Paul Gauguin, The Red Cow, 1889, oil on canvas (LACMA)
Note: though the video states that the cypress trees suggest this canvas may have been painted in the south, it was painted in Le Pouldu near Pont-Aven in Brittany.
Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:
[flickr_tags user_id=”82032880@N00″ tags=”the red cow,”]
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:06] We’re at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and we’re looking at a painting by Paul Gauguin, “The Red Cow,” from 1889. It’s a really wild painting.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:16] It is a wild painting. There’s a woman in the left corner with a jug.
Dr. Zucker: [0:20] Very near.
Dr. Harris: [0:20] She’s kind of moving, right, at the very fore, and she’s moving toward the left edge of the image — of the frame, and she’s cut off. And the cow…
Dr. Zucker: [0:29] Is moving the opposite direction.
Dr. Harris: [0:29] …is also cut off. His head is cut off.
Dr. Zucker: [0:33] So she’s moving off to the left, and our attention goes to her first, but then she’s sort of moving off stage in a very distracting kind of way. Then the cow is also presumably moving slightly to the right, and there’s a small dog that seems to be…
Dr. Harris: [0:46] Kind of chasing.
Dr. Zucker: [0:46] Chasing the cow.
Dr. Harris: [0:48] Then there’s a kind of fence and a hedge behind them, locking them into the foreground.
Dr. Zucker: [0:52] Right, which has its own careful attention. There’s a wonderful contrast of color, of course, between the orange-pink-red of the cow…
Dr. Harris: [1:00] Cow. And the green grass.
Dr. Zucker: [1:00] …and the brilliant green. But then in the foreground all the colors of the cow can be seen in the flowers, which are really delicately painted for a Gauguin.
Dr. Harris: [1:08] Really delicate.
Dr. Zucker: [1:09] Very unusual. And again, are in the bodice of the woman who’s bending forward towards us holding…
Dr. Harris: [1:14] The orange again.
Dr. Zucker: [1:14] Holding that pitcher. Her eyes are delicately…
Dr. Harris: [1:19] Then those lovely purples against the orange.
Dr. Zucker: [1:20] Oh, they’re gorgeous.
Dr. Harris: [1:20] He’s so thinking about complementary colors here.
Dr. Zucker: [1:24] He is.
Dr. Harris: [1:24] It’s so obvious.
Dr. Zucker: [1:25] He really is. And there’s a lot of drawing in here. Look at the delicacy of the light on her face as she bends down and the shadow and reflected color.
Dr. Harris: [1:33] It’s interesting that you say “light” because in some ways there’s light in this painting. And in some ways there isn’t to me. It’s not atmospheric at all.
Dr. Zucker: [1:41] That’s true. This is not the light of the Impressionists. Not at all.
Dr. Harris: [1:45] No. There is light. You can say, “OK, there is sunlight in this landscape. There is sunlight hitting her face.”
Dr. Zucker: [1:51] Shadow as well.
Dr. Harris: [1:51] And shadow, but there’s no sense of atmosphere.
Dr. Zucker: [1:54] What happens is the light seems to be located almost the way the color is, as a pooled area that is not necessarily a result of clouds and sun…
Dr. Harris: [2:05] No.
Dr. Zucker: [2:05] …but seems to almost generate from the object itself.
Dr. Harris: [2:08] The forms themselves.
Dr. Zucker: [2:08] It’s almost actually in a pre-Renaissance style in that light is…
Dr. Harris: [2:14] Where they’re not thinking about the way that light actually looks yet and reflects and moves.
Dr. Zucker: [2:19] That’s right.
Dr. Harris: [2:19] He’s clearly trying to transcend, I think, those kinds of naturalistic effects to say something a little bit more serious, a little bit more spiritual, and a little bit more meaningful.
Dr. Zucker: [2:31] I think the spiritual is absolutely intentional here. But I think he’s running into some problems because the subject itself is so aestheticized. It’s so laden with the tradition of the landscape. You’ve got this really beautiful aesthetic quality.
[2:48] If you look at the field just beyond the fence, the middle ground, you have this very light pool of light green, purple, and orange.
Dr. Harris: [2:56] Greens and oranges. It’s fabulously beautiful.
Dr. Zucker: [2:59] They really are. It’s almost a wash, as if it was a watercolor. Of course, there are two men there.
Dr. Harris: [3:02] Very thinly applied.
Dr. Zucker: [3:03] Two farm workers it looks like, with a…
Dr. Harris: [3:04] Tilling the field with a scythe.
Dr. Zucker: [3:07] …scythe. Then above that, these very elegant…
Dr. Harris: [3:10] Cypress trees.
Dr. Zucker: [3:10] …cypress trees, which makes me think…
Dr. Harris: [3:13] And clouds.
Dr. Zucker: [3:13] …that this might be when he’s down in the south of France.
Dr. Harris: [3:16] The cypress trees become very abstracted, these just vertical forms. Then the clouds are also these very simple shapes. Again, really nothing atmospheric about the clouds, and the sky, and the flat blue color of the sky. There’s something very transcendent…
Dr. Zucker: [3:31] It’s true.
Dr. Harris: [3:32] …about the landscape that conflicts for me with the…Maybe this is what he was going for.
Dr. Zucker: [3:38] Specificity of the…
Dr. Harris: [3:39] The everyday-ness of the scene in the foreground with the woman in the picture, which reminds of me of Vermeer, and the cow, and then this landscape that is somehow kind of magical.
Dr. Zucker: [3:50] We see that division in Gauguin’s work. If you think about “Jacob Wrestling with an Angel,” you have that very clear division by the bough of the tree where you have the spiritual displaced from the physical, the actual space in which we inhabit. We’re a part of the area that’s on this side of the fence.
Dr. Harris: [4:07] He’s clearly divided these two areas, right?
Dr. Zucker: [4:09] He has. It’s a pretty wonderful painting.
[4:10] [music]
