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Gauguin, Paul (June 7, 1848, Paris - May 8, 1903, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia), one of the leading French painters of the Postimpressionist period, whose development of a conceptual method of representation was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles (1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art for expressiveness through color. From 1891 he lived and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South Pacific.Gauguin said himself about his drawings that "It always seems to me that something is missing: the color." Gauguin's style was characterized by the use of large flat areas of non-naturalistic color. Gauguin's bold experiments in coloring led directly to the 20th-century Fauvist style in modern art. His strong modeling influenced the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch and the later expressionist school.Gauguin's painting technique was quite different from both that of the Impressionists, who applied their colors in small, opaque dabs, and that of Van Gogh, who used thick impastos and bold, expressionistic brushstrokes. Gauguin's paintings in the main are characterized by broad areas of color, relatively flat but nevertheless containing subtle variations of hue that give them a rich glow. He often added wax to his paints to give them extra smoothness and flow. Sometimes parts of backgrounds were applied with a palette knife and then overlaid with thin, translucent paint put on with a brush.Paul Gauguin lived in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893, and again from 1895 until his death. In Tahiti his painting style evolved to reflect the Pacific Islands' primitive forms and brilliant colors. Under the influence of the tropical setting and Polynesian culture, Gauguin's paintings became more powerful, while the subject matter became more distinctive, the scale larger, and the compositions more simplified. Gauguin retained the qualities of expressive color, denial of perspective, and thick, flat forms. His striking images of Polynesian women rank among the most beautiful paintings of the modern age.In 1903, Gauguin, dissipated by drug addiction, after several failed suicide attempts, died of a heart attack on Atuana, Hiva Oa Island in the Marquesas in French Polynesia."The further I go, the more I feel sure that thoughts can be expressed by something quite different from literature," Gauguin wrote. Gauguin's artistic development of a conceptual method of representation was important for the history of art as it moved into the twentieth century. Painters no longer aimed at depicting the outer world but at rendering their inner dreams by symbolic allusion and decorative form. Line and color developed their powers of expression, taking inspiration in global art.