Paul Gauguin

Works by this Artist

Vision After the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
Paul Gauguin, 1888

Where do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Paul Gauguin, 1897-98

Background

wealthy, liberal family; grandmother was the famous French socialist writer Flora Tristan

Studies

self-taught; with Camille Pissarro at Académie Colarossi (Paris)

Career

1871 – begins working as stockbroker

1874 – meets Camille Pissarro

1876 – exhibits at Paris Salon

1880 – exhibits at Fifth Impressionist exhibition (also Sixth 1881; Seventh 1882; and Eighth, 1886)

1882 – loses job as a stockbroker

1886 – begins working in ceramics; moves to Pont-Aven, Brittany

1888 – returns to Pont-Aven with Emile Bernard; Paul Sérusier visits; joins Vincent van Gogh in Arles October-December of 1888; returns to Paris in December

1889 – exhibits with Les XX (Brussels); submissions rejected by the Exposition universelle (Paris); joins alternative exhibition at Café Volpini; returns to Brittany with Sérusier

1891 – leaves for Tahiti following successful fundraising sale of his work in Paris

1893 – returns to Paris; exhibits at Galerie Durand-Ruel

1895 – returns to Papeete, Tahiti

Important Artworks

Blue Tree Trunks, 1888 (Ordrupgaard Collection, Denmark)

Still Life with Three Puppies, 1888 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Christ in the Garden of Olives, 1889 (Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach)

Playing in the Waves, 1889 (Cleveland Museum of Art)

The Yellow Christ, 1889 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo)

Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ, 1889 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

Poèmes Barbares, 1896 (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University)

The Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery)

Nevermore, 1897 (Courtauld Institute Gallery, London)

Web resources

smarthistory: Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon

Readings

Boime, Albert. “Gauguin’s D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? Millenarianism and Necromancy in Fin-de-Siècle France, “ Revelation of Modernism. Responses to Cultural Crises in Fin-de-Siècle Painting. Columbia, MO and London: University of Missouri Press, 2008, pp. 135-220

Brettell, Richard R. The Art of Paul Gauguin. Exhibition catalogue. Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1988

Dorra, Henri. The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007

Eisenman, Stephen F. Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth and Dream. New York: Skira, 2008

Eisenman, Stephen F. Gauguin’s Skirt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997

Gauguin, Paul. Paul Gauguin: the Search for Paradise: Letters from Brittany and the South Seas. London: Collins and Brown, 1992

Gauguin, Paul. The Writings of a Savage. New York: Paragon House, 1990

Herban, Mathew. “The Origin of Paul Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888),” The Art Bulletin, vol. 59, no. 2 (September 1977): 415-20

Mathews, Nancy M. Paul Gauguin: an Erotic Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001

Pickvance, Ronald. Gauguin and the School of Pont Aven. London: Apollo, 1994

Rookmaaker, H.R. Gauguin and 19th-Century Art Theory. Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1972

Shackelford, George. Gauguin Tahiti. Exhibition catalogue. Boston, MA: MFA Publications, 2004

Silverman, Debora. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Going native,” Art in America (July 1989): 119-28

Thomson, Belinda. Gauguin. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987

Varnedoe, Kirk. “Gauguin,” in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, William Rubin, ed. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984, pp. 179-209

Images