AFTER THE IMPRESSIONISTS TALK 3: GAUGUIN

Gauguin – Painting the Primitive

Sat 14 Dec, 11am–12pm

At the Museum and Online

This event is at the Museum in the Headley Lecture Theatre and online via Zoom

It is the third in our series of talks on Post-Impressionists as Change Makers

With Juliet Heslewood, art historian and author

The first Impressionist exhibition was in 1874 and caused disruption in the Parisian art world. By the end of the century artists had explored its innovations, liberating them from the conventions of the past. Their dramatic changes, achieved out of the movement, would have wide-spread repercussions, establishing Paris as the centre of the modern European stage.

In this talk, Juliet will explore how although Paul Gauguin had learned much from the Impressionist group, he found it fell short of his interests that were leading away from the purely visible.

Gauguin often escaped Paris and stayed in Brittany where in painting the local people and their lives he hoped to create work that was 'like the sound of my clogs on the earth'.

In Martinique, where he stayed in 1887, and in Tahiti in the 1890s, he was moved to explore the very essence of different cultures, leading to a taste for 'Primitivism' in artists such as Picasso, Matisse and the German Die Brûcke.

Richly coloured painting of Mahana no atua (Day of the God), by Paul Gauguin, 1894. Courtesy Chicago Art Institute of Chicago / Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection

Mahana no atua (Day of the God), Paul Gauguin, 1894. Public domain. Courtesy Chicago Art Institute of Chicago / Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection