Word: gauguins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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PAINTER Paul Gauguin set in motion one of the main art trends of the 20th century when he decided that "the Greek [style] is the great error, beautiful though it is," and plunged off to Tahiti to capture the expressive power of primitive art. In the hands of such moderns as Painters Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Sculptors Brancusi, Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti, this source of inspiration has not only produced new art; it has also caused primitive art itself to be reassessed. The rise of primitive works from artifact to art is currently being demonstrated by the first showing...
...friend. Gauguin wrote: "I believe it is one of my best things; quite incomprehensible, of course, so abstract is it. It looks at first like the head of a bandit . . . the eyes, mouth and nose are like flowers in a Persian carpet, thus personifying also the symbolical side. The color has nothing whatever to do with nature . . . Through all the reds and purples run streaks of flame as though a furnace were blazing before one's eyes, seat of all the painter's mental struggles. And all this on a background of chrome yellow with childish little bouquets...
...Less than three weeks later. Gauguin arrived for the nine weeks' stay with Van Gogh that moved inevitably towards disaster as Gauguin finished his Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers. Gauguin, who urged that painting be done from memory, dispensed with Van Gogh as model. Van Gogh, anxiously watching the painting grow and trying hard to learn from Gauguin, acknowledged: "At times I look like that, absolutely exhausted yet charged with electricity." But after a tiresome day in a nearby museum had set the two men arguing their rapidly diverging views of art, Gauguin cruelly finished off the portrait. Said...
...Gauguin's portrait proved prophetic. A few days later. Gauguin returned to find Van Gogh upstairs, unconscious, a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. Van Gogh, in despair at Gauguin's decision to leave Aries, had severed his left ear with a razor, handed it as a gift to the prostitute who had befriended him. Van Gogh recovered to paint some of his greatest works, including one self-portrait with his disfigured head shrouded in bandages. But after two years of living on the borderline of madness, he shot himself...
...Gauguin, selling his paintings to pay the passage, turned his proud-beaked head toward Tahiti and the unknown future. Toulouse-Lautrec, grown famous for his paintings peopled with characters from Parisian cafés and brothels, remained a staunch defender of Van Gogh until his own death eleven years later...