28 December 2021

Gauguin

Paul Gauguin – "Women of Tahiti" or "On the Beach" – 1891

It was in April 1891 when Paul Gauguin set sail for Tahiti. He had just broken up with his Danish wife and was in search of something new and vibrant that could inform his painting. He thought he might find it in  faraway Tahiti. He was forty three years old.

The painting shown above was created a couple of months after his arrival. Two Polynesian women are sitting on the beach with Pacific Ocean rollers behind them. The woman on the right appears to be weaving strands of coconut palm. The two figures seem somehow separate, distant from each other. It is a quiet, reflective moment without words.

In 1892, Gauguin painted a very similar canvas which is titled "Parau Api". It was as if this particular composition had remained with him and required further exploration.

During his life, Gauguin befriended Vincent van Gogh and was also close to Pissaro and Degas. The long sojourn in Tahiti cemented his position in the history of art. The style he developed there and his original use of colour influenced a number of important artists who came after him - including Picasso.

in May 1903, Gauguin died on  Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands. He was 54 years old. Like Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin was also a paedophile. Living in eastern Polynesia in the last years of the nineteenth century allowed him to pursue his unwholesome attraction to pubescent girls with minimal constraint. At his death he was almost certainly syphilitic, his general health ruined.  Should this negate his art? I am not sure.

33 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. https://www.clevelandart.org/research/in-the-library/collection-in-focus/paul-gauguins-noa-noa

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  2. I never really thought much of his art and after reading about him and syphilis, I think even less. I didn't realize how prevalent syphilis was or how disfiguring it was. I remember having a patient back in the 1980s with tertiary syphilis who didn't want his wife to know. He was an elderly man and I didn't like that he was witholding this information from his wife.

    But I digress. It surprises me how much people traveled even over a hundred years ago. I tend to think of it as a modern invention, but of course it isn't.

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    1. It took Gauguin 68 days to reach Tahiti by ship.

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  3. If we are to ignore achievement because the same person has moral failings, we will never celebrate anything ever again.

    I wish Gauguin had not abused young girls but even if we erase his name, his influence remains.

    I have a friend who refuses to acknowledge the work of MLK junior because he had an affair. All I can say is, point one finger and three pont back at you

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  4. Anonymous6:58 am

    I didn't know that about either of him and how disappointing to learn. Should the fact negate their art? I unusually will sit on the fence with one.

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    1. I am still on the fence with you. Damn this barbed wire!

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  5. I never think of the private lives of painters or sculptors whilst looking at their work; unlike with 'singers' who use their fame to abuse fans. I am a big fan of Gauguin, especially at this stage of his work. I think Tahiti treated him well.

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    1. On Hiva Oa, his former presence remains a source of mixed feelings.

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  6. That is a question I find impossible to answer. Can we, should we, separate the art from the artist? I think it can't be done, because the art speaks of the artist, it was created by the artist, coming from the artist's mind and hands. But of course, there are many great works of art, be it in music, sculpture, architecture, painting or writing or any other form of art, that have human beings as their creators who were or are far less from what is now regarded as having good moral/ethical values.
    Probably 90 % of what we admire as art was made by someone who beat his wife and children, was a pedophile or cruel to animals, had racist views, promoted anti-Semitims and generally had all sorts of undesirable qualities. Does this mean we should question art more, or less?

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    1. Well put Meike but it still leaves me sitting on the fence. I think of those young girls living lives that he effectively ruined for his own animal pleasure.

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  7. I didn't realise but either Picasso or Gaugin were paedophiles. You can't rewrite history (which is why I think a lot of this woke malarky is stupid). I think you have to separate the genius of their art from the people themselves.

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    1. I wonder why Jimmy Savile never appears in re-runs of old Top of the Pops shows on the BBC. There are parallels.

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  8. I am not intelligent enough to tease this one out.

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    1. That's a shame. I was hoping to get your take on this Mary. I have been reading your blog for a while and your intelligence is not in question.

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  9. I prefer Donald McGill beach picture postcards.

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    1. They are rather vulgar so I understand Dave.

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  10. I think this tendency of "cancelling" people for past transgressions is a slippery slope -- one I'd rather not slide down. Especially when it's someone who lived more than a hundred years ago on the other side of the planet, in a society where, as Margaret Mead demonstrated, sexual matters were more open.

    (I'd argue that Jimmy Savile is a different situation, since he lived much more recently within the norms and expectations of modern British society.)

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    1. Interesting reflections Steve. Gauguin's behaviour was colonial in the extreme. No wonder he is reviled by many eastern Polynesians even to this day.

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  11. I like Pissarro and Degas, but am not as fond of Gauguin. Van Gogh is hit or miss; I enjoy some of his works. Geniuses and creative types are sometimes disturbed people. The link between genius and madness is troubling.

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  12. I agree with those who said if we only celebrate those without faults, we'll never celebrate anyone's achievements. I try to separate the personal from the professional, even in politics. (I can think of several politicians I could not vote for based on their policies, but would love to sit down with over a beer or two) Even so, when I learn things like this, it tends to influence my opinion of them. I didn't know Gaugin and Picasso were pedophiles.

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    1. If you were one of the girls affected by such sexual predators I think you would want to make a bonfire of their art.

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  13. I agree with Kylie's comment 100%.

    On the subject of Jimmy Saville I would tend to make the argument that he was not a genius and deserves nothing but to be reviled. When I saw the Louis Theroux interview I said to friends that Saville seemed to me to come across as one of the sleaziest, most flawed characters I'd ever seen 'close up' on the television. His 'genius' for which he was lauded was was what he did for and with people. Gaugin was lauded for something completely separate. It is possible to see one without the other. With Saville I think the two are too inextricably linked.

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    1. Thanks for your thoughtful reflections Graham.

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  14. Abuse of the young is below the surface in many English + French novels.
    There were more child brothels in London than any city in Europe.
    Emily had to die in The Old Curiosity Shop or she would have become a sex worker.
    Thomas Jefferson used his power to sleep with young black women, his chattel slaves.

    Dostoyevsky wrote an account of his time in London and a homeless little girl who followed him in the busy night streets.

    One of the finest children's writers in the 20th Century, William Mayne, was convicted of abusing young girls, went to prison, and later hanged himself in his country cottage in England.
    Mayne's reputation as a potential abuser was well known by staff in Puffin Books.

    What do you think Gaugin's Tahiti paintings are really about?
    I have never understood them or the strange silence surrounding the young women?
    Is he telling us something about himself and what they had to endure?

    J Haggerty

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    1. If his predatory habits are referred to in any of his Tahitian pictures, I think they are effectively veiled. Surely he was just thinking about the imagery that inspired him in a place far from home. It was the exoticism.

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    2. The exoticism is a painted veil, surely.
      What lies beneath?
      Not so much Darkness Visible as Darkness Invisible.

      I do not want to check my art books, or crib, or read Waldermar Januszczak.
      Journalists can be overbearing and their editors have one eye on fashion.
      Imagine looking at Gaugin in the company of Bernard Berenson !
      Berenson's notebooks help you to look long and hard and pierce the veils.

      Gaugin's Polynesia disturbs, and it's Gaugin's eye, not the indigenous people, that disturbs. Gaugin has none of Van Gogh's pity or piety.

      At times I am reminded of Randolph Stow's 1979 novel *Visitants* set in Papua-New Guinea, when the frightened native man says: 'The house should be like a cave, I said, close and dark.'
      Close and dark are the dwellings in Gaugin's Tahiti, and there is that unnerving silence in the gaze of the women.

      The colonials brought their own darkness, not least syphilis, and we should never forget that Europe was always at war with itself.
      Somerset Maugham looked to Gaugin for his novel, *The Moon and Sixpence*.
      Perhaps there is a clue there?

      Haggerty

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  15. I wrote a similar piece on Eric Gill a while ago - http://stanforthsharpe.uk/art/i-can-see-a-rainbow-blue-indigo-and-violet - it's a difficult debate, isn't it? I still can't fully articulate exactly why I feel as I do, but once that biography is known, it can't be unknown and, for me, it somehow taints the artwork.

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    1. It is indeed hard to separate the two. If The Yorkshire Ripper had created art in his prison cell I could never have admired it no matter how skiful his canvases.

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  16. *The author abused children: should we read his books?*
    Catherine Bennett (2004) The Guardian online.

    The disturbing case of William Mayne whose novels for children were called original, intoxicating, magical.
    Haggerty

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    1. It is a difficult moral question. The answer is as slippery as a fish pulled from the water.

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