Gauguin : Les Chemins de la Spiritualité

Description

Before turning away from dogma, Gauguin had learned to listen to the silence of churches and the promises of theology. Yet throughout his life, behind the blazing colours and enigmatic figures, he pursued the same question: what remains of the divine when certainties crumble? From the Christianity of his childhood to Theosophy, from Christ to Buddha, from Hindu deities to Polynesian powers, his thought gradually became a spiritual constellation freed from all boundaries. His famous declaration, "One must kill God," does not so much mark an abandonment of the sacred as a refusal to confine God within dogma and literal interpretation. Through his paintings, writings, readings and the encounters that shaped his thought, this book traces the transformations of a quest at once deeply intimate and profoundly tumultuous. It thus reveals, behind the painter of colour and elsewhere, a man journeying towards the "Unfathomable Mystery," seeking not so much to represent the divine as to feel its presence.