The youth of the artist
Eugène-Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848 to a journalist father and a Peruvian mother, daughter of the committed writer Flora Tristan. He spent his childhood in Peru, where his father died in 1851. Returning to France at the age of 7, he studied and prepared for the naval academy, finally joining the navy at the age of 17. Second lieutenant on the Chile, he sailed the world's oceans from 1868 to 1871. But on the advice of his tutor Gustave Arosa, he finally opted for a settled life and a noble path, and became a stockbroker in Paris in 1872, where a certain financial success awaited him. In 1873, he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad, with whom he had five children.
The impressionist upheaval
The first turning point in his life came in 1874, when he and his art-loving tutor attended the first Impressionist exhibition. Fascinated, he began collecting, buying canvases by Monet, Manet, Renoir and Pissarro, and starting out as an amateur painter. In 1876, he exhibited for the first time in Viroflay and was noticed by Camille Pissarro, who invited him to work with Guillaumin and Cézanne. He then began exhibiting with other Impressionists.
In 1882, a stock market crash shattered his career as a stockbroker. Perhaps a blessing in disguise: the young painter decided to devote himself exclusively to his art.
The time of turmoil
The following years proved to be turbulent. From 1882 onwards, Gauguin struggled to make a living from his painting in Rouen, where he produced some forty paintings. But money was tight. Waiting for the crisis to end, he became a tarpaulin salesman in Denmark for a while; another failure, accompanied by the incomprehension of his in-laws. In 1885, no longer able to support his wife and children, he abandoned them and returned to Paris, where he began working with ceramics and joined forces with Ernest Chaplet to produce 50 works.
The first feelings of exoticism
After two attempts to settle in Panama and Martinique in 1887 - a harsh year in which Gauguin, enthralled by the light and landscapes, nevertheless painted seventeen canvases - he took refuge once again in Paris, then in Pont-Aven, a small village in Finistère. "The experience I had in Martinique was decisive," he wrote four years later. Only there did I really feel myself, and it's in what I brought back that you have to look for me if you want to know who I am". Indeed, Paul Gauguin's works were evolving. He moved from dense, heavy tones to exoticism and color, which he drew from the wonder of his youth at sea(Bord de mer, 1887). On his return to France, his break with Impressionism was evident in Vision après le sermon (1888), also known as Jacob's Struggle with the Angel, which influenced Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch. This work marks a new style for the artist: Symbolism.
The episode of Arles, a tumultuous friendship
In 1888, at the invitation of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he had met two years earlier, Gauguin went to Arles. The two artists spent two months together, painting the Alyscamps series, portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Great sensitives, brought together by a common interest in color, they nevertheless came into conflict when Gauguin painted Van Gogh painting sunflowers, a portrait of which Van Gogh would say: "It's me, but I've gone mad This rich artistic phase turned sour, ending with the famous episode of Van Gogh's severed ear on December 23, 1888.
The first stay in Tahiti
After several new masterpieces, including Le Christ jaune and Autoportrait au halo et au serpent, Gauguin could only think of fleeing. When he decided to leave for Tahiti, he set out to reconcile his life and his work. "Surrounded by a new family, far from this European struggle after money. There in Tahiti, in the silence of the beautiful tropical nights, I can listen to the soft murmuring music of the movements of my heart in loving harmony with the mysterious beings around me. Free at last, without worrying about money, I will be able to love, sing and die", he wrote. Yet it was an already worn-out man, approaching 40, who landed on Polynesian shores, after a tortuous journey fraught with pitfalls.
In April 1891, he settled in Mataiea, on the island of Tahiti, and met 13-year-old Taha'amana. Disillusionment was swift: the ancient civilization he sought no longer existed, but the period was nonetheless fruitful. The young girl, with whom he began a relationship - criticized by commentators in view of her very young age - became a veritable muse: Gauguin painted no less than seventy canvases in the space of a few months. Most of the paintings from this period depict scenes of daily life with Tahitian figures, but a certain melancholy emanates from them, with the characters' gaze absent and their attitude exuding a certain gentleness, as in Femmes de Tahiti in particular.
Caught up by the sadness of losing his daughter Aline, by poverty and illness, the painter soon sank into depression and even attempted to end his life.
The second stay in Tahiti
In 1893, Gauguin returned to Europe to sell his paintings. He held a major exhibition in Paris and began writing Noa-Noa. But his stay was fraught with disappointment, with yet another financial failure and the loss of a court case. Disgusted with Western civilization, he returned to Tahiti in 1895.
Paul Gauguin settled in Punaauia with 14-year-old Pau'ura. Although he failed to recreate the happy atmosphere of his days in Mataiea, he did sign some of his finest canvases: Nave Nave Mahana (Delicious Days), Poèmes barbares and, above all, D'où venons-nous? What are we? (Where are we from? Where are we going?), with their massive forms and saturated colors. "You have to sacrifice everything to color," he used to say. But here again, bitterness and alcohol got the better of him: depressed, the wild painter found Tahiti already too Westernized.
Hiva Oa, tumultuous end of life
After a stay in hospital in Papeete and another suicide attempt, Paul Gauguin set sail for the Marquesas in the summer of 1901, settling in the village of Atuona on the island of Hiva Oa. Although paradise seemed close at hand this time, the artist soon became disillusioned. He took aim at the abuses of the colonial administration, which he provoked at every opportunity, fought for the rights of the natives and observed a real rejection of the Church. With the agreement of the chief of a small village, he abducted the young Marie-Rose Vaeoho, 39 years his junior, from the Catholic school. Pregnant, the young woman is quickly sent back to her village to give birth; wanting to mock the bishop, the painter soon replaces her with Henriette, a pupil at the Sisters' school and wife of the altar boy. And since two provocations are better than one, he also christened his cabin the "Maison du Jouir".
Despite his run-ins with the Church and the gendarmes, Gauguin signed a contract with Paris-based art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who paid him monthly installments of 300 francs and provided him with free canvas and colors in exchange for a minimum of twenty-five paintings a year, each priced at 200 francs. The artist then painted twenty-nine pictures in 21 months, as well as numerous drawings, engravings and sculptures, including his most profound creations: Contes barbares (1902), Cavaliers au bord de la mer (1902). His last work is a self-portrait.
Pursued, alcoholic, drug addict, syphilitic and destitute, "Koke" as he was then known to the inhabitants of Hiva Oa, died at the age of 55 on May 8, 1903, a cursed artist in total anonymity. In all, he completed nearly one hundred paintings, four hundred engravings and dozens of sculptures. Since then, he has been laid to rest in the Calvaire cemetery, above the village of Atuona, leaving behind him a mixed memory, to say the least. His grave is next to that of Jacques Brel, who also fell in love with the island.
A posthumous glory
In spite of himself, it was only after his death that Paul Gauguin achieved fame and success. A true avant-gardist in modern art, art dealer Ambroise Vollard had anticipated this: he had all the artist's barely dried canvases shipped back to Paris. In this way, the man who also revealed Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, put Gauguin on the map in France, Europe and the rest of the world at the beginning of the 20th century.
Today, his works are exhibited in six museums in France, including the celebrated Musée d'Orsay, as well as in some twenty museums around the world. A Gauguin museum was even created on the island of Tahiti, but unfortunately closed its doors a few years ago. In Atuona, the Gauguin Cultural Center retraces the artist's life with paintings, letters, photographs and various memorabilia. Most of these are reproductions, of course, as the originals are kept in museums in major capitals.
Finally, among the most spectacular sales, we should mention the March 2008 sale of the painting La Fin royale (1893), bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for close to 30 million dollars, and the February 2015 sale of Quand te maries-tu?(Nafea faa ipoipo?), painted in 1892 and sold for 7 francs to the Marquesas Islands when Gauguin died, acquired by a Qatari family for 265 million euros..
Tributes
Sometimes a respected artist, sometimes a controversial man, Paul Gauguin and his tortuous existence have inspired more than one literary and cinematic work. The writer Victor Segalen, who arrived in Hiva Oa three months after the death of the painter to whom he felt a strange fascination, wrote several homage texts, including the short story Le Maître du jouir, the article Gauguin dans son dernier décor (1904) and Hommage à Gauguin (1916) for the preface to the edition of Gauguin's letters to his friend Georges-Daniel de Monfreid. The painter is also the hero, along with his grandmother Flora Tristan, of the most recent novel Le Paradis - un peu plus loin (2003) by Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. In this book, the author recounts Gauguin's life in Tahiti and his desire to leave the European civilization that would have destroyed him.
The artist has inspired six feature films. The latest, Gauguin - Voyage de Tahiti, directed by Édouard Deluc and released in 2017, starred Vincent Cassel in the lead role. Some media outlets have notably criticized the author's approach to the nature of the artist's sexual relationships. Fabrizio Dori's beautiful comic strip Gauguin - L'autre monde(2016) uses the painter's colorful palette to describe Gauguin's prolific, Polynesian end of life.
