Word: painter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...museum retrospective is just a matter of a "definitive" array of works, or of critical intelligence applied to them, or of a deep curiosity about the artist's life. It is a combination of all three, a vision of how they weave together -- the museum's equivalent of George Painter on Marcel Proust, or Leon Edel on Henry James. Once you have digested it, neither you nor the artist will be quite the same. You have seen the record set straight. Such events cannot be replaced by 50 Helgas...
...legend was helped by other people's fictions, though Gauguin's own existential posturings as hero, Christ-martyr, magus, savage and artist-criminal lay at its root. For many, the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is still the "real" Gauguin -- a stockbroker and Sunday painter who cracks out of the bourgeois egg, dumps his wife, family and career and hightails it to Tahiti to "find himself" among the breasts and breadfruit. He is part brute and part escape artist, the Houdini of the avant-garde...
Such an image of Gauguin, as Stuckey and Brettell show by exhaustive research, is mostly moonshine. The brute of fiction was not only a superbly intelligent painter but also a writer who left, as Brettell points out, the "largest and most important body of texts, illustrated and otherwise, produced by any great artist in France since . . . Delacroix . . . That he has always been treated as a businessman-turned-artist rather than an artist- turned-writer shows the extent to which his literary achievement has been undervalued...
...story of self-creation told by the early work is just as surprising as anything in his Tahitian years. By 1880 the Sunday painter in his 30s had become a tardy impressionist, imitating Pissarro's landscapes and Mary Cassatt's moppets. After ten years of work in Paris, Brittany and with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin was making his first real masterpieces, like The Ham, 1889, a still life that pays homage to Cezanne and Manet while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness, and Yellow Christ, 1889, with its startling extremes of yellow and orange. This painting of peasants...
...gang members in the past five weeks, an impressive performance that is marred by the fact that the county sheriff was forced to give early release to 1,200 prisoners in order to make room for the newcomers. "We have $500 million in jail construction in progress," says James Painter, who, as chief of the Los Angeles sheriff's custody division, oversees a jail system that is larger than the prison facilities in any of 46 states. "But our projections show that by the time those are completed in five years, we will be more overcrowded than...