Word: gauguins
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...Bandit's Head. The figure on which the friendless Van Gogh fastened with an intensity that had near fatal consequences for them both was Gauguin, who boasted that he was part Spanish Borgia, part savage. When Van Gogh saw Aries on a trip to Southern France in 1888, he told Gauguin that he had found a glaring brilliance and overpowering color to match the tropics Gauguin longed for. Van Gogh dreamed that if Gauguin would only come to Aries, it would be the impressionist center for all painters...
...move towards founding such a community. Van Gogh suggested they trade pictures. The painting Van Gogh received was historic. Entitled Les Miserables, it was a self-portrait of Gauguin, and included the profile of their friend Emile Bernard. 20, with whom Gauguin had just discovered a new way of painting flat areas with brilliant, arbitrary colors that marked the beginning of postimpressionism...
...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...