The Yellow Christ
Artist: Paul Gauguin
Year: 1889
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:
GAUGUIN PAINTED SEVERAL important canvases in 1889 which were to affirm his new concepts. The Yellow Christ is one of these. It exemplifies Gauguin’s newly developed theory that the impression of nature must be wedded to the aesthetic sentiment which chooses, arranges, simplifies, and synthesizes: the painter ought not to rest until he has given birth to the child of his imagination, begotten in a union of his mind with reality.
From Brittany, where he painted The Yellow Christ—inspired by the crude stone crucifixes to be found on the waysides—Gauguin wrote to a friend: “Don’t copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming in front of it, but think more of creating than of the actual result.” Indeed, Gauguin now even spoke of his intention to “paint like children,” yet—far from the true primitiveness that expressed itself so touchingly in the works of the douanier Rousseau—Gauguin’s approach to his subjects was a highly reasoned one, a conscious attempt to simplify forms and colors for the benefit of a more striking expression. He now felt free to use the elements of nature as best suited his purpose, and in The Yellow Christ this purpose was, as he himself said, to convey the “great rustic and superstitious simplicity” which struck him among the peasant folk of Brittany. To achieve this aim of creating a pictorial equivalent of primitive religious feelings, Gauguin endeavored to reduce all forms to their essential outlines, to use pure colors, to avoid shadows as far as possible (because they represent a realistic approach), and to renounce modeling to a great extent. Thus he attained in this work a strange eloquence, a mixture of crudeness and subtlety that seems to point the way to all the art movements that were subsequently to break away even more radically from the representation of nature.
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