Paul Gauguin - Contes barbares [1902] -

Paul Gauguin -

Contes barbares [1902] -

Essen; Folkwang Museum - nytimes

 

Gauguin's Contes Barbares depicts a man in a missionary dress crouching behind two barely clad figures in a post-lapsarian paradise heady with scents and textures. This demonic persona stems from the 1889 Portrait of Meijer de Haan, whom Gauguin transformed into an icon of the artist as maverick sage, conflating Milton's Paradise Lost with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. The artist as prophet defies convention through Baudelaire's notion of "barbare", denoting a schematic language by which synesthesia gives art meaning. Long hailed as an inspiration for the mystical concept of synesthesia, Baudelaire's poem "Correspondences" provided Gauguin with a paradigm for his belief in art as revelation. The parable encoded in Contes Barbares aligns the fate of the dying Oceania with Gauguin's own imminent death; it transcends surface reality not only to enable the audience to experience the realm of truth behind appearances, but ultimately to proclaim that this is the very mission of art.

Source:

J. Hargrove

www.researchgate.net/publication/292372402_L'oeil_qui_eco...

 

Done