The Kelp Gatherers (II)

The Kelp Gatherers (II, 1889) at Museum Folkwang belongs to the group of subjects Gauguin explored at Le Pouldu on the southern Breton coast, where the kelp-gathering women working the rocky shore provided images of elemental labor in an ancient landscape. He painted the kelp gatherers in multiple versions, finding in the subject the combination of physical toil and coastal monumentality that distinguished Le Pouldu from the more pastoral Pont-Aven. The women who gathered seaweed for use as agricultural fertilizer were engaged in work that had been performed on the same shores for centuries, and Gauguin's elevation of this labor to major pictorial subject was part of his project of finding in Breton peasant life the authentic, pre-modern values he believed had been destroyed by industrial modernity. Museum Folkwang's possession of this canvas alongside the Riders on the Beach makes the Essen institution one of the most important repositories of Gauguin's work outside France and the major American collections.

The figures are reduced to bold silhouettes against a dark sea rendered in flat overlapping planes. Gauguin uses the horizon line to push the figures forward and the ocean back, creating a shallow, compressed pictorial space that gives the scene its tapestry-like weight.