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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Paul Gauguin catalogue critique, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.
After his first visit to Pont-Aven, Paul Gauguin's journey to the Antilles represented a major turning point in his life and work. From June until November 1887, Gauguin went to ‘live in the wild’ with his friend Charles Laval, setting out to discover another culture while escaping a European society in the throes of industrialisation (letter from Gauguin to his wife, quoted in D. Wildenstein, Gauguin, Premier itinéraire d'un sauvage, catalogue de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 2001, vol. II, p. 317). Desperately in search of nature in its purest form - a paradise lost - he produced several major compositions depicting indigenous characters against a lush, tropical backdrop of vegetation, including Au bord de la rivière and La cueillette des fruits (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). Meanwhile, the artist also built up a collection of illustrated notes depicting the indigenous people and local wildlife, a few motifs from which appear in the Martinique paintings.
‘At present, I am driven to produce sketch after sketch so that I can delve into their character before asking them to pose’, he explained to his friend Claude-Emile Schuffenecker at the beginning of 2 July (letter from Gauguin to Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, quoted in D. Wildenstein, ibid., p. 319). It reveals the new processes that the inventive Gauguin had become fond of using in his preparatory work at this time and which were applied to his montage and inversion techniques. In fact, he often reused and reworked these silhouettes or isolated elements for different compositions, freely combining bodies and faces and/or inverting them (he probably examined his own drawings on transparent film). These new tools gave the artist a newfound freedom in using the figures that he transcribed into his notebooks and sketches.
Gauguin's stay in Martinique gave him new impetus in his creative work as well as in his technique and, through the graphic work he produced, allowed him to create a personal vocabulary of motifs from which he could draw from at will. Confiding in Charles Morice during this pivotal period of his artistic evolution, Gauguin said: ‘The experience I had in Martinique... changed my life. Only there did I feel like myself, and anyone wishing to understand who I am must look for me in the work that I brought back from there, more than what I produced in Brittany’ (quoted in C. Morice, Paul Gauguin, Paris, 1919, p. 81).
After his first visit to Pont-Aven, Paul Gauguin's journey to the Antilles represented a major turning point in his life and work. From June until November 1887, Gauguin went to ‘live in the wild’ with his friend Charles Laval, setting out to discover another culture while escaping a European society in the throes of industrialisation (letter from Gauguin to his wife, quoted in D. Wildenstein, Gauguin, Premier itinéraire d'un sauvage, catalogue de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 2001, vol. II, p. 317). Desperately in search of nature in its purest form - a paradise lost - he produced several major compositions depicting indigenous characters against a lush, tropical backdrop of vegetation, including Au bord de la rivière and La cueillette des fruits (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). Meanwhile, the artist also built up a collection of illustrated notes depicting the indigenous people and local wildlife, a few motifs from which appear in the Martinique paintings.
‘At present, I am driven to produce sketch after sketch so that I can delve into their character before asking them to pose’, he explained to his friend Claude-Emile Schuffenecker at the beginning of 2 July (letter from Gauguin to Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, quoted in D. Wildenstein, ibid., p. 319). It reveals the new processes that the inventive Gauguin had become fond of using in his preparatory work at this time and which were applied to his montage and inversion techniques. In fact, he often reused and reworked these silhouettes or isolated elements for different compositions, freely combining bodies and faces and/or inverting them (he probably examined his own drawings on transparent film). These new tools gave the artist a newfound freedom in using the figures that he transcribed into his notebooks and sketches.
Gauguin's stay in Martinique gave him new impetus in his creative work as well as in his technique and, through the graphic work he produced, allowed him to create a personal vocabulary of motifs from which he could draw from at will. Confiding in Charles Morice during this pivotal period of his artistic evolution, Gauguin said: ‘The experience I had in Martinique... changed my life. Only there did I feel like myself, and anyone wishing to understand who I am must look for me in the work that I brought back from there, more than what I produced in Brittany’ (quoted in C. Morice, Paul Gauguin, Paris, 1919, p. 81).