Paul Gauguin: Quotes about life

“Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming.”

Paul Gauguin

Quote in Avant et Après, (1903); taken from Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, trans. (1923) Van Wyck Brooks [Dover, 1997, ISBN 0-486-29441-2], p. 2
1890s - 1910s

Life , Dreams , Revenge

“I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.”

Paul Gauguin

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 48: quoted in the interview 'Paul Gauguin Discussing His Paintings', Jules Huret, printed in L'Écho de Paris, (23 February 1891)

Life , Peace , Art , Way

“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.”

Paul Gauguin

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 137: Diverse Choses, his notebook (1896 - 1898)

Life , Women , Color , Nature

“Life at Papeete soon became a burden.It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off — and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?”

Paul Gauguin

Quote from Noa Noa ,(1893) [Dover, 1985, ISBN 0-486-24859-3], p. 2.
1890s - 1910s

Life , Fashion

“This Cézanne [a 'Still life with Compotier, Fruit and Glass', Cézanne made c. 1879-1882!! ], that you ask me for is a pearl of exceptional quality and I already have refused three hundred francs for it; it is one of my most treasured possessions, and except in absolute necessity, I would give up my last shirt before the picture.”

Paul Gauguin

Quote in a letter (June 1888) to Gauguin's friend Émile Schuffenecker; as cited in Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition, Anne Distel, Michel Hoog, Charles S. Moffett, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York, N.Y.) 1975, p. 56
1870s - 1880s

Life

“I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.”

Paul Gauguin

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 109

Life , Music , Color , Way

“I was so bent on putting all my energy in its 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going' before dying [suffering from syphilis, Gauguin decided to commit suicide at the end], such painful passion amid terrible circumstances, and such a clear vision without corrections that the hastiness of it disappears and life bursts from it. It does not stink of models, professionalism, and the so-called rules that I have always disregarded.”

Paul Gauguin

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 160: Gauguin's quote in his letter from Tahiti to a friend, c. 1899

Life , Pain , Suicide , Suffering