Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin

Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1889) at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is an explicitly self-referential work, a remaking of Courbet's famous Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1854) in which the artist encounters a patron on a country road. Where Courbet's original projected bourgeois social confidence — the artist acknowledged and respected by an established patron — Gauguin's version transposes the scene to a wet Breton landscape and replaces the confident self-presentation with a cloaked, somewhat sinister figure confronting a Breton peasant woman across a gate. The comparison was legible to any informed viewer: Gauguin was explicitly declaring himself the successor to Courbet's realist ambition while transforming its social meaning. He was also, by 1889, consciously positioned as the outsider-artist, the wanderer who does not belong in the social world he passes through. The Hammer Museum's holding of this unusual, relatively small panel alongside other Post-Impressionist works provides an important documentation of Gauguin's self-construction as a mythological artist-figure.

Painted on panel with the bold, simplified drawing that characterises his post-Arles Synthetist work. The figures are outlined with dark contours against a bleak, simplified landscape of grey-green and dark brown, with almost no atmospheric recession—a deliberately flat, icon-like pictorial space.