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Lot Essay
Please note that this lot will be examined by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute at their next committee meeting.
‘To do new things, one must go back to the beginnings, to the infancy of humanity’
Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin was an artist with an indefatigable need for discovery. This insatiable desire took him to the furthest corners of the globe, as he voyaged from Peru, Paris, Pont-Aven and Arles, to Martinique, Tahiti and finally the Marquesas Islands as he sought a simple, primitive existence, one that was freed from the bounds of Western civilisation, which could offer him new subjects and an entirely new mode of expression. This lifelong quest also led Gauguin to embrace a plethora of different media, ranging from carved wood sculpture and lithography, to woodcuts, painting and ceramics. Working simultaneously in a range of practices, Gauguin saw no hierarchical distinction between media, revelling in the transference of techniques and processes between various materials. Depicting his ceramic creations in his paintings, modelling portraits in clay objects or carving wood for his printmaking, Gauguin broke new ground in each medium that he worked in, seeking always to cross into hitherto uncharted artistic territory.
Having led a respectable life as a Paris stockbroker, in the early 1880s Gauguin decided to leave behind this bourgeois existence and pursue a career as an artist. In 1886, shortly before he left Paris for his first seminal trip to Brittany, Gauguin began to produce ceramics, having been introduced by his friend, the painter and engraver Félix Bracquemond, to Ernest Chaplet, one of the leading ceramicists of his day. Seeking to supplement his meagre income, Gauguin arranged to make pottery in Chaplet's studio on the rue Blomet and to split the proceeds between them. While the initial arrangement was that Gauguin would decorate the pieces that Chaplet made, the artist fast developed a talent for throwing his own pottery, quickly forging a unique and radical avant-garde aesthetic.
For the years that followed, Gauguin frequently returned to Chaplet’s studio when he was in Paris, with his most experimental pieces created following his return from his revelatory summer in Martinique in late 1887. It was around this time that he executed to following lots: Vase porte-bouquet ("Atahualpa") (executed late 1887-early 1888) and, in the years following, Pot à la petite tahitienne (executed circa 1889), both of which encapsulate Gauguin’s innovative, highly expressive and unique mode of ceramics. Gauguin’s work in this medium was immediately noticed by critics and dealers in Paris, including Theo Van Gogh. When, in January 1888, five of Gauguin’s ceramics were exhibited at Boussod & Valadon in Paris, the legendary Félix Fénéon singled out these works, remarking particularly on a work that was likely Vase porte-bouquet ("Atahualpa").
‘Whether stained glass or furniture, earthenware… These are in essence my aptitudes, much more than actual painting’
Paul Gauguin
Instead of following the traditional technique of throwing pieces on a potter’s wheel, Gauguin preferred to construct his ceramics by hand, a method known as coil and slab construction. This practice, he believed, was essential to a new, avant-garde form of ceramics, and he called for artists to ‘transform the eternal Greek vase…replacing the potter at his wheel by intelligent hands, which could impart the life of a figure to a vase while remaining true to the character of the material’ (Gauguin, quoted in G. Groom, ed., Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, exh. cat., Chicago & Paris, 2017-2018, p. 47). As a result, Gauguin’s pieces have an anthropomorphic and sculptural form, often with appendages attached, their functional uses playfully subverted so that they become fantastical artistic objects. This can be particularly regarded in Vase porte-bouquet ("Atahualpa"), the name a reference to the last King of the Incas, which is humorously formed of the bust and head of a man, his lips and beard visible. To these tactile, complex surfaces, the artist then added glazes, slips, carved incisions or imagery. As in his painting, colour was endowed with an expressive, abstract potential, rather than being solely naturalistic. Inspired by a range of sources, from the contemporaneous vogue for Japonisme, to medieval, Renaissance and pottery from his native Peru, Gauguin found with pottery a means to achieve his deeply felt desire for a primitive mode of expression. In every way an ‘artist-artisan’, he expanded the boundaries of the medium in his quest to convey his powerful artistic vision in three-dimensional form.
‘To do new things, one must go back to the beginnings, to the infancy of humanity’
Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin was an artist with an indefatigable need for discovery. This insatiable desire took him to the furthest corners of the globe, as he voyaged from Peru, Paris, Pont-Aven and Arles, to Martinique, Tahiti and finally the Marquesas Islands as he sought a simple, primitive existence, one that was freed from the bounds of Western civilisation, which could offer him new subjects and an entirely new mode of expression. This lifelong quest also led Gauguin to embrace a plethora of different media, ranging from carved wood sculpture and lithography, to woodcuts, painting and ceramics. Working simultaneously in a range of practices, Gauguin saw no hierarchical distinction between media, revelling in the transference of techniques and processes between various materials. Depicting his ceramic creations in his paintings, modelling portraits in clay objects or carving wood for his printmaking, Gauguin broke new ground in each medium that he worked in, seeking always to cross into hitherto uncharted artistic territory.
Having led a respectable life as a Paris stockbroker, in the early 1880s Gauguin decided to leave behind this bourgeois existence and pursue a career as an artist. In 1886, shortly before he left Paris for his first seminal trip to Brittany, Gauguin began to produce ceramics, having been introduced by his friend, the painter and engraver Félix Bracquemond, to Ernest Chaplet, one of the leading ceramicists of his day. Seeking to supplement his meagre income, Gauguin arranged to make pottery in Chaplet's studio on the rue Blomet and to split the proceeds between them. While the initial arrangement was that Gauguin would decorate the pieces that Chaplet made, the artist fast developed a talent for throwing his own pottery, quickly forging a unique and radical avant-garde aesthetic.
For the years that followed, Gauguin frequently returned to Chaplet’s studio when he was in Paris, with his most experimental pieces created following his return from his revelatory summer in Martinique in late 1887. It was around this time that he executed to following lots: Vase porte-bouquet ("Atahualpa") (executed late 1887-early 1888) and, in the years following, Pot à la petite tahitienne (executed circa 1889), both of which encapsulate Gauguin’s innovative, highly expressive and unique mode of ceramics. Gauguin’s work in this medium was immediately noticed by critics and dealers in Paris, including Theo Van Gogh. When, in January 1888, five of Gauguin’s ceramics were exhibited at Boussod & Valadon in Paris, the legendary Félix Fénéon singled out these works, remarking particularly on a work that was likely Vase porte-bouquet ("Atahualpa").
‘Whether stained glass or furniture, earthenware… These are in essence my aptitudes, much more than actual painting’
Paul Gauguin
Instead of following the traditional technique of throwing pieces on a potter’s wheel, Gauguin preferred to construct his ceramics by hand, a method known as coil and slab construction. This practice, he believed, was essential to a new, avant-garde form of ceramics, and he called for artists to ‘transform the eternal Greek vase…replacing the potter at his wheel by intelligent hands, which could impart the life of a figure to a vase while remaining true to the character of the material’ (Gauguin, quoted in G. Groom, ed., Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, exh. cat., Chicago & Paris, 2017-2018, p. 47). As a result, Gauguin’s pieces have an anthropomorphic and sculptural form, often with appendages attached, their functional uses playfully subverted so that they become fantastical artistic objects. This can be particularly regarded in Vase porte-bouquet ("Atahualpa"), the name a reference to the last King of the Incas, which is humorously formed of the bust and head of a man, his lips and beard visible. To these tactile, complex surfaces, the artist then added glazes, slips, carved incisions or imagery. As in his painting, colour was endowed with an expressive, abstract potential, rather than being solely naturalistic. Inspired by a range of sources, from the contemporaneous vogue for Japonisme, to medieval, Renaissance and pottery from his native Peru, Gauguin found with pottery a means to achieve his deeply felt desire for a primitive mode of expression. In every way an ‘artist-artisan’, he expanded the boundaries of the medium in his quest to convey his powerful artistic vision in three-dimensional form.