Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

lebrate the centennial of the taking of the Bastile. Of this exhibition and of the

e doubtless startled to find upon the walls a hundred pictures of a kind calculated to shock all their susceptibilities in art matters. Their perplexity cannot have been greatly lessened by the

e Bernard, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Louis Roy, Léon Fauché, Georges Daniel, Ludovic Nemo (a pseudonym of Bernard's) and lastly, Paul Gauguin. Lithog

ious discussion. But a few spirits, more venturesome or more prophetic, took the trouble to test the new ideas. A few, chief among them Sérusier of the Académie J

reau were the Impressionists. Their movement was already through its second phase and entering upon its third. The earliest of the Impressionists, led by Manet, insisted that a picture was only nature seen through a temperament; in other wo

theories of light, of Rood, Chevreuil and Helmholtz. To Claude Monet, the founder of this new

e the tenets of their two sets of predecessors. They retained formal composition but broke up color into minute points or do

icism of Cabanel and Bougereau and from the work of both Manet and Monet. Puvis was a decorator who could think and paint only in terms of walls. He had achieved, after a long struggle, a decorative synthesis of his own, based upon the ruthl

en considered by some to be a myth, for he lived far from Paris and had for long enough sent no pictures to be exhibited. Finally, Degas, associating himself with the Impressionists at the outset, had been careful to preserve the classic

oanec inn, near Pont-Aven. It was from these men that the reaction against Impressionism started, a reaction which, in its turn, was destined to provoke another reaction towards the theories of mathematical and analytical abstraction of line, color and form, which we know as Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism. It was these men surrounding Gauguin, who for