4 Paul Gauguin Quotes on Symbolism

Paul Gauguin quotes on symbolism

19. As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting. It is indeed the outdoor life - yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow. 'But none of this exists!' 'Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter.' Very subtle, very knowing in her naivete is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me.

25. ?uvre etrangement cerebrale, passionnante, inegale encore, mais jusque dans ses inegalites poignante et superbe. ?uvre douloureuse, car pour la comprendre, pour en ressentir le choc, il faut avoir soi-meme connu la douleur et l'ironie de la douleur, qui est le seuil du mystere. Parfois, elle s'eleve jusqu'a la hauteur d'un mystique acte de foi; parfois, elle s'efface et grimace dans les tenebres du doute. Et, toujours emane d'elle l'amer et violent arome des poisons de la chair. Il y a dans cette ?uvre un melange inquietant et savoureux de splendeur barbare, de liturgie catholique, de reverie indoue, d'imagerie gothique, de symbolisme obscur et subtil; il ya des realites apres et des vols eperdus de poesie, par ou Gauguin cree un art absolument personnel et tout nouveau; art de peintre et de poete, d'apotre et de demon, et qui angoisse.

30. Gauguin's work is symbolic, and he himself is a myth. He rejected the values of bourgeois society and of a machine civilization. His gesture had its sordid side, but retrospectively it seems to have been appropriate, coming at a time when the world was preparing for annihilating wars. It was not a useful example: we cannot all go and live on South Sea islands, and, as I have said before in this connection, modern man carries his civilization like a pack on his back, and cannot cast if off. But he can nevertheless protest against the burden, and state the real values of life. So Gauguin did, in paintings that are symbols of eternal truths, images of great beauty and serenity.

33. One may wonder if any painter in the last century put more meaning into his sense of color than Gauguin.