Paul Gauguin citations
Paul Gauguin
Date de naissance: 7. juin 1848
Date de décès: 8. mai 1903
Paul Gauguin, né le 7 juin 1848 à Paris et mort, le 8 mai 1903, à Atuona, Hiva Oa, aux îles Marquises, est un peintre postimpressionniste. Chef de file de l'École de Pont-Aven et inspirateur des nabis, il est considéré comme l'un des peintres français majeurs du XIXe siècle, et l'un des plus importants précurseurs de l'art moderne avec Munch et Cézanne.
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écrivain françaisCitations Paul Gauguin
„Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming.“
— Paul Gauguin
Quote in Avant et Après, (1903); taken from Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, trans. (1923) Van Wyck Brooks [Dover, 1997, ], p. 2
„I was so bent on putting all my energy in its 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going' before dying [suffering from syphilis, Gauguin decided to commit suicide at the end], such painful passion amid terrible circumstances, and such a clear vision without corrections that the hastiness of it disappears and life bursts from it. It does not stink of models, professionalism, and the so-called rules that I have always disregarded.“
— Paul Gauguin
p. 160: Gauguin's quote in his letter from Tahiti to a friend, c. 1899
„I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.“
— Paul Gauguin
p. 109
„Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?“
— Paul Gauguin
in a letter to Charles Morice (July 1901), from French Paintings and Painters from the Fourteenth Century to Post-Impressionism, ed. Gerd Muesham [Frederick Ungar, 1970, ], p. 551
„I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination.“
— Paul Gauguin
p. 22: quote in a letter to Ambroise Vollard, 1900
„I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.“
— Paul Gauguin
p. 48: quoted in the interview 'Paul Gauguin Discussing His Paintings', Jules Huret, printed in L'Écho de Paris, (23 February 1891)
„[In] painting... all sensations are condensed, everyone... with a single glance [has] his soul invaded by the most profound recollections... everything is summed up in one instant. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses: harmonious colors correspond to the harmonies of sound.“
— Paul Gauguin
Quote from Gauguin's unfinished essay 'Notes Synthetiques', published in the July / September 1910 issue of ' Vers et Prose' XXII, pp. 51-55, as cited in: Shannon N. Pritchard, Gino Severini and the symbolist aesthetics of his futurist dance imagery, 1910-1915 https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/pritchard_shannon_n_200305_ma.pdf Diss. uga, 2003, p. 23
Gauguin's essay 'Notes Synthetiques' was written in Pont -Aven in 1888 and left incomplete. His essay was first published in 'Vers et Prose' XXII
„If we observe the totality of Camille Pissarro's works, we find there, despite the fluctuations, not only an extreme artistic will which never lies, but what is more, an essentially intuitive pure-bred art... He looked at everybody, you say! Why not? Everyone looked at him, too, but denied him. He was one of my masters and I do not deny him.“
— Paul Gauguin
Quote c. 1902, in Racontars d'un Rapin, Paul Gauguin; as quoted in 'Introduction' of Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro – (translated from the unpublished French letters by Lionel Abel); Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 15
After Paul Cezanne it was Gauguin who came to ask advice and painted landscape at the side of the much elder Pissarro. The traces of this apprenticeship as an impressionist were soon to disappear from Gauguin's works, but shortly before he died, he wrote these sentences about his former teacher
„In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?“
— Paul Gauguin
p. 107: in his letter, published in Le Soir, (25 April 1895)
„You have long known what I have tried to establish: the right to dare everything; yet the difficulty I have had finding enough money to live on has been too great, and my capacities have not produced a very big result but the mechanism has got underway nevertheless. The public does not owe me anything because the pictorial work I have done is only relatively good, but the painters who benefit from that freedom today do owe me something.“
— Paul Gauguin
p. 214: in a letter to George-Daniel de Monfreid, Marquesas Islands, October 1902
„At an exhibition in London, one sagacious critic wrote: 'Monsieur Degas seems a good pupil of Nittis!' Doesn't this reflect that mania which men of letters have for squabbling in court over who had a given idea first? And the mania spreads to painters who take great care of their originality.“
— Paul Gauguin
p. 219: quote in 1898
„In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?“
— Paul Gauguin
Quoted by Bengt Danielsson in Gauguin in the South Seas http://books.google.com/books?id=u41CAAAAIAAJ&q=%22In+Europe+men+and+women+have+intercourse+because+they+love+each+other+In+the+South+Seas+they+love+each+other+because+they+have+had+intercourse+Who+is+right%22&pg=PA137#v=onepage (1966)
