Tahitian Landscape
Artist: Paul Gauguin
Year: 1891
Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin was a French painter with a post-Impressionist style influenced by Picasso, Matisse, and more. His work often contained symbolism like primitive art. He was born in 1848 and was ahead of his time. His fame didn't come until after his death, which occurred in 1903.
1954 Commentary by John Rewald:
ONCE HE HAD ABANDONED IMPRESSIONISM, Gauguin painted very few pure landscapes as he had done before under Pissarro’s guidance. It would seem that in Tahiti the natives attracted him almost more than the beautiful scenery, or at least that he seldom contemplated this scenery without simultaneously thinking of its inhabitants who, in his mind, were an inseparable part of it. Their strange customs, their nimble bodies, their colorful raiment deeply stirred his imagination. Yet every now and then he let himself be impregnated with the mystic charm of a tropical landscape such as this, where he studied nature almost without thinking of its inhabitants: the lone native and the black animal hardly interfere with the majesty of the scene—they even appear to accentuate its solitude.
No longer bound by the rigorous requirements of his Synthetism developed in Brittany, Gauguin’s style has somewhat mellowed lines and curves have become more gracious, the flat areas have acquired softness through slight variations of tones, and the coloration itself has lost its strong accents. But his composition nevertheless draws on the same elements: simplified forms and large expanses of uniform planes, tied together by a rhythmic design.
Either because of the peace which at last had pervaded his soul or because of the untroubled beauty of the fields and mountains extending in front of his lonely hut, the artist found here an appropriate expression for the calm and luxuriance which had lured him to the South Seas.
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