"I shut my eyes in order to see."
Happy Birthday, Paul Gauguin! Eugéne Henri Paul Gauguin was born in 1848 in Paris, France. At the age of three, Gauguin and his parents fled to Lima, Peru to escape France's tumultuous political climate. The imagery of Peru later influenced Gauguin's art. Before he married and settled in Paris, Gauguin joined the merchant marines and traveled to India and the Black Sea. While working as a stockbroker, Gustave Arosa, a wealthy Spanish financier, introduced Gauguin to artist Camille Pissarro which developed Gauguin's love for art. Gauguin, who was invited to exhibit his work by Pissarro, began his artistic career with the Impressionists in Paris during the late 1880s.
Gauguin became a full-time artist painting Impressionist landscapes, still lifes, and interiors heavily influenced by Paul Cézanne. Gauguin adopted and adapted Cézanne's parallel, constructive brushstrokes; Gauguin's pictures showed a preoccupation with dreams, mystery, and evocative symbols that revealed his own artistic inclinations. His modernist approach brought him to Brittany and Panama where he produced lithographs. After his encounter with artist Émile Bernard, Gauguin painted Vision After the Sermon which utilized broad, matte fields of non-naturalistic color to express visions of Breton peasant women - clearly abandoning Cézanne's technique, Gauguin's painting became the hallmark of Symbolist art.
In October of 1888, Gauguin traveled to Arles, France where he met Vincent van Gogh. He encouraged Van Gogh to paint as he did, from memory and imagination, rather than nature motifs. However, their collaboration abruptly ended when Van Gogh suffered from a mental breakdown. Back in Paris, Gauguin helped to organize the Volpini exhibition where he produced a suite of ten zincographs. Unfortunately, the exhibition was not a major success, and Gauguin was itching for an exotic adventure. He set sail for preindustrial Tahiti in 1891 where his inspiration and painting flourished. His first major work, Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary), addresses a Christian theme in a Polynesian guise of a Tahitian Virgin Mary worshipped by two other Tahitian women colorfully dressed in a lush, tropical landscape. Therefore, most of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings are a hybrid of the West and East. He experimented with various colors and inks to explore different artistic and emotional effects. His final great masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, is a monumental allegorical painting serving as the culmination of his art.
In 1901, Gauguin became disillusioned with the Westernization and colonial corruption of Tahiti so he hopelessly searched for paradise on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa. In 1903, Paul Gauguin's searched ended, and he became an inspiration for a new generation of artists.
