Paul Gauguin, Post Impressionist with Abstract Concepts

Highly Innovative Painter

The Post Impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin greatly influenced modern art with his designs and bold choices in color. His use of different materials in his paintings, such as wax painting, ground chalk and tempera were highly innovative. His style and technique was defined by his use of colorful, decorative, textured matte surfaces. His influence was predominant in the early 20th century.

Artists such as Andre Derain, Pablo Picasso and Van Gogh were influenced by Gauguin. In the late 19th century, Gauguin was highly popular for his achievements in bringing Primitivism to the forefront of the art world. His success was motivated by his admiration of a powerful pull towards other cultures. This pull was matched by the curiosity of the elite of France as they discovered the art of Native Americans, Africans and Micronesians. Gauguin was able to make the movement popular and appreciated.

Highly Popular Painter

Gauguin was not only a painter but also a printmaker and sculptor. Most of his childhood was spent in Lima which was a far cry from his days as a stockbroker in Paris. Even further from that was his time spent with Vincent van Gogh in Arles in 1888. Over his life he increasingly rejected the affluent lifestyle of materialism. He eventually rejected it completely and left for Tahiti in 1891.

Powerful Works

His raw and powerful works became anti-materialism as he moved to a more spiritual sensibility. This was his total abandonment of all that European culture represented. Ironically, Tahiti was greatly influenced by European society already as it was a French colony and the Capital, Papeete was already a European metropolis.

Gauguin would gain a close connection to Tahiti and the people. The Polynesian culture greatly influenced his later works and his palette selection became closely tied to the colors of the tropics. He would spend most of his days painting under the trees until it was dark. He felt it was very important to not paint from nature, but instead to transform nature and distort it and create an abstract art.

Gauguin’s influences can be tied to the artwork that he owned of Pissarro and Cezanne and then later to Tahiti. He originally showed an interest in Neo-Impressionists, but soon lost interest and referred to it as ‘confetti painters’. Gauguin’s influence on the style of artists that create original acrylic art, sculptures and the like, still weighs heavily today. At the time of his passing he had amassed a collection of his work of over two hundred paintings, sculptures and writings.

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