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(jazzy music)
Male: We're looking at Paul Gauguin's
Vision after the Sermon,
Jacob Wrestling with an Angel, from 1888.
It's wildly, vividly colored
Gauguin is doing, I think, one of the most
interesting things here by allowing color
to function in a purely abstract way.
Female: The idea of freeing color
from the natural world and using color expressively
and separating the painting from having
to be a mirror of reality, which it had been
since the Renaissance.
Male: Not only is the red vivid and powerful,
there's this wrestling match going on
between Jacob with the yellow wings,
who seems to be getting poor Jacob in a kind of headlock.
Not only do you have the sense of the red
equated in some way with violence,
but the red is powerful and it's forcing itself forward.
Female: The flattening of space, which of course
he's also getting from Japanese prints.
Male: In fact, that Japanese print is referred to
in a very explicit way by that wonderful
tree trunk which diagonally divides the canvas.
Female: I remember Gauguin talking about
not wanting the painting to look real;
to bring it back to a sense of the visionary
and the spiritual, so he repressed
the use of shadows, for example,
and lots of other techniques that were used
since the Renaissance to create
a convincing illusion of reality.
Male: In fact in a letter to Van Gogh, his friend,
he would write that his paintings
of this time were abstract.
We don't look at a painting like this
and think of it as abstract,
but by that I think he meant the refusal
of the modulation of light and shadow.
Female: Gauguin is in Brittany.
Male: Which is in the northwest of France
over by the coast.
Female: An area that's rugged and difficult weather.
There was an artist's colony there,
but Gauguin went there very much
to separate himself from the life of the city
and modern Parisian culture, and to find
something that was more true, more uncivilized,
closer to some kind of original human nature.
Male: This is coming out of the Enlightenment.
This is Rousseau's philosophy of natural man.
This is Gauguin completely inventing.
We're seeing these women who are in their
traditional headdresses as if this was
the 17th or 18th century.
It would be almost like us going to Wyoming
and on a day that they have rodeo,
everybody's got their cowboy hat on,
and thinking that that's the way people
dress all the time, with chaps,
as if it was 100 years earlier.
It's completely invented.
Female: But the point he's making
is a very interesting one, ultimately, I think.
He's got the peasants in the foreground.
Their eyes are closed.
They seem to be turned inward.
What's interesting about this painting
is it's not a religious painting.
It's not a biblical subject.
It's not just Jacob wrestling with the angel.
It is a painting about people having
a religious experience.
Male: That religious experience is then separated
from their world by that tree, which separates
the spiritual realm from the physical realm.
Female: It's really a spectator religious painting;
a painting where we watch other people be religious.
I think that Gauguin identified a modern dilemma,
which is that it's very hard to have the same
relationship with the spiritual that human beings
had before the Modern Industrial Era.
I think he feels a nostalgia and longing
for what he imagines is a more direct
spiritual experience.
Male: So this is a strategy, actually
a very sophisticated strategy,
for bringing that kind of religious imagery
that was embedded in the Medieval,
and the Renaissance, even in the Baroque,
now into the Modern world.
(jazzy music)