Paul Gauguin
Bretonischer Junge, 1889

Alfred Flechtheim and Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin is considered a precursor of both the French Fauves group of artists and German Expressionism. He worked first of all in at Bertin’s, a bank in Paris, and held his first exhibition in the Salon in 1876. He became familiar with Impressionism through his contact with Camille Pissaro in 1879 and subsequently took part in their exhibitions. From 1883 onwards he devoted himself entirely to art. Three years later he met Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas. Gauguin frequently spent time with artist friends such as Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier in Pont-Aven, Brittany. It was there and on Tahiti, where he worked from 1891 onwards, that he developed his expressive, exotic style of painting, based on native folk art, with simplified, large-scale shapes and intense colours. This ‘synthetic painting’ and his sculptural work had a lasting influence on 20^th-century art.

Gauguin was sponsored by Theo van Gogh, among others. In 1903, long before the retrospective in the Salon d’Automne in autumn 1906, Karl Ernst Osthaus was the first German museum director to acquire several works for the Folkwang Museum in Hagen. In 1904 the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe drew attention to Gauguin’s importance and, one year later, the collector Harry Graf Kessler organised the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Großherzogliches Museum in Weimar. At the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912 Gauguin had a room to himself and was celebrated as a leading figure of Modernist painting.

In 1906/07 Alfred Flechtheim first saw Gauguin’s work in Paris which he then collected and sold on a limited scale. In 1909 he loaned a lithograph to an exhibition in Düsseldorf for the first time and other works to the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914. Although Flechtheim leant more towards Picasso and Braque, he still continued to exhibit Gauguin’s works after World War I. In 1937 several works by the artist were confiscated by the Nazis and shown at the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Munich.