Word: gauguins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...neighbors decided that the Cones had become "mental cases." Undaunted, the two sisters, with their bachelor brother, turned the 17 rooms of their adjacent apartments into a private museum. In time every inch of wall space (including Dr. Claribel's bathroom) was covered with paintings by Derain, Gauguin, Braque, Cézanne and Matisse. The three-foot-wide corridor and living rooms were crowded with Matisse drawings and with sculpture by Renoir, Degas, Picasso, Maillol and Matisse. The two sisters made about 20 trips to Europe, each time returning with more paintings, heavy furniture and ornate boxes (in which...
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...
Ironically, until close to the end (at the age of 54, in 1903), Gauguin believed that he would soon be rich, that he and his wife and children would be reunited, and that he would again be the slippered Papa at the family hearth. The Walter Mittys of this world dream of becoming Paul Gauguins; they will be astonished to hear how the Gauguins dream of becoming Walter Mittys...