Word: gauguin
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Every reader of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence knows who Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin was: the middle-aged Paris stockbroker who callously turned his back on business and family, fled to Tahiti and became a great painter amid the palm trees and dusky native maids. Devoted Gauguinists have damned the Maugham novel (in which the thinly disguised Gauguin is actually an Englishman named Charles Strickland) as six-pennyworth of moonshine. But they have never managed to scotch it. They never will, because the tale is essentially true...
...Gauguin's latest biographers, the Hansons, are a British husband-and-wife team who have successfully sunk their teeth into some big, meaty subjects, including Necessary Evil: The Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle (TIME, May 19, 1952) and Chinese Gordon (TIME, May 31). Gauguin is an even tougher order, not only because he needs explaining as an artist who helped change the face of painting, but because he has become a symbol of the conflict between art and breadwinnery, artistic duty and normal social responsibility. In their fine study, the Hansons' own sympathy is with the artist...
...Gauguin used to wail, in later years-much as a lifer's wife might wail: "I had no idea he was going to Sing Sing!" Mette Gad was a Danish civil servant's daughter, a handsome, white-skinned Juno (Gauguin favored husky women) who met her fate on a jaunt to Paris in 1873. Paul Gauguin was a strapping fellow with a bull neck, a great beak of a nose, and hooded, blue-green eyes. His stockbroker's black business suit sat strangely on him because he looked like a pirate chief and walked with the rolling...
...Study of a Nude (1880) "came into being like a bolt from the blue" and shattered a tradition "established through centuries." In Study, Gauguin painted Justine, his children's nurse, "sitting [naked] on her bed mending her chemise. Her shoulders droop . . . her breasts . . . sag, her belly protrudes...
...flesh is a little slack." She was "a girl of our own day," wrote a lone enthusiastic critic, "neither lascivious nor simpering, who occupies herself usefully by mending her clothes." Three years after painting Study of a Nude, Gauguin came home one day with the news that he had left the stock exchange; henceforth, he told Mette, he intended to be a full-time painter. Moreover, he assured his alarmed and angry wife, he was going to make a heap of money...