Gauguin, the Wildness in My Heart

Author: Fran?oise Gauthier
Publisher:
Publish 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 to a 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 seek 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 was not seeking a pastoral hermitage life, but rather a new source of 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 Tahiti he discovered was too Westernized and civilized, leaving him deeply 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. In it, he tells the story of Ariaro. According to legend, this group of Polynesian male and female gods lived on the island of Bora Bora.