Paul Gauguin's The Yellow Christ

I will be focusing on Postimpressionist artist Paul Gauguin's The Yellow Christ, painted in 1889. This painting is considered an "avant-garde" work and I will prove so using Griselda Pollock's formula presented in The Challenge of the Avant-Garde. Pollock explains for an artist to be considered avant-garde, their work had to display reference, deference, and difference. I will go for in-depth to explaining these aspects and how they describe avant-garde works, such as Gaugion's. The first thing the viewer notices when looking at Gauguin's piece, is his color palette of mostly yellow's, oranges, and red's. He has seemingly rejected the notion of actual color and uses these colors to illustrate emotion, a vibrant and happy color palette. However doing so, he has created this bright and emotional palette on top of a more somber and perhaps morbid scene. He depicts a central character on a cross with a completely yellow skin tone, and particular bold outline. The other character's below this one on the cross, are also outlined in a more bold outline, which is pertinent to Gauguin's postimpressionist style. This character on the cross highly resembles Jesus Christ, but has been known to actually contain more similar facial features to the artist himself. Gauguin perhaps do this deliberately to compare Christ's sufferings with the ones of himself as an artist in society. The character resembling the artist is an elongated form, and contributes to Gaguin's abstract style. In depicting this scene resembling Christ on the Cross, however doing so in Brittany in 1889, Gauguin has touched upon Pollock's first point of reference (showing an awareness of what was already going on). Gauguin has chosen a scene that most people are familiar with and can refer too, and has obviously added some quarks to it. Adding different notions of color to play with the viewer's emotion, and depicting facial features similar to himself, Gauguin has radically developed and created a deference into his work. His abstract use of elongating the body, specifically arms of the character on the cross depicts the subject in an odd form. The usage of a solid yellow color with little to no shading for the character's skin color, also aids this notion of deference. With no shading, except a slight use of a blotchy green color, Gauguin has stepped out of the box here. We also see three subjects faces depicted below the central character, and however knelt and purposely there, they show little emotion through facial expression. This also adds to the abnormal feeling that a viewer may get, when noticing what this scene is depicting. This abstract style of Gauguin’s illustrates the last of Pollock’s aspects of the avant-garde, difference. Gauguin’s style and composition’s were very different from what the world was seeing in Impressionism and even the onset of Postimpressionism. His works were unsurely viewed by people at the time, and had a different mode about them then other artists of Postimpressionism. Pollock describes her definition of difference as; to be both legible in terms of current aesthetics and criticism, and a definitive advance on the current position. This absolutely illustrates Paul Gauguin and his style of art within the period of Postimpressionism.