Woman with Figs

Paul Gauguin is well known for his unconventional use of brilliant color. Consequently, this black and white print seems atypical. Nonetheless, the fluid juxtaposition of strong tonal shapes is a muted version of forms seen elsewhere in his work. The abrupt spatial contrast between the near foreground and distant background is also characteristic of Gauguin. The effect of this disjunction is telling. The woman who sits at a round table, does not look at the bowl, the napkin, the textured cloth, or the figs before her, but toward the distance. She appears as a self-contained individual who draws our attention to the landscape, even as she ignores us and remains alone.

Inez Olszewski '22

Born in 1848, Paul Gauguin—along with fellow artists Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Surrat—was a core member of the Post-Impressionist movement. These artists responded to Impressionism by over emphasizing perceptual objective reality and underestimating the personal and subjective. Consequently these artists –and most especially Gauguin– privileged the internal over the external experience and turned their focus away from the reality of the Impressionists and towards the representation of their own imaginations.

Paul Gauguin (on his mother’s side) was from a family of Peruvian descent, making Gauguin feel distinct because of his multicultural background, and perhaps sparking his interest in travel and the non-western. Even before becoming a banker and later an artist—he traveled the world—first as a pilot in the Merchant Marine and then for two years in the French navy. Increasingly, Gaugin viewed the European civilization in which he grew up in as inadequate and wanted to gain contact with a society that he felt had not yet suffocated itself with its own sophistication. He traveled elsewhere to find inspiration for his radical new artistic vision. This search led him to Brittany, Central America, and most notably Tahiti. In all his travels Gauguin sought to capture what he saw as the soul of a primal culture that modern society wrongly felt they had already surpassed. Camille Pissarro, a mentor and teacher to Gauguin, once commented on Gauguin’s work, stating "He's in another world".

This attachment to the imaginative and dreamlike landscape can be seen in one of Gauguin’s earlier works, The Vision After the Sermon, in which we witness devout Britten women collectively hallucinating Jaocb wrestling an angel, the biblical scene from that day’s sermon. Having liberated himself from the Impressionist notion of the mimetic representation, Gauguin here relies on deep, saturated colors to convey emotion and imagination. Though the Woman With Figs depicts a scene inspired by a much later trip to Brittany –after he returned from his first trip to Martinique and before his final trip and residence in Tahiti– his palette remained brilliant.

Woman with Figs was printed posthumously in 1966, long after both Paul Gauguin and Armond Seguin, a past printer and retoucher of this work, had passed away. A signed inscription by Seguin can be seen on the upper left which states “Chez Seguin/St. Julien”. The print (or at least its early stages) may be the result of Gauguin being confined to drawing and watercolor for much of his trip to Brittany. He had broken his leg in a brawl at this time and could not paint.

Certainly, this black and white print – seems atypical of the artist’s work oeuvre. Nonetheless, some characteristics of Gauguin’s work, such as the contrasting strong tonal shapes and spatial juxtaposition between the near foreground and distant background, are present in this work, even if comparatively muted. The table at which the subject, a woman, sits extends past the foreground into the viewer’s space, as if inviting us to take a seat across from her. While her body sits facing our direction, her frame and gaze turns away from the viewer, pointing with her finger in the same direction as if attempting to share with us what she is viewing, which sits outside the frame. Although invited to the table, we find ourselves ignored by our host, whose mind, similar to the landscape in the background, recedes into the distance as she ignores us and remains alone.

Inez Olszewski ‘22