Paul Gauguin

Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin was a post impressionistic main artist. He was known best of all as a painter and his daring experimentation with colours led directly to the synthetic style of the modern art. Paul Gauguin was also a high-powered exponent of the woodcut as an art form.

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848 to the father, journalists Clovis Gauguin and the mother, Half-Peruvian Aline Maria Chazal, the daughter of the socialist leader flora Tristan. In 1851 the family left Paris to Peru, motivated by the political climate of the time. His father Clovis died on the trip, three-year-old old Paul, his mother and his sister to itself leaving. They lived four years in Lima, Peru with the uncle on Paul Gauguin and his family. The pictures of Peru have strongly influenced Paul's later art.

At the age of seven years Paul Gauguin and his family returned to France to his grandfather. With seventeen, Paul Gauguin committed himself Paul Gauguin to Paris in the merchant fleet, in 1871 returned where he protected himself a workplace as a stockbroker. In 1873 Paul Gauguin married the Dane Mette Sophie Zacke. In the course of the next ten years they would have five children.

Paul Gauguin had been interested since his childhood in art. In his spare time he started to paint. He made friends with Camille Pissarro and the different other artists. Paul Gauguin showed pictures in impressionistic exhibits in 1881 and 1882. To Copenhagen Paul Gauguin had gone to paint all-day, he returned in 1885 to Paris, his family in Denmark letting. Without suitable existence his woman and her five children returned to her family.

With his strong impulse Paul Gauguin painted Gogh and Pissaro under the influence of van. Disappointed about the impressionism he thought that the traditional European painting had become to imitativ and had lack of symbolic depth. By the unresemblance the art of Africa and Asia appeared to him of fully mystic symbolism and energy. There was at this time a fashion in Europe for the art of other cultures, especially Japan (Japonismus). Paul Gauguin was invited to take part in the 1889 of Les XX organised exhibit.

In 1891 Paul Gauguin went after Tahiti and late Dominique where he died in 1903. There the artist found his individual style, big pictures with sharp contours in lively and strong colours. More and more Paul Gauguin was inspired by the beauty and the magic of the southern Pacific and the impressive characters among the natives. His pictures are expressively exotic and Gauguin can be called called legitimately as a predecessor of the expressionism and Fauvism.