"He created a fiction about Brittany which corresponded with what people believed about Brittany." The artist had long explored the idea of mythologising ordinary people of the soil, even in the paintings of European peasants he produced earlier in his career in Brittany, she added. He was disappointed to find that European missionaries had been at work for a long time before he got there, and so, instead of luscious young Tahitian girls, he found women dressed up to their necks in smocks, attending church every Sunday," said Ms Thomson. "The old Tahiti was a more powerful idea for him. Yet the Tate's new exhibition reveals that, rather than capturing the reality of what he saw in the region, Gauguin preferred to depict a profoundly exoticised Tahiti, conjured squarely from a colonial master's imagination and reinforcing, to some extent, stereotypical portraits of the island. He found himself inspired by Tahiti's tropical flora and fauna, and its fast-disappearing Maori culture, ritual and myths, which he felt compelled to capture on canvas. Apart from two further years in France after leaving Europe for Tahiti in 1891, the remainder of his life was spent in the South Seas. He had lived, for a short time, in Martinique and worked as a labourer on the Panama Canal construction (although he proved to be no good at this type of work – he was dismissed from his job after only two weeks). Frustrated by a lack of recognition at home and financially destitute, he finally sailed to the tropics to escape European civilisation and "everything that is artificial and conventional."Įven before he landed in Tahiti, he had made several attempts to find a tropical paradise where he could "live on fish and fruit" and paint in his increasingly primitive style. From 1886, Gauguin became increasingly disenchanted with Paris and worked mainly in Brittany. ![]() Yet in 1883, with five children to support, he resigned from his job and became determined to pursue an artistic career.
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