Resumen de Les Contes barbares de Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin's enigmatic Contes Barbares (1902; Folkwang Museum, Essen) has multiple symbolic meanings. The painting depicts a man in a missionary dress crouching behind two barely clad figures in a post-lapsarian paradise heady with scents and textures. This demonic persona is adapted from the 1889 Portrait of Meijer de Haan, whom Gauguin transformed into an icon of the artist as maverick sage. The artist as prophet defies convention through Baudelaire's notion of “barbare,” a schematic language by which synesthesia gives art meaning. The parable encoded in Contes Barbares aligns the fate of the dying Oceania with Gauguin's own imminent death; it transcends surface reality, both to allow the audience to experience the realm of truth behind appearances and, ultimately, to proclaim that this is art's very mission.
