The Yellow Christ

The Yellow Christ (1889) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is one of the most celebrated and theologically complex works of Gauguin's Pont-Aven period — a large composition depicting a yellow-painted Romanesque crucifix in the Breton landscape, surrounded by women in traditional costume praying at the foot of the cross. The yellow coloring of Christ was not naturalistic but symbolic and formal: Gauguin was using color as an expressive and structural force rather than a descriptive one, and the warm golden yellow of the figure created a chromatic unity across the whole canvas. The Breton women praying around the cross were direct documentary observation — such crucifixes were ubiquitous features of the Breton landscape, and the women's intense Catholic devotion was one of the marks of the pre-modern culture Gauguin had come to Brittany to find. The Scottish National Gallery's Vision after the Sermon from the same year represents the interior equivalent — the women's collective vision after a Sunday sermon — while The Yellow Christ shows the outdoor devotion that framed their religious life. The Buffalo AKG's possession of this major work makes it one of the most important American museums for understanding the Synthetist breakthrough year of 1889.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat planes of non-naturalistic color bounded by dark contour lines — a style he called Synthetism. His palette is saturated and expressive: deep carmines, cadmium yellows, tropical greens, and acid blue-purples.