Tim Marlow TV - Waldemar Januszczak TV - Paul Gauguin - John Richardson - Vincent van Gogh - Octave Mirbeau - Stephane Mallarme - Fake or Fortune? TV - James Fox TV -
Gauguin has the most colourful life and career of any modern artist. Tim Marlow on ... Gauguin
Multi-layered, rich and complex. ibid.
Gauguin emerges as a kind of assimilator and pioneer from this exhibition. A man of great cultural curiosity but also blessed with an acute visual and poetic sensibility, who never lost the idea that art had the immense power as a vehicle for imaginative transformation. ibid.
This painting made by Gauguin the summer of 1888 ... Haymaking ... Space and form seem simplified ... Tim Marlow at the Courtauld 3/3
Gauguin sought inspiration further afield in the south seas in the island of Tahiti. ibid.
Gauguin ... he was one of those annoyingly talented people who could turn their hand to most things: and for the first half of his career Gauguin turned his hand to Impressionism. Waldemar Januszczak, The Impressionists III: Painting and Revolution: Painting The People, BBC 2011
Gauguin was already forty-three when he left for Tahiti. A big chunk of his career was behind him. ibid.
Gauguin was an Impressionist. He showed in five of the eight Impressionist exhibitions. ibid.
Gauguin’s Impressionist landscapes are so subtle and modest. ibid.
There are so many things that Gauguin was good at: sculpture, painting, ceramics, print-making, but not at selling tarpaulins. ibid.
A hint – don’t paint too much direct from Nature. Art is an abstraction! Study Nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God – to create like our Divine Master. Paul Gauguin, 1888
Art is either plagiarism or revolution. Paul Gauguin
It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block. Paul Gauguin
The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public. Paul Gauguin
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will. Paul Gauguin, Notes Synthethiques
I am a great artist and I know it. It’s because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue – which is what many people think I am, for that matter. Oh well, what difference does it make. What upsets me the most is not so much the poverty as the things that perpetually get in the way of my art, which I cannot carry out the way I feel and which I would carry out if it weren’t for the poverty that is like a straitjacket. You tell me I am wrong to stay away from the artist [sic] centre. No, I am right; I’ve known for a long time what I am doing and why I am doing it. My artistic centre is in my brain and nowhere else, and I am strong because I am never thrown off-course by other people and because I do what is in me. Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them. Paul Gauguin
The 1906 exhibition of Gauguin’s work left Picasso more than ever in this artist’s thrall. Gauguin demonstrated the most disparate types of art – not to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical myths, and much else besides – could be combined into a synthesis that was of its time yet timeless. An artist could also confound conventional notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing his demons to the dark gods (not necessarily Tahitian ones) and tapping a new source of divine energy. If in later years Picasso played down his debt to Gauguin, there is no doubt that between 1905 and 1907 he felt a very close kinship with this other Paul, who prided himself on Spanish genes inherited from his Peruvian grandmother. Had not Picasso signed himself ‘Paul’ in Gauguin’s honor. John Richardson
Gauguin interests me very much as a man – very much. For a long time now it has seemed to me that in our nasty profession of painting we are most sorely in need of men with the hands and the stomachs of workmen. More natural tastes – more loving and more charitable temperaments – than the decadent dandies of the Parisian boulevards have. Well, here we are without the slightest doubt in the presence of a virgin creature with savage instincts. With Gauguin blood and sex prevail over ambition. Vincent van Gogh, letter to Emile Bernard
His art is strangely cerebral and passionate, uneven still, but poignant and superb in its very unevenness. A sorrowful work, for to understand it, to feel the shock of it, we ourselves must know sorrow and the irony of sorrow, which is the threshold of mystery. It sometimes rises to the height of the mystical act of faith; sometimes it obliterates itself and grimaces in the gloom of doubt. It always emanates the bitter and violent aroma of the poisons of the flesh. There is a dazzling and savoury mixture of barbaric splendour, Catholic liturgy, Hindu reverie, Gothic imagery, and obscure and subtle symbolism; there are harsh realities and distraught flights into poetry, through which M Gauguin creates an altogether new and personal art – the art of a painter and poet, of an apostle and demon, an art which instils anguish. Octave Mirbeau, ‘Paul Gauguin, L’Echo de Paris’
It is extraordinary that anyone could put so much mystery into so much brightness. Stephane Mallarme
We’re on the trail of two pictures believed to be by one of the world’s most sought-after artists: Paul Gauguin. Fake or Fortune? s6e3: Gauguin
Self-centred and impulsive, a hedonist. ibid.
Doubts about the authenticity of the still life are mounting up. ibid.
‘The Gauguin Committee will gladly make a statement as to the inclusion of this drawing in the catalogue.’ ibid.
Paul Gauguin had bought into an old myth about Polynesia … but it did inspire a number of intoxicating paintings. James Fox, Oceans Apart: Art and the Pacific s1e2: Polynesia, BBC 2018
His time spent in the Pacific was particularly controversial. ibid.