Painting the inside of a head

The Impressionists had trained themselves to record the truth of the eye, the exact color of light on water at a particular minute, the world as it actually looks. Gauguin, in one picture, threw that out and pointed in the opposite direction.

The break is in four parts. First, the subject is imagination itself: the painting shows not a scene in the world but a vision inside people’s heads, and gives that vision its own zone on the canvas, fenced off by the diagonal tree. Second, the color is freed from description: the red ground answers to feeling and meaning, not to anything you could photograph. Third, the form is flat, built from sealed areas of pure color bounded by dark lines, the flat physical surface of the canvas (its picture plane) frankly admitted as flat instead of faked into deep space. Fourth, it leans on sources the academy despised, Japanese prints, medieval glass, enamel, instead of the Greek-and-Roman tradition.

Put together, those four moves make the case the rest of modern painting would build on: that a picture does not owe the world a faithful copy, that color and flat shape can carry meaning on their own, and that what happens inside a head is as fit a subject as anything you can see out a window. That is why Vision after the Sermon gets called the first complete statement of Synthetism rather than just one more pretty Brittany scene.