INTRODUCTION

PAUL GAUGUIN had no formal education of any kind beyond high school. He started to paint in earnest comparatively late in life. These apparent handicaps were to turn to his advantage: he acquired the inventiveness and the assurance that come with self-teaching, and he became a great experimenter with new techniques and new ideas at a time when the norms of traditional art were crumbling and when innovations were beginning to be appreciated. Indeed, more than anyone else, he established the right upheld by modern artists to devise the technique best suited to their expressive and decorative purpose of the moment.

Gauguin acquired a taste for travel as a young man when he was a sailor. His mixed heredity—his mother was partly Peruvian—accounted for a natural affinity for the life of the tropics. And he was perhaps psychologically unfit for the “civilized” life of the West. The years of his artistic maturity were spent in Polynesia.

In the 18th century Rousseau had advocated a return to a primitive way of life. In Gauguin’s days, when the growth of industry had imposed a new materialism on the West and when developments in communications were providing easier means of escape, the apparent freedom of the savage had become even more appealing to the romantically inclined. The primitivism of Gauguin is, actually, the culmination of a movement that had begun with the taste for the exotic in the previous century. His contribution was momentous because he was eminently fitted to understand exotic and primitive art.

In adopting the principles of design of many lands and many periods he helped to stress the universality of man’s creative effort, and he fostered a broader under-standing of different cultures that makes us, the public of today, as sensitive to Aztec statuary as to the frieze of the Parthenon. In establishing “the right to dare everything” he paved the way for the freedom of expression that some contem¬porary artists enjoy. He was also a born decorator, and his influence helped to re-assert the place of color and design for their own sake in modern art.

Gauguin has sometimes been accused of being sly. This is probably because like so many shy people he preferred sarcasm and paradox to normal conversa¬tion. He was often rude to the point of boorishness, but this can be partly attrib¬uted to the care he took to preserve his independence and to his hatred of mediocrity. Suffice to say that many who knew him well were devoted to him and that he lived for several years at the expense of friends who were willing to support him as much because they liked him as because they appreciated his painting. In one matter, however, he showed extraordinary selfishness: he chose to ignore his family’s financial plight after separating from his wife.
The last white man to see Gauguin alive, a Protestant missionary named Vernier, wrote that he was “a very amiable man who behaved with utmost sweetness and simplicity towards the Marquesans.”