Word: gauguin
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Echoes on Granite. It took less than two years for Painter Gauguin to become a homeless, penniless beggar...
...taste of poverty and humiliation brought out the worst in him: he once hid behind the women's bathing place at the beach and surprised a pastor's wife in the nude; another time he strolled into the drawing room wearing only a shirt. A year later, Gauguin took off for Paris with one child, leaving his wife and the other children behind. "When my sabots echo on the granite," he said, "I hear the sound, dull and strong, that I'm looking for in painting." Thanks to the generous mistress of a Breton pension, Gauguin painted...
Boundless wealth, he kept assuring Mette (who resolutely sat tight in Denmark), was just around the corner-in Tobago, for instance, where they would "have to do nothing but dig up gold with a spade and shovel." Gauguin actually got as far as Panama on their Tobago road, but the only gold he managed to dig up was the navvy's pay Gauguin got for working on the new canal. From there he pushed on to Martinique: "Paradise, after Panama," he wrote. And the women! "Pretty, my goodness! . . . They do their best to enslave me." Gauguin finally settled down...
...difference between us," Gauguin once wrote his wife, "is the difference between . . . the mediocre and the creative...
Monstrous Notion. The blunt fact emerging from this biography is that not even the greatest artist has the right to tell a mother of five that she is not "creative." Although Gauguin has left posterity a host of fine paintings, he has also left it hugging the monstrous notion that (in Shaw's words) "the true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living ... if only the sacrifice of them enable him to ... paint a finer picture...