The great seriousness of Cezanne, the escapism of Gauguin, and the passionate rebelliousness of Van Gogh are part of the same pattern. In their various ways the outstanding painters of this period abandon what seem to them the superficial values of nineteenth-century life and art. Cezanne represents the form-seeking side of post-Impressionism; Gauguin and Van Gogh contribute emotional striving and a sense of dissatisfaction with the life of the time.

Gauguin's love of the exotic and strange was deeply rooted. His early childhood had been spent in Peru. The next period of his life, in a Jesuit seminary in France, was very unhappy. At seventeen he shipped as pilot's apprentice on a boat making South American ports. From twenty to twenty-three he was in the French navy as a stoker. He. then settled down as a clerk in a stockbroker's office and in the next eleven years made a good deal of money, married, and had five children. The marriage was not altogether successful, due to a restlessness of spirit which led him to art, first as a collector and then as a painter.

From 1880 - 1882 he exhibited with the Impressionists. A year later he gave up a profitable business to devote himself entirely to painting. His wife went back to her family in Copenhagen while Gauguin, trying to make his way in the art world, lived a hand-to-mouth existence as a billboard paster and scenic decorator. In 1886 he had an unsuccessful first show. Gauguin, by this time, had decided that modern civilization was decadent, so he went off to Brittany where he would not have to contend with the problems of ordinary city life. After a year he came back to Paris, but there was still no recognition. He next went to Martinique where he stayed for a brief period.

Back in Paris once more, he met Van Gogh and his picture-dealer brother Theo. For a few months he lived with the former at Arles in the south of France. This short-lived and disastrous experience ended in Van Gogh's first nervous breakdown. Again Gauguin tried "unspoiled" Brittany where the peasants lived as they had for centuries. Here he took a leading part in the so-called Pont-Aven school of painting.

Under the influence of the profound piety of the Breton people and the angular forms of their native religious art, he produced a number of pictures that represent a departure from the Impressionist viewpoint. Although brightly charged with color, a painting like The Yellow Christ has an altogether new and symbolic quality. It conveys the solemn contemplative frame of mind of people who have just come from church and carry in their minds the thoughts evoked by the sermon. Thus the women in their peasant costumes sit about the foot of a Cross conjured up out of their imaginations. This is quite different from the saccharine superficiality with which academic painters so often treat religious themes.

The form also differs from both the conventional photographic stories of the academicians and the shimmering Impressionist pictures. Instead of a detailed illustration, the artist causes the unrealistic, yellow Christ to emerge from the simplified forms of the women about the Cross. It is a frankly imaginary or spiritual scene; not a Crucifixion as such, but an image, a dream of a Crucifixion. The broad color areas recall medieval enamels or stained glass, while the figure of Christ is derived from sculptures of the Middle Ages. The perspective suggests the arrangements of Japanese art, already seen in Impressionist painting, with the spectator high up and to the side, looking through a number of prominent foreground objects to the space beyond.

As in Cezanne, the space has a deliberately restricted quality. The patterning of trees, hills, and other forms does not lead back into the painting. Rather the eye moves back and forth across the surface. The yellow of the Christ is repeated in the hills; the blue of the woman’s clothes in the sky and horizon; the foreground green in similar accents higher up and further back. The total effect is a vertically projected pattern of pleasant curving color areas, always related to something in the foreground. It is what Gauguin calls “Synthetism”, the synthetic or artificial reconstruction of landscape, still life, or whatever interests the artist.

His later pictures were of Tahiti, where he finally went to escape from European civilization. Though often less symbolic than The Yellow Christ, these works share the same qualities. In the Barbaric Tales, as before, Gauguin is interested in the independent and non-naturalistic function of color. Strongly intensified and covering a broad area, color has a new power and meaning. This is heightened by the sinuous movement of linear contours which represent the process of growth itself. Figures are not only abstracted, they are integrated into the picture pattern. They become a symbolic part of nature and its inherent growth. Gauguin's frequent theme of women outdoors is also favored by the Fauves and Expressionists of the next generation.

In the search for a means to express his feeling for "primitive" existence, Gauguin combines the linear art brought from France with Buddhist-Indian, Egyptian, and other Eastern art forms that are highly civilized, however "different." The woman facing us in this picture is posed like a Buddha, legs crossed and hand pointing to the ground, "calling upon the Earth to witness." Here in this broadly colored, sinuously contoured, and formally controlled picture, Gauguin sums up his protest against modem materialism, his own version of the return to nature.