Paul Gauguin

Stockbroker, sailor, self-taught painter, and one of the most consequential — and controversial — figures in the history of Western art. Gauguin came to painting seriously in his mid-thirties after years at a Paris brokerage, exhibiting in the Impressionist shows and painting alongside Pissarro on weekends. The crash of 1882 effectively ended his finance career, and he began a decade of increasing commitment to painting and withdrawal from conventional life: he left his Danish wife and five children, moved to Brittany, then to Martinique, then — after an explosive period painting alongside Van Gogh in Arles that ended in breakdown and a severed ear — to Tahiti. In Polynesia, Gauguin developed the mature style that made his reputation: flat planes of deeply saturated color, outlined in the manner of stained glass, depicting Tahitian women in poses drawn from Javanese temple reliefs he had studied at the 1889 Paris Exposition. He called his method Synthetism — a fusion of observation, memory, and imagination. The paintings are technically beautiful and ethically troubling in equal measure: Gauguin was part of the colonial apparatus he appeared to escape, and much of the 'primitive paradise' he depicted was carefully constructed to meet European fantasies rather than observed from Polynesian reality. He died nearly destitute in the Marquesas in 1903 at fifty-four, having spent his final years in conflict with French colonial authorities. Within a decade of his death, the flat color planes and anti-naturalistic palette of his Polynesian work were central to Matisse's Fauvism and to the tribal influence that ran through early Picasso. The ethical questions his biography raises have become increasingly central to how his work is exhibited and discussed in the 21st century.