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The Loss of Virginity
- Nude
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- Fox
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- Synthetism
- Cloisonism
"Gauguin," Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris, Summer 1949. (Exhib. cat. no. 24).
"Paul Gauguin," Kunstmuseum, Basel, Nov. 26, 1949 - Jan. 29, 1950. (Exhib. cat. no. 41).
"Gauguin," Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 1950. (Exhib. cat. no. 40).
"Motif in Painting," Norton Gallery of Art, Palm Beach, Feb. 7 - March 2, 1952. (Exhib. cat. no. 8).
"Paul Gauguin. His Place in the Meeting of East and West," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 27 - April 25, 1954. (Exhib. cat. no. 23).
"The Two Sides of the Medal. French Painting from Gérôme to Gauguin," Detroit Institute of Arts, 1954. (Exhib. cat. no. 107).
"Gauguin Paintings, Engravings, and Sculpture," Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and Tate Gallery, London, Sept. 30 - Oct. 26, 1955. (Exhib. cat. no. 37).
"Paintings from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.," Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Seattle Art Museum; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Minneapolis Art Institute; St. Louis City Art Museum; William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City; Detroit Institute of Arts; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 2, 1956 - April 14, 1957. (Exhib. cat. no. 84).
"Chrysler Art Museum of Provincetown Inaugural Exhibition," Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1958. (Exhib. cat. no. 21).
"Gauguin," Art Institute of Chicago and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Feb. 12 - May 31, 1959. (Exhib. cat. no. 26).
"French Paintings, 1789-1929, from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.," Dayton Art Institute, March 25 - May 22, 1960. (Exhib. cat. no. 69).
"The Controversial Century 1850-1950," Chrysler Art Museum of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1962. (Exhib. cat. not paged).
"Gauguin and the Pont-Aven Group," Tate Gallery, London, Jan. 7 - Feb. 13, 1966. (Exhib. cat. no. 36).
"The Sacred and Profane in Symbolist Art," Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1969. (Exhib. cat. no. 89).
"Puvis de Chavannes and the Modern Tradition," Art Gallery of Ontario, Oct. 24 - Nov. 30, 1975. (Exhib. cat. no. 52).
"Le Symbolisme en Europe," Museum Boymansvan Beuningen, Rotterdam, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, and Grand Palais, Paris, Nov. 14, 1975 - July 19, 1976. (Exhib. cat. no. 55).
"Treasures from the Chrysler Museum at Norfolk and Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.," Tennessee Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood, Nashville, June 12 - Sept. 5, 1977. (Exhib. cat. no. 42).
"Veronese to Franz Kline: Masterworks from the Chrysler Museum at Norfolk," for the benefit of The Chrysler Museum Art Reference Library, Wildenstein & Co., New York, N. Y., April 13 - May 13, 1978. (Exhib. cat. no. 25).
"Vincent Van Gogh and the Birth of Cloisonism," Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam, Jan. 24 - June 14, 1981. (Exhib. cat. no. 70).
"French Paintings from The Chrysler Museum", North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, May 31 - September 14, 1986; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, November 6, 1986 - January 18, 1987. (Exhib. cat. no. 40).
"Paul Gauguin," Museum Folkwang, Essen, June 1 -October 18, 1998; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, November 6, 1998 - January 10, 1999.
"Gauguin's Nirvana: Painters at Le Pouldu, 1889-1890," Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford CT, Jan. 26 - April 29, 2001. (Exhib. cat. no. 86).
"Van Gogh and Gauguin: The 'Studio of the South'," Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, September 11, 2001-January 13, 2002; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, February 9-June 2, 2002.
"Gauguin Tahiti," Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., February 29 - June 20, 2004.
"Gauguin in Tahiti," National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan, July 3 - September 23, 2009.
"Gauguin: The Maker of Myth," Tate Modern, London, England, September 30, 2010 - January 16, 2011; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., February 21 - May 30, 2011.
“Paul Gauguin," Beyeler Museum, Basel, Switzerland, February 8 – June 28, 2015.
"The Agrarian Ideal: Monet, van Gogh, Homer," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, October 7, 2016 - January 8, 2017.
French, 1848–1903
The Loss of Virginity, 1890–91
Oil on canvas
Watch out! A fox seems to threaten a young girl lying on the ground in rural Brittany near the French coast. The sheaf of wheat at her feet symbolizes the fertility of the land, while the menacing fox disrupts the innocence of this remote area. Soon after completing this painting, Paul Gauguin departed for Tahiti in search of a place and people uncorrupted by modern life.
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 71.510
French, 1848-1903
The Loss of Virginity, 1890-1891
Oil on canvas, 35½" x 51¼" (90.2 x 130.2 cm)
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.510
References: Harrison, _CM_, 1986, no. 40; _The Art of Paul Gauguin_, exhib. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and Art Institute of Chicago, 1988, no. 113.
In 1883 Paul Gauguin abandoned his career as a Paris stockbroker to devote himself solely to art. Seeking artistic inspiration from the religious myths and superstitions of "natural men" uncorrupted by modern culture, he embarked upon a restless search for "the savage and the primitive." This quest led him first to Brittany, where from 1886 to 1890 he often worked at the artist colony of Pont-Aven and at the nearby, but more secluded and "primitive" coastal spot of Le Pouldu. Gauguin's early visits to Brittany were preliminary steps in his long retreat from European civilization, which culminated in his first trip to Tahiti in 1891-93.
Working together with Emile Bernard and other painters at Pont-Aven and le Pouldu, Gauguin put aside his earlier Impressionist aesthetic and, for a time, experimented with the Post-Impressionist style of Cloisonism, or Synthetism. As can be seen in his Cloisonist masterpiece of 1890-91, _The Loss of Virginity_, Gauguin at this time began to compose in broad fields of bright, unmodulated color compartmentalized by dark outlines. Following the dictates of Synthetism, Gauguin also rejected naturalistic representation in favor of a more purely Symbolist aesthetic, employing the colors, shapes and objects of the visible world as subjective evocations of ideas and moods. "Art is an abstraction," he proclaimed; "derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it."
In November 1890 Gauguin returned to Paris from Le Pouldu with plans to depart for Tahiti, which he did the following April. Though some scholars contend that the undated _Loss of Virginity_ was painted at Le Pouldu in the early autumn of 1890, most have argued that Gauguin produced it in Paris in the winter of 1890-91, when he was in close contact with the Symbolist poets and critics. In all likelihood, the painting is his "final major canvas in an overtly Cloisonist and Symbolist vein and as such [it] constitutes both the culmination and termination of his pre-Tahitian development" (Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov).
The picture's densely Symbolist theme was correctly explicated in 1906 by Gauguin's early biographer, Jean de Rotonchamp. Rotonchamp described the subject as that of "a virgin seized in her heart by the demon of lubricity" - i.e., a young woman's loss of sexual innocence. Lying deathlike on the ground, the naked maiden holds a plucked flower (an iris?), a traditional symbol of lost innocence. With her left arm she embraces an evil-eyed fox, who precipitates her downfall with a paw upon her heart. In two of Gauguin's wood sculptures of the period - the 1889 _Be in Love and You Will be Happy_ (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and _Luxure_ of 1890-91 (J.F. Willumsens Museum, Frederikssund) - a fox also appears as an emblem of lasciviousness. In fact, in an 1889 letter to Emile Bernard, Gauguin identified the fox in _Be in Love_ as "an Indian symbol of perversity." In the painting’s background Breton peasants proceed along a narrow path. A wedding party, perhaps, or a group of pious church-goers, they may symbolize the maiden's dream of respectability.
The landscape in _The Loss of Virginity_ is that of Le Pouldu, its fields of grain leading down to the grass-covered dunes at the mouth of the Laita River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean. The season is autumn: the grain has been harvested and a sheaf lies at the maiden's feet. In planning the setting of the painting, Gauguin probably consulted one of his earlier landscapes painted on site at Le Pouldu, the 1890 _Harvest: Le Pouldu_ in the Tate Gallery, London. Gauguin's preparatory charcoal study for the fox and young woman's head is in the collection of Marcia Riklis Hirschfeld, New York.
Wayne Andersen has suggested that Gauguin derived the maiden's supine pose from that of the dead Christ found in late-medieval Breton "Calvary" sculptures. From this he concludes that the artist intended to parallel Christ's death on the cross with the sacrifice of the maiden's virginity. Consulting Breton harvest legends, Andersen also interprets the harvested grain in sacrificial terms, as an emblem of the "reaping" of the maiden's innocence.
Gauguin's symbolic treatment of the painful passage from maidenhood to womanhood may have had a highly personal meaning for him. It has often been noted that the woman who modeled for _The Loss of Virginity_ - a young seamstress named Juliette Huet - was Gauguin's mistress at the time. The artist met Huet in Paris toward the end of 1890, and though she was pregnant with his daughter, he abandoned her when he departed for Tahiti.
Jefferson C. Harrison, _The Chrysler Museum Handbook of the European and American Collections: Selected Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings_ (Norfolk: The Chrysler Museum, 1991), 152-153, pl. 119.