Gauguin. Jp. A. Calosse
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its wood reliefs, Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses (Be in love and you will be happy) and Soyez mystérieuses (Be mysterious).
Flower Vase by the Window
1881
Oil on canvas, 19 × 27 cm
Fine Arts Museum, Rennes
In his regular report to Paris, the bishop wrote: “The only noteworthy event here has been the sudden death of a contemptible individual named Gauguin, a reputed artist but an enemy of God and everything that is decent.” It was only twenty years later that the artist’s name appeared on his tombstone, and even that belated honour was due to a curious circumstance: Gauguin’s grave was found by a painter belonging to the Society of American Fakirs.
Snow Effects (Snow in Rue Carcel)
1882–1883
Oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
It was only due to the presence of a few travellers and colonists who knew something about art and to the ill-concealed greediness of his recent enemies who, for all their hate, did not shy away from making money on his works, that part of Gauguin’s artistic legacy escaped destruction.
Sleeping Child
1884
Oil on canvas, 46 × 55.5 cm
Private collection, Lausanne
For example, the policeman of Atuona who had personally supervised the sale, destroyed with his own hands some of the artist’s works, which supposedly offended his chaste morals, was not above purloining a few pictures and later upon his return to Europe, opened a kind of Gauguin museum. As the result of all this, not one of Gauguin’s works remains in Tahiti.
Ice Skaters in the Frederiksberg Park
1884
Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen
The news of Gauguin’s death, which reached France with a four-month delay, evoked an unprecedented interest in his life and work. The artist’s words about posthumous fame came true. He shared the fate of many artists who received recognition when they could no longer enjoy it.
Dieppe Beach
1885
Oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
Daniel de Monfreid predicted this in a letter written to Gauguin several months before his death: “In returning you will risk damaging that process of incubation which is taking place in the public’s appreciation of you. You are now that unprecedented legendary artist, who from the furthest South Seas sends his disturbing, inimitable works, the definitive works of a great man who has, as it were, disappeared from the world. Your enemies – and like all who upset the mediocrity you have many enemies – are silent: they dare not attack you, do not even think of it. You are so far away. You should not return. You should not deprive them of the bone they hold in their teeth. You are already unassailable like all the great dead; you already belong to the history of art.”
Bathers in Dieppe
1885
Oil on canvas, 71.5 × 71.5 cm
Ny Carlsberg Glypotek, Copenhagen
Corner of a Pond
1885
Oil on canvas, 81 × 65 cm
Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan
In the same year, 1903, Ambroise Vollard exhibited at his Paris gallery about a hundred paintings and drawings by Gauguin. Some had been sent to him by the artist from Oceania, others had been purchased from various art dealers and collectors. In 1906, in Paris, a Gauguin retrospective was held at the newly opened Salon d’Automne.
Self-Portrait in front of Easel
1885
Oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm
Private collection
Two hundred and twenty-seven works (not counting those listed in the catalogue without numbers) were put on display – paintings, graphic art, pottery and woodcarvings. Octave Maus, the leading Belgian art critic, wrote on this occasion: “Paul Gauguin is a great colourist, a great draughtsman, a great decorator; a versatile and self-confident painter.”
Self-Portrait “To My Friend Carrière”
1886
Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 32.5 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington
When it comes to the question of accepting or rejecting his artistic credo or of determining his place in art, the different, even mutually exclusive views expressed by different generations of researchers with different aesthetic tastes are quite justified. Some experts see Gauguin as a destroyer of realism who denounced traditions and paved the way for “free art”, be it Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism or Abstraction.
Self-Portrait near Golgotha
1886
Oil on canvas, 74 × 64 cm
Museu de Arte, São Paulo
Others, on the contrary, think that Gauguin continued the European artistic tradition. Some contemporaries reacted to his departure from Europe with mistrust and suspicion, for they believed that a true artist could and must work only on his native soil and not derive inspiration from an alien culture. Pissarro, Cézanne and Renoir shared this opinion, for example. They considered Gauguin’s borrowings from the stylistics of Polynesian culture to be a kind of plunder.
Young Bretons at Bath
1886
Oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm
Museum of Art, Hiroshima
Such controversial opinions of Gauguin’s art are by no means accidental. His life and work present many contradictions, though often only outward ones. His life was naturally integrated with his creative activity, while the latter in its turn embodied his ideals and views on life. But this organic unity of life and work was maintained through a never-ending dramatic struggle.
The Four Breton Girls
1886
Oil on canvas, 72 × 91 cm
Neue Pinakothek, Munich
It was the struggle for the right to