Gauguin: The Wildness in My Heart

Author: Francine Gagnot
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2004-10-01
Features: Grandmother was a feminist pioneer in Peru, and father was a free-lance journalist who loved traveling. Such a background seemed to predestine Gauguin's life of simplicity and wandering. From his youth, he wandered between Copenhagen, Avignon, Martinique, and Arles, filled with nostalgia for tropical countries. In 1891, he resolutely left the civilized world and went to the primitive Tahiti. "I left to pursue tranquility, to break free from the influence of civilization. I only wanted to create simple art." This "unwilling savage" died on May 8, 1903, in the Marquesas Islands. For several centuries, choosing to be an artist was simply a tradition of inheriting the father's profession. The future painter breathed the smell of glue and resin from childhood. The family was responsible for his apprenticeship training. His studio was usually at home. But from the late 18th century, the desire to be an artist became a form of rebellion, an escape, and a very unique way of self-realization. Cezanne and Manet were examples of this, and Gauguin was no exception. When Gauguin set off for the South Pacific, he sought not a pastoral hermitage life, but a new inspiration, as Rimbaud said, "the key to an ancient banquet," leading to the mysteries of forgotten and vanished religions and traditions, and to the discovery of great primal myths. But the real Tahiti he discovered was too Westernized and civilized, leaving him greatly disappointed. Gauguin used a ethnographic survey report titled Journey to Oceania, published half a century earlier by Jacques-Antoine Maerenhout, the administrator of Papeete, as the source for some of his most famous paintings. He also used this book to create ink and watercolor sketches of The Ancient Beliefs of Maori between 1892 and 1893, telling the story of Arioro. The legend goes that this group of Polynesian male and female gods lived on the island of Bora Bora.