Afdeling for Æstetik og Kultur — Tværæstetiske Studier - AU Library ...

Speciale af Helle Børsen Rosholm Vejleder Hans Jørgen Frederiksen
Årskortnummer 20032411
As an artist, Gauguin found that diverse works from distinctly different cultures could, on a
formal basis, be lumped together as they had certain proporties in common: they did not
imitate any observable reality, nor did they seem to create a three-dimensional reality;
therefore, scale and proportion took a new meaning. The notion of the ”primitive” was eagerly
discussed in France as elsewhere in the 19. century. Various discliplines studied and compared
the ”primitive” in prehistory, in childhood and in tribal societies, as evidence for their
arguments over man’s limitations, potentials and place in natural order, and the ”primitive”
was often used as a positive or negative reflection of the Western, industrialized society.
Many ideas regarding the ”primitive” were closely tied with the exoticism of the Romantic
period. Exoticism was the geographical counterpart of historicism’s emulation of the
temporally distant; often, the two tended to flow into one another and it was these conceptions
of the ”primitive” that inspired Gauguin to travel to for instance Brittany and Tahiti.
By the art critic Albert Aurier, Gauguin was declared the leader of the Symbolist movement in
painting in 1891.The Symbolist movement was a part of a broad anti-materialist and antirationalist
trend in ideas and art, notions that Gauguin was discussing with passion with his
fellow artists. They experimented with artistic innovations that in many ways were connected
with cultural and philosophical trends of the last three decades of the 19. century. Inspired by
various philosphical and religious theories they established a new relationship between form
and content, style and subject matter in the interest of giving personal experience and emotion
meaning at a universal, human level. Many of these theories were adapted in parts and
synthesized into a more modern context, and hybrids of convictions seemed to be the
standard, as for example the theosophy, which contends to be a synthesis of all religions. Its
principal doctrines were a pantheistic evolution and reincarnation, while the only morality it
demanded was an adhesion to the brotherhood of man. Gauguin reflected over these notions in
presenting himself for example in the role of en Initiate at the inn in Le Pouldu, much as he
had adopted the guise of an outlaw or a Christ in other self-portraits.
In many of Gauguin’s Symbolic paintings, reality was the starting point but more was
expressed about it than was visible to the eye and Gauguin was inspired by the thought that
colour and line in themselves could express ideas or feelings. One of the major qualities of
these works of art was the ambiguity that Gauguin gained through his eclectic working
methods.
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