The Primitive Sophisticate

There cannot have Men many other artists who set out as wholeheartedly to live the life they envisioned in their art as Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) did. He lived between two worlds. In this art he held up a mirror to his own civilization, which he despised, and showed an alternative, primitive life in all its simple, naive harmony. But painting it was not enough for Gauguin. He wanted to experience it himself. He wanted to prove that South Sea exoticism-was not merely a forced and magical escapism, of the kind that was fascinating his European contemporaries in an age of world fairs and newspaper reports. Gauguin personified a new union of art and life, imagination and order, and in anticipating this predominant 20th century characteristic he became one of the true pioneers of modernism.
Gauguin discovered his artistic bent relatively late. When he made his break with comfortable middle-class life, he already had a wife, a ' family, and a small fortune. In making the break he liked to see himself as an unconventional anti-hero, forging ahead on his own, indifferent to the recognition of his fellow-men. But much as he would have liked to despise the bourgeoisworlti, Gauguin the outsider still hankered after the success which Gauguin the stock market speculator had formerly achieved. As his failure became ever deeper, he became a wrathful critic of that European civilization which ignored him, and in the end even took to actively resisting the colonial administration in Tahiti.