Word: gauguins
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...spectacular Gauguin show spreads Tahitian light...
...life. Stirred by the success of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, about a household servant who inspires Vermeer, publishers have rushed in with titles like Christopher Peachment's Caravaggio; Will Davenport's The Painter, about Rembrandt; and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Way to Paradise, about Gauguin. As a rule, the books are intelligent, sometimes even ingenious, but in most, the underlying formula is plain: art plus sex. So Chevalier's new best seller, The Lady and the Unicorn, features Nicolas des Innocents, painter, tapestry designer and Renaissance stud--a guy who puts the pig in pigment...
...whiff of the lecture hall is detectable all through this book. (Some passages have more dates than an almanac.) But the juxtaposition of Tristan's and Gauguin's stories is fascinating all the same. In their different ways, both were moralists and proselytizers. Gauguin saw his paintings as pamphlets. His sensual Tahitians and Maori gods, his untamed yellows and greens were ripostes to the attenuated spiritual powers of Europe. His grandmother, meanwhile, was eventually compelled to admit the importance of sex for human happiness, despite her attachment to higher goals. And both were constantly embroiled in fights with the police...
...Llosa reimagines 1844, the year of her death from typhoid at the age of 41. Tristan spends most of it traveling around southern France, pleading her vision of a cooperative future to small, mostly uncomprehending audiences. Years earlier she had fled her abusive husband, taking their small daughter Aline, Gauguin's mother. Tristan thinks back on the odyssey that then took her as far as Peru, where she went in hope of securing an inheritance from her late Peruvian father. The money was denied her, but Tristan was dauntless, the sort of woman who would later dress...
...Gauguin the road to salvation is through the senses, and it takes him far from weary Europe. It's in his part of the story, so full of the contradictions of this yearning, difficult man, that Vargas Llosa makes the book come alive. Gauguin arrives in a paradise that is already lost to the corruptions imported by French colonial administrators and missionaries. In search of a truly unspoiled culture, he eventually sets off for the even more isolated Marquesas with his paintings and collection of pornographic postcards. Two years later he dies there, blind and covered with syphilitic sores...