Word: gauguin
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...undistinguished landscape by Van Gogh, L'Hôpital de St. Paul á St. Rémy, joined the no longer select club of certified million-dollar marvels by fetching $1,200,000. A smallish Gauguin self-portrait, far less impressive than several others he painted, brought $420,000-an auction record for that artist. Degas's 37½-inch-high La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, wearing the original cloth tutu and silk hair ribbon Degas used, broke the existing auction record for sculpture, selling for $380,000. Ironically, the little statue was received with such hostility...
...harpies of legend, having once gripped an artist, are slow to let go. One of their regular victims has been Paul Gauguin. The image of the painter has been yanked, tugged, tortured and distorted by a succession of novels and films starting with Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence...
Moon provided a legend of the theatrical kind that Gauguin himself invited. Here was an archetypal rebel against bourgeois civilization, who quit a prosperous job on the Paris Stock Exchange to find his true artistic self in Tahiti among brown innocents, baptized anew in coconut milk and liberated from his own and Europe's stale past by primitive ritual...
This Tale of the South Pacific has added enormously to the market value of Gauguin's paintings, but it is false in almost every detail. Gauguin's contact with the Noble Savage served mainly to give him the pox. He spoke barely a word of the Tahitians' language, understood nothing of their rituals and social structures, never ate yams or fish when he could afford tinned asparagus and claret, and was prone to copy his scenes of native life from tourist photographs purchased in the grubby colonial port of Papeete. The most advertised side of the legend...
Priapic Swagger. Unlike the Impressionists, Gauguin did not paint what he saw: he chose to see what he wanted to paint. And his ideas on what was paintable grew out of other art-from the broad color patches and rhythmic line of Japanese cloisonne and wood block prints, from rural Breton sculpture and the flattened, monumental figures of a French artist he greatly admired, Puvis de Chavannes. Style absorbed him -not only the priapic swagger and ebullience of his own lifestyle, but the pervasive feedback of art style into nature. Even the fierce colors which scandalized some of his contemporaries...