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How did Paul Gauguin's paintings depart from naturalism?
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Western painting
Self-Portrait, oil on canvas by Judith Leyster, c. 1630; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Paul Gauguin departed from naturalism by rejecting the Impressionist focus on the direct observation of light and nature, which he considered superficial and confining. Instead, he advocated for a more conceptual approach, urging artists to rely on memory and feeling rather than copying the physical world.12
His departure from naturalism was characterized by several key stylistic shifts:
- Synthetism: Gauguin coined this term to describe a method where formal elementsâsuch as broad planes of pure, unshaded color and clear, strong outlinesâwere synthesized with the artist's internal ideas or emotions.12
- Flattening of Space: He abandoned the traditional perspectival space developed since the Renaissance, opting instead for two-dimensional, decorative arrangements of parts.12
- Symbolic Representation: Rather than replicating an actual scene, he used pictorial means to induce specific feelings in the viewer, often combining different levels of reality, such as the everyday world and the dream world, into a single composition.12
Through these innovations, Gauguin moved away from empirical representation toward a subjective, decorative style that prioritized artistic creation over the imitation of nature.31