c.1893 · Detroit Institute of Arts · Sources
Life
Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848. Amid the political upheaval that followed the February Revolution of that year, his father, the Republican journalist Clovis Gauguin, set off for Peru with his family in 1849 (this is often compressed into a tidy story of "exile under Napoleon III," but the family in fact left in 1849, before the 1851 coup). The father died during the voyage, and young Paul was raised in comfort for about four years (roughly 1850–1854, ages 2 to 6) at his mother's family home in Lima. His maternal great-aunt's line ran to the socialist feminist writer Flora Tristán, and that exotic Peruvian-Spanish blood, together with his childhood memories of the Andes, would draw him for the rest of his life toward a longing for the "primitive" and the "paradise." As a young man he sailed the world in the merchant marine and navy (roughly 1865–1871), then became a Paris stockbroker and made a great deal of money. In 1873 he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad, with whom he had five children, and for a time he lived as a bourgeois family man, a Sunday painter, and a collector of Impressionist works.
The Paris stock market crash of 1882 turned his life upside down. Resolving to devote himself to painting, he watched his family life gradually fall apart. In 1884 he took his family to Copenhagen, where his wife's relatives lived, but both his business and his domestic life failed; in 1885 he returned alone to Paris, effectively parting from his family. In 1886 he first settled in Pont-Aven, an inexpensive corner of Brittany, where he mingled with Émile Bernard and others, abandoned the imitation of nature, and developed "Synthetism / Cloisonnism" — filling bold outlines with flat areas of color. In 1887 he crossed to Panama and Martinique, where he experienced the light and color of the tropics.
In October 1888, at Van Gogh's invitation, he joined the "Yellow House" in Arles, where the two lived together for about nine weeks and dreamed of a "studio of the South." But Van Gogh, who wanted to paint nature directly before his eyes, and Gauguin, who wanted to synthesize from memory and imagination, clashed over aesthetics, and on December 23, 1888, after a fierce quarrel, Van Gogh cut off his own ear. Gauguin soon left Arles. Around the same time (1888) he produced, at Pont-Aven, revolutionary Symbolist works such as "Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)."
Disillusioned with European civilization, Gauguin set off for Tahiti in April 1891, capturing the life, myths, and sensuality of its people in intense color. In 1893 he returned briefly to France, burdened by debt and illness (it was then that he conceived "Noa Noa," his account of life in Tahiti). The Detroit Institute of Arts' "Self-Portrait" (c.1893) is the very picture in which, during this homecoming, he staged himself as a "stranger within civilization" (per the DIA's own commentary). In 1895 he left for Tahiti again, this time for good. Despite poverty, syphilis, and conflict with the authorities, in 1897–98 he completed his monumental philosophical testament, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" In 1901 he moved to the still more remote Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, where he came into conflict with the colonial administration while championing the islanders. He died on May 8, 1903, at the age of 54.
Style & Innovation
Gauguin's central innovation was to transform painting from a "record of what the eye sees" into a "synthesis of ideas and feeling." Where Impressionism chased the fleeting light that fell on the retina, Gauguin taught painters not to look at nature directly but to "close your eyes and synthesize (synthétiser) from memory and imagination." The result was Synthetism. Form is pared down to its essence, and color is laid on not as the actual color of things but as the color of emotion (he would sometimes paint a meadow red and the shadows a blue-green).
The technique that embodied this was Cloisonnism. As in medieval cloisonné enamelwork, stained glass, or Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), he penned form within thick, dark contours and filled the enclosed areas with flat planes of color. The critic Édouard Dujardin coined the name by likening Émile Bernard's technique to cloisonné enameling, but Gauguin pushed it on into Synthetism, creating a picture in which "neither form nor color dominates, both playing an equal role." His deliberate abandonment of perspective and three-dimensional modeling, turning the picture into a two-dimensional decorative plane, was a head-on break with the illusion — central to Western painting since the Renaissance — of the picture "as a window." In "Vision after the Sermon," the red field where Jacob wrestles the angel is not real space but a vision in the minds of the Breton peasant women, and color itself becomes symbol.
Within this exhibition's seven-section narrative, Gauguin stands at the heart of (3) Post-Impressionism. If, in that same section, Van Gogh represents the "eruption of emotion" and Cézanne represents "structure and the artist's viewpoint," then Gauguin represents "symbol, a yearning for the primitive, and the autonomy of color." His flattening, his color planes, and his symbolism lead straight into (4) Symbolism and, above all, became the direct point of departure for (5) Fauvism (Matisse's liberation of color), Expressionism, and the Nabis. The Rome touring-show commentary itself speaks of "Gauguin's legacy carried on through the Nabis — Denis, Vallotton, Bonnard, and others." In short, Gauguin stands on the bridge from Impressionism to twentieth-century Modernism, and he is the figure who most clearly foretold this exhibition's overarching current of "color and form that do not imitate nature."
Technique
The first thing that strikes you before a Gauguin in the flesh is its "flatness." There is almost none of the thick impasto piled on by Van Gogh; instead, broad fields of paint applied relatively thinly and smoothly dominate. These color fields are sharply partitioned by contours of deep blue, black, and purple (Cloisonnism), and standing before the canvas you can confirm that these contours are "lines" drawn with the brush — at once painting and something close to a colored print or stained glass. Adjacent color fields collide in complementary, high-chroma tension, meeting plane against plane with no gradation.
The surface texture is worth studying too. In his Tahiti and Marquesas years he often painted not on fine, costly canvas but on coarse jute (burlap) sacking, so the heavy weave of the cloth shows through and the paint settles into its grooves, creating a matte, rough texture. He also enjoyed a "matte" effect, blotting the oil out of the paint with paper to kill its sheen — he wanted, even in oil, a surface as calm and sunken as fresco or mural painting. Up close you find fine parallel brushstrokes or near-pointillist touches hidden within the color fields, so that what looked like a flat plane is in fact a subtly trembling layer of color.
Detroit's "Self-Portrait" (c.1893, oil) lets you see his technique of "staging" firsthand. He painted himself not as a suited Parisian but as a long-haired "stranger" in plain dress (read as Breton-peasant garb); he split the background horizontally to contrast a spiritual world above with a material world below; and his finger is interpreted as pointing toward Delacroix's iconography of "Adam and Eve Banished from Paradise" — likening himself, (temporarily) expelled from the paradise of Tahiti, to that couple. Weaving symbol and quotation into the picture this way, turning a portrait into an allegory, is characteristic of Gauguin's portraiture.
Conservation science has revealed much as well. X-ray and infrared reflectography studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery, and elsewhere show that Gauguin repeatedly transferred a single motif (a figure, an animal) across several works, and that there are many pentimenti — earlier compositions lying beneath the surface — and traces of revision. Besides painting, he made woodcuts, ceramics, and wood carvings; in his woodcuts he deliberately preserved the roughly gouged marks to emphasize a "primitive" texture. So when looking at his paintings it helps to check, in turn: (1) the thickness and color of the contours, (2) the flatness of the color fields and the complementary contrasts, (3) the coarse weave of the support and the matte surface, (4) whether a signature, dedication, or Tahitian title is written into the picture as text, and (5) the symbols and quotations hidden within the image. The specific X-ray and infrared analyses of the Detroit self-portrait can be found in the work's catalogue.
Key Works
c.1893 · Oil on canvas · Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit (Gift of Robert H. Tannahill, 1969; accession no. 69.306; credit line 'Gift of Robert H. Tannahill') · Sources
Why it matters
The DIA's signature Gauguin painting. Painted during his brief 1893 return to France from Tahiti, this self-portrait distills Gauguin's self-awareness as he stages himself as a "stranger within civilization." Because Gauguin is named as a representative artist in this exhibition's Post-Impressionism section (Section 3), there is a good chance this self-portrait is among the works on view. The final loan list can be confirmed from the gallery labels and the catalogue. A 1969 gift of Robert H. Tannahill (who died that same year, bequeathing some 557 works to the DIA), the Tannahill collection decisively strengthened the DIA's modern holdings of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Degas, Seurat, Matisse, Picasso, and more.
👁 What to look for
(1) The way he paints himself as a "stranger," long-haired and in plain dress (read as Breton-peasant garb) rather than a suit. (2) Whether the background is split horizontally, contrasting a spiritual world above with a material world below (the key point the DIA's commentary spells out). (3) The small picture his hand points to — a reproduction of Delacroix's sketch of "Adam and Eve Banished from Paradise," through which he identifies himself, (temporarily) expelled from the Tahitian paradise, with that couple (confirmed by the DIA's official commentary). (4) The dark Cloisonnist contours that trace the outline of the face, the ridge of the nose, and the line of the eyes; the flat, single-color fields; the restrained modeling. Up close, look too for the fine brushwork within the color fields and the matte surface.
Backstory
This self-portrait's provenance is illustrious. From the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume → Brendan Davies in London → Sir Michael Sadler in Oxford → the Wescotts (L. B. Wescott) of New Jersey → the J.K. Thannhauser gallery in New York, it was bought in 1955 by the Detroit collector Robert H. Tannahill and entered the DIA in 1969 (Tannahill died in 1969, bequeathing his collection). Gauguin painted some forty self-portraits over his lifetime, endlessly "staging" himself as saint, martyr, or savage; this work is regarded as the example that most directly reveals his self-narrative of "the banished one," by way of the Delacroix quotation.
1888 · Oil on canvas · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh · Sources
Why it matters
The manifesto-like masterpiece of Gauguin's Synthetism and Cloisonnism. Though it is neither in the DIA nor on view in this show, it is the "key" visitors must know to understand the DIA's Gauguin. With its unreal red field, bold contours, and Japanese-print diagonal composition, it depicts not "the reality before the eye" but "a vision in the mind," breaking with Impressionism and launching Symbolism and Synthetism.
👁 What to look for
Note how the apple-tree trunk crossing the picture serves as the device that separates reality (the praying Breton women on the left) from vision (Jacob wrestling the angel on the right). Look at the fact that the meadow is an intense vermilion rather than green, at the rhythm made by the white headdresses, and at the shadowless flatness.
Backstory
Gauguin is said to have tried to donate this painting to a church near Pont-Aven (or in a neighboring village), but was turned down because the priest would not accept it as a serious religious work. The red background, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e and medieval stained glass, marks the watershed at which he declared that color could be not the color of things but the color of feeling and symbol.
1889 · Oil on canvas · Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly Albright-Knox), Buffalo · Sources
Why it matters
The pinnacle of his Brittany-period Synthetism. Through a Christ in a single yellow, an autumn field, and Breton women kneeling beneath the cross, it symbolically distills folk faith and primitive piety. Though it is neither in the DIA nor on view here, it is a key comparative work that shows Gauguin's principle of "color as symbol."
👁 What to look for
Look at the artificial yellow that covers Christ's entire body, the fields of color sharply partitioned by contours, and the flat composition that kills any sense of depth. The heart of it is the "fusion of vision and reality" — as if a painted wooden crucifix (a piece of Breton folk carving) had been set down in a real landscape.
Backstory
Around the same time, Gauguin painted a self-portrait set against this Yellow Christ ("Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ"), overlaying his own artistic suffering on the Passion of Christ — a vivid expression of his self-image as a misunderstood martyr.
1897-1898 · Oil on jute (coarse burlap) · Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · Sources
Why it matters
The monumental philosophical testament of Gauguin's Tahiti years. On a mural-sized surface nearly 3.7 m wide, the cycle of life unfolds from birth (the baby on the right) to death (the old woman on the left), moving right to left and posing the fundamental questions of human existence. Though it is not in the DIA, it is the summit of Gauguin's art and exemplifies his coarse-jute technique and matte surface.
👁 What to look for
Look at the matte, mural-like texture made by the weave of the coarse jute support showing through the paint; at the mysterious tonality where blue-green and golden light intermingle; and at the title and signature written in French in the upper-left of the picture. Note too that the figures are defined by contour, without modeling.
Backstory
Despairing of poverty, the news of his daughter Aline's death, and illness, Gauguin resolved on suicide and wrote in a letter that he had painted this great work in one stretch (in about a month) as a "testament." After finishing it he drank arsenic in a suicide attempt that failed. He wrote the title directly into the canvas, turning the painting itself into a kind of philosophical inscription.
Behind the Canvas
01From stockbroker to painter — the artist made by "Black Monday"
Gauguin was once a thriving stockbroker enjoying a steady income in Paris, and with that money a collector of Impressionist works by Pissarro, Cézanne, Manet, and others. When the Paris stock market crash of 1882 put his livelihood at risk, he resolved that "from now on I will paint every day." His choice to give up a secure bourgeois life of his own accord and become a poor painter was the opening scene of the "flight from civilization" impulse that runs through his entire life.
02His great-aunt's line ran to the socialist feminist Flora Tristán
Gauguin's "yearning for the primitive and the exotic" had roots in his bloodline. His great-aunt's line ran to Flora Tristán, a Peruvian-French socialist feminist activist and writer, and through his mother flowed the blood of a distinguished Peruvian family. Gauguin himself spent about four childhood years (ages 2 to 6) in Lima, Peru. All his life he styled himself a "savage" (sauvage), convinced that real life lay outside Europe.
03The Arles "Yellow House" and the ear incident — nine weeks of two masters
In the autumn of 1888, dreaming of an artists' colony, Van Gogh summoned Gauguin to Arles, and the move came about on condition that his brother Theo would support Gauguin. The two painted the same motifs together (Les Alyscamps, the Night Café), but Van Gogh — who held that one must paint nature directly from observation — and Gauguin — who urged synthesizing from memory and imagination — clashed endlessly. On December 23, 1888, after a fierce quarrel, Van Gogh cut off his own ear (the lobe), and Gauguin soon left Arles. Gauguin's painting "The Painter of Sunflowers (Portrait of Van Gogh)" survives as testimony to their time together.
04Painting on coarse burlap — a technique born of poverty
In Tahiti and the Marquesas, Gauguin could not afford fine canvas for oil painting and would paint on coarse jute sacking instead. Yet this product of poverty actually suited his aesthetic — the matte surface, where the coarse weave absorbed the paint and killed its sheen, produced the "mural-like, primitive" feel he was after. Conservators also point out that this coarse support makes later conservation difficult.
05"Noa Noa" and the self-staging of myth
On his return to France in 1893, Gauguin wrote "Noa Noa" (Tahitian for "fragrant"), an account of his life in Tahiti, together with the poet Charles Morice. But the book's image of "a painter in communion with pure islanders" was in large part a myth he deliberately fashioned — the reality was a complicated one entangled with colonial administration and tourism. Modern art history is critically rereading his Tahitian work alongside questions of colonialism, age, and power, so this context is worth keeping in mind when viewing the work.
What to check in person
- Look at the contours first: Gauguin's forms are sharply enclosed by bold lines of deep blue, black, and purple. Note how these Cloisonnist contours partition the color fields, and check the thickness and color of the brush-drawn line.
- Ask whether the color is the "color of things" or the "color of feeling": grass may be red, a shadow blue-green. Savor the plane-against-plane tension as adjacent color fields collide in complementary, high-chroma contrast with no gradation.
- Feel the flatness: perspective and three-dimensional modeling are deliberately weak. See whether the picture reads not as deep space but as a decorative two-dimensional plane, and how that differs from the Renaissance "window picture."
- Surface texture and sheen: if you can, let light fall across the surface from the side. See whether there is almost no impasto and the paint, thinly spread, settles matte (without sheen); for Tahiti-period works, check whether the weave of the coarse jute (burlap) support shows through.
- Hunt for text and quotation within the picture: Gauguin would write titles, signatures, dedications, and Tahitian words directly into a painting. In the Detroit self-portrait, look for the "picture within a picture" quotation — the Delacroix "Adam and Eve" iconography his finger points to.
- Read the symbols and self-staging: Gauguin endlessly staged himself as saint, martyr, or stranger. In a self-portrait, decode what self-narrative is built by the dress, the hair, the division of the background, and the gesture of the hand.
- Look near and far in turn: from a distance the color fields seem flat, but as you approach, fine parallel brushstrokes or near-pointillist touches tremble within them. Confirm that duality.
- Compare with Van Gogh and Cézanne: in the same Post-Impressionism section, comparing Van Gogh's thick impasto and swirling brushwork and Cézanne's construction in color planes makes Gauguin's flatness, contour, and symbolism stand out all the more clearly.
Connections
Within this exhibition, Gauguin represents the "symbol, color, and the primitive" strand among the three branches of Post-Impressionism (Section 3). With Van Gogh, in that same section, he is directly entangled through their 1888 cohabitation at the Arles "Yellow House" and the ear incident, so that seeing the two side by side makes the aesthetic opposition plain at a glance — "Gauguin, who synthesizes from memory and imagination" versus "Van Gogh, who looks at nature directly and erupts." With Cézanne he is a brother in that both sought to escape Impressionism's "retina," yet they diverge — Cézanne toward "structure," Gauguin toward "color plane and symbol." Among predecessors, the Impressionist Pissarro served as a kind of teacher to Gauguin (Section 2); among successors, Gauguin's flat color planes and liberation of color lead straight into the Fauvism of Matisse and Derain (Section 5) and into the Nabis and Expressionism — the Rome touring-show commentary, too, speaks of "Gauguin's legacy" carried on through the Nabis such as Denis, Vallotton, and Bonnard. In short, Gauguin is the bridge from Impressionism (Section 2) to Fauvism and abstraction (Section 5 onward), and the figure who first foretold this exhibition's overarching current — the "autonomy of color and form" that leads toward Kandinsky's abstraction (his painting studies for white form).
Did You Know
- This self-portrait is among the works in this 52-work exhibition. — medium: Both the Rome touring show and the Seoul exhibition name Gauguin as a representative artist of the Post-Impressionism section, and since the DIA's signature Gauguin painting is this self-portrait, the chance it is on view is high. That said, publicly available material does not pin down the specific loan list, so whether it is finally on view can be confirmed from the gallery labels and catalogue.
- Some search results claiming the DIA also holds another Gauguin work (e.g., 'Spirit of the Dead Watching'). — low: 'Manao tupapau' (Spirit of the Dead Watching) is usually known to belong to the Buffalo AKG, so the claim that it is in the DIA appears to stem from confusion. It is not adopted in this guide.
Sources (13)
- https://dia.org/collection/self-portrait/45667
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gauguin
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Paul_Gauguin
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Institute_of_Arts
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hudson_Tannahill
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_After_the_Sermon
- https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5249
- https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/19651-yellow-christ-le-christ-jaune
- https://collections.mfa.org/objects/32558
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Gauguin
- https://www.romeing.it/impressionism-and-beyond-masterpieces-from-the-detroit-institute-of-arts/
- https://dia.org/about/blog/detroits-modern-art-home-and-rome
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Gauguin_Sel-Portrait_1893_Detroit_Institute_of_Arts.JPG