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In this illustrated volume, Francoise Cachin traces the evolution of Gauguin's theories on art and the technique of painting step by step, from his earliest days as a self-taught Sunday painter to his last masterpieces painted in the South Seas, underlining their importance for the development of modern art. She places the artist's work in the context of his life, quoting from his copious correspondence and other writings to show how his painting was affected by what was going on around him - from the artistic and intellectual effervescence of his contemporaries to his personal tragedies. Analyses of the works that marked important stages in the progress of Gauguin's art complement the main text.
This study of Gauguin's life-long search for the primitive, which led him from Brittany to the Marquesas Islands, recounts his break with the Impressionists, which was a profession of faith in the pre-eminence of intellectual associations in art over to the passive receptivity of the eye, his involvement with the Neo-Impressionists, the development of Cloisonnism, which resulted in Gauguin's treatment of forms in flat areas of colour, his associations with the young Symbolist writers of the day, and finally his rejection of any intellectual influence whatsoever at the end of his life. His source of inspiration in other painters (Degas, Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes) and other cultures (Egyptian, pre-Colombian, Japanese) is carefully traced and copiously illustrated.
