Word: christs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gauguin is a legendary figure, with all the accretions that entails. His legend was helped by other people's fictions, though Gauguin's own existential posturings as hero, Christ-martyr, magus, savage and artist-criminal lay at its root. For many, the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is still the "real" Gauguin -- a stockbroker and Sunday painter who cracks out of the bourgeois egg, dumps his wife, family and career and hightails it to Tahiti to "find himself" among the breasts and breadfruit. He is part brute and part escape artist, the Houdini of the avant...
...Mary Cassatt's moppets. After ten years of work in Paris, Brittany and with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin was making his first real masterpieces, like The Ham, 1889, a still life that pays homage to Cezanne and Manet while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness, and Yellow Christ, 1889, with its startling extremes of yellow and orange. This painting of peasants adoring a wayside crucifix was also, perhaps, an allegory of Gauguin's opinion of himself: Christ's face is his schematic self-portrait, and the Breton women may stand for Gauguin's followers in Pont-Aven...
Always in the art world, as in a madhouse, there are bad painters who obstreperously claim to be prophets. Gauguin was that discomfiting figure, a great artist with little modesty who made good on strident prophetic claims. He saw himself as both Christ and savage, sacrificial lamb and initiator of cultural mayhem. The whole tangle of the "primitive," so basic to early modernism, begins with Gauguin -- not in Tahiti but in Brittany, "savage and primitive," he wrote, where "the flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting...
...Christ came gently with a robe and crown...
Winchester's activities have not always received official support. He has been suspended twice without pay after members of the Pentagon's community of Christian Fundamentalists complained that his group was not sufficiently "Christ centered." Winchester, a devout Roman Catholic, sat down with his adversaries. He convinced them that the group would bring people closer to God and agreed to remain under the chaplain's chain of command. Since then, he has begun offering monthly stress-reduction workshops and has conducted a special meditation program for employees of the Defense Intelligence Agency...