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Europe 1800 - 1900
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 5
Lesson 4: Post-Impressionism- Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part I
- Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part II
- Neo-Impressionist Color Theory
- Seurat, Bathers at Asnières
- Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
- Seurat, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884”
- Van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin
- Think you know van Gogh? The Potato Eaters
- Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
- Van Gogh, The Bedroom
- Van Gogh's Irises: Getty Conversations
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- The Pont-Aven School and Synthetism
- Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables)
- Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
- Gauguin, Nevermore
- Gauguin, The Red Cow
- Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching
- Gauguin, Oviri
- Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Gauguin and Laval in Martinique
- An introduction to the painting of Paul Cézanne
- Why Is This Woman in the Jungle?
- Cézanne, The Bather
- Cézanne, The Basket of Apples
- Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid
- Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid
- Cézanne, The Red Rock
- Cézanne, Still Life with Apples
- Cézanne, Turning Road at Montgeroult
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cezanne, Card Players
- Cézanne, Bathers
- Cezanne, The Large Bathers
- Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge
- Post-Impressionism
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Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel
Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888, oil on canvas, 2' 4 3/4" x 3' 1/2" (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)
Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker & Dr. Beth Harris
. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.Want to join the conversation?
- 'Artists colony' is mentioned in the video, how would they function?(8 votes)
- Good question. This is a different use of the term colony than the one we are used to - here it just means that a significant number of artists gathered/lived and worked at this location.(8 votes)
- How do you pronounce his name?(2 votes)
- Even if this is not a "religious painting"...would you say then that Gauguin himself was a religious man?(0 votes)
- I think the answer to your question comes in what Dr. Harris says in the last 45 seconds of the video: Gauguin suffered a "modern dilemma which is that it is very hard to have the same relationship to the spiritual that human beings had before the modern industrial era. I think he feels a NOSTALGIA AND A LONGING for what he IMAGINES is a MORE DIRECT spiritual experience."
Is he religious? I think he is a man like Nathaniel Hawthorne said Herman Melville was:
"He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us."(4 votes)
- When does Gauguin move to Tahiti?(1 vote)
- What is the purpose of him painting the animal that I am assuming is a cow?(1 vote)
Video transcript
(jazzy music) Male: We're looking at Paul Gauguin's Vision after the Sermon, Jacob Wrestling with an Angel, from 1888. It's wildly, vividly colored Gauguin is doing, I think, one of the most interesting things here by allowing color to function in a purely abstract way. Female: The idea of freeing color from the natural world and
using color expressively and separating the painting from having to be a mirror of
reality, which it had been since the Renaissance. Male: Not only is the
red vivid and powerful, there's this wrestling match going on between Jacob with the yellow wings, who seems to be getting poor
Jacob in a kind of headlock. Not only do you have the sense of the red equated in some way with violence, but the red is powerful and
it's forcing itself forward. Female: The flattening
of space, which of course he's also getting from Japanese prints. Male: In fact, that Japanese
print is referred to in a very explicit way by that wonderful tree trunk which diagonally
divides the canvas. Female: I remember Gauguin talking about not wanting the painting to look real; to bring it back to a
sense of the visionary and the spiritual, so he repressed the use of shadows, for example, and lots of other
techniques that were used since the Renaissance to create a convincing illusion of reality. Male: In fact in a letter
to Van Gogh, his friend, he would write that his paintings of this time were abstract. We don't look at a painting like this and think of it as abstract, but by that I think he meant the refusal of the modulation of light and shadow. Female: Gauguin is in Brittany. Male: Which is in the northwest of France over by the coast. Female: An area that's
rugged and difficult weather. There was an artist's colony there, but Gauguin went there very much to separate himself from
the life of the city and modern Parisian culture, and to find something that was more
true, more uncivilized, closer to some kind of
original human nature. Male: This is coming out
of the Enlightenment. This is Rousseau's
philosophy of natural man. This is Gauguin completely inventing. We're seeing these women who are in their traditional headdresses as if this was the 17th or 18th century. It would be almost like
us going to Wyoming and on a day that they have rodeo, everybody's got their cowboy hat on, and thinking that that's the way people dress all the time, with chaps, as if it was 100 years earlier. It's completely invented. Female: But the point he's making is a very interesting
one, ultimately, I think. He's got the peasants in the foreground. Their eyes are closed. They seem to be turned inward. What's interesting about this painting is it's not a religious painting. It's not a biblical subject. It's not just Jacob
wrestling with the angel. It is a painting about people having a religious experience. Male: That religious
experience is then separated from their world by that
tree, which separates the spiritual realm
from the physical realm. Female: It's really a
spectator religious painting; a painting where we watch
other people be religious. I think that Gauguin
identified a modern dilemma, which is that it's very
hard to have the same relationship with the
spiritual that human beings had before the Modern Industrial Era. I think he feels a nostalgia and longing for what he imagines is a more direct spiritual experience. Male: So this is a strategy, actually a very sophisticated strategy, for bringing that kind
of religious imagery that was embedded in the Medieval, and the Renaissance, even in the Baroque, now into the Modern world. (jazzy music)