|
In 1891 the painter Paul Gauguin travelled for the first time to the South Seas. His extraordinary paintings and sculptures of this first journey to Tahiti from 1891 to 1893 focus on why Gauguin, along with Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh, is considered one of the fathers of Modern Art. Like Cezanne and Van Gogh, he tried to overcome the form dissolving art of Impressionism. Landscapes and still-lifes of Brittany from his previous phase of development mark the emergence into this life-long journey in which Paul Gauguin was searching for the roots of his artistic expression. After a life of roving that led him to Brittany, Martinique and to Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, he found in Tahiti a world in which colonial reality and exotic dreams clashed. The glowing, powerful paintings from the last decade of his life, that were marked by impressive creative impulses and deep loneliness, became the symbolic embodiment of the by now Lost World. Gauguin died at the age of 54 on May 8, 1903 in Atuona on the Marquesa during his second journey to the South Seas. |