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During
these years Gauguin evolved from a secondary Impressionist
painter into the leader of the Symbolist movement
in painting. His efforts to move on from Impressionism
led him to question the entire naturalist tradition
of European art as it had developed from the Renaissance
onwards. One by one he abandoned all the descriptive
devices traditionally used in painting (perspective,
shadows, chiaroscuro, local tone) in favour of the
pure value of line and colour on the picture plane.
The present exhibition follows this process through
an amount of 186 works divided into nine sections:
the first six sections, devoted to the development
of Gauguin’s work between 1884 and 1891, will
be shown at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, while the
last three sections, focusing on the influence of
Gauguin on the Pont-Aven artists and the Nabis circle,
can be seen at the Casa de las Alhajas, the exhibition
space of the Fundación Caja Madrid. This second
part will also feature a room devoted to Synthetism
in Spain.
Venue 1. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
1.The circle of Pissarro. Gauguin trained as
a painter with Pissarro, absorbing the latter’s
pastoral interpretation of Impressionism imbued with
a vision of humanity reconciled with nature. This
pastoral sentiment would inspire Gauguin at the start
of his lengthy quest for the primitive.
2. Landscape and arabesque. From Cézanne
to Martinique. Gauguin’s work in Martinique constitutes
a key episode in the creation of his new pictorial
style. Figures and landscape come together, the linear
arabesque of the paths and the branches of the trees
with their sinuous curves reveal a more profound process
of feminisation and erotizicing of the landscape.
3. Degas, the nude and the dance. While the
influence of Pissarro followed by that of Cézanne
would determine the development of Gauguin’s
landscape painting, his treatment of the human figure
would be determined by the example of Degas.
4. The vision. From Cloisonnisme to Synthetism.
Gauguin also looked to artists younger than himself.
He was inspired, for example, by Cloisonnisme, the
style developed by Louis Anquetin and Émile
Bernard between 1887 and 1888 which in turn looked
to Japanese prints, old stained glass and enamel.
Cloisonnisme would be the catalyst for Gauguin’s
most advanced experiments, allowing him to formulate
a new manner of organising the picture surface through
areas of flat colour and simplified line.
5. Eve and the gods. Woman, the key protagonist
of Gauguin’s oeuvre, takes on a specific role
within the context of his visions and symbols of the
supernatural. While the male universe appears as the
setting for the hegemony of positivist reason, the
female realm is used to reveal the irrational power
of the sacred.
6. The Suite Volpini. The zincographs (prints
from zinc plates) of the Suite Volpini (1889) can
be seen as a kind of public manifesto in which the
artist repeated the compositions he considered most
original (Breton women dancing, pastoral scenes in
Martinique, women of Arles, etc).
Venue 2. Fundación Caja Madrid
7. In the wake of Gauguin: from Pont-Aven to
the Nabis. While the small-format paintings of the
Nabis painters, inspired by the example of Gauguin,
focused their innovations on the interplay of patches
of paint and textures, the decorative ensembles painted
by Bonnard, Vuillard, Sérusier and Maurice
Denis focus on the drawing, on the floral line of
the arabesque which defines large areas of flat colour.
8. Prints by the Nabis. The lithographs and
woodcuts by the Nabis were not, however, merely brilliant
abstract pictorial exercises, but cast light on the
social and literary context, with their frequent references
to the circle of the Revue blanche and to avant-garde,
fin-de-siècle Parisian theatre.
9. Paco Durrio, Picasso and Synthetism in Spain.
From 1900 onwards, Gauguin’s influence was evident
in the work of a number of Spanish artists working
in Paris, the most important was Picasso. For the
most advanced Spanish artists, and until the spread
of Cubism, Gauguin’s Synthetism in its various
forms was the key to deciphering all of French Post-impressionism,
including the work of Cézanne.
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Autorretrato
en Lezaven, 1888.
Cristo
en el huerto de los olivos, 1889.
Mujer
con cofia, 1901.
Visión del sermón (La vision du sermon),
1888.
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