Gauguin, Paul - The Yellow Christ (1889)

Paul Gauguin didn't move to Brittany for the scenery. He went there because he was done with the light-dappled fluff of the Impressionists and the cold iron of the Eiffel Tower. In 1889, while Paris was worshiping electricity and steam at the Exposition Universelle, Gauguin was standing in the mud of Pont-Aven. He was looking for something ancient. He wanted a primitive soul that the modern world had already started to execute.

The Yellow Christ is not a portrait of a Sunday service. It is a manifesto of Cloisonnism. Gauguin rejected naturalism by drenching the world in a flat, unapologetic yellow. He didn't care if the grass looked like a real field. He wanted it to feel like the autumn transition between life and the coming winter. The Christ figure wasn't a vision from the clouds either. It was modeled after a 17th-century wooden crucifix he found in a local chapel in Tremalo.

The heavy dark outlines around the figures mimic medieval stained glass and Japanese woodblock prints. It is a flattened, spiritual space where peasant women in traditional coifs pray to a wooden idol that has come to life in their own fields. While the rest of the world was staring at the raw power of the new century, Gauguin was obsessing over ancient superstitions and the smell of heavy wool soaked in rain. He saw the death of the sacred coming and he tried to trap it on a canvas before it vanished forever.

References

Gauguin, Paul. The Writings of a Savage. Edited by Daniel Guérin. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

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

Brettell, Richard. The Art of Paul Gauguin. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1988.

Eisenman, Stephen. Gauguin's Skirt. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997.