Word: gauguin
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...with them, his early sense of grids and twinkling interstices) relate to Van Gogh; a third, resembling the veined canopy of a Tiffany lamp, may recall what the decorative arts of 1900 owed to the cloisonism (decorative "inlaying" of the picture surface with outlines) of Van Gogh and Gauguin. The Paris of the cubists may have gone; but like the Umbria of Piero della Francesca, Van Gogh's Provence manages to endure, both in and out of the frame...
...Polynesian temples or the megaliths of Easter Island, as the Georgian William Hodges or Sydney Parkinson did, and quite another to imitate primitive styles as though their artists were as worthy of homage as Raphael or Ingres, which modernism did. The transition from one to another began with Paul Gauguin...
...Gauguin's stay in Tahiti and the Marquesas from 1891 to 1903 is by now one of the soap operas of art history. Yet the curious fact, as Varnedoe points out in a brilliant catalog essay, was that Polynesian art made virtually no impact on his painting; all its primitive elements-the flatness, the sinuous friezelike poses, the outlining-were either there already or deduced from photographs of Javanese, Cambodian and other Oriental material that he took with him. (One should not forget that in the 1880s, Frenchmen were still talking about Japanese art as art pri-mitif.) When...
...Gauguin talked and wrote incessantly about being a primitive man-a condition he identified with that of an artist, a mind instinctively coupled to spirits, ancestors and myths. This defined his importance to modernist primitivism. But his work treated tribalism as spectacle, like the imported "native" villages and trophy walls featured in French colonial exhibitions...
...science has replaced art as the art of the period, precisely because it shows no bounds. The catalogue for the 1913 Armory Show in New York, which for the first time displayed for great numbers of Americans the works of Gauguin, Cezanne and Van Gogh, announced: "Art is a sign of life. There can be no life without change, as there can be no development without change. To be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life." People believed that. The trouble was that science soon proved itself more attuned to the different and unfamiliar...