was not just that he infected 11-year old Tahitian girls with syphilis,
nor that he abandoned his impecunious wife
and 5 children in Copenhagen,
but (thirdly) that he inspired the equally-loathesome Picasso
(an equally second-rate painter) and infected
the already long-pestilential Western Culture*
with the viral capriciousness
of much "Modern Art".
*Now called The American Way of Life
3 comments:
I think Gauguins's best pictures were painted at the art-colony in Pont-Aven (Brittany).
He left it to create (and probably orchestrate) an art-colony (of two) with Van Gogh, an inestimably-better painter, whose troubled, crypto-autistic mind was almost certainly not made any calmer by the brothel-creeping Gauguin.
Without a shred of evidence I opine that it was the nasty sexuality of Gauguin that made Van Gogh savage the lower part of his innocent ear.
Oups! (as we say in France) I may be on the point of joining frigid funless lesbian barren socialist witches in thinking that all straight males are nation-building rapists.
* Devika Ponnambalam (what a glorious name! I love her for this reason alone) has imagined the life of one of Gauguin's unprotesting (and presumably unsatisying) victims, Teha’amana, in her novel, I Am Not Your Eve.
Thanks for the clarification about Gauguins's nature. I merely read about his story in a book about genetics and human evolution that did paint him in a much more favourable light as a broken but highly self-reflected man - due to the early death of his daughter.
A quote from it:
"Although he had lost most of his illusions about the nobility of the Tahitian natives by the time he began to work on D'ou Venons-Nous?, in the painting itself he clung to his conviction that even if they were not noble now, they had been until corrupted by civilization. [...] Gauguin had dreamed of this idyllic setting when he first headed for Tahiti, believing that he could love, sing, and die there, free of money worries, in ecstasy, and for art. The righthand panel of D'ou Venons-Nous? might represent the tropical Eden of Gauguin's imagination, and the answer to the first of his three questions: we begin our life cycle in a state of innocence, which we either retain or which we lose to corruption, depending on circumstances."
M.
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