Gauguin [antikvár]

Paul Gauguin was born in 1848, a year of great social upheaval. Upheaval predominated, equally, in the private history of his own family. But neither in European politics nor in the turbulent activity of his parents and grandparents was there a sequence of events more extraordinary, more genuinely and meaningfully dramatic, than that which marked Gauguin's career as a painter. What others have dreamed of doing, Gauguin actually did: he lived his ideas to the point at which they destroyed him. In so doing, he led a legendary life. But the legend relates more to the man than to the work: the really important thing about Gauguin is that he was perseverance personified. Had he not been perseverance personified, he would not have been able to bring about, almost single-handed, the renewal of painting. In his art, as in his medical history, he would have gone down for ever, beyond recapture and beyond recall. What happened was precisely the contrary: even when he was dying, a man broken in body in his early fifties, he was painting as well as ever; and in his last notes on the nature of art he achieved, if anything, an ever greater lucidity and objectivity. He remained to the end the man who once said that although his own paintings were only relatively good he had at least struck a blow, and a lasting one, on behalf of the painters of our own century. Gauguin's apprenticeship, insofar as he had one, is so unlike the apprenticeship of any other major painter that it is worthwhile to examine it in some detail. From infancy—from the day of his birth, almost, since there