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The Artist as Rebel and Visionary
Image: The Vision after the Sermon, Paul gauguin, 1888 |
 Paul Gauguin |
The Artist as Rebel and Visionary
With Seurat, Impressionism was brought to a kind of symbolism. Something similar happened in the work of Paul Gauguin. As early as 1885 Gauguin was interested in the significance of lines, numbers, colors, and shapes, but it was not until 1888 that he finally broke with Impressionism and with what he called the "gross error of naturalism." The first picture in the new style, The Vision after the Sermon, was of Breton women who, coming from Mass, have a vision of Jacob struggling with the angel. Gauguin felt free to introduce into his paintings an element of unreality. His choice of form and color was arbitrary, or, rather, made for expressive reasons. He used flat areas of flat color with heavy enclosing lines because this helped to stress the primitive, naive quality that he wished all art to possess. In him we meet the artist in complete opposition to society. Courbet's declaration of artistic independence had resulted in Gauguin's attitude of artistic defiance. Gauguin detested the European society of his day. He found it overcivilized and decadent and thought all its values wrong. Through his art he sought to offer an alternative. He chose to live among the most simple and unspoiled people that he could find, at first in Brittany and then in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, and he painted them in a style that matched his subject. To create this style, sometimes called Symbolist, he drew upon non-European art sources, notably Japanese prints and Oriental and primitive sculpture, for he knew that an infusion of the kind was necessary for the revivification of western European art. He was right. He helped to create the climate of thought that made appreciation of artists like Henri Rousseau possible, and his own innovations led directly to the immense stylistic variety of 20th century art. |