Gauguin [antikvár]

Paul Gauguin, the birth of a legend "When will men understand the meaning of the word freedom - you know what I mean: the right to dare" (Gauguin to Daniel de Monfreid, October 1902). In the loneliness of the Marquesas, already bent under the burdens oí illness and poverty, Gauguin was declaring yet once again the principle that drove him relentlessly through his life and work, bringing him in the end to the final break of exile. Even while he was still alive, Gauguin's independence and consequent isolation led to a legend, a legend that still survives, the legend of the misunderstood artist persecuted by society and condemned to exile. This myth has blurred all means of a true analysis of the man, putting Gauguin in an isolated position with respect to the men and artists of his time, and has made people confuse his aesthetic challenges for provocations against the established order. Far more words have been dedicated to the traveler and the adventurer than to the painter, the sculptor, the ceramist, the brilliant engraver. The vahines and the pink-sanded beaches of his paintings attract attention exactly as do the posters for holiday clubs displayed in our city streets. His work had a subtle smell of scandal and flesh that, by the end of the century, had allure for an industrial and colonial society by then without its own ideals. Far too often his art has been interpreted as an expression only of burning sensuality or of some exotic paradise, and its true meaning has been ignored: freedom, the freedom of the artist-creator. Gauguin traversed the currents of aesthetics of his time, going from Impressionism to Symbolism without ever falling prisoner to any trend, unceasingly striving to find his personal expression. Degas perceived his nature clearly: "Mind you Gauguin is a lean wolf, but he wears no collar" (Gauguin to André Fontainas, March 1899). The wolf of fables that roams woods without restraint, that is always in search of new horizons. His contemporaries looked with skepticism on the efficiency of such emancipation. They preferred the artistic adventures of cafés or ateliers and were only too eager to exchange the paint-smudged rags of a dauber for a redingote and top hat. "One can paint so well at the Batignolles!" exclaimed Renoir. Gauguin instead committed himself entirely to his quest for authenticity, which drove him from Vaugirard to Tahiti, fleeing the dying world of contemporary official painting and the new generations of artistic clubs. Many painters and poets praised the marvels of getting away, the splendors of faraway landscapes, and the inexhaustible sources of inspiration in the East. But only a few risked real adventure, or quickly returned to savor it in small doses within the salons of Paris. In the footsteps of Delacroix and the lovers of antiquities, Gauguin might have crossed the Mediterranean or made the classic journey through Italy or Spain. But he felt the pulse of the violent current of his complex nature in which were mingled the warm and restless blood of the Borgia d'Aragon of his maternal lineage and the hghter imprint of bis father, a Republican journalist disappointed in his efforts, who died too soon. His infancy spent in Lima had definitely marked him with the stamp of the exotic, leaving in him the image of "the savage from Peru" and the longing for distant voyages. His awareness of belonging to a double world, one European and the other Indian, forced him to move unceasingly from one to the other of them in search of his identity. By the middle of the 1870s, Gauguin had started his first artistic fights in the Parisian melée. The press then arose against a small group of rebels whom the journahsts variously termed "the intransigents," "the impressionables," and even "the impressionists," the last being the name created by Louis Leroy that ultimately stuck. These artistic snipers protested against the academic aesthetics and their offiicial manifestations. They had gathered in a cooperative organization in order to arrange private exhibitions outside the official Salon in which were displayed the anecdotal paintings and illusionistic artifices of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In their paintings, the Impressionists expressed a world of ephemeral emotions and perceptions that came from the observation of nature and