The fate and work of Paul Gauguin

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Everyone knows the bright and exotic canvases of the French painter Paul Gauguin. The largest representative of post-impressionism lived a bright and complex life.

Tropical Enchantment

He was born in Paris in June 1848 in the family of a Republican journalist and an eminent Peruvian. Already a year after the birth of the baby, the family moved to South America, on the way there, Paul Gauguin's father died of a heart disease. Until the age of seven, little Paul lived with his mother's family among the colorful landscapes of hot Peru. Then a passion for the tropics, travel and iridescent joyful shades was born in his soul, with which his painting will be filled.

Youth of a genius

At the age of seven, the boy returns to France with his mother. The biography of Paul Gauguin is now connected with studies. At the age of seventeen, he takes an exam at a nautical school, but does not enter there. Then the young man goes to sea as a cadet on a ship that plows the Mediterranean and North Seas. The impressions of those years also did not remain in the further fate of Gauguin without being embodied in his artistic plastic works. Having received a suicide letter from his mother, Paul realizes that happiness is entirely in his hands: long sea wanderings have torn him away from his family, depriving him of hope for help. He,however, he finds her in the person of an old friend of his mother, a broker who arranges Paul Gauguin for the position of a stock broker and takes care of the young man in every possible way.

Passion for exquisiteness

Then come years of prosperity and abundance. Gauguin marries the daughter of a we althy industrialist, breeds expensive varieties of roses in his garden and collects Impressionist paintings - he has a special passion for them. And, of course, he writes himself. The first pictures find a lively response from professionals. Personal acquaintance with the impressionists Pissarro and Degas becomes not only a source of new inspiration and self-confidence, but also a serious financial support. Degas buys paintings by Paul Gauguin for his collection and convinces major dealers to do the same.

Choice

In 1885, Gauguin leaves stock exchange activities, as well as his wife and children, and leaves Copenhagen, where the Gauguins lived at that time, first to France, and then to Brittany. Now his whole life is subordinated to art alone. He is friends with artists, makes short trips to different countries. In 1888, Gauguin settled in Arles, where his famous colleague Vincent van Gogh decided to found an association of artists. Painting classes do not bring the income that Gauguin once had from successful exchange transactions. Cold and hunger freeze the soul of the master, but he does not give up.

Heaven on earth

Increasingly, Gauguin turns to exciting childhood experiences, enjoying the memory of the riot of colors and smells of exotic southernAmerican villages near the ocean. Observing the growth of scientific and technological progress in cities, the artist is more and more inclined to consider civilization as an ailment that fettered people, he sees healing in the bosom of beautiful and wild nature. Then Paul Gauguin decides to settle away from the boiling cities. The island of Tahiti became for him the home and abode of the Muses. He painted canvases and poetry. At the same time, these were years of distress. His paintings were still sold in France, but quite inexpensively. Soon, money from Paris was no longer sent to him. Then he asked for flower seeds to be sent to him.

Near his modest hut, the artist created a magnificent flower garden. It was a challenge to trials and a statement of living eternal beauty. Paul Gauguin also found a new love here. The artist became the father of babies, who were born to him by a young beautiful Tahitian woman. The artist likens the relationship with her to the happiness of the first people - Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. By this time, there are paintings filled with crafty tenderness and all-embracing harmony - the canvases “Motherhood”, “Two Tahitian women”, “Are you jealous?”. At the same time, Gauguin is passionate about creating sculptures. He inspiredly sculpts them from clay and covers them with wax. The figures of people and animals make the locals freeze in horror and delight.

His immortal inheritance

Interest in mythology, ancient legends and oriental figurative system makes Gauguin's works incredibly mysterious and attractive. It is hard to believe that these bewitching emotional landscapes, portraits, plot compositions were created byexhausted by poverty, illness and depression, which almost led to suicide, a man. The artist died in the spring of 1903 on the island of Hiva Oa, in Oceania. He was in his fifty-fourth year. Glory found Gauguin three years after his death. More than two hundred of his paintings were exhibited at the Paris Exhibition, which were a wild success.

Today the life and creative biography of Paul Gauguin are of the same interest as his immortal creations. Films are made about him and books are written. And a conversation about the art of the twentieth century is unthinkable without mentioning this great and inimitable artist.