the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt six)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

He was also pondering the wider questions: what actually is painting, and what is its relationship to the other branches of art? This was the sort of thing he would have hammered out at the café table with the Manet gang over a glass of absinthe, or with Pissarro during their painting trips, but now he had to come up with the answers on his own. He found the writings of the composer Richard Wagner helpful on the nature and philosophy of culture. Unsurprisingly, Wagner named music as the supreme art. Music was not concerned with physical limitations, not busy creating images of the phenomenal world. Rather, it roamed the abstract, speaking the language of the Wille (soul, sensation or spirit) directly. Music was art as pure spirit, untethered from physicality. Only music could open the gate to complete spiritual experience; the gate to completeness, making all the senses vibrate in harmony.

This resonated with Gauguin, who (like Wagner) experienced synaesthesia: an interconnection of sensual experience. When Gauguin heard music he saw coloured images that vibrated. Seeing a painting containing the mysterious magic that was ‘art’, his thoughts appeared before his eyes, and he saw them written in sentences. In time, he would write words on his paintings, a forerunner of Modernist practice; his contemporaries often found this irritating.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt five)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

Gauguin’s first major painting to survive, Working the Land, is dated 1873. It shows a flat, panoramic landscape in the environs of Paris. Two small figures are working patchwork green and yellow fields. A few trees provide verticals. The land is well observed, if dully painted. The sky is a disaster. A bank of cotton wool cloud presses down heavily, squashing the earth. Corot is the major influence, along with the other Barbizon painters that Gauguin was so familiar with from Arosa’s walls. There is nothing Impressionist about it, but the compositional similarity to the overdoor Spring in Pissarro’s Four Seasons is striking. The other pictures that survive from this couple of early years are similarly cautious landscapes.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt four)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

Gauguin was receiving an education in art despite himself. On his regular Sunday visits to Arosa’s house, surrounded by the collection he had known since a boy, it was taken for granted that, following the horrors of war, art was the supreme means of re-establishing a civilised society. Chez Arosa, the latest advances in art and photography were discussed with deep seriousness with fellow guests who often included Philippe Burty, the influential art critic of Le Figaro and the ever-stimulating Nadar. Gauguin was encouraged to go sketching, fashionably en plein air, in the company of Arosa’s younger daughter Marguerite, a red-haired, milky-skinned girl with the bloodless looks of doomed maidenhood made fashionable by Edgar Allan Poe. This made her popular as a photographic model for Nadar and her father, but Gauguin preferred to sketch beside her than to sketch her. His feelings for her were close and tender; brotherly, not erotic. Marguerite was anaemic but her character was robust. She determined to become an artist, an ambition she achieved with a degree of success in Spain and in France.

Marguerite took lessons from Camille Pissarro. Like the Arosas and the Pereires, he was of Sephardic Jewish origin. Gustave Arosa’s elder brother, Achille Arosa, had commissioned Pissarro to decorate a salon in his house at 44 Rue de Bassano. The quartet of canvases he produced, The Four Seasons, is now considered of the greatest importance as the first complete decorative scheme of Impressionist art. There must have been considerable excitement in the Arosa household in 1873 when Pissarro was producing it. That was also the year leading up to the important first Impressionist exhibition, held from April to May 1874 in Nadar’s studio, with Pissarro taking a large part in its organisation.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt three)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

On arriving in Paris to set herself up as a seamstress, Aline had become part of the great mass of social displacement and confusion, part of the demi-monde of women on the fringes of respectable life, making a living as best they could. ‘Thousands of floating existences–criminals and kept women–which drift about in the underworld of a great city’ as Balzac wrote to Manet, recommending that the painter take this as the subject of his paintings, which indeed he did, reimagining the Venus of the Second Empire as a streetwalker in his notorious canvas Olympia, which was painted in 1863, the year after Gauguin arrived in Paris. Olympia was to hold overwhelming significance for Gauguin all his life. In 1891, he spent days in the Musée du Luxembourg trying to copy it; though he eventually gave up, this did not dismay him. Rather the opposite: to be unable to capture the magic only made the magic more alluring. Throughout his mature life, he would carry a photograph of the painting and pin it up on the walls of his studio wherever he happened to be in the world.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt two)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

The Albert was not a comfortable passenger ship. It was a small, square-rigged two-master brig, the speediest type of merchant ship of its time. Captains of such ships were set in a perpetual circular race against each other to be first to deliver their cargoes before their perishable goods perished, or rival captains beat them to it and spoiled the market for the stuff they were hoping to sell. While the captain of the Albert was running his commercial race, Gauguin’s father Clovis saw the voyage as something quite else, something idealistic and beautiful. He was taking his family back to a pre-industrial country, to a new dawn in whose light he might fight for modern democratic values. That his compassionate fight would be financed by his wife’s family’s immense riches derived from slave labour–the pre-industrial equivalent of machine-led profitability–does not seem to have been a worry.

The atmosphere on board became thicker and thicker with antagonism between Clovis and the captain, who lusted after Aline. She was an extraordinarily direct and appealing person, as we see from Gauguin’s portrait. Slightly built, dark-haired and dark-eyed, Aline never lost a sense of self-worth and self-determination, despite being abused by her father and having spent her childhood parked in institutions. While her mother had been out saving the world, Aline had been left in the guardianship of the novelist George Sand, who didn’t much like Flora but took her duties towards the child Aline sufficiently seriously to keep an eye on her development from a distance. A fiercely independent spirit, Aline’s qualities of candour, receptiveness and optimism made her devastatingly attractive to the rough, tough sea captain, who pursued Aline openly, to the impotent fury of Clovis. They could hardly settle the matter in the usual way: a duel on board guaranteed awkward consequences.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt one)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

Shortly after his first birthday, Paul Gauguin was bundled aboard a ship called the Albert, to sail some 12,000 miles from the French port of Le Havre to Peru. The year was 1849, and France was no place for outspoken radicals such as Gauguin’s parents. Charles-Louis Napoleon had become president of the French Republic and it didn’t take political genius to foresee that he would segue smoothly from the post of president to that of Emperor Napoleon III of France. Gauguin’s father, Clovis, was an anti-Bonapartist journalist determined to continue the republican fight from Peru, where he planned to start a newspaper on the back of an excellent connection: Simón Bolívar, who overthrew Spanish rule in much of South America and had Bolivia named after him, had been a family friend. Gauguin’s mother, Aline, was also a ‘person of danger’ on the list of the French Republic’s spies and secret police. Aline had not had much time recently to be a national danger. Two years previously, she had given birth to Gauguin’s elder sister Marie, and then Gauguin himself had come along. Her hands had been more than full of babies. But sometimes symbols adhere more firmly to particular names than to their recent activities and Aline Gauguin had inherited the symbolic mantle of firebrand feminist and proto-Communist from her mother Flora Tristan.

the last book I ever read (I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, excerpt ten)

from I Give You My Silence: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa:

The idea that so many of his countrymen turned to witch doctors to cure their ailments had unsettled Toño for several days. What was most repugnant to him was the apparently widespread belief in Peru that if a witch or shaman passed a guinea pig over a person’s naked body, the creature would die as soon as it touched the skin beneath which an infected organ lay. For hours, the patient would have to lie still and allow that filthy cousin of the rat to caress his bare skin. The mere thought of it repelled him.

And all of this took place in cabins or miserable, filthy rooms, because these people with so-called magic powers were poor and had learned their trade from their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents in lessons passed on in silence. Their work was outside of the law, like drug dealing—and that was another aspect of his homeland that depressed him. Marijuana, pills, cigarettes dipped in who knew what, easy to make, easy to buy, sold cheap to addicts in the street, given away outside the doorways of schools to create future addicts … In principle, Toño thought it was people’s right to ruin their lives with drugs—to hell with them, was his attitude—but children needed to be cared for until they were old enough to make responsible and realistic decisions about these things.