I get why you chose this painting, and it's certainly a contender in the influence game. But I'm uncomfortable calling it a new use for abstraction--it's a completely familiar and proven one.

Isn't Gauguin using an essentially Gothic pictorial vocabulary? Except instead of using some elaborate pattern--fleur de lis, or whatever--to dematerialize space and denote mystical experience, he's using a single saturated color. None of the figures in the foreground looks directly at Jacob or the angel; that and the color let us know it's their inward vision.

The only thing that makes Gauguin novel is his proximity to Impressionism, with its emphasis on materialism and the pseudo-scientific deconstruction of vision. Right?

If you want to talk about phenomenology, we need to be looking at Cezanne, I'd think. Cezanne both looks and inwardly knows, in the same gesture, the same tense, second-guessed image; Gauguin just dreams.

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