📰 Source: upgoat.net | Upgoat
✍️ Original author: Joe_McCarthy
⬆️ score: -1
v/OccidentalEnclave · by u/Joe_McCarthy
📝 Original content:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1496663173i/901309.jpg
Full excerpt:
The vague outline of Gauguin’s life is well known in the Western world; it is one of the legends that help to make humdrum existence more bearable. To a society smothering in obligations Gauguin symbolizes escape of the most delicious kind: to the gentle air of the South Seas, far beyond commuting and computing, where delicacies need only be plucked from the trees and shared with precocious girls who, as Gauguin said, “invade one’s bed.”” Moreover, Gauguin’s myth permits dutyhaunted desk-bound man to have his cake, or breadfruit, and eat it too. It is important to be successful, not merely a beachcomber, and did not Gauguin on occasional effortless afternoons produce masterpieces that are worth a fortune?
Gauguin’s myth is public property. If he were now alive he would scarcely be permitted to change it. Rather than hear him say that his life in the South Seas had not always been idyllic, most pale office workers would prefer to throttle him. Indeed Gauguin was made aware of the importance of his myth, as opposed to the relative triviality of his human existence, during his lifetime. When he was prematurely old, diseased and desperate on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, he wrote to one of his few friends in France and expressed the wish to come home. The friend replied, in effect: For heaven’s sake, don’t do it. You are already held in the esteem accorded to the famous dead; why spoil everything? Gauguin remained in Hiva Oa and died there.
In Tahiti Gauguin was surprised and fascinated by the charming, natural way in which the islanders had adopted Christianity. In this painting he shows the Madonna and Child from a Tahitian point of view; even the blue-and-yellowwinged angel at the left is a blackhaired Polynesian. The title of the picture, written at the lower left, is the opening phrase of the Tahi
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