Gauguin, Paul - Vision of the Sermon (1888)

The Death of the Eyeball

By 1888, the Parisian art scene was a suffocating machine of light and logic. Gauguin traveled to Brittany to find meaning in art, and ended up finding a living ghost. In the rugged, salt-sprayed landscape of Pont-Aven, he found a people who still believed in the invisible, and Gauguin painted their collective imagination, his way. Impressionism had become too scientific, obsessed with how light hits a haystack. Gauguin wanted to know how a soul hits a canvas instead.

Vision of the Sermon is the moment the umbilical cord to objective reality finally snapped for Gauguin. The scene is split by a brutal, diagonal tree trunk borrowed straight from Japanese woodblock prints. On one side, you have the Breton women in their stiff white caps and black wool. On the other, a biblical wrestling match between Jacob and an angel, in the background. The ground beneath them isn't grass. It’s a flat, screaming field of vermilion red.

This is a mindscape, not a landscape. Gauguin is painting the collective hallucination of a congregation after a particularly fire-and-brimstone sermon. The red isn't a color, it’s the heat of belief. When he tried to give this masterpiece to the local church in Nizon, the priest actually turned him away. The church couldn't handle a vision that didn't follow the representational rules for shadows and dirt. Gauguin didn't care. He had killed the observation of nature to make room for the imagination.

References

Gauguin, Paul. Letters to Nanette. Edited by Amy S. Wyckoff. Museum of Modern Art.

Thomson, Belinda. Gauguin. Thames & Hudson. 1987.

Silverman, Debora. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2000.

Bretell, Richard. The Art of Paul Gauguin. National Gallery of Art. 1988.

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