Still Life with Onion and Japanese Woodcut

Still Life with Onion and Japanese Woodcut (1889) at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is one of Gauguin's most explicitly self-referential still lifes — a composition that acknowledges the Japanese influence on his formal development by incorporating the source directly into the pictorial field. He and his Pont-Aven colleagues had been collecting Japanese prints since the mid-1880s, and by 1889 the flat color zones, bold outlines, and decorative spatial compression of Japanese woodblock printing were no longer a distant influence but an integrated component of his own formal language. Placing a Japanese print in the background of a European still life was a gesture toward transparency about his sources at a moment when the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist generation's debt to Japanese art was widely understood but rarely explicitly declared. The Glyptotek's collection of five Gauguin works spanning different periods of his career makes it one of the most historically instructive institutions for tracing his development, and this unusual conceptually self-aware still life is among its most distinctive holdings.

The composition works in two planes: the foreground still life of onion and everyday objects, and the Japanese print on the wall behind that flattens and decorates the background. Gauguin's handling of the still life objects is simplified and Synthetist, matching the flat graphic quality of the Japanese print. The palette combines domestic ochres with the vivid colors of the woodcut.