Word: gauguin
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...little Spanish artists' colony in Montparnasse, he identified himself in a sentimental way with the wretched and down-and-out of Paris, the waifs and strays. This wistful misérabilisme, verging on allegory, was the keynote of his so-called Blue Period. Late in 1901 he had painted some Gauguin-like figures, using the characteristic flat silhouettes and solid blue boundary lines that Gauguin, in his turn, had extracted from Japanese decorative art. By 1902 the blueness of this line had spread to dominate the whole painting. It had a symbolic value, of course: it spoke of melancholy...
...influence of one artist dominates the Blue Period. He was Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), a painter of pale, chalky allegories, figure compositions with gravely flattened and somewhat elongated bodies, whose work was admired by Van Gogh, Gauguin and the symbolists of the 1890s, as well as young Turks like Picasso. He had studied Puvis's frescoes in the Pantheon, and their upright, formalized mien gave the measure to his big allegory of young love and despair, La Vie, 1903. (Originally the young man in the painting was a self-portrait, but Picasso turned it into the face of Carlos...
...other hand, so wide a cast has its advantages. All art has a context in other art, and the advanced painting of the 1880s was no exception. Thus, to take only one example, one's understanding of the motives of the Pont-Aven painters, Paul Gauguin and the artists who gathered around him in Brittany?Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier and others?can only be enriched by seeing how their more traditional contemporaries dealt with the same subjects of Breton life. Brittany pervaded the salons of the 1880s. Its landscape of tight villages, stony shorelines, near primitive Christian...
...therefore seemed lax and unambitious. They wanted to return painting to a more demanding kind of diction ?exemplary and grand, like the art of the museums. All manner of stylistic sources fed into their project: the abstracted allegories of Puvis de Chavannes, for instance, gave some cues to Gauguin, as did the formal outlining of Japanese cloisonne enamel: that bluish bounding line was the diametric opposite of impressionist blur and pulsation. The swirling abstract patterns it the background of Paul Signac's portrait of Critic Félix Fénéon?with its long portmanteau title, Against the Enamel...
...which mocks us Mystics! Lord, I pray you, may our reign come!" The desire for coherent symbols ?religious, mystical, anything but political?was as important a part of the early modernist program as the desire to purify art to flat patches of color on a flat surface. B Gauguin wanted to make vast allegories of human fate; Edvard Munch, in Norway, elaborated an entire structure of symbolism to describe the 1 inner world that Freud, in the 1890s, was beginning to approach through clinical means. Even styles that now seem symbolically neutral could be charged with unexpected meanings...