Saluez Mary, Paul Gauguin 1891 © Everett - Art - shutterstock.com.jpg
Fatata te Miti, Paul Gauguin, 1892 © Everett - Art - shutterstock.com.jpg
Deux femmes, Paul Gauguin, 1901-1902 © Everett - Art - shutterstock.com.jpg

The youth of the artist

Eugène-Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848 to a journalist father and a Peruvian mother, daughter of the committed woman of letters Flora Tristan. He spent his childhood in Peru, where his father died in 1851. Back in France at the age of 7, he studied and then prepared for the naval school, to finally join the navy at the age of 17. Second lieutenant on the Chile, he sailed all the oceans of the world from 1868 to 1871. But on the advice of his tutor Gustave Arosa, he finally opted for a settled life and a noble path, and became a stockbroker in Paris in 1872, where a certain financial success awaited him. In 1873 he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad, with whom he had five children.

The impressionist upheaval

The first turning point in his life came in 1874, when he and his tutor, a great art lover, attended his first Impressionist exhibition. Fascinated, he started collecting, bought paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir and Pissarro, and began to work as an amateur painter. In 1876, he exhibited for the first time in Viroflay and was noticed by Camille Pissarro, who invited him to work with Guillaumin and Cézanne. He then began to exhibit with other Impressionists.

In 1882, a stock market crash shattered his career as a stockbroker. A bad for a good perhaps: the young painter decided to devote himself exclusively to his art.

The time of turmoil

The next few years will prove to be hectic. From 1882 onwards, Gauguin finds it difficult to make a living from his painting in Rouen, where he produces about forty paintings. But money was lacking. Waiting for the end of the crisis, he becomes a canvas representative in Denmark for a time; another failure, accompanied by the incomprehension of the in-laws. In 1885, as he could no longer afford to support his wife and children, he abandoned them and returned to Paris, where he began to work in ceramics and joined forces with Ernest Chaplet to produce 50 works.

The first feelings of exoticism

After two attempts to settle in Panama and Martinique in 1887 - a harsh year in which Gauguin, enthusiastic about light and landscapes, painted seventeen canvases - he took refuge once again in Paris, then in Pont-Aven, a small village in Finistère. "The experience I had in Martinique was decisive," he wrote four years later. Only there did I really feel myself, and it is in what I brought back that I must be sought if one wants to know who I am. ». Indeed, Paul Gauguin's works evolve. He went from dense and heavy tones to exoticism and colour, which he drew from the wonders of his youth at sea(Bord de mer, 1887). On his return to France, his break with Impressionism appears with Vision after the Sermon (1888), also known as Jacob's Struggle with the Angel, which influenced Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch. A work that marks a new style specific to the artist: symbolism.

The episode of Arles, a tumultuous friendship

In 1888, at the invitation of Vincent Van Gogh, whom Gauguin had met two years earlier, Gauguin went to Arles. The two artists spend two months together and paint the series on the Alyscamps, portraits, landscapes and still lifes. Highly sensitive, brought together by a common interest in colour, they nevertheless came into conflict when Gauguin painted Van Gogh painting sunflowers, a portrait of which Van Gogh would say: "It is indeed me, but gone mad. "This rich artistic phase went wrong and ended with the famous episode of Van Gogh's severed ear on December 23, 1888.

The first stay in Tahiti

After a few new masterpieces, including The Yellow Christ and Self-portrait with a Halo and a Snake

, Gauguin could only think of fleeing. When he decided to leave for Tahiti, the man intended to reconcile his life and his work. "Surrounded by a new family, far from this European struggle after money. There in Tahiti, I will be able, in the silence of the beautiful tropical nights, to listen to the soft murmuring music of the movements of my heart in loving harmony with the mysterious beings of my surroundings. Free at last, without worrying about money, I will be able to love, sing and die", he wrote. However, it was a man already worn out, approaching 40, who disembarked on the Polynesian shores, after a tortuous journey full of pitfalls.

In April 1891, he settled in Mataiea, on the island of Tahiti, and met 13-year-old Taha'amana. Disillusionment was swift: the ancient civilization he sought no longer existed, but this period was nonetheless fruitful. The young girl, with whom he began a relationship - criticized by commentators in view of her very young age - became a true muse: Gauguin painted no less than seventy canvases in a few months. Most of the paintings from this period depict scenes of daily life with Tahitian figures, but a certain melancholy escapes, the gaze of the characters is absent and their attitude exudes a certain gentleness, as in Femmes de Tahiti

in particular. Caught up in the sadness of the loss of his daughter Aline, by misery and by illness, the painter soon sinks into depression and even attempts to end his life.

The second stay in Tahiti

In 1893, Gauguin left for Europe to sell his paintings. He holds a major exhibition in Paris and starts writing Noa-Noa

. But his stay is strewn with disappointment, with another financial failure and the loss of a lawsuit. Disgusted by Western civilization, he left for Tahiti in 1895. Paul Gauguin then settles in Punaauia with the young 14-year-old Pau'ura. Although he did not succeed in recreating the happy atmosphere of the days spent in Mataiea, he signed some of his most beautiful paintings: Nave Nave Mahana (Delicious Days), Barbaric Poems and above all: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? with massive forms and saturated colours. "Colour, we must sacrifice everything to it! "he used to say. But here again, bitterness and alcohol will get the better of him: depressed, the wild painter finds Tahiti already too westernized.

Hiva Oa, tumultuous end of life

After a hospitalization in Papeete and a new suicide attempt, Paul Gauguin set sail for the Marquesas Islands in the summer of 1901 and settled in the village of Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa. If paradise seemed close to him this time, the artist was quickly disappointed. He targeted the abuses of the colonial administration, which he provoked at every opportunity, fought for the rights of the natives and observed a real rejection of the Church. With the agreement of the chief of a small village, he kidnapped the young Marie-Rose Vaeoho, 39 years his junior, from the Catholic school. Pregnant, the young woman is quickly sent to her village to give birth; wanting to make fun of the bishop, the painter will not delay in replacing her with Henriette, a student of the Sisters' school and wife of the altar boy. And as two provocations are better than one, he also baptized his hut the "House of Pleasure".

Despite his troubles with the Church and the gendarmes, Gauguin was under contract with the Paris-based art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who paid him monthly installments of 300 francs and provided him with free canvas and colors in exchange for a minimum of twenty-five paintings per year, the unit price of which was fixed at 200 francs. The artist then painted twenty-nine paintings in 21 months, as well as numerous drawings, engravings and sculptures, including his most profound creations: Contes barbares (1902), Cavaliers au bord de la mer

(1902). His last work is a self-portrait. Pursued, alcoholic, drug addict, syphilitic and miserable, "Koke" as the inhabitants of Hiva Oa called him at the time, died at the age of 55 on May 8, 1903, as a cursed artist and in total anonymity. In all, he had completed nearly one hundred paintings, four hundred engravings and dozens of sculptures. Since then, he has rested in the Calvary cemetery, above the village of Atuona, leaving behind him a mixed memory, to say the least. His grave is next to that of Jacques Brel, who also fell in love with the island.

A posthumous glory

In spite of himself, it is only after his death that Paul Gauguin knew glory and success. A true avant-gardist in modern art, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard had anticipated this: he had all the artist's barely dry paintings shipped back to Paris. Thus, the man who also revealed Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, put Gauguin at the top of the bill in France, in Europe and in the world at the beginning of the 20th century.

Today, his works are exhibited in six museums in France, including the famous Musée d'Orsay, as well as in some twenty museums around the world. A Gauguin museum was even created on the island of Tahiti, but unfortunately closed its doors a few years ago. In Atuona, the Gauguin Cultural Center

retraces the life of the artist with paintings, letters, photographs, and various souvenirs. Most of them are obviously reproductions, the originals being kept in the museums of the big capitals. Finally, among the most spectacular sales, we should note the sale in March 2008 of the painting La Fin royale (1893), bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for an amount approaching 30 million dollars, and the sale in February 2015 of the work Quand te maries-tu?(Nafea faa ipoipo?), painted in 1892 and sold for 7 francs to the Marquesas Islands at the death of Gauguin, acquired by a Qatari family for the sum of 265 million euros..

Tributes

Sometimes respected artist, sometimes controversial man, Paul Gauguin and his tortuous life have inspired more than one literary and cinematographic work. The writer Victor Segalen, who arrived in Hiva Oa three months after the death of the painter to whom he had a strange fascination, wrote several homage texts such as the short story Le Maître du jouir, the article Gauguin dans son dernier décor (1904) or Hommage à Gauguin (1916) for the preface to the edition of Gauguin's letters to his friend Georges-Daniel de Monfreid. The painter is also the hero, with his grandmother Flora Tristan, of the most recent novel Paradise - a little further

(2003) by Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize in Literature 2010. In this book, the author traces Gauguin's life in Tahiti and his desire to leave the European civilization that would have destroyed him. In the cinema, the artist has inspired six feature films. The latest, Gauguin - Voyage de Tahiti, directed by Édouard Deluc and released in 2017, featured Vincent Cassel in the lead role. In particular, some media have criticized the author's approach to the nature of the artist's sexual relationships. The beautiful comic book Gauguin - L'autre monde, by Fabrizio Dori (2016) uses the painter's colorful palette to describe Gauguin's prolific and Polynesian end of life.