Gauguin [antikvár]

Life The picture of Gauguin can be pieced together from self-portraits and from letters, read in conjunction with one another; the painted and the written word help to bring alive a face that has been altered by the passage of time. His most recent biographers have discovered photographs, too, to assist us. The strongly modelled face, with its deep furrows, is the mirror of a personality which can never be completely disguised by the distortions and falsifications of a novel or a film. His inner life, intense, rich, profound, was lived in far greater secrecy than one might gather from the famous and spectacularly violent episodes connnected with it such as the extraordinary climax of his friendship with Van Gogh in Aries, when Van Gogh, without premeditation, sliced off his ear. More important facts about his life concern his vocation for the exotic, in life as in art; the building up of his personality as a superman, beyond all normal emotional and moral ties; his complete withdrawal from society and from his bourgeois background; the blindly egoistic choice of freedom and solitude inspired by his almost superhuman pride. His taste for the exotic and for adventure began with the voyages he made in his early youth. The sailor boy was running away from bourgeois civilization in search of the island of his dreams, an earthly paradise created by his imagination. He dreamed of countries where time had stood still in some primordial age of truth and innocence; distant lands where he could leave his ship and find salvation. In February 1889, in a letter to his wife, Gauguin gave the finishing touch to his ideal picture of himself by admitting that he had made the choice between his sensitive and his primitive nature and had chosen to follow the latter, which he maintained would allow him to progress firmly and without hesitation. Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848. His father, Clovis, was a journalist on the 'National. His mother, Aline Vi