Post-Impressionist artists were interested in the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in his concept of the Ubermensch, a superman who would be capable through intense struggle of surmounting the lower forces that would limit his ability to achieve. The idea that man could evolve beyond his present capacities influenced the relationship of European man to previous cultures and to contemporary but less "civilized" societies. This paper explores the ways in which Paul Gauguin applied the Ubermensch concept to his art and to his life, and examines parallel motifs in the oeuvres of his contemporaries.
The Artist Gauguin: Man, Nature, Ubermensch and God
At the beginning of the Renaissance, Massacio painted The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and initiated a new view of humanity: an intensely personal and emotionalized struggle against fate. In spite of the Neo-Classical return to the formal norms of the past, the human agony on the face of Masaccio's Eve heralded a new view of the personalized man in art.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Modernist movement sought to establish new innovations, which would radically transform the staid concepts of Victorian art. Dividing into two movements, both of which eschewed the sentimental and classicized views of humanity, Modernism was as radical a departure from the artistic standards of the day as Masaccio's masterpiece from the Gothic tradition. The Abstractionist side of Modernism sought order in the aesthetic arrangement of colors, shapes and forms; the Expressionist manipulated formal elements to convey intense, highly personalized feelings.
The Impressionists built on these concepts to convey the importance of the individual's experience, and fractured reality to convey the emotions that the viewer might have as his personal situation merged with the external world.
The Post-Impressionists built upon the concepts established by the Impressionists. Gauguin and Van Gogh were their most important representatives, with Toulouse Lautrec, Seurat and Cezanne amplifying their contribution.
Seurat and Gauguin both were also referred to as Avant-Garde artists, a term that originated in 1825 French socialist thought as a designation for propagandist philosophy, and which suited those artists' commitment to social change through their oeuvre.
Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin was born in 1848 to a middle-class family, and until his thirties showed no inclination to stray from his position as head of a happy family and a successful stockbroker. However, he became influenced by Impressionist art and began first to collect it and then to attempt to create it. He went through a series of stages, from Impressionist to Independent, and finally developed his own form, which he called Synthetic Symbolism. It used simplified, unrealistic, bright colors, along with bold, sketchy forms owing derivation to the Japanese tradition as well as to the linear outlines of stained glass windows. Also, the forms of people and objects underwent a flattening of perspective that translated them into bold, iconic figures laden with highly personalized symbolism.
In 1888, after a prolonged period of correspondence that led them to believe that their goals and ideologies were sympathetic, he went to stay with Vincent Van Gogh. However, the few months that they shared proved to both that they were incompatible personalities and after Van Gogh had a violent episode and sliced off his ear, Gauguin left, never to return. In 1891 he left his family, managed to get sponsorship from the French government and moved to Tahiti, where he created an astonishing body of work.. In 1897 his autobiography Noa, which roughly translated means "The Fragrance of Experience," was published; in 1901, he moved to Atuana where he died in 1903.
Before his dramatic relocation to the South Seas, he had experimented with rejecting bourgeois society before, moving to Brittany where he lived among the peasants. By so doing, he hoped to discover a less hypocritical and more genuine society; he may also have enjoyed the sensation of being more "advanced" than the indigenous members of Breton society.
In addition to landscape scenes, which celebrated the beauty of the pastoral countryside as seen through his evolving aesthetic, he painted a number of works depicting the peasants. One of note is The Yellow Christ. In this painting, a rather wispy Christ is crucified, with bulky forms of peasant women performing the lamentation. Their vigor and animal heft contrasts with the thin, almost boneless figure of Christ, and their garments are in vivid primary colors. The unusual color of Christ may have been inspired by the same color philosophy as Matisse's, who believed that yellow was the color...
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