Paul Gauguin: Color, Escape and a Complicated Legacy

Searching for a simpler life, Gauguin went to Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1886, then to Martinique in 1887. He began working with blocks of color in large, flat planes.¹

Back in Pont-Aven in 1888 he painted Vision of the Sermon, with broad planes of color, clear outlines and simplified forms. He called his style “Synthetism”: a synthesis of form with idea and emotion.¹

In late October 1888 Gauguin went to Arles to stay with Vincent van Gogh, who dreamed of a “Studio of the South.” The two argued constantly about art. After two months, the stay ended in the famous crisis in which Van Gogh's ear was cut.¹

The usual story says Van Gogh mutilated himself. In 2008, two art historians, Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, argued after studying police records and letters that Gauguin had done it with a sword, and that the two men kept it secret.¹ The question is still debated.

Gauguin arrived in Papeete in June 1891. His idea of Tahiti as an untouched paradise came partly from a novel, and he was disappointed to find how much French colonization had changed the island.¹

Gauguin's influence on 20th-century art was enormous: his experiments fed many avant-garde movements.¹ But his life in Polynesia is now seen more critically. When the National Gallery in London devoted an exhibition to his portraits in 2019, its wall texts stated that he “undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner” and that he repeatedly had sexual relations with very young girls.³

Both things can be true: a painter who changed how color is used, and a man whose life deserves an honest look.