Paul Gauguin,Vision After the Sermon

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) shared Van Gogh’s distaste for advanced civilization and likewise yearned for a utopian alternative. His abandonment of society, however, was perhaps the most radical of any artist of his time. A stockbroker, he was attracted to art, collected the Impressionists, and by the early 1870s, had taken up painting himself. He lost his job in 1882 and began to paint full time. He studied with his friend Pissarro, who introduced him to the work of Cézanne, and participated in the last four Impressionist exhibitions between 1881 and 1886.  In 1886 he abandoned Paris to begin a nomadic search for a more meaningful existence, which he believed existed in a simpler society steeped in nature. He first went to the village of Pont-Aven, a remote, rural community in Brittany. Here locals wore a distinctive regional costume and displayed an intense, charismatic piety.

After briefly leaving Brittany for the Caribbean Island of Martinique in 1887, Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven in 1888, where he painted with a colleague Émile Bernard. Together they developed a style they called Synthetism, a reference to their synthetic production of images based on imagination and emotion as opposed to a mimetic, empirical replication of reality. In their search to produce an authentic, direct art, as free of civilized influences as possible, they turned to a variety of vernacular and primitive sources, including crude popular illustrations (especially religious) and folk, children’s and medieval art. Especially appealing were medieval stained-glass windows, because of their spiritual function and saturated colors, and cloisonne enamels, which similarly use curvilinear lead dividers to separate areas of flat color.

The impact of medieval glass and cloisonné is apparent in Gauguin’s The Vision After the Sermon, where an undulating blue line encase everything. Gauguin presents a group of Breton women just after they have heard a sermon about Jacob wrestling with the angel. The artist attributes to the women a blind, naïve piety that allows them to see spirituality in such mundane objects as a cow, whose shape resembles the two struggling biblical figures the priest had just described. In a bold composition that conceptually comes from Japanese prints, Gauguin places the cow and the wrestlers to either side of a tree, sharply contrasted on an intense mystical field of red. The objects of the women’s vision clearly exist in an otherworldly sphere, where they appear to float magically.^[1]