Pont-Aven

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 385.

During this period he worked alongside Emile Bernard to develop a manner of painting known as Synthetism. This style celebrated simplified reality and the synthesis that occurs when an artist does not paint from life, but from memory coloured by emotion. Reacting to the naturalism of the Impressionists, the point of Synthetism was to "paint an object the way the imagination perceived it, not as it really was". The artist could then disregard the shapes and colours of reality, and be free to express their effects on his emotions. Although the official creator of Synthetism, was Bernard, Gauguin was its greatest and most ingenious exponent. The shapes on the canvas were no longer meant to portray reality, but the impression left on the memory by reality. The artist could forego the rules of perspective, tone, shading, and chiaroscuro, and just apply the color on a flat surface, delimiting it with thick contour lines. This style paved the way for Expressive Abstraction.

In 1888 Gauguin completes The Vision after the Sermon. He offers the canvas as a gift to the parish priest of Nizon, but that rejects it. This landmark work shows Gauguin's shift from Impressionism to Symbolism. "I believe I have attained in these figures a great rustic and superstitious simplicity. The whole is very severe." Shunning traditional ideas about perspective, Gauguin uses flat areas of unmodulated colour framed by heavy blue-black outlines. "I believe that the landscape and the fight only exist in the imagination of the people praying after the sermon, which is why there is a contrast between the people, who are natural, and the struggle going on in a landscape which is non-natural and out of proportion".

The Loss of Virginity

Imbued with literary and pictorial references, from Manet's Olympic to Holbein's Dead Christ, this painting became the quintessential example of Symbolism. At the girl's head is a fox, the artist's symbolic representation of perversity. While the Impressionists wanted to celebrate the beauty of nature, Gauguin preferred to look inward and explore the subconscious mind. His works are the creative expression of his anxiety, fears, and imaginary visions. This painting is also known as Spring Awakening. In her right hand she holds a red flower, and with the left hand she strokes a fox. The animal rests one of his paws on the girl's breast in a subtly erotic fashion. Symbolist artists were the forerunners of the Surrealists. Inspired by the art of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Wagner, and Burne Jones, they never acknowledged themselves as or gathered into a distinct cultural movement, nor did they adopt the same style or technique. Indeed, the term "symbolism" has only recently been coined by critics to indicate some unifying elements in the works of several painters with different artistic backgrounds and theories. This new current developed in France at the end of the 19th century, just as the Decadent style was flourishing.