Paul Gauguin

Stockbroker turned painter who walked away from a comfortable Paris life to chase a more 'primitive' visual language — first in Brittany, then in Martinique, and finally in Tahiti and the Marquesas. Gauguin abandoned naturalistic color in favor of flat planes of saturated pigment outlined like stained glass, an approach he called Synthetism. The Polynesian paintings that made his reputation were also entangled with the colonial exploitation he both depicted and participated in, a tension contemporary scholarship has not let his legacy off the hook for. He died nearly destitute in the Marquesas at fifty-four; the canvases he left behind would soon shape Matisse, Picasso and the Fauves.