GAUGUIN, Paul (Paris, 1848 – Atuona, 1903)
Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848. He spent his childhood in Peru and returned to France, together with his family in 1854. After an eventful adolescence, often spent travelling, Gauguin settled in Paris at the beginning of the 1870s and initially worked as a stockbroker. Thanks to a number of acquaintances, who spurred him to devote himself more seriously to his artistic inclinations, Gauguin gradually abandoned his previous business activity in order to receive an adequate training. From 1874 the aspiring artist pursued his career under the advice of Camille Pissarro, attending art classes at the Académie Colarossi. In 1876 he exhibited for the first time at the Parisian Salon presenting a work that reflected his assimilation of the atmospheric subjectivity that characterised of the Impressionist movement. From 1879 until 1886 the artist participated on a regular basis in the Impressionist exhibitions. The stock-market crash of 1883 forced Gauguin to definitely resign from his job as a broker and led him to move the following year to Copenhagen, where his wife Mette had been born. Notwithstanding his extreme poverty, Gauguin decided to move back to Paris as soon as 1885 where he survived for a while thanks to the financial help of Paul Schuffenecker. The artist took up ceramics and in 1886 he spent the summer in the Brittany village of Pont-Aven. During the 1880s Gauguin began to elaborate a more personal and mature style which, also resulted from the influence of contemporary artists such as Cézanne and Van Gogh with whom he had the occasion to work in separate instances (with Cézanne in Pontoise at Pissarro’s house in 1881 and with van Gogh in Arles from October to December 1888). In 1888 the artist returned to Pont-Aven where he became familiar with Émile Bernard’s pictorial experiments, also known as cloisonnism, to which he adhered for a time, although introducing a personal touch of symbolism, as epitomised by The Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland). That same year Gauguin met the painter Paul Sérusier who, on returning to Paris, founded together with Bonnard, Denis and Vuillard among others, the Nabi Group, whose departure point was their great admiration for Gauguin’s works. At the beginning of the 1890s, Gauguin’s life and work increasingly shared the desire to challenge the basic values of civilisation, which eventually led him to desert France for more remote locations in search of pure and primitive forms of life. In 1891 Gauguin left France for Papeete, which nevertheless disenchanted him at first, leading to a prompt return in December of 1894. After a brief period between Copenhagen and Paris, Gauguin decided once more to reach the islands of French Polynesia where he arrived on 9 September 1895. This time his stay would last until his death. Probably due to his worsening health, Gauguin spent his last years meditating on the human condition producing works such as Where do we come from_ Who are we_ Where are we going_ (1897, Boston Museum of Art). Gauguin’s great pictorial innovations, coupled with the myth that inspired his undomesticated way of life, led him to become the great precursor of the 20th-century artistic avant-garde movements. The artist died in Atuona, in the Marquesas Islands, on 8 May 1903.
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