Roses and Statuette

Gauguin's Roses and Statuette of 1889 combines cut flowers with a sculptural object in a way that reflects his growing practice as a sculptor alongside his painting. By 1889 he had been producing ceramic sculptures and wooden carvings that showed his engagement with non-Western decorative traditions — the forms of Pre-Columbian pottery and Polynesian carving were already entering his visual vocabulary through his study of material culture at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where he also saw the Indonesian and Japanese pavilions that reinforced his primitivist orientation. The statuette within the still life asserts the claims of three-dimensional, cultural art-making against the purely pictorial tradition of the flower piece. Cézanne, whose still lifes he admired deeply, also placed ceramic objects alongside fruits and flowers, but with a different intention — Cézanne sought geometrical relationships between volumes, while Gauguin used the sculptural object to introduce cultural and symbolic dimensions into what would otherwise be a decorative subject.

Gauguin's still life arranges the roses and statuette with the deliberate compositional intention that characterized his mature Synthetist approach. The flowers' organic forms contrast with the statuette's compact, three-dimensional solidity, and his treatment of the two subjects through his bold outlining and relatively flat color creates an interesting tension between the living, fragile flowers and the permanent cultural object. His palette is warm and decorative.