Paul Gauguin: In Search of a “Primitive” Ideal

Paul Gauguin - Old Women of Arles (Mistral) - oil on jute - 1888 - Art Institute of Chicago (click photo for larger image)Late in October 1888, Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) traveled to Arles, in the south of France, to stay with Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) (partly as a favor to van Gogh’s brother, Theo, an art dealer who had agreed to represent Gauguin). The two men (Gauguin and Vincent) did not get along at all—and a number of violent confrontations (about art) erupted.

Despite their differences, the style of both artists shows individual, personal developments, in each of their works, of Impressionism’s use of color, brushstrokes, and non-traditional subject matter. Gauguin’s Old Women of Arles (Mistral) featured here portrays a group of women moving through a flattened, arbitrarily conceived landscape in a solemn procession. As in much of his work from this period, Gauguin applied thick paint in a heavy manner to raw canvas, in keep with the “primitive” ideal he was attempting to establish. Both artists’ styles also reflected the influence of Japanese art, prevalent at the time.