Status Updates From Gauguin (Artist Monographs)

D'où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?, 1897

'He bade farewell to his friends at the café Voltaire on 23 April [1891], at a banquet presided by Stéphane Mallarmé, who declared in his toast "to admire this superb consciousness which, in the brilliance of his talent, exiled him in order to retreat into the distance and into oneself".'

Beach at Le Pouldu, 1889

'[1890,] in full possession of his capabilities, the artist proclaimed loud and clear his new plastic language, made up of simplified shapes, marked contours, enhanced decorative lines, superimposed planes of pure colour and growing symbolism. The creations of this periods were marked by their primitivism and syncretism, two of the orientations characterising the whole of his work [...].'

Vincent van Gogh painting Sunflowers, 1888

Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888

La Ronde des petites Bretonnes, 1888

'It is during his second stay at Pont-Aven in 1888 that the stylistic revolution took place, the fruit of his interactions with Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh [...]. All three shared the taste for pure colour, Japanese prints, and a radical conception of art.'

'Far from being idyllic, this first trip [to Martinique] strengthened the artist's conviction that he had to work in the tropics, that it was there where he would find his human and artistic truth.'

'Between 1886 and 1890, the artist made four decisive stays in Brittany. The first one took him to Pont-Aven in July 1886, to which he was drawn by the favourable rates for the Gloanec boarding house. He stayed for three months in that small Brittany village which had gathered a small colony of cosmopolitan artists since 1866.'

Sleeping Child (Clovis Gauguin), 1884

'A self-proclaimed "savage", nostalgic for his Peruvian childhood, he was on a perpetual quest for authenticity and freedom.'