The Walters Art Gallery's impressive show, "Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven," opens today, making Baltimore the only East Coast venue for this important collection of Post-Impressionist paintings.
Paul Gauguin was a seminal figure in the group that spent summers in the French village of Pont-Aven in the 1880s and 1890s, devising a painting theory based not on the way objects appeared to the eye but on the artist's emotional response to a scene.
Pont-Aven in Brittany became a magnet for younger artists, attracted by the province's rugged landscapes, simple peasants and low costs. Like the Impressionists, they rejected formal conventions of 19th century academic painting and sought in unspoiled nature an antidote to the urban, industrial culture of their time.
But where the Impressionists were fascinated by transitory effects of light, Gauguin and colleagues formulated a set of principles on the idea of extracting the most significant components of a scene and reducing them to simple shapes and colors, the better to express the subjective emotions.
Gauguin was aided by Emile Bernard, who as a student had helped invent a style inspired by medieval stained glass and Japanese prints. Bernard's methods relied on flat areas of color sharply delineated by bluish-black outlines. In Pont-Aven, he and Gauguin refined this new aesthetic, which eschewed traditional perspective in favor of a two-dimensional, non-representational style that implied depth by overlapping figures of graduated size.
Though Gauguin's work made Pont-Aven briefly an artistic center rivaling even Paris, the public remained indifferent. He was often too poor to buy food, tobacco or even art supplies. "It is true suffering stimulates genius," he once joked, but then added: "It is well not to have too much of it; otherwise it merely kills one."
By 1891, the painter had become disillusioned and left France for the South Pacific island of Tahiti, where he painted his most famous canvases. But the style he developed in Pont-Aven helped secure his reputation as one of the most brilliantly original artists of his era.
The Walters has done a magnificent job in telling the story of his fascinating life and times.