137TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)CHAPTER 31 The Move Toward Modernism 137137Figure 31.30 PAUL GAUGUIN, The Day of the God (Mahana no Atua), 1894. Oil on canvas, 27^3 ⁄ 8 355 ⁄ 8 in.
The blues in the background are of the same intensity as those in the foreground, thereby flattening space
to create a tapestrylike surface. Gauguin denied that his paintings carried specific meanings. “My dream is
intangible,” he wrote a friend, “it comprises no allegory.”
foreground pool of water and the fetal positions of the
figures lying on the shore are suggestive of birth and regen-
eration. These and other figures in the painting seem spiri-
tually related to the totemic guardian figure (pictured at top
center of the canvas), who resembles the creator god and
supreme deity of Maori culture (compare Figure 31.29).
Gauguin joined van Gogh at Arles in southeastern
France in the fall of 1888, and for a brief time the two
artists lived and worked side by side. Volatile and tempera-
mental, they often engaged in violent quarrels, during one
of which part of van Gogh’s ear was cut off, either by van
Gogh himself, or (as some historians claim) by Gauguin.
But despite their intense personal differences, the two
artists were fraternal pioneers in the search for a provoca-
tive language of form and color. Gauguin’s self-conscious
effort to assume the role of “the civilized savage” was root-
ed in the notion of theprimitif, the condition of unspoiled
nature celebrated by Rousseau, Thoreau, and others. His
flight to the South Seas represents the search for a lost
Eden, and reflects the fascination with exotic non-Western
cultures that swept through late nineteenth-century
Europe. As such, Gauguin’s bohemian nonconformity may
have been the “last gasp” of Romanticism.to Martinique in the West Indies, to Tahiti in the South
Seas, and to southern France, returning for good to the
islands of the South Pacific in 1895.
Gauguin took artistic inspiration from the folk culture
of Brittany, the native arts of the South Sea islands,
and from dozens of other nontraditional sources. What
impressed him was the self-taught immediacy and authen-
ticity of indigenous artforms, especially those that made
use of powerful, totemic abstraction (Figure 31.29). His
own style, nurtured in the Symbolist precepts (discussed
earlier in this chapter) and influenced by Japanese wood-
cuts and photographs of Japanese temple reliefs on view at
the Exposition Universellein 1889, featured flat, often dis-
torted and brightly colored shapes that seem to float on the
surface of the canvas.
In The Day of the God(Figure 31.30), bright blues,
yellows, and pinks form tapestrylikepatterns reminiscent of
Japanese prints and Art Nouveauposters. Gauguin’s figures
cast no shadows; his bold, unmodeled colors, like those of
van Gogh, are more decorative than illusionistic. Like the
verbal images of the Symbolist poets, Gauguin’s colored
shapes carry an intuitive charge that lies beyond literal
description. For example, the languid, organic shapes in the