It Is The Eye Of Ignorance

From The Writings of a Savage (1978), this remark encapsulates Gauguin's rejection of the academic convention that each object in a painting has a "correct" local color that the painter must reproduce faithfully. He had absorbed from the Impressionists — and pushed further than they did — the idea that color could be used expressively and symbolically. In Tahiti he would paint sky green, flesh crimson, and shadow purple, deliberately departing from optical reality. This philosophy directly influenced the Fauves and later Expressionists, who took his liberties with color to their logical extreme in works like Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905).