. The British art critic John Berger (born 1926) wrote a ground breaking book on the subject: Ways of Seeing (1972). Recognizing issues of power an d subjugation, and drawing on the PSYCHO ANALYTIC theories of Freud and of Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey gave the term its newly important meaning in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975). Mulvey focused on film, but her ideas sparked many others in art historical writing. Interpretations change depending not only on the angle of the spectator's looking, but also on "the gaze" of the person with in the image: Is she sleeping, looking in a certain direction, or looking back at the supposed spectator? Not all discussions of the gaze have to do with gender and sexuality. Roland Barthes, for example, wrote about REM BRANDT's Syndics of the Cloth makers' Guild (1662)-the group portrait of men who look not only at a presumed audience with in the room in which they are seated but also at "us," their flesh and-blood audience: "It is the gaze that is the numen [presiding divinity] here, the gaze that disturbs, intimidates, and makes man the ultimate term of a problem. To be stared at by a portrait is always disconcerting. . . . They [the syndical are gathered together . . . to look at you, thereby signifying an existence and an authority beyond which you cannot go. . . . [Their gaze] posits you, implicates you; makes you exist." The historian Margaret Olin sums up: "A work of art is to look at. Theories of the gaze attempt to address the consequences of that looking. Sometimes, however, it is important to look at our selves (looking). We not only need to 'see ourselves as others see us, we also need to see ourselves seeing one another. But to visualize looking is not as easy as it might appear. What might seem to be a purely visual theory, or a theory of pure vision, has become lost in the mysteries of human relation ships."