"As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting.It is indeed the outdoor life — yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow."But none of this exists!""Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter."Very subtle, very knowing in her naïveté is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 137: Diverse Choses, his notebook (1896 - 1898)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Gauguin
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French Post-Impressionist painter; From 1895 he lived and painted in Papeete on Tahiti.
64 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Paul Gauguin →
Related Quotes
"De amigo reconciliado e de caldo requentado, nunca bom bocado."
"Gauguin was a great writer and I just read Noa, Noa, and Van Gogh wrote the most amazing autobiography."
"What is he, then? He is Gauguin, the savage who hates the burden of our civilization, a sort of Titan who, jealous of…"
"Gauguin's work is symbolic, and he himself is a myth. He rejected the values of bourgeois society and of a machine ci…"
"The popular fancy that Gauguin 'discovered himself' as a painter in Tahiti is quite wrong. All the components of his …"
"One may wonder if any painter in the last century put more meaning into his sense of color than Gauguin."
"I advised him [Gauguin] to go to New Orleans [where Degas stayed for a few months and painted there], but he decided …"
"I have never wanted and never will accept the lack of modeling or gradation: it's an absurdity. Gauguin was not a pai…"
"Paul Gauguin, then [March 1885] still a Parisian stockbroker, had entered art as a collector of impressionist paintin…"
"The last thing that Bonnard and Vuillard and Matisse [artists of Nabis wanted to do was paint portentous allegories a…"