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This program is made possible through the generous support of the Cameron Baird Foundation.
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Paul Gauguin |
SUPPLIES
Paper, pencil, and crayons.
DISCUSSING THE PAINTING
For the purposes of this discussion, please keep in mind that children will have different responses to the questions you ask, and that to most of these questions there is no right or wrong answer. The
children will interpret what they see through the filter of their own experiences and backgrounds.
In this painting, we see three women dressed in the traditional peasant clothes of their time at the foot of a cross upon which Jesus Christ is nailed. Look at the painting and have the students explore and describe what they see. Prompt them with questions if they have not noticed certain things.
What is going on in the foreground of the painting?
What kinds of clothes are the women wearing?
What do you think they are doing? What might they be thinking?
Who is hanging on the cross? Do you know the story of Jesus Christ?
Why is he on the cross? What might he be thinking?
What is in the middle ground of the painting?
Can you find three figures?
Who are the figures? What might they be doing?
Can you find a wall and a path? Or do you think they are two walls?
Why?
Can you find the wall in this painting?
What kind of wall is it? What do you think it is made of, and how might it have been built? What might it be used for?
What is in the background of the painting?
Is this the country or the city? How can you tell?
What season is depicted? How can you tell?
Look at the different tree shapes. Can you describe them? Can you draw them on your own paper?
Can you find the houses? How would the people climbing over the wall get to those houses?
Look at the sky. What time of day do you think it is?
ADDITIONAL EXPLORATIONS
Look at the whole painting.
How many different yellows can you find? Oranges? Blues?
Can you make the colors with your crayons? Mix colors if you need to.
Once you have made the colors with your crayons, can you (or the class) make a chart of the colors you see in this painting? Look very carefully at the painting when you see it in the Gallery and decide if you missed some colors!
CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISE
Tell the students to pretend they are the person climbing the wall. Ask them to write a story from the point of view of that person. You can ask them to answer these questions in their story:
Who are you? Are you a man or a woman? Where are you going?
What does it feel like to climb the wall? What do you see, what do you smell, what do you touch, and what do you hear as you climb the wall?
Who are the other people in the painting? How do you know them?
What happened right before the moment depicted in the painting? What will happen after you cross the wall?
Have the students read their compositions out loud so they can hear the variety of ideas and interpretations inspired by the artwork.
ART ACTIVITY: FOREGROUND, MIDDLE GROUND, BACKGROUND
With crayons, draw a picture of the main character in your story - the person crossing the wall. Draw the character's family or friends. They are in the foreground!
Now with pencil, draw a line across the middle of your crayon drawing that will be a wall, or a path, if you prefer. This is your middle ground. Where the wall can be seen, draw it in with crayon, remembering that it is BEHIND your character.
Now you have a background! In the background, smaller than your character and his/her family and friends, draw something that happened to the character or something he/she is thinking about.
Talk about your drawing – what is going on in the foreground?
The middle ground? The background?
SUGGESTED READING
Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal (Fine Art Series)
by Paul Gauguin, Chronicle Books, 2005
Gauguin's personal journal
Paul Gauguin (The Life and Work of)
by Paul Flux, Heinemann Library, 2002
Reading Level: Ages 4-8.
FURTHER INFORMATION FOR EDUCATORS
Born in Paris in 1848, Paul Gauguin lived in France throughout the 1870s and 1880s, enjoying a comfortable bourgeois life as a stockbroker. After a stock market crash in 1883, he lost his job and began
to try to make a living as an artist, finally leaving France for Tahiti in 1891. While living in France, he painted the people and landscapes that surrounded him. The Yellow Christ depicts the crucifixion
of Jesus, a biblical story, set in Brittany, France during the time period in which it was painted.
Paul Gauguin depicted himself and this painting in a self-portrait called Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ. Looking at both works, it is clear that Gauguin's face is the face on the figure of Jesus in The Yellow Christ. Some art historians believe that Gauguin felt that, like Jesus, he was suffering for a great and noble cause – in Gauguin's case, his art. Certainly during his lifetime, he had little financial success from his painting, which caused hardship for his wife and five children in France, and resulted in a rift that was never repaired.
Gauguin is one of the painters who worked with the early French impressionists such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissaro, painting fleeting moments of light and color outdoors. Later in his career, as one of the four famous so-called postimpressionists (Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne), he rejected the idea of seeing and capturing fleeting changes in color and light, and instead began to choose colors, shapes, and compositions based on his own feelings and opinions. This resulted in a style that was more abstract than most European painters of his time. For example, in The Yellow Christ, we can see that the color of Christ's complexion is not intended to accurately depict a real skin tone; the length of Christ's limbs and body are exaggerated; and the actual crucifixion of Christ had, of course, never happened in Brittany in 1889. Gauguin's influences included medieval stained glass, folk art, and Japanese prints, and Gauguin has counseled: "Don't paint from nature too much. Art is an abstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation that will result." He called his style Synthetism because it synthesized the observation of the subject in nature with the artist's feelings about that subject. The Yellow Christ is world-famous as a quintessential example of this style.
This painting was begun at Pont-Aven in Brittany, but probably finished at a more remote and primitive fishing village called Le Pouldu. The visual source of the crucified Jesus is an ancient wooden crucifix that hangs in a local chapel. The mystic and religious undertones of the local community intrigued Gauguin. For example, the local folklore placed a deep spiritual significance on the autumn harvest. It was believed that the grain underwent a kind of crucifixion, and then a resurrection when it grew again in the spring. That is the reason for Gauguin's selection of autumn as the setting for The Yellow Christ.
To talk about narrative painting (those that tell a story), many times we speak of dividing images into three sections – the foreground, the middle ground, and the background. The foreground refers to the space closest to the viewer, the background is the area farthest away, and the middle ground is everything in between.