LES FAUVES

Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism. Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions. In 'Vision after the Sermon' where Gauguin depicts Jacob wrestling with an angel, he paints the background a flat red to emphasise the mood and subject of the sermon: Jacob's spiritual battle fought in a blood red field of combat. Gauguin believed that colour had a mystical quality that could express our feelings about a subject rather than simply describe a scene. By breaking the established descriptive role that colour had in painting, he inspired the younger artists of his day to experiment with new possibilities for colour in art.

GAUGUIN




Paul GAUGUIN was born in Paris in 1848 in a middle-class French family. He was of noble hispano-Peruvian ascent by his mother, and his family being labelled "liberal" - his father worked for the organ of the Radical Party, the "National" newspaper, -, reached Peru in 1849 to escape repression from the "Party of the order".
His father dies during the travel, and Paul will return to Paris six years later with his mother and his sister. Of this early childhood in exile in Latin America , he will always keep a liking for travel and exoticism.

At the age of 17, he engages in the merchant marine. From this quay of Le Havre where Manet had embarked in 1848, as a sailor, Paul sees in his turn moving away the coasts of France. The destination is the same one : Rio de Janeiro. By finding back the continent of his childhood, the young sailor is happy. By the Magellan Strait, to Port-Famine, Paul goes on his father's grave, then moves to Panama, Polynesian islands, Indies. There, in 1867, he gets to know of his mother's death.

After franco-prussian war of 1870-71, Paul Gauguin has to start all over again. He will find a job as a stockbroker employee which he will keep until Stock Market crash of 1882. Gustave Arosa, a friend of his family that had become his tutor at his mother's death in 1867, will initiate Paul with painting. Arosa owned an important art collection, including works of Delacroix. Under his influence, Gauguin will become himself an amateur painter, then an art collector, buying Impressionist works.

He meets a young Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad, whom he marries in 1873. She will give him 5 children. Gauguin who was successful as a stockbroker settles into a comfortable bourgeois existence.