Gauguin

As is pretty well-documented, Paul Gauguin is my favorite painter. Now the obvious question is - why? Like my good friend David Kelley is fond of saying, "none of us ever survive our childhood" - so maybe there are roots back into my early days. I know that one of the first books that I absolutely fell in love with was W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Six Pence, which is his retelling of the Gauguin story. And it's not just about a desire to run off and live in Tahiti, although after a week of the oppressive gloom of Russia that sounds pretty good. What I loved about Maugham's book is how the Gauguin character (although not called Gauguin in the novel) struggled with the enormity of his artistic gift/curse and how difficult it was to express his vision. Certainly Maugham, while in many ways sympathetic to the character, never tried to gloss over the artist's many bad attributes. I've also really liked Gauguin's ability to recreate reality in his paintings, and, really, once the camera is invented the job of the artist shifted to creating reality as compared to simply replicating it. I also loved Gauguin's use of symbolism, both Christian and other, to tell his story - and there's also a belief that most of the better attributes of humankind are related to nature and that society itself is a corrupting influence. The Hermitage doesn't have my all-time favorite Gauguin painting, The Spirit of Death Looks On, but they had several others that I love. I mean, they had an entire room of Gauguins - I just stood in the center and stared at them with this stupid grin on my face - I'm sure the Russians were horrified - and there are other Gauguins spread around the museum that I didn't even locate until much later in the day when my camera battery was quite dead. Of the ones I have posted, I like the first one, The Girl Holding a Fruit best, although the second, The May of Mary, is a close second.