Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art
Category: Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Arts & Literature
Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art Details
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Reviews
Fletcher 's brief biography offers a good overview of the vanities, theories, and feuds that fueled the art scene in Paris in the late nineteenth century. What I find odd is Fletcher's adoring approach to Gauguin the man. He seems in complete harmony with the painter's antisocial attitudes and even with his cruel behavior toward people who tried to befriend him in his relative poverty. Gauguin embraced an intellectual fad that others flirted with, the notion of the noble savage. His Noa Noa, the journal of his months in Tahiti, recounts his attempt to be one of these noble types.In its opening pages, he evokes an imagined and il-defined yesterday of glorious savagery. His descriptions of the island's people sprout clearly from his libido. And he damns French culture whenever he runs out of island fantasies. His Journal is a picture painted in the shades of fantasy and sexual desire.Fletcher writes uncritically about these things, seemingly under the spell of the notion that dried paint on a canvas or scribbled words on a page elevate the artist above other requirements of the decent life.