Word: gauguins
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Paris had been kind to Gauguin the dashing young sailor, Gauguin the successful banker and stockbroker, and even to Gauguin the diffident "Sunday painter." But at 35 he quit his job and left his wife and five children in order to paint full time. Then Paris was different. It was, said Gauguin, "a desert for a poor...
Three years later, in 1886, Gauguin tried to find new security in the hedged, rock-buttressed fields of Brittany, and succeeded only in learning how to compose his paintings better. In Aries, where he went to visit his friend Vincent van Gogh, he learned something about translating sunlight into arbitrary colors (chrome yellow, red-violet). Said he in his journal: "Though the public had no suspicion of it, two men were performing there a colossal work that was useful to them both." The work ended when Van Gogh went mad, chased Gauguin down the street with a razor, then went...
Even in the South Seas, Gauguin found plenty to contend with. Among his problems: syphilis (contracted on his last night in Paris), meddling officials (who disapproved of his interest in the native girls and native rights, once jailed him for three months), extreme poverty (failing to sell the pictures he sent back to Paris, he had to count on occasional presents from his Paris friends). But he used the mingled depths of the Pacific sky and sea and the Persian-rug colors of the land to turn his escape from civilization into a wonderful enrichment of Western culture...
...Gauguin without Maugham. A Manhattan gallery last week put on the best Gauguin show yet seen in the U.S. (including 40 paintings and 44 prints and drawings). Not included: the Boston Museum's 14-by-5-ft. masterpiece entitled Whence Do We Come? What Are We? Whither Are We Going?, which Gauguin painted on burlap sacks after trying to poison himself...
...paintings were good enough to make most visitors forget Somerset Maugham's smoothly dramatic Moon and Sixpence-which borrowed many of the circumstances, but few of the inner realities, of Gauguin's life...