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Анри Тулуз-Лотрека историки искусства называют постимпрессионистом. Он работал в
основном в графике и оставил острые, доходящие до гротеска образы. Это в основном
литографии, посвященные типажам парижской богемы. Тулуз-Лотрек делал плакаты с
изображением знаменитых танцовщиц и певиц кабаре. В "Мулен де ла Галетт" и "Мулен
Руж" художник экспрессивно и драматически изобразил веселье Парижа.
Многочисленные рисунки, эстампы, литографии свидетельствуют о Тулуз-Лотреке как о
выдающемся рисовальщике XIX века.
V. Summarize the text.
VI. Topics for discussion.
1. Toulouse-Lautrec's style and characters.
2. Toulouse-Lautrec as a great draughtsman.
UNIT XV GAUGUIN (1848-1903)
Paul Gauguin, a French painter, sculptor and printmaker, was a founder of modern art. A
successful businessman without any artistic training Gauguin began painting as an amateur while
working as a stockbroker. He soon met Pissarro and Cezanne, as well as the Impressionists.
Gauguin absorbed their ideas and techniques and from 1879 to the last Impressionist exhibition in
1886 showed regularly with this group.
Paul Gauguin lived a life that reads like a classic tale of the misunderstood, and
uncompromising artist, searching for verities against all odds. He was born in Paris and four years
of his childhood lived in Peru (he was partly of Indian origin); six years of his youth he spent as a
sailor and was incurably drawn to the exotic and the faraway.
For Gauguin painting itself became identified with his wanderlust and drew him away from all
his daily associations. In 1883 he gave up his business career and his bourgeois existence to devote
his life to art. Gauguin was convinced that European urban civilisation was incurably ill. His life
was nomadic; he moved back and fourth between villages in Brittany and the island of Martinique.
Impoverished, deadly ill, and in trouble with the law, Gauguin died on the Marquesas Islands.
Gauguin's departure from Western artistic tradition was prompted by the rebellious attitude that
impelled his break from middle-class life. But Gauguin, too, was not an Impressionist at heart. He
sought art using ideas rather than the tangible world as a starting point. In this he was influenced by
the artist Emil Bernard and by the Symbolist poets Rimbault and Baudelaire. Joining him in
renouncing naturalism were the Symbolists, and van Gogh.
Gauguin renounced the formlessness of Impressionist vision and recommended a return to the
"primitive" styles as the only refuge for art. What he sought was immediacy of experience. Gauguin
did this in his brilliant Vision After the Sermon or, alternatively, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,
painted in 1888, during his second stay in Brittany. This painting marked Gauguin break with
Impressionism to follow his own style. He rejected realism in favour of the imagination, and
through his expressionist means he made one of the most influential impacts on Western art. In the
background Jacob is depicted wrestling with the angel. This event forms the lesson in the Breton
rite for the eighth Sunday aflei Trinity. On the preceding day the blessing of horned beasts took
place, followed by wrestling contests and a procession with red banners, and at night fireworks, a
bonfire that turned the fields red with its glow, and an angel descending from the church tower. In
the foreground Gauguin has shown at the right the head of a priest and next to it praying women in
Breton costumes. Although the figures are outlined with the clarity that Gauguin derived from his
study of Oriental, medieval, and primitive arts, the contrast between the large foreground heads and
the smaller groups in the distance still presupposes Western perspective, and is drawn from theatre
subjects developed by Duamier, Degas, and Renoir.
In Oceania Gauguin was influenced only to a limited degree by the art of the natives with
whom he lived. He took his flattened style with its emphasis on brilliant colour to the South Seas
with him, and fitted into it the people whose folkways and personalities attracted him. The attitudes
in which he drew and painted them still derive from Impressionist vision. In The Day of the God, of
1894, a happy nude woman and her two children rest at the water's edge below the towering image