Gauguin [antikvár]

Introduction 4iT am a great artist and I Isnow it," A wrote Gauguin from Tahiti in 1892. "It is because I am, that I have endured such suffering." The remark is a testament both to the integrity of his artistic vision and to his "monstrous egotism." Gauguin never doubted his talent, attributing lack of financial success to the Philistinism of the picture-buying market, or the corruption of dealers living off the backs of artists. "I feel I am right about art," he wrote in the year of his death, "in any case I wiU have done my duty, and there wlU always remain the memory of an artist who has set painting free." Gauguin was always in search of an unspoilt haven where he could paint and live simply and cheaply. It was an elusive quest for a primitive idyll, and drove him ever further from western civiUzation — from iVIartinlque to Tahiti, from Taliiti to the Marquesas Islands. But he was to find French colonialism had already made inroads into virgin territory like "decrepitude staring at the new flowering, the virtue of the law breathing impiu-ely upon the native but pure imashamedness of trust and faith." Gauguin "saw with grief this cloud of smoke [and] felt ashamed of [his] race." Illness, lack of funds and bureaucracy made Ufe ui Tahiti a nightmare, yet Gauguin was not tempted to abandon South Sea island life for an offer from a Paris dealer to receive a "modest but fixed Income" for paintings produced at wUl. As Degas remarked, "Gauguin is the thin wolf without the coUar (that is — he prefers liberty with starvation to servitude with abundance)." Gauguin's "haughty nobility, obviously iimate," was, as his friend Charles Morice noted, "a simpUcity that bordered on triviaUty aristocracy permeated by the proletariat." It was an image Gaugum approved. He saw his own origins as noble and exotic — "on my mother's side I descended from a Borgia of Aragon, Viceroy of Peru." Gauguin ascribed immense importance to his Peruvian forebears, even though these connections were ten- Paul Gauguin Self-portrait 1893-94 Musée d'Orsay, Paris uous, deriving from a Uaison between a young French woman, Thérese Laisnay, who fled to Spain during the Revolution, and a noble Spanish colonel of Dragoons, Don Mariano de Tristan y Moscoso. This produced Flora TYistan, Gauguin's maternal grandmother. The Tristan Moscoso family had setfled early ui Peru, and Gauguin fancied that their blood had mingled itself with that of the ancient Incas. In adult life he referred to himself as a "Peruvian savage" and inscribed the frame of one of his works "a gift from Tilstan de Moscoso" (see page 22). Gauguin's Peruvian association encouraged him to consider himself as something of a "noble savage." It also suggested a hereditary urge driving him to follow his destiny in a way his ancestors had, and perhaps mitigated any sense of guilt he may have later felt in rejecting everything for his art. Gauguin revered his maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, "a sociaUst-anarchist blue stocking," as he himself styled her, and kept her writings by him untü his death. His career paraUels that of his mother: having abandoned a spouse to follow her own star, "she spent her whole fortime," Gauguin tells us, "on the workers' cause, travelUng ceaselessly." Although her pursuit, imlike Gauguin's own, was philanthropic, he had before him the example of one who had abandoned aU material wealth for a cause, which was the way he chose to see his art. Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, a year which saw revolutionary activity throughout Europe. DisiUusioned with the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon, Gauguin's republican father, Clovis, a political journaUst, decided to set out for Lima in Peru, where his wife's great uncle and family lived, Intending to start a newspaper. On the journey he collapsed and died of a ruptm-ed blood vessel. His widow Aline travelled on to Lima with her two young children Marie and Paul, and on arrival good fortune attended her, for not only was her great uncle Don Fio a member of the Lhna aristocracy (his son was President for some years') but the familv was large and welcoming-