The Wildenstein Plattner Institute is pleased to announce the latest update of the Paul Gauguin digital catalogue raisonné, featuring paintings from the artist’s time in Brittany and Paris (1889–1891). This new release, along with updates to the previously-published collection of artworks from Gauguin’s two voyages in the South Pacific (1891–1903), now offers a comprehensive study of Paul Gauguin’s painted works as a dynamic digital resource that incorporates the breadth of material in WPI digital archives.
Gauguin’s time in Brittany constituted years of valuable experimentation with color, form, and composition, as he developed an aesthetic that lay the foundation for the style of his later French Polynesian works. This period encompasses a total of 105 works, including several of his most celebrated: Dans les vagues (1889), La Perte du pucelage (1890–91), and Jésus au jardin des Oliviers (1889); the group also features portraits of Gauguin’s associates and their families, and a series landscapes in which vivid colors and spatial distortions anticipate the nascent abstractionism in Western art. An overview of the style and techniques Gauguin used for several of these works is presented in introductory essays, translated and adapted from renowned Gauguin scholar Sylvie Crussard’s forthcoming monograph.
Each work is accompanied by provenance, exhibition and publication information that has been integrated with primary source material from WPI’s digital archives. This material includes the stockbooks, correspondence, inventories, sales catalogues, and photo archives that had been gathered and maintained by the Wildenstein Institute, and later by the WPI, offering users unparalleled access to the digital catalogue raisonné’s foundational research. With this new release, each work is also accompanied by an examination status, indicating the date that the Gauguin Committee was able to examine the work in person.
The WPI produced Gauguin: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings 1889 – 1903 using the digital catalogue raisonné platform created by Navigating.Art. This compendium now joins the WPI’s on-line roster of accessible resources and catalogue raisonné projects, including those of Claude Monet.