Gauguin, Paul (1848-1903)
Drame au village, Pont-Aven (Drama in the village, Pont-Aven)
1894
Oil on canvas, 73.4 x 93 cm
Private collection
A dream-like, symbolic scene in sultry, evocative hues, Paul Gauguin’s Drame au village, Pont-Aven epitomizes the artist’s fascination with the exotic and represents an enchanting vision of the artist’s life-long interest in depicting the unfamiliar. Executed in 1894, the present work is one of a select group of paintings completed in France between Gauguin’s first and second trips to Tahiti in 1893 and 1895; 13 of these reside in museum collections. It draws equally upon the artist’s previous series of works inspired by the rugged, rural landscape of Brittany in the far west of France and upon his recent travels through Papeete and its Tahitian environs, conjuring the sensuous beauty and visual splendor of the tropics. Formerly in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Drame au village, Pont-Aven bears an exceptionally distinguished history, and befitting its significance, it has been featured extensively in literature and exhibitions about the artist. Not seen publicly since it was last exhibited in Japan in 1987, the present work is a rare and important example of Gauguin’s legendary oeuvre.
Frustrated by the disingenuous sophistication of Paris and seeking what he saw as a simpler life, Gauguin journeyed to Pont-Aven in Brittany, a remote region known for its agricultural and conservative religious communities. It was here that he began to develop his signature Synthetist style, and created some of his most important early compositions, including Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) (1888, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh). Gauguin’s bold use of pure color and symbolic choice of subject matter marks the beginnings of his radical mode of expression, which reached its apex several years later during his time in Tahiti. Peripatetic by nature, Gauguin was attracted by the freedom, wilderness and simplicity he perceived in the Pacific islands. Following his first trip in 1893, he returned in 1895, and remained there for the rest of his life. It was there that his use of vivid, emotional colors and thick, gestural brushstrokes reached its full expression.
Drame au village, Pont-Aven, executed immediately following Gauguin’s first trip to Tahiti, deliberately emulates elements of both the Brittany paintings and his Tahitian style. Blending the sensuous, warm palette inspired by the “exotic” islands with the distinctive Breton architecture, Gauguin invents a romanticized landscape at once familiar and strange. The composition centers on the seated female figure in the foreground. Using one of his favored devices of “quoting” key motifs from his earlier paintings, Gauguin here borrows the subject of his earlier Grape Harvest at Arles (1888, Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen) and Human Miseries (1889, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Her posture was inspired by the Peruvian Chachapoya mummy, which Gauguin had seen at the Exposition Trocadéro in Paris—the same mummy that reputedly inspired Edvard Munch’s iconic image The Scream—offering an existential, anguished undertone. The young woman, sitting with her head in her hands, physicalizes grief, sorrow, and shame; she is the subject of the titular “village drama.” As Anna Barskaya has observed, “Village Drama is full of human sorrow, it is a ‘parable’ about outraged honour —this is unambiguously indicated by the figure of an overdressed fellow contemptuously looking down at a bareheaded young woman. Her dreams and her unconscious sensuality brought her nothing but grief and bitter disappointment which showed the futility of earthly pleasures” (Anna Barskaya, Paul Gauguin, London, 2011, p. 60).
This overdressed fellow, who is likewise “quoted” in Landscape in Le Pouldu (1894, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City), stands imposingly over the young woman. In a letter to Theo van Gogh, Gauguin labels this figure as a “seducer,” suggesting the sexual nature of the young woman’s plight, and notes that the upper portion of the composition represents “the rotten city of Babylon,” evoking society’s decadence and hypocrisy as well as the social and religious criticism responsible for the drama unfolding (Henri Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity, Berkeley, 2007, p. 92). Societal condemnation was a frequent subject for Gauguin, who returned to the Biblical themes of temptation, seduction, and exile throughout his oeuvre—the fallen Eve in particular. Indeed, the crouching female figure of the present work, one of Gauguin’s most significant icons, often recurs in his pictures as Eve, for instance in Don’t Listen to the Liar (1889, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio). In this way, Drame au village, Pont-Aven becomes a symbolic depiction of a fall from grace, and society’s hypocritical judgment of human nature. (Sotheby’s)