Paul Gauguin’s adventure with the primitive, or rather the non-European, began only a year into his life. In 1849, after Louis Napoleon comes to power, his parents emigrate to Peru to stay with Gauguin’s grandfather. 6 years later the family returns to France and young Paul attends a boarding school at Orleans. At 17 he takes to sea, voyaging which takes him round the world, returning home in 1868 to join the French Navy. With the end of the Franco-Prussian War he gets a job as a broker's agent three years later.
At 25 he marries Mette, a Danish children's nanny. In the following 10 years they have 5 children and live comfortably on the income from his day job. It is at this time that he develops an interest in Art. His artistic apprenticeship, first with his stockbroker friend Claude Schuffenecker and later with Pizzaro, Cezanne and others meets with success; he rents a studio and exhibits regularly with the Impressionists and the Independents.
1889
Paul Gauguin ”Self Portrait”
The end of the good life which comes when he quits the stock exchange job coincides with the birth of his last child. The next 3 years are difficult as his marriage begins to disintegrate while his wife remains with the children at her parents' in Copenhagen. Unable to stay there and without a job he travels with his son Clovis to Paris to take up an artist's life.
Although this factual account of an awakening of a great artist lacks nuance, it does nevertheless capture a gradual reorientation of an artist's will against the grain a life. What also becomes clear is that the bourgeois years of Paul Gauging life (between his 25th - 35th birthday) were merely a quiet interval in an otherwise restless life. It is this restlessness which I see as defining his character and fundamental to an understanding of the man.
I suspect that the bourgeois years were in a sense unavoidable. The combined forces of nature and social custom collaborated in a way against the as yet uncristallised spiritual longings. The break with tradition came gradually and in relation to his family at least I don't think it was a question of abandonment. We should recognise a basic honesty and a sense of idealism in his approach to life. His profoundly spiritual conceptions of womanhood, the family and society, and perhaps in particular his promethean, Christ like longings are clearly visible in his art.
1891
Paul Gauguin ”Brooding woman”
1899
Paul Gauguin ”Two Tahitian women with mago”
Both Christianity and restlessness were powerful forces in Paul Gauguin’s life. Conceptually, however, the two are not easily reconcilable. Restlessness can be many things; an expression of disquiet and symptomatic of a desire for peace or an unquenched thirst for the unknown. If the restless heart is restless for peace Christianity can offer such a refuge, an oasis that shelters and nourishes, however much it depends on the existence of Evil which is, after all, its projected opposite. Without evil, Christian paradise can seem terribly boring in comparison with earthly existence. It is, I think, this aspect of Christianity which for Paul Gauging sat awkwardly with his desire to understand human existence; that restlessness which made his life an unended quest for the essence of being. His approach was that of a myth-maker. Not as literary a man as William Blake and within the context of that new realism of which I spoke earlier in relation to Slewinski, Paul Gauging set about creating a new mythology, a visionary art which I feel is still poorly understood.
1892
Paul Gauguin ”Arearea”
1896
Paul Gauguin ”Not Working”
Much has been said about Gauging the artist holding up a mirror to our European civilisation. He is not a simple observer or a propagandist however. His art is one long labour of mythos for the modern man. Christian elements and non-Christian symbolism are worked together to mythologize the present. What is unusual, as in Blake, is that it is primarily an aesthetic approach and yet of necessity an equally philosophical task. He succeeds intuitively where many a thinker have failed. A deeply self conscious artist he presents to us symbolically the common threads of humanity, the tangled roots of Christian symbolism and that of the non-Christian other; in other words, a shared community of archetypes. Poetically and with conviction Gauging reveals to us the two-fold nature of the underlying substratum of life, the world as both spirit and matter. In this he is no less revolutionary a philosopher than Spinoza who on purely metaphysical grounds argued that there is only one substance.
1896
Paul Gauguin ”Nativity”
I feel that the sense of spiritual mystery which emanates from his works owes its potency to this perception of all things as both material and spiritual manifestations of the one God, a deity immanent in all nature rather than a separate or transcending entity. The proposition that there is no great parent up in the sky to lead, to reward or to punish us, and that the ultimate responsibility for heaven and hell rests squarely within the scope of our lives, within each act, each thought and each gesture, this proposition is as powerful as it is disturbing. It is I think for this reason that we continue to see Paul Gauging as the painter of exotic paradise rather than a true Promethean who revealed to us God's power over our lives.
1892
Paul Gauguin ”Woman with a mango”
1897
Paul Gauguin ”Nevermore, O Tahiti”
1899
Paul Gauguin ”Three Tahitians”
1902
Paul Gauguin ”Barbarous tales”
Paul Gauguin died in 1903 in French Polynesia.
