Paul Gauguin: Letters To His Wife And Friends

by Paul Gauguin

May the day come--and perhaps soon--when I can flee to the woods on a South Sea island and live there in ecstasy, in peace and for art, Gauguin wrote to his wife, Mette, in 1890. As both art history and enduring legend have shown, Gauguin's life in the South Seas was anything but ecstatic or peaceful, even as he created some of the most revolutionary and iconic objects of his time. This book, to date the most comprehensive volume of the painter's letters to be published, offers an uncensored glimpse into Gauguin's life, from his days as a young newlywed reporting on the birth of his first child, through his early developments as an artist and finally throughout the extraordinary adventure of his years in Tahiti and the Marquesas. Gauguin's writings, from Noa Noa to his Intimate Journals , have proven him a talented, uninhibited literary stylist. Nowhere is this more evident than in these letters to many of his closest associates and, above all, to Mette, for whom he detailed his plans, described artworks in progress, and gave running accounts of his life and states of mind on distant shores. Published to coincide with the centennial of Gauguin's death and with a major international exhibition, Letters to His Wife and Friends restores to print, after many years, one of the most compelling, intimate and revealing epistolary autobiographies ever assembled.

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2003

About the author

Gauguin was a financially successful stockbroker and self-taught amateur artist when he began collecting works by the impressionists in the 1870s. Inspired by their example, he took up the study of painting under Camille Pissarro. Pissarro and Edgar Degas arranged for him to show his early painting efforts in the fourth impressionist exhibition in 1879 (as well as the annual impressionist exhibitions held through 1882). In 1882, after a stock market crash and recession rendered him unemployed and broke, Gauguin decided to abandon the business world to pursue life as an artist full-time.

In 1886, Gauguin went to Pont-Aven in Brittany, a rugged land of fervently religious people far from the urban sophistication of Paris. There he forged a new style. He was at the center of a group of avant-garde artists who dedicated themselves to synthétisme, ordering and simplifying sensory data to its fundamentals. Gauguin's greatest innovation was his use of color, which he employed not for its ability to mimic nature but for its emotive qualities. He applied it in broad flat areas outlined with dark paint, which tended to flatten space and abstract form. This flattening of space and symbolic use of color would be important influences on early twentieth-century artists.

In Brittany, Gauguin had hoped to tap the expressive potential he believed rested in a more rural, even "primitive" culture. Over the next several years he traveled often between Paris and Brittany, spending time also in Panama and Martinique. In 1891 his rejection of European urban values led him to Tahiti, where he expected to find an unspoiled culture, exotic and sensual. Instead, he was confronted with a world already transformed by western missionaries and colonial rule. In large measure, Gauguin had to invent the world he sought, not only in paintings but with woodcarvings, graphics, and written works. As he struggled with ways to express the questions of life and death, knowledge and evil that preoccupied him, he interwove the images and mythology of island life with those of the west and other cultures. After a trip to France (1893 to 1895), Gauguin returned to spend his remaining years, marred by illness and depression, in the South Seas.

Reviews

[Carlmaria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am like the kneeling Sicambrian before Saint Remigius the bishop: under the threat of the ubiquitous Neo-puritans, I am summoned to burn Gauguin whom I adored, and instead adore Rothko and Pollock (who cuckolded Lee Krasner, but don't tell anyone I told you). So I undertook to search for Gauguin-the-Golgoth in his correspondence. His most intimate letters had to provide evidence of the ill-tempered, alcoholic, quarrelsome, jealous and sleazy painter, who terrorized his artist buddies and pulled his girlfriends' hair. Gauguin had to confess somewhere, to his wife or to his (molested) friends, his dirty impulses and his terrible remorse? Admit that the reason why he attempted to flee, to Panama, Brittany, Papeete, the Marquesas was not art but expiation? Allude to his colonialist racism? Testify in front of the jury of his closest relatives that, even in exile, he continued to abuse the innocents and disturb public order, until, finally, syphilis delivered the world from such a pitiless demon? Alas. All I found was a man who obsessed with his art, cared about his friends, worried about his children, and complained about the icy harshness of his Danish Lutheran wife. No Bluebeard. Yet a New Zealand art historian claimed "he was an arrogant, overrated and condescending pedophile." The New York Times (Is it time Gauguin got canceled, Nov 18, 2019) had warned me against a monster who never painted shadows. Good painters paint shadows. Another proof that Gauguin was abnormal and dangerous, as two German art historians have further proven: it was Gauguin who cut van Gogh's ear off (and ate it)."It was not Vincent van Gogh who cut his ear with a razor, it was his colleague and roommate Paul Gauguin, a hot-tempered and irascible man, an experienced fencer, who severed van Gogh's left ear with his sword, during an argument outside the brothels of Arles.”(Kaufmann, H., Wildegans, R. (2008). Van Goghs Ohr - Paul Gauguin und der Pakt des Schweigens/van Gogh's ear and the pact of silence). What is the office of censorship doing? Gauguin-the-ogre's correspondence is sold over the counter ; poster prints of his victims in the nude can be purchased in every museum shop around the world outside taliban territory. And BTW Zola's novels and Marx's essays are sold in a library near you, yet it is now proven that Zola, like Marx, cheated on their wives. As for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, an article claims that he once visited a brothel. The limits of tolerance have been reached.

[ako · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should give it 5 stars because this book is precisely what it says on the cover and is therefore successful, but Gauguin was kind of the worst so I'll give it 3.

[Addison Hart · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deserves a higher rating, really, since it does exactly what it says on the tin, but Gauguin is undeniably too godawful a human being to make the experience pleasant.