Edvard Munch - Evening Melancholy I

"In a strongly emotional state of mind, a landscape will have a particular effect on one.  By portraying this landscape, one will produce a painting which is effected by one's mood.  The mood is the main thing, nature is simply the means."
                                                                             - Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, Evening Melancholy I, 1896 (color woodcut)

Munch took part in the decorative craze that was going on especially in France at the end of the 19th century.  He conceived a group of 22 paintings that he worked on as a group like Monet's series paintings, hoping to sell them together.  He wanted it to be a picture of life with a Nordic theme. Life, Love, Fear, Death, Melancholy.  Wanting to give something back to humanity, Munch decided to paint feelings, not a photograph of nature, or a pretty picture to hang in a drawing room.

Emotion and anxiety, all those feelings that have importance for human beings were important to Munch and in order to emphasize the aura of intense emotion he wanted to evoke, he would use shadows and rings of color around his figures. Munch worked on various different techniques to create the images of his paintings with different mediums to find the affect different materials would have on the meaning of his work.

Munch taught himself printmaking and created his own prints. He would take the whole and cut it into 3 jigsaw woodcut pieces which would aid him and make the multicolor printmaking process easier.  He experimented a lot with reproducing prints of his paintings which allowed him more flexibility and the different materials provided opportunities for experimentation and innovation.

Like Gauguin, Munch used printmaking to aid the character of his art.  He liked the little imperfections saying it made the work more real, more sincere.  The natural grain of the wood would be part of the element of design and technique.  Gauguin used the 10 woodblock prints for his journal/novel from Tahiti, Noa Noa,  to aid him in giving his audience the essence of the place.  Munch used the different woodcut prints to explore the essence of human emotions.

In Melancholy I, Munch depicts his friend Jappe Nilssen, sitting by a lone, desolate shoreline, in deep thought.  His shoulders are stooped, his expression grim, he seems to be looking into the depths of the water. He is a dark figure alone on a dark landscape.  The red of the sky could be indicative of his desire to have someone to love in his life.  When we compare this image to Gauguin's Nave Nave Fenua (Delightful land) we can see the distinct difference between the two artist, how they looked at life and their environment.  Gauguin wants to represent to us this delightful land full of happy, native women where life is primitive and natural while Munch is showing us the anxiety that is part of the human condition in a modern world.

Edvard Munch - Madonna

Edvard Munch, Madonna, lithograph and woodcut, 1892-1902
(Museum of Modern Art, New York)

This lithograph of a mysterious and erotic woman with moonlight cast across her face is titled Madonna.  Munch has taken a traditional religious icon and represented her as a passionate, sexual woman.  She looks as if she is in the throes of ecstasy.  This is actually a representation of Munch's conflicting ideas about women as dangerous seductress as well as the givers of life.  She is surrounded by a red frame, the color of passion and life.  The color red combined with forms resembling sperm floating on the frame is underscoring the idea of life-giving.  For Munch life and death always went hand in hand, there is a dead fetus on the bottom of the frame presenting this idea.

Paul Gauguin, Hail Mary, 1891
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

When  he was in Paris, Munch was enthralled by Paul Gauguin's work.  Gauguin was also doing biblical images around this time and  he was obsessed with Eve.  In Hail Mary he reworked the western concept of Mary with the symbols of another culture.  Gauguin's Mary was brown and wearing a red pareu, while an angle with yellow wings is presenting the Madonna and Child to two half naked Tahitian women in western style prayer poses.  In the lush setting, exotic fruits are laid out at the bottom of the picture, recalling an altar.
Similar to Gauguin, Munch is reworking the theme of the Madonna here, in his own visual vocabulary.  While the primitive was Gauguin's obsession, Munch was interested in sex, life and death.

By representing the dead fetus, he might also be tipping his hat to the French Symbolists because he wanted to show these paintings in Paris.  There was an obsession with degeneration of society and depopulation in France at this time. The French Symbolists were also depicting dead fetus' because of the beginnings of the feminist movement and women having less babies, society was developing a fear concerning the drop in the birth rate and abortion.  On the one hand there is woman as seductress and on the other the symbol of death - life and death going hand in hand together in art as well as society's conscious.

Edvard Munch - Self-Portrait with Cigarette

"Sickness and insanity were the black angels that guarded my cradle."
                                                                    - Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1895
(National Gallery, Oslo, Norway)

Edvard Munch, a Norwegian Symbolist, was obsessed with sickness and death.  He lost his mother when he was five and then his favorite sister and his brother, all to tuberculosis. But this was not exceptional since health problems were rampant at this time and people thought it was due to living in cities where the air was not clean.  Munch, as an adult, had acute anxiety and depression and even had to be institutionalized.

After studying art in Oslo and not getting the response he wanted to his first show, he went to Paris to learn to draw on a fellowship from the government.   He had to return home after a very brief stay because his father died. Although he traveled, he lived in Germany for the rest of his life.  Munch had some very tumultuous relationships, never got married or had any children.

Munch worked on several self-portraits to explore his mood and sense of self.  In Self-Portrait with a Cigarette, he portrayed himself almost being subsumed by a purple cloud of smoke, giving the impression that he had been smoking for sometime.  The smoke also heightens the expressive effect of his hand and face. He has painted yellow highlights on his face and hand as well as red veins popping on his hand giving him an overall sickly appearance.  Because he put so many different things in his paints, how he treated the surface of the canvas and the drippings at the bottom, this painting almost has the appearance of a water color. He stares out, his eyes wide and intense, with his hand blocking the progress of the viewer into the picture, protecting himself.  He almost looks startled, questioning, maybe a little surprised at himself or someone who is watching him.  This is a very radical image because smoking a cigarette was not the typical way artists depicted themselves.

Munch is actually proclaiming his association with the commonly accepted concepts of Decadence and Bohemianism  in the 1890's in Self-Portrait with Cigarette. Decadence was a Parisian literary movement from the 1870's that suggested the exploration of the self in art as opposed to the naturalistic narrative that dealt with social issues- a rhetoric of moral deformity as a source of artistic redemption.  Bohemianism was the lifestyle of the marginal, non-traditional, like-minded artists and writers who promoted a dissent from the prevailing middle-class modes of behavior, and the cafe which was served as the social setting for this.1  

When he showed this painting along with a group of others, critics were so appalled that they said this was the work of a sick mind that could potentially corrupt young minds.  Scharffenberg, a 26 year old medical student, tried to scientifically prove a direct link between Munch's art and the illnesses in his family. Munch was not bothered by this, in fact he considered sickness a positive for creativity because it suggested that the aesthetic imagination could exceed the boundaries set by a rational mind and provided the flexibility for the artist's creative abilities to come thorough.  He insisted that illness and anxiety were central to his work. In 19th century there was a well established connection between artistic creativity and illness.

There was also a social class related issue to smoking, because cigarettes communicated that its user was someone outside of middle class boundaries and or someone with pretensions to working class status.  During his early adulthood, one of the ideals of Munch and his circle of friends from 'Kristiania (present day Oslo) Boheme' was the destruction of such boundaries; cigarettes and alcohol were the signs of their bohemian cafe persona.2


Norwegian critic Andreas Aubert identified Munch, as "one of the children of a refined, over civilized age," affected with the condition of neurasthenia, a nervous disorder.  Munch embraced this idea because this condition made the person have more sensitivity to the world around him so he could portray the world differently.3


With the iconography of this image, Munch is referencing marginality, dissolution, and taking his place with the degenerate who wanted to demolish middle-class values.  In this self-portrait Munch gives us a glimpse into the his inner feelings and symbols instead of what he observed in the mirror. He is also using color, line and composition in an expressive way to evoke emotions and moods. All these elements makes this painting a great work to study in order to understand one of the different artistic styles of Symbolism.

1-3 Patricia G.Berman, "Edvard Munch's Self-Portrait with Cigarette:  Smoking and the Bohemian Persona" Art Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 4,(Dec 1993), 630-636

Edouard Vuillard - Self-Portrait

Edouard Vuillard, Self-Portrait, 1892
(Private Collection)

The Nabis' art was a combination of Gauguin's Symbolism and Impressionism. Unlike Gauguin, they did not reject modern life, their subject matter like the croquet game was very much of the moment.  Edouard Vuillard painted a lot of intimate interior scenes involving his mother, sister and his mother's business which she ran out of their home.  He was obsessed with pattern.

Edouard Vuillard must have painted this colorful self-portrait from his imagination though. Obviously his hair was not bright yellow, face pink and beard bright orange.  His whole face has become a pattern, even the odd shape that covers half his face is just for effect.  The dots on the background are decorative elements he paints to give energy and an aura around his head.  He has even broken with the tradition of the canvas always being rectangular.

Vuillard was best known for his interior scenes where the objects and figures are embedded in their surroundings.

Pierre Bonnard - Twilight or Croquet Game

The Nabis were a group of precocious young artists whose close relationship started in school and later on Denis, Bonnard and Vuillard shared an apartment and remained life-long friends.

Pierre Bonnard, Twilight, or Croquet Game, 1892
(Musee d'Orsay)

This painting by Pierre Bonnard is a multi-figure composition, that fits Denis' description of a flat surface covered in a successful combination of colors, surface pattern and emotion with a nature-based subject matter. It is the scene of a croquet game taking place in real time with identifiable figures from his own life- his father, brother-in-law, and sister watching their cousin standing, to make her next shot.  There were many peasant paintings with the title Twilight and in this case it is supposed to be evocative.  It may be emphasizing the paintings melancholic undertones of Bonnard's father, getting old and coming to the twilight of his life.

Paul Gauguin, The Vision after the Sermon
(Jacob Wresting with the Angel), 1888
(National Gallery of Scotland)

Pierre Bonnard, like the other Nabis, respected Gauguin and mostly admired his use of color.  In Twilight,  he was looking to Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon, but took his image out of any kind of religious context. Both paintings are structurally very similar.  In the foreground of Vision after the Sermon, Gauguin has the Breton women in the actual reality, and people from Bonnard's life are playing croquet in the foreground of the Twilight.  The upper part of both the paintings are devoted to the realm of the imagination- in Twilight, the dancing women who could be from any time, any place and in Vision after the Sermon, the apparition of the biblical story.

In Bonnard's canvas the figures stand shrouded in vegetation and half light, the surface of the painting, lush greens separated with linear patterns and especially the pattern of the dog in the middle, is a thick tapestry of design.  Similar to Gauguin each area of color and pattern are separate.   The soft, dusky light that permeates Twilight, is actually due to design  than nature, we see the women dancing under carefully shaped forms of yellow and green on the upper right of the canvas.

Bonnard painted Twilight on the grounds of his beloved family home. He used this country home in other paintings as well because he felt it embodied the ideal family harmony.  He is known for his built up surfaces of broad and short strokes in colors of close values and narrative compositions of interiors and gardens inhabited with family and friends.  

The Nabis

"Remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."
                                                                      -  Maurice Denis, 1890

Maurice Denis, Climbing Mount Calvary, 1889
(Musee d'Orsay)

Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Paul Serusier, Maurice Denis and Ker Xavier Roussel were a group of eclectic painters that called themselves the Nabis.  They exemplified the cult-like character of Symbolism and they developed their own private language.   The name "Nabis" is from the Hebrew and Arabic word for "prophet."It was given to these artists by poet Henri Cavalis in response to the painters' aim to revitalize painting and become prophets of modern art.  They believed in the idea that art is decoration; for every emotion and thought there "existed a plastic decorative equivalent, a corresponding beauty."

According to the Nabi, painting was first and foremost a harmonious ensemble of lines and colors.  One area of color pattern had to be separated from one another by a line.  They were very influenced by Gauguin.  When Paul Serusier was sojourning in Pont Aven in the summer of 1888, Gauguin was advising him on painting this painting which was to become their talisman.  He was literally leaning over Serusier's shoulder, giving him directions like to paint nature as he saw it, and to use colors straight from the tube.  This image became a charm for them to look at for inspiration.

The Nabis tried to destroy the separation between the fine arts from the decorative arts and thus reunite arts and crafts.  They designed posters, illustrations, theater sets, screens, stained glass, textiles, and ceramics.  They were aspiring to see painting and sculpture as part of a decorative whole and erase the division between art and everyday life thorough the production of functional decorative objects. In time while they maintained their status as avant-garde painters, they also extended the function and language of painting through decoration.  They wished to move painting away from the public sphere into the private world of the interior.1  

Alberti's idea of a painting as a window into a world was not true anymore.  Art was about decoration.  They were thinking of expressing their own individuality by line and color, to create harmony where the subject matter was secondary.

1  Nicholas Watkins, "The Genesis of a Decorative Aesthetic"

Paul Gauguin - Oviri

Paul Gauguin, Oviri, 1894
(Musee d'Orsay)

The title of this sculpture, Oviri,  is derived from a Tahitian word meaning "savage."   It is the depiction of a Tahitian deity  that is a woman-destroyer, who is destroying a blood stained she-wolf by her hip while another one lies at her feet.
Gauguin was born in Peru to a French father and a half Peruvian mother and he liked to think of himself as being savage, someone who is not completely within the boundaries of respectable society. This sculpture became his grave monument.

This is a partially glazed, stoneware ceramic in a light brown tone, the color and the from recalling the more androgynous body type of the Maori female.  There is a roughness to the surface of the sculpture and a crudeness to the glaze due to the fact that it is splotchy.  Gauguin liked to leave certain areas deliberately rough in order to emphasize the primitive, where the artist has left his mark, his touch, making the work more real, authentic.

He produced this sculpture when he was back from his first trip to Tahiti, in France, where he could get materials easily. Unfortunately, he hadn't received the grand reception he was expecting upon his return.  This sculpture might be interpreted as the visual manifestation of his disillusionment with his life, art and career.  It could also be classified as reworking the traditional western nude, a commentary on the female nude in the sculpture tradition.

Gauguin and Cezanne revisit Manet's Olympia

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538
(Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy)

Artists often revisited themes that had already been painted by artists of previous generations, paying homage to them or reworking them in their own style.  Paul Gauguin's Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching) from 1892 and Paul Cezanne's A Modern Olympia from 1873-1874 are both referencing Edouard Manet's Olympia from 1863.  The subject of the painting, that of a female reclining on a bed, in front of some kind of a curtain in the presence of a black maid/spirit can actually be attributed to Titian's very famous Venus of Urbino.  Here is the Venus that inspired Manet to paint his Olympia, directly gazing at the viewer, completely naked with two maids in the background rummaging thorough a chest and a dog sleeping on the bed, at her feet.  Although named after a goddess, the painting not only does not display any mythological attributes, it is actually defiantly erotic.

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863
(Musee d'Orsay)

Edouard Manet, took Titian's Venus and portrayed her as a prostitute lounging on her bed, being attended to by a black maid.  The white pillows, the screen in the back dividing and placing her in the front of the picture plane, the placement of the hand on her genitals and the direct confrontational gaze, stayed the same.  The dog was replaced with a cat, the two servants with one black maid, the flowers in her hand by a huge bouquet being presented by the maid. His contemporary viewers would understand the connotations immediately since Olympia was a name associated with courtesans in second empire France.  What was even worse was the fact that she was a woman of their time, not some timeless, mythological or historical figure.  She had the accessories of a 19th century woman, the slipper, the ribbon around her neck plus the shawl she was sitting on. Manet's painting technique of flattenening the figures with the omission of transitional tones made her even more prominent that the viewer could not escape her. The viewer in this case being the white male gaze, her client. The critics absolutely hated it and said she looked dirty, ugly, deathly pale, and they talked of violence done to the body.  Although it was accepted into the official Salon, it had to be moved on the second day of the exhibit, to a position high above a doorway, so no one would notice it.  But none of these reviews stopped this painting from becoming one of the most famous icons of  the paintings of modernity.  

Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching), 1892
(Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York)

The representation of the female nude had always been one of the most used themes in Western art throughout history. What had been acceptable and admirable until mid 19th century suddenly became confrontational and hard to handle.  Paul Gauguin treated the representation of the traditional female nude in a different perspective by putting her on her stomach instead of lying on her back in Manao Tupapau. According to Peter Brooks in his essay "Gauguin's Tahitian Body" Gauguin's female is open to the male gaze as well but not with the sense of self-display that is in Manet's Olympia who is available for a price.  In Manao Tupapau,  Tehamanna's nakedness is in an unself-conscious way without the connotations of venality. She is offered to the viewer's gaze in a way that, is a state that is the natural way of existing for this woman, without overtones of sin or commerce. Here the cultural connotations perceived by the western colonizing male of the offering of the female body as a gift also comes into the equation.1 

There is a story that goes with this painting that Gauguin explained in great detail on several occasions in his letters, notebooks and in Noa Noa - Gauguin came back late one night to find Tehamana lying in the dark, terrified of the evil spirits of the night. The figure in the back is supposed to be Tupapau, the evil spirit of Maori superstition.  Even though Gauguin went into great detail about explaining this work, all his various explanations only add to the ambiguity of the painting. If this was supposed to be an interpretation of Manet's Olympia - it was actually referred to as "brown Olympia" -the black maid with the flowers has been replaced with the Spirit but instead of sitting and confronting the viewer, this female is lying on her stomach in a stiff pose, looking in our direction without any comprehension in her eyes.  Tehamana's odd pose of lying in the very front of the picture plane, almost as if she is about to fall, shifts the viewer's dominant position and instead of confrontation, he is faced with a plea for help.  This submissive position can also be read as the documentation of her rape since Gauguin associated sex with violence.  

Paul Cezanne, A Modern Olympia, 1873-1874
(Musee d'Orsay)

While Manet was interested in Olympia as a distinctive individual, Cezanne was more interested in the drama that was taking place between the man and the maid and the woman whose face is impossible to see clearly, in  A Modern Olympia. As in Manet's Olympia there is a black maid behind the woman on display but she is in midmovement, she is either revealing or covering the female on the bed.  In Manet the viewer is put in the position of the client while in Cezanne the viewer is viewing the client causing some art historians to think this may actually be a biographical work where Cezanne is putting himself in front of Olympia.  Cezanne has also shifted Olympia's position from the front and center instead to middle-ground causing her to appear less aggressive. The cat from Manet's Olympia has resurfaced again as a dog this time. 

Fragonard, The Swing, 1767-1768
(Wallace Collection, London)

The females in both Manet and Gauguin's paintings were of their own time and experience; Manet's model was Victorine Meurent, his long time model, muse and companion and Gauguin's model was his 13 year old mistress Tehamana. In Cezanne's painting not only is the woman's face indistinct but there are no fashionable accessories relevant to the time period she existed in.  Cezanne seems to be putting this scene in a rococo time frame since the table and the vase actually recall the decorative style of late 18th century. He might have been thinking of Fragonard in whose paintings there is an element of sexuality and playfulness as well as voyeurism.  In the Cezanne, the playfulness is gone but sexuality and the voyeuristic aspects are emphasized.  It has been noted that there is also a sense of being afraid and rape in this painting which would be another element A Modern Olympia had in common with Gauguin's Manao Tupapau.


Men have been representing the female body for centuries under the guise of classical, historical or mythological themes.  Females have been subjugated to the male gaze as sexual objects probably from the beginning of time.  Here we can rejoice in the fact that at least these three artists have opened this issue to discussion.  No matter what their original motives were, today, we can interpret them as a critique of the male gaze and the representation of the female nude in the Western culture. This critical look and discussion I feel actually empowers women.

1  Peter Brooks, "Gauguin's Tahitian Body" 340

Paul Gauguin - Hail Mary or la Orana Maria

Paul Gauguin, Hail Mary or la Orana Maria, 1891
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

If at first you don't see the halos and don't really understand the description, you might think this is just another painting by Gauguin about representing the exotic female body through the white, male gaze.  In fact Gauguin was religious and before he started his pictures depicting the Polynesian culture, he painted this canvas of a Christian theme. He has combined his version of Tahitian symbolism of the Maori women, nudes dressed in pareus with western symbolism of the Madonna and Child being revealed by an angel with yellow wings to the two Tahitian women who have their hands together in a western style prayer position.  He has laid out the exotic fruits at the  bottom of the painting like an altar, where the viewer can enter the picture before his/her attention gets drawn by Mary in a Red pareu with the Christ child on her shoulder.  It was very radical for Western painting to have a brown Madonna and Child; as a matter of fact papal allowance for this was not given until 1951.

Gauguin again gives his European audience what they would perceive as the exotic with the thick Maori bodies of the women only half covered in pareus which he described in a letter as "cotton cloth printed with flowers." The women in Tahiti, in reality, were wearing missionary dresses, covered from neck to toe and the flowery, bright colored, cotton cloths in his paintings were made in France.  He also didn't get his inspiration from Tahiti but from a photograph of a bas-relief in the Javanese temple of Borobudur; the body types and the vegetation are very similar in Hail Mary to the ones on the relief.  He would probably defend himself by saying that he was a Synthetist and this was the poetry of the artist.

According to Gauguin and the Western culture, Primitivism, in regards to Tahiti,  was associated with timelessness and with a pre-industrial, simpler way of life uncorrupted by modern culture and linked to nature.  It was considered as a feminine and instinctual culture that acted according to feelings and instinct.   It was also admired by Gauguin for its spontaneity and crudity, primary colors and simplified forms.  I think there is a great contradiction in admiring and longing for a non-Western, primitive culture and then representing that culture with the main symbols of the civilization he was criticizing and trying to escape from, but that was Gauguin...  

Paul Gauguin - The Myth Maker - Noa Noa

Gauguin traveled to Tahiti for the first time in 1891to set-up his "studio of the tropics".  He was trying to find a way out of the 'civilized' materialist culture of Europe to a more primitive, preindustrial way of life that is linked to nature.  After viewing the Colonial Exhibits in the Exposition Universelle of 1889, where he was exhibiting his Breton paintings at a cafe nearby, he must have found the paradise he was dreaming of for a life of "ecstasy, calm and art." He chose to go to a French colony in hopes of the government funding his trip and being able to communicate in his language.

Noa Noa, which translates as fragrance, is Gauguin's diary and novel of his experiences on his first stay in Tahiti. It includes information about his paintings, Tahitian culture, religion and daily life, and use of the native language. It is mostly a diverse collection of preconceived notions, photos, brochures and plagiarized  works of others.  By including native language Gauguin hoped to establish a sense of authenticity for his French audience who wouldn't know that he had made many grammatical errors.  Peter Brooks mentions in his essay "Gauguin's Tahitian Body" that Gauguin arrives on the eve of the death of King Pomare V and in his book, Noa Noa, chooses to portray the passing of the king as the final extinction of Maori culture.1 In fact the Maori culture had been demolished from one hundred years of colonialism but Gauguin wanted his audience to think he had found what he had imagined he would find before he left France.

Paul Gaguin, Nave Nave Fenua
(Delightful Land), 1893-1894
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Gauguin included 10 woodblock prints with his book Noa Noa, to give his audience a sense of what the place was like.  He used what he called authentic materials, and where he cut into the wood, he left rough areas in the background.  This was his way of embracing, idealizing and creating the concept of a way of life that was primitive and premodernity.  

In his woodblock print Nave Nave Fenua (Delightful Land), Gauguin tries to evoke woman as Eve before she falls from grace, where she has no shame. Gauguin's Eve is brown and thick rather than the European ideal alabaster body with the S curve, but she stands frankly, in an exotic, sensuous setting, the growing flowers referring to the Garden of Eden.  Although Peter Brooks accepts that depiction of the Maori female body is a myth created by Gauguin for a French audience, he still argues that Gauguin is actually criticizing the traditional, academic ways of depicting the female nude under the guise of classical themes like his contemporaries were doing. 2

The Abstract patterns that can be seen on the left side of the print are Gauguin's invention from things he had seen, probably at the Exposition Universelle, that actually had nothing to do with the Maori culture.

Gauguin uses his book, Noa Noa to create the myth of a primitive paradise that offers the colonizing white male, women as 'gifts' in a 'Tahitian Arcadia' that actually matches the European concept of what Tahiti was all about.

1  Peter Brooks, "Gauguin's Tahitian Body," 334
2  Ibis. 335

Paul Gauguin - Vision after the Sermon

Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) 1888
(National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Paul Gauguin was a Sunday painter, a stockbroker, a husband and father of five, before he devoted his whole life to art.  Camille Pissarro whom Gauguin had met at the end of the 1870's when painting was just a hobby for him, had become a teacher and mentor, influencing his works towards impressionism.  These earlier works depicting scenes from upper middle class bourgeois life are very different from the works that are associated with Gauguin. After the Paris stock market crash of 1882, Gauguin lost his job, abandoned his family in Denmark and returned to Paris to paint full time.


Brittany in Northern France was known at this time  for its 'primitive' appeal as well as being a cheaper place to live.  Gauguin moved to Pont Aven and alongside Emile Bernard, came up with the artistic style that was coined by the critic Edouard Dujardin 'Cloisonnisme' on the occasion of the Salon des Independants in March 1888.  Cloisonnism was a new mode of painting where dark colors and lines outlined unbroken areas of flat colors, the idea was very similar to enameling where lead outlines separated areas of bright colors.  Because of the lack of modeling and the areas of unbroken color, these images tend to look flatter. They were influenced by sources inside as well as outside of France, namely Cloisonné, Japanese prints and medieval stained glass windows.  


Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) is the best known work among several Gauguin  painted of Breton themes that exemplified the movement away from illusionist naturalism towards abstraction.  In order to distinguish it from "Cloisonnisme", Gauguin coined his work "Synthetism" which was aimed at combining or synthesizing the real appearance of the subject, the poetry the artist sees in it and the artist's personal response to it.  Even though subject matter was still important to him, lines, colors and shapes took precedence over it.  


This work was supposed to be a visionary painting of a group of Breton peasant women who are so moved after the impassioned sermon they had just heard, that they are experiencing a vision of the biblical story of redemption.  Even without the title, it is easy to decipher the religious context because of the praying women and the priest plus Jacob and the Angel in the upper part of the painting. 


Gauguin radically split his picture plane by a diagonal tree trunk, separating the earthly realm from the heavenly one.  The background is an unnaturalistic red, the color of the earth in Gauguin's imagination, the Breton women who exist in the natural world are in the subdued black, white and dark blues while Jacob and the Angel of the heavenly realm are represented in bright yellow, blue and green reinforcing this separation also.   


In reality, the conception of Brittany as somehow primitive, severe and eminently folkloric has been revealed as itself a mythic representation.  According to an essay written by Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock in 1980, "Les Donnees Bretonnantes", Pont Aven in the 1890's were in fact an international artists' colony, and a popular site for tourism, as well as home to a relatively prosperous economy based on fishing, agriculture, kelp harvesting and iodine manufacturing. 1  


So the whole image Gauguin is representing is based on artifice; the clothing worn by pious Breton women in the painting actually was for attracting tourists. And according to Gauguin's distinctive style of Symbolism, the ground could be red, the perspective could be off and the protagonists the image of his preconceived notions.

"The painter ought not to rest until he has given birth to the child of his imagination... begotten by the union of his mind with reality."

                                                                       -  Paul Gauguin 


1  Abagail Solomon-Godeau, "Going Native - Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism" p.316

Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin - Self-Portraits Dedicated to Each Other

Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait (with portrait of Emile Bernard)
dedicated to Van Gogh, (Les Miserables) 1888
(Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait dedicated to Gauguin, 1888

(Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University)

Emile Bernard, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Gauguin,1888
(Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

Van Gogh was trying to get Gauguin to come down to Arles in order to establish his vision of an artist's colony there, he even wrote to Gauguin "...think of yourself as the head of this studio."  Van Gogh's brother, Theo was going to pay for Gauguin to come down to visit him.  The dialog between the two artists, at one point culminated in an exchange of self-portraits.  He desperately wanted this exchange of artistic ideas.  As a matter of fact, there is a third self-portrait in this exchange that Emile Bernard sent to Van Gogh with a portrait of Gauguin hanging on the wall behind him.  Van Gogh ultimately wanted to get Emile Bernard and all their artist friends to come down to Arles as well but he decided to start by luring Gauguin first.

Gauguin was the first one to send his portrait to Van Gogh.  In his Self-Portrait dedicated to Van Gogh, Gauguin also included on the back wall a portrait of his artist friend Emile Bernard whom he was working near in Normandy at that time.  In a way it was a commentary on his situation of already being established in an artist's colony and his expression of looking askance as if to say "can you do this?" added to the overall effect of being in a better situation.

The wallpaper behind Gauguin with the white flowers is the same bright yellow as Van Gogh's Sunflowers. Van Gogh in turn responds with color, to Bernard's portrait on the wall behind Gauguin.  It is an incredibly hard to reproduce color, Veronese green, which is not available today because of its arsenic containing toxic quality. With the colors, he uses, Van Gogh represents his meditative side.

Instead of a centered composition of the portrait format, Gauguin puts himself off center and breaks away from tradition. He has put an inscription at the bottom of his painting 'Les Miserables' - with this he is referencing Jean Valjean, the main character who is an ex-convict from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Gauguin liked the idea of himself as the passionate man who doesn't quite fit into bourgeois society.  He has also depicted half his face in dark while the other half is in light, which pronounces his good and evil sides.  Van Gogh must have picked up on these allusions since he reports to his brother that Gauguin seems desperate and not at all serene.  As a response to this, Van Gogh paints himself as a Bonze, a Japanese Buddhist monk, he even goes as far as to slant his eyes as well as a shaved head in the portrait.  He paints an aura around his head to reinforce the element of spirituality.  He says that he wants to bring Gauguin back to serenity.  He also mentions to his brother that he painted himself not only as himself but as an Impressionist, someone who lives to paint.

In their respective self-portraits, while Gauguin is representing himself as a renegade, Van Gogh wants to represent himself as a serious, meditative monk. The composition, the colors, and the symbols all point out the message each one wants to convey to the other.  Van Gogh writes that when he put them side by side, he is happy with the outcome, that his portrait can hold its own...
The letter for Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo van Gogh, from Arles, dated October 7 1888 is below; in it one can find Van Gogh's inner thoughts and feelings... Also there is a very interesting video at the bottom of the page from http://smarthistory.org.

My dear Theo,

Many thanks for your letter. How glad I am for Gauguin; I shall not try to find words to tell you - let's be of good heart.

I have just received the portrait of Gauguin by himself and the portrait of Bernard by Bernard and in the background of the portrait of Gauguin there is Bernard's on the wall, and vice versa.

The Gauguin is of course remarkable, but I very much like Bernard's picture. It is just the inner vision of a painter, a few abrupt tones, a few dark lines, but it has the distinction of a real, real Manet.

The Gauguin is more studied, carried further. That, along with what he says in his letter, gave me absolutely the impression of its representing a prisoner. Not a shadow of gaiety. Absolutely nothing of the flesh, but one can confidently put that down to his determination to make a melancholy effect, the flesh in the shadows has gone a dismal blue.

So now at last I have a chance to compare my painting with what the comrades are doing.My portrait, which I am sending to Gauguin in exchange, holds its own, I am sure of that. I have written to Gauguin in reply to his letter that if I might be allowed to stress my own personality in a portrait, I had done so in trying to convey in my portrait not only myself but an impressionist in general, had conceived it as the portrait of a bonze, a simple worshiper of the eternal Buddha.

And when I put Gauguin's conception and my own side by side, mine is as grave, but less despairing. What Gauguin's portrait says to me before all things is that he must not go on like this, he must become again the richer Gauguin of the “Negresses.”

I am very glad to have these two portraits, for they finally represent the comrades at this stage; they will not remain like that, they will come back to a more serene life.

And I see clearly that the duty laid upon me is to do everything I can to lessen our poverty.

No good comes the way in this painter's job. I feel that he is more Millet than I, but I am more Diaz then he, and like Diaz I am going to try to please the public, so that a few pennies may come into our community. I have spent more than they, but I do not care a bit now that I see their painting—they have worked in too much poverty to succeed.

Mind you, I have better and more saleable stuff than what I have sent you, and I feel that I can go on doing it. I have confidence in it at last. I know that it will do some people's hearts good to find poetic subjects again, “The Starry Sky,” “The Vines in Leaf,” “The Furrows,”the “Poet's Garden.”

So then I believe that it is your duty and mine to demand comparative wealth just because we have very great artists to keep alive. But at the moment you are as fortunate, or at least fortunate in the same way, as Sensier if you have Gauguin and I hope he will be with us heart and soul. There is no hurry, but in any case I think that he will like the house so much as a studio that he will agree to being its head. Give us half a year and see what that will mean.

Bernard has again sent me a collection of ten drawings with a daring poem - the whole is called At the Brothel.

You will soon see these things, but I shall send you the portraits when I have had them to look at for some time.

I hope you will write soon, I am very hard up because of the stretchers and frames that I ordered.

What you told me of Freret gave me pleasure, but I venture to think that I shall do things which will please him better, and you too.

Yesterday I painted a sunset.

Gauguin looks ill and tormented in his portrait!! You wait, that will not last, and it will be very interesting to compare this portrait with the one he will do of himself in six months' time.

Someday you will also see my self-portrait, which I am sending to Gauguin, because he will keep it, I hope.

It is all ashen gray against pale veronese (no yellow). The clothes are this brown coat with a blue border, but I have exaggerated the brown into purple, and the width of the blue borders.

The head is modeled in light colours painted in a thick impasto against the light background with hardly any shadows. Only I have made the eyes slightly slanting like the Japanese.

Write me soon and the best of luck. How happy old Gauguin will be.

A good handshake, and thank Freret for the pleasure he has given me. Good-by for now.

Ever yours,

Vincent.

Letter courtesy of Web Exhibits

Van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin - Smarthistory

Van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin from Smarthistory Videos on Vimeo.

Vincent Van Gogh - The Night Cafe

Vincent Van Gogh, The Night Cafe,1888
(Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven)

Van Gogh painted this canvas when he was living in Arles by himself in 1888.  Gauguin had sent him a drawing of a brothel scene and Van Gogh wanted to paint something similar from his own life. He had rented rooms above this place when he first moved to Arles.  He was painting from his own life. He recognized that this cafe could really ruin a person, like the man and the woman at the back of the room.  

He said he wanted to paint something that is really ugly, "a devil's furnace of sulfurous yellow." He planned on not using any refined brushwork and layered his brushwork. This was Van Gogh's interpretation in terms of color.  He was back to a night scene but this time it was a hellish night scene.  A sulfurous, bright, intense yellow permeates the whole picture plane, he uses an acidic green on the ceiling and a really bright red on the walls of this uninviting place.  The floor is tipped up, the perspective is off, everything gives the  impression of instability and like being in hell. The bartender with the green hair stands in the middle of the room, with his hands down not welcoming or inviting, just like the other occupants of the room who are wasting away, absorbed in their own drama.

Even the different kinds of lights, Van Gogh seems to be interested in, added to the atmosphere of unsavoriness.  There is a gas light hanging over the table, which was a new invention, that Van Gogh is using to intensely light up the table while he is creating an aura around the oil lamps with his brush strokes.

What separated the Symbolists from the Impressionists was the idea that a work of art should derive from the artist's inner feelings, dreams and/or symbols, not from observed nature.  Also, artistic techniques such as color, line and composition would be used in an expressive way to evoke emotions and moods.  Van Gogh uses all of these tools in this painting to evoke his own inner emotions and thoughts about this cafe and what it could do to a person.  He wrote to Theo that he even stayed up for three nights to paint this picture, in order to create this mood by making himself understand that state of mind of being up.

In The Night Cafe, we not only get a feeling for what Van Gogh felt about a certain place, but also his interpretation of the people that frequented such a space.  Just looking at the sad, depressing painting makes one feel sorry for the kind of melancholy he must have been feeling at the time.

Vincent Van Gogh - Portrait of Pere Tanguy

Vincent Van Gogh, Portrait of Pere Tanguy, 1887-1888
(Musee Rodin)

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch-born artist who eventually moved to France.  Although to this day, he has a reputation of being insane, approaching art as therapy and being a hermit, none of these are true.  Van Gogh had some kind of a medical condition similar to epilepsy; he would have fits where he couldn't function at all.  He would have to be calm and lucid in order to paint.  He was a very well read, intellectual who had traveled a lot in his youth and approached painting as an intellectual theory. He was very communicative and was in constant contact with the world; he even wrote to his brother and friends when he was in the asylum. He tried out a couple of different professions before he decided to become an artist.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885
(Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

He was obsessed with nocturnal scenes in the beginning of his career and his palette was very dark.  When he painted The Potato Eaters  in 1885, he tried to create light effects in the dark by illuminating the peasants' faces with the light from the lamp.  In his letters, he talked about the images being lit from the top with light eyes and dark lower faces.  He might have read Charles Blank's book about the grammar of design and trying to read and understand art intellectually. Van Gogh strove to be a true 'peasant painter' and asked these peasants to pose for him in the winter months when they didn't have to get up early to go to the fields in the morning.  He spoke of them as having a certain  honesty and being connected to the earth. They had used the same hands to dig the potatoes form the earth that they were using to take food from their plate - they deserved to take this time. But at the same time he emphasized that they were different from him and not civilized people.

Van Gogh did attend art school in Antwerp and he also collected Japanese prints that he made copies with slight variations in color and patterns but still literal studies.  He traveled to Paris 1886- 1888 where he further studied Japanese prints and learned about Impressionism; this caused a huge change in his palette as well as subject matter.

Pere Tanguy was an art dealer and a socialist.  This was about the time Van Gogh was coming up with his ideas of an artist's colony where they could live and work together.  Around this time he had read about the Japanese Buddhist monks, Bonze, who lived together and he was hoping to model his Artist's Paradise after these Japanese Monks.  In the painting Portrait of Pere Tanguy, Van Gogh has him sitting in a Bonze pose. He also has the Japanese prints Pere Tanguy dealt in behind him with Mount Fuji at the top, coming out of his head and the female Japanese figures almost interacting with him.  The beginnings of the development of his signature style of linear brush strokes can be seen here.

Vincent Van Gogh, Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, 1888
(Neue Pinakhotek, Munich, Germany)

Van Gogh, unfortunately had a reputation as being melancholic and having fits which wasn't conducive to seducing any artists to come and live with him. In February of 1888, Van Gogh, moved to an ancient town, Arles, in the South of France, to escape Paris and to establish an artist's commune called "the Studio of the South" which would be Van Gogh's "painter's paradise." He would try to get Gauguin to come and join him there who was living in an artist's colony up in the North of France in Normandy.  Gauguin actually owned one of Van Gogh's Sunflower paintings. So when Van Gogh moved into the Yellow House before Gauguin came down to visit him, he started to paint a series of sunflowers to decorate his house. Van Gogh wanted to create a sense of harmony, and warmth so he started to use color as an expressive tool for these ends.  He painted the sunflowers as decoration for his home but even in these still-lives all the flowers were in action.  All the flowers are animated with petals tipped up or leaning forward as if wanting to talk to the viewer.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Yellow House (The Artist's House), 1888
(Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

Vincent Van Gogh, The Artist's Bedroom in Arles, Sept. 1889
(Art Institute of Chicago)

Through color, Van Gogh wanted to convey how he felt about a place.  He believe complementary colors were harmonious and peaceful. In his paintings of his bedroom, he wanted to represent a place where one could rest the brain and the imagination.  He believed square pieces of furniture portrayed rest and serenity.  In The Artist's Bedroom in Arles, there are no shadows and the paintings on the wall are of friends and family and a landscape - nothing to disturb your peace.  Van Gogh wanted to give the viewer his version of restfulness through his colors and furniture. He went back and revisited the same motif several times to improve upon it.  He reworked this scene with slightly different colors made some other changes. He was always struggling to make it better.

Perhaps the best way to try to understand Van Gogh, is to read the letters he wrote to his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris.  http://www.vangoghletters.org is a website that has the 902 letters that went back and forth between the brothers.  It is truly a fascinating way to gain some inside knowledge into the mind of this complex man who has been surrounded with a lot of myths that has even colored the way we read his art.