Lecture 45: Beyond Impressionism—From Seurat to Matisse
direction, they have no movement, and they contribute to the stasis of the
painting. Note that this is the opposite of the momentary effect of motion
and light that was the aim of some of the Impressionists. Seurat also painted
a border, like the mat on a print, in the same Pointillist technique; the colors
in the border are darker than, but related to, the colors to which they are
adjacent. The painting was then ¿ nished with a pure white wooden frame.
Seurat was an anarchist, and we can certainly read social commentary in this
painting, yet we cannot pin it down speci¿ cally.Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) was born in Paris but spent part of his childhood
in Peru and six years as a sailor, which helps to explain his later life.
Gauguin was a Sunday painter and stockbroker who, learning his craft
from the Impressionist paintings he collected,
was invited by Pissarro to show with them. He
exhibited with the Impressionists ¿ ve times
between 1879 and 1886 but was considered an
amateur by some members of the group.We see The Yellow Christ (1889). Gauguin
gave up his job in 1883 and, in 1886, went to
Brittany, where he lived in poverty at Pont-
Aven and Le Pouldu until 1890. This painting
was inspired by a wooden cruci¿ x that is
still in the chapel near Pont-Aven where the
artist saw it. Gauguin enlarged the cruci¿ x to
life size and placed it in a Breton meadow, where pious women kneel in
prayer and contemplation. The image is ambiguous, because it has the size
of a real cross, but the yellow body of Christ is unreal. On the other hand,
Gauguin uses the same intense yellow, interspersed with an equally intense
and unnatural red, in the landscape. The scene is not treated as a vision and,
in the ¿ nal analysis, was probably inspired both by the small cross he saw
and by the larger cavalries—stone cruci¿ xion groups—that are found beside
many Breton churches.Gauguin sailed from Marseilles to Tahiti in 1891, returned to Paris in 1893,
and went back to Tahiti in 1895, spending the rest of his life there. His health
was ruined, but he continued to paint until his death. From this later period,From this later
period [of Gauguin],
we see the Day of
the God (1894).
Astonishingly, this
masterpiece of the
South Seas was
painted in Paris!