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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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Gauguin, Nevermore
Paul Gauguin, Nevermore, 1897, oil on canvas (Courtauld Gallery, London) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Rachel Ropeik, Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- ? did gauguin leave france right after van gogh cut off his ear mail it to his love to show his love ? did he leave before ? did that play not into going to tahaiti
yours forevermore,
b.(2 votes)- No. The incident in Arles with van Gogh happened in 1888, while Gauguin left for his first trip to French Polynesia in 1891. See these wikipedia articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh#Gauguin.27s_visit and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauguin for a better understanding about the two men's friendship and its destruction.(4 votes)
- Gauguin was French and spoke and wrote in French presumably as well...that being said, why would a Frenchman have given an English title to his painting? Could that in itself have meaning of some kind?(2 votes)
- How long did Gauguin have a relationship with this girl?(1 vote)
- Always felt she was haunted by the crow, rather than the explanations of Dr. Beth and Dr. Steven, was I way off? I'm not familiar with this Poe story, are there any relevant ties?(1 vote)
- Here's some interesting stuff about the origin of this painting:
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150820-the-mysterious-tale-of-charles-dickenss-raven
..And I quote the relevant extract:
"In 1891, the disillusioned Paul Gauguin was preparing to leave France – and his wife and children – for the island of Tahiti. On the eve of his departure, his friends gave him a farewell dinner at the Café Voltaire, at which Poe’s The Raven was read aloud. Although Gauguin denied he had been inspired by the poem, he called one of his 1897 paintings Nevermore – the word repeated by the bird throughout the poem. The picture features a perched bird that watches over the figures below and in the top left-hand corner of the canvas, the word NEVERMORE is painted. In a letter to his friend Daniel de Monfreid, written in 1897, Gauguin commented, “The title is Nevermore; it is not Edgar Poe's raven keeping watch, but the Devil's bird.” "(2 votes)
- Is there any connection to be made between the pattern on the yellow pillow and the pattern of the yellow wallpaper in his "Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard"? They look similar.(1 vote)
- Atthe speakers say that this is not a "Venus". Why is this not a Venus? Also, why is emotion related to this form/technique more than those of the past? 1:20(1 vote)
- I think it is because it departs from traditional representations of the reclining nude which have historically been based on the Venus whereas in this case, this is a polynesian individual, a tahitian whose features such as her flat but almost provoked face is not a universal image of woman.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(jazzy music) Female: We're standing here
in the Courtauld Gallery in front of Paul Gauguin's
Nevermore from 1897. Male: This is one of the paintings that really lives up to our
expectations of Gauguin, the classic story that
he goes off to Tahiti. This was painted during
his his second trip. He's got a much more complex relationship with Tahiti than I think
is often acknowledged. Female: I just love the idea of Gauguin kind of going off to Tahiti with this idea that he would be finding
an untouched civilization and people living freely
and naturally without what he saw as sort of the ruining influence of modern
society, and he got there and it was much more developed and a tourist center, and
that wasn't at all the case. Then he sort of painted
it that way anyway! Male: That's true, and yes,
he does paint it that way, but at the same time, this is in many ways a traditional French painting of a nude. He's really sort of
creating our expectations of a primitive society. It's been roughly handled. The colors evoke a sense of
a pre-industrial culture. There's some very radical ways
in which he handles paint. But at the same time,
we have a full-length nude reaching across the
canvas up on her hip, which in some ways is not so distinct from the ways that nudes have been handled in the Academy for many years. Female: Right, but it's not a Venus. Male: No. Female: I do think there's something kind of ambiguous about the way the nude is portrayed, though, which may have something to do with that. Typically, in your Academic nudes, the woman is very much kind of laid out for the viewer's pleasure. You can look at her and
she's fairly passive, and she's fairly exposed. This woman, certainly with her face, is given a bit more independent presence. She has this sidelong glance, perhaps looking back at the
people in the background, whether they're talking about her or not. There's a way that her right arm comes in front of her chest that suggests a kind of protecting of her body and the way that her left hand comes up about her face that draws our eye up to her head and her sense of her presence and independence in a
way that is different than a kind of just
the flirtatious typical nude that would have been in the Academy. Male: It's true. In those cases you would not be able to read into her at all. Here, she has clear intention. She's thinking and we
can see her thinking. We can see her reacting. Female: And her head, the contrast with that bright yellow of the pillow right behind her head, too, I think makes that a spot in the whole painting that really draws your
attention very strongly; more than, perhaps,
other parts of her body which are contrasted against
other dark areas of paint. Male: There's really
an interest in contour and a very, very strong,
very dark contour, so much so that her left leg almost seems like an independent unit that's sort of been
placed against her body. Female: Look at all those curves; of the bed-frame or headboard in the back of the furniture that she's lying on, the curve of her back, the arabesques on the wallpaper. There's a lot of
flattening, decorative forms that I think for Gauguin are an effort to remove the figure
from an everyday world and place her more in a dreamlike space. When you mentioned the yellow,
that very bright yellow, almost citron yellow, that her head is on, it made me think that
maybe what we're seeing is her dream, is her
imaginings on this bed; not that we're looking at a real scene of a woman on a bed, but
a kind of imaginary space. Male: You'll notice that
that yellow shows up only again in the clouds, so I think there's something to what you're saying. At her feet there's a red that shows up again in the trees in the background. Actually, that little bit
of a trace of a landscape that we see through the window and through the doorway, does feel very much almost like an illustration for a children's book. It feels very much like
a fantasy, like a dream. Female: It does have a
very dreamlike quality. I think this bird, this
raven, which we assume is connected to the title of the painting, Nevermore, from the Edgar Allan Poe poem, that bird is kind of done the same way. There's a very flattened, decorative, sort of dreamlike quality
to the bird as well, almost as though it's
kind of one of the pieces of patterning in the wall
decoration in the background. Male: There's something
really psychological here, something very emotive, and
something that seem to be getting at a kind of reality
that is below the surface, that sort of pulls away our expectations and pulls away even what's visible to us and seems to just try to evoke a kind of internal emotional state. Female: Exactly; and her emotional state. (jazzy music)