Gauguin

Abstract

Apart from his work, Paul Gauguin's life is an extraordinary novel. Peru, Orleans, Copenhagen, Paris, Brittany, Arles, the Mediterranean, Brazil, Chile, Panama, North Cape and Cape Horn, the Baltic, Martinique, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands ... How many men in the nineteenth century were able to roam the planet in search of themselves? And his ancestry does not give in to geography, an ancestor Viceroy of Peru, a great-grandmother intimate of Simon Bolivar, a feminist and revolutionary grandmother, Flora Tristan, a father with the beating heart of the Revolution from 1848, so many crossed figures, George Sand, Pissarro, Degas, Manet, Seurat, Emile Bernard ... And the tragic face-to-face with Van Gogh. He himself was a naval officer, a marine fighter, a scholar, a conspirator, a great family man with a tormented destiny, a painter, a sculptor, a journalist and a writer. Exceptional character whose shadows will not be faded. The true story told here sometimes defies the imagination. Gauguin was also a powerful, major, slow-blooming creator, whose work irrigates the twentieth century and our future, for he first comprehended in full clarity the unconscious roots of beauty and opened western art to the imaginary of other peoples and civilizations. An artist-world who sought to aggregate all forms inherited from men to give new shines of light.--Translation of page 4 of cover by Fayard.