Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin is a French Post-Impressionist painter, major figure of Symbolism and Primitivism whose bold and visionary work paves the way for modern art. After a life as banker and Impressionist collector, he abandons everything at age 35 to devote himself entirely to painting, developing a synthetic style characterized by flat areas of vivid non-naturalistic colors, cloisonné contours and decorative simplification of forms inspired by Japanese art and primitive arts. His quest for authenticity and spirituality leads him first to Brittany in Pont-Aven, then to Martinique, and finally to French Polynesia where he creates his most emblematic works - Tahitian scenes with saturated colors that mythologize and idealize primitive life as an alternative to decadent Western civilization. Rejecting Impressionism which he judges too attached to visual appearances, he affirms the painter's right to express his interior and symbolic vision, profoundly influencing the Nabis, the Fauves and Expressionism, and embodying the romantic figure of the cursed artist in rupture with bourgeois society.