Paul Gauguin 1848-1903
60.6 x 27.9 x 27.3 cm
Further images
Originally modelled in clay in 1890 by Paul Gauguin, Eve is a bronze sculpture cast at the historic Valsuani foundry in Paris. Valsuani was a reference for the modernists and impressionists alike, casting some of the most prominent modern sculptures known today, under the instruction of artists including Gaugin, Rembrandt, Degas, and Rodin.
The subject, identified as the Judeo-Christian Eve, emerges from a signed cloisonné base composed of delicate floral pattern and foliage, supporting the figure, and the trunk of the 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. The design, conceived about a year prior to his first voyage to Tahiti, is a rare window into the young Gaugin’s idealisation of the female character, unimpacted by his travels overseas and the fauvist and primitivist aesthetic.
The sculpture was influenced by the renaissance depictions of the quintessentially feminine idols, such as Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve. Nonetheless, Gauguin refuses the old master’s notions of pose and movement by offering us more freedom to interpret the biblical mother. The modernity of Gauguin’s Eve lies in the reinterpretation of the figure, which, contrastingly with the classic, is neither smiling and nurturing nor in despair, rather, she looks ahead defiantly as she leans forward.
The sculpture brings to life the mysterious vivifying force of the first woman, her generative but also destructive power, and the inherent ambivalence of her holiness and sin. Gauguin would return to the theme in his controversial 1902, Adam and Eve, transposing an original Eve into the Tahitian scenery. This piece offers us the mysterious vivifying force of the first woman, generative but also destructive, with the inherent ambivalence of holiness and sin, life, and death.
The artist was deeply concerned with religious and spiritual traditions, and the question of human 'origins' and fate, embodied by his masterpiece Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1898; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Groom, 2016.
Gauguin’s works are held in the collections of the most prestigious modern art institutions, including Tate, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art USA (which holds the ceramic version of Eve in their collection) and the MET.
Provenance
Ernst Beyeler, Paris, 1960s
Private collection, UKLiterature
J. Rewald, Post-impressionism, from Van
Gogh to Gauguin, New York, 1956 (the stoneware version illustrated p. 442).
M. Bodelsen, Gauguin's Ceramics, London, 1964, p. 139 (stoneware
version illustrated on the cover & fig. 93).
C. Gray, Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin, Baltimore, 1963,
no. 92 (the stoneware version illustrated p. 214-215).
