Gauguin--The Wildness in My Heart (Discovery Journey 79)

Author: (French) Gauguin, translated by Liao Sushan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-10-01
Features: Grandmother was a feminist pioneer in Peru, and the 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 harbored a nostalgia for tropical countries and wandered between Copenhagen, Avignon, Martinique, and Arles. In 1891, he resolutely left the civilized world and went to the primitive Tahiti. "I left to pursue peace, 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. Cézanne 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 Voyage in 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 Ancient Beliefs of the Maori between 1892 and 1893, telling the story of Ariaro. According to the legend, this group of Polynesian male and female gods lived on the island of Bora Bora.