Культурология. Горелова А.В - 5 стр.

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1. PAINTING
1.1. A Brush With The Old Masters (Paul Gauguin)
In 19
th
century France it was common for struggling artists to pay for their
board and lodging with their works. In southern Brittany, dozens of artists were
drawn to the region, as much by the fact that it was cheap to live as by its pretty
scenery and wooded tidal estuaries delving inland from sandy beaches.
Paul Gauguin, along with fellow artists Meyer de Haan, Paul Serusier and
Emile Bernard, holed up in le Pouldu in 1889. Now one of the most somnolent
of the many sleepy coastal resorts, then it was quieter still home to a handful of
farmers, fishermen and seaweed collectors. The artists stayed in the Buvette de
la Plage, a tiny inn which they decorated with murals and paintings.
In 1891 Gauguin deserted France for his famously productive period in
Tahiti. As surely for the bill of Fr300 he’d run up, he left the inn’s owner, Marie
Henry, some paintings. When he returned in 1894, he tried to get them back. But
the local court found in Madame Henry favour, and Gauguin even had to pay the
legal court the legal costs. After she died in 1945, her art collection - some 130
works - was sold by her sons to galleries around the world.
Sadly, the Buvette de la Plage is now the characterless modern Cafe de la
Place. However, Marie Henry’s old hostelry has been reconstructed two doors
down. We know, by chance, roughly what it looked like then: the original
murals were discovered hidden under seven layers of wallpaper by a decorator
in the 1920s and photographed.
Gauguin and his fellow artists had retreated to the tranquility of le
Pouldu from Pont-Aven, at the head of the sensuous Aven estuary. Then a
bustling port, since the 1860s it had also been a thriving artists’ colony. The
painters preferred the port to more rustic bases in Brittany because the locals
spoke French instead of Breton.
When he arrived in Brittany, Gauguin was aligned to the impression
school of painting was changing. This was partly due to the influence of the
primitive Celtic traditions of the region, as he acknowledged: “There is
something wild and primitive about it - when my wooden clogs strike this
granite ground, I hear the dull, muffled, powerful tone I seek in my painting.”
As important was the inspiration provided by Emily Bernard, who was
applying vivid, unalloyed colours to his canvasses in wide, flat blocks, with no
shading or traditional sense of perspective. Gauguin took up this unacademic,
non-realistic style, and became the seminal figure in what soon became known
as the Pont-Aven school. His maxim was: “Don’t copy nature too literally, just
look at it and dream.” The school, which petered out when he went to the South
Seas, has been called the first chapter in the history of modern art and led to
Fauvism and Cubism.
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