Paul Gauguin (Gauguin Paul)

(1848-1903)
Eugц?ne Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on June 7, 1848. In 1865 he joined the team of a merchant ship and made several long voyages. At the age of 23 began a successful but short-term business career in Paris. Financial success allowed to do Gauguin, collecting impressionist. Gauguin did not receive the regular arts education, except for a few lessons, which gave him an impressionist Camille Pissarro. In 1883 he left the business to devote himself to painting, this has led to poverty and the gap with the family. In 1887, Gauguin made a trip to the island of Martinique, during his stay there he realized that the inspiration for the creative needs of a solitary life in harmony with nature. In 1888 he spent some time in Brittany. In his works, executed in Brittany, in contrast to the bright works of the Impressionists, he focused on the image of the austere beauty of the terrain and scenes from the life of the peasants. In one of his most famous works of Breton - The Vision after the sermon (1888), the artist accentuates the flatness of the pictorial surface, which may be the result of his acquaintance with Japanese prints. The best landscapes of Gauguin and the painting Yellow Christ (1889) also refer to the Breton period of creativity
. During these years, Gauguin became a leader of a new direction - sintetizma, whose adherents of a new use of color and shape, boldly Mapping objects, simplifying the images, comparing the large areas of pure color to achieve an emotional effect
.

At the end of 1888 Gauguin spent several months in Arles with Van Gogh, whom he met in Paris in 1886. During this visit, he created several beautiful drawings and paintings, but it ended in a quarrel, during which Van Gogh cut off his ear; soon Gauguin left Arles.

In early 1891 Gauguin was an auction of his works, to get some money to travel to the island of Tahiti. Disappointment in the French colonial life forced him to go deep into the island. In his paintings of Gauguin created images of people living in harmony with nature, a sense of earthly paradise and the golden age of humanity. Among the works of this period of his creativity - Manao Tupapau - Tracking the Spirit of the Dead (1892) and Tahitian Pastorals (1893, St. Petersburg, Hermitage).

Disease and poverty are forced to Gauguin in 1893 to return to Paris. Two years later he again came to Tahiti. Gauguin's Tahitian works of the second period, similar to the decorative frieze compositions. Among them, a panel Where are we? Who are we? Where are we going? (1898, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) - an allegory on the stages of human life. In his recent works Gauguin embodied images of an ideal life beyond time and space.

In 1898, nearly destitute, in despair, Gauguin tried to commit suicide. In 1901 he moved to Dominica (Marquesas Islands), where the sick and lonely, died May 8, 1903.

Gauguin left a literary legacy, which, in addition to letters and diaries, including Noa Noa (Fragrance) (study of Tahitian culture and myths) and the memoirs Before and After. Gauguin also wrote critical articles in periodicals and founded the satirical magazine in Tahiti.