Still Life with Head-Shaped Vase and Japanese Woodcut

This 1889 canvas at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art brings together several of Gauguin's characteristic obsessions: the self-portrait jug he had made as a ceramic, the Japanese woodcut as Western artist's talisman, and the domestic still life objects of a Breton interior. The self-portrait ceramic head placed among ordinary still life objects creates Gauguin's characteristic charged symbolism — the artist's head as an artifact, like the Japanese print an object carrying cultural significance beyond its immediate appearance. The Tehran museum acquired important Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works before the 1979 revolution, and this canvas is among the most significant.

The composition is organized around the contrast between the three-dimensional ceramic jug and the flat, graphic Japanese woodcut behind it — a deliberate visual paradox about depth and surface. Gauguin's Synthetist handling gives all objects strong outlines and simplified color areas. The palette ranges from the warm clay of the ceramic to the bold colors of the woodcut.