Human Nature to Want to Essay

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Question 5: 1899 was a difficult year for Gauguin. After a brief period of fortune, he was again destitute, was suffering from a leg injury, and had for all intents and purposes settled in Tahiti and separated himself from the Parisian art world. He painted Two Tahitian Women shortly after a suicide attempt (Walther, 87). Chances are that his audience at this point was himself, though the specter of the Parisian art culture probably still played a role in his decisions. He may still have been seeking ways to break with the Impressionist tradition, but the purity and emotion of the paintings of this period suggest an artist who was using art to experience and internalize the world more than one who was seeking to deliver a message to an audience.

Question 6: Gauguin's Tahitian paintings are strongly representative of the Expressionism movement. Expressionism sacrifices realism for the sake of evoking the strong emotions of the artist (Grove). This is usually done through the use of bold, graphic colors and simplified, strongly outlined forms. Symbolism is also used in Expressionism to express the artist's message. The characteristics of Expressionism can clearly be seen in Gauguin's paintings, especially in his use of colors, primitive and flattened forms, and his use of fertility and sexuality symbols.

Question 7: 1899 was a complicated time for Europe and for the European colonies. In the "fin de siecle" culture of France in which Gauguin came into prominence, there was a sense of boredom with the old culture and uncertainty about the new century (Britannica). This led to a feeling within artistic and intellectual circles of boredom, disillusionment with European culture and human nature in general, and decadence. Gauguin had participated to some extent in all of these feelings, and part of the allure of Tahiti (especially the Tahitian women) was the simplicity and naivete of the culture in comparison to the corrupted and corpulent European civilization.

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Gauguin's paintings present pure, direct, clean representations of this innocence and the natural, pure state of humans not yet warped by the corruption of civilization. Though he is well-known to have participated in much of the decadence of his age, paintings like Two Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms reveal his appreciation for, and perhaps even longing for, a clean, simple, straightforward existence. His assertion that this painting represents a "Tahitian Eve" before the Fall shows that he viewed Tahiti as a Garden of Eden untroubled by the sinfulness and selfishness of the world around it.

Question 8: This image is in two-point linear perspective. We know this because the view is straight-on, the horizon is clearly visible in the center of the painting, and the top side of the buildings are angled towards two different vanishing points, one to the right and one to the left.

Question 9: The type of linear perspective in the second image is three-point. We know this because the image is captured from a great height above the objects, creating three visual vanishing points. Two of the vanishing points are created by the horizontal lines of the top of the prominent building in the center, while the third is not actually in the image, but is pointed to by the vertical sides of the building, which create lines that eventual meet beneath the image.

Question 10. This third image has a one-point linear perspective. We know this because there is one clear vanishing point on the horizon of the image, and all of the lines in the image either meet at the vanishing point or are perpendicular or parallel to the horizon......

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