Gauguin's Paradise Lost (ePub)

A new edition of the 1971 classic that for weeks was a New York Times "Book of the Times." Reviewed extensively and favorably across the US and the UK, this book soon became out of print. This new edition changes by being more richly illustrated with reproductions interlaced with the text, and has an expanded first chapter to take into account the Peruvian Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa's book The Way to Paradise. Gauguin has been widely admired and emulated as a man who through over the trappings of a corrupt civilization for the natural, sensuous truth of the primitive state, and as an artist who discarded traditional pictorial values for an intensely personal approach to color and form. Yet the documented accounts of his life and the richly symbolic content of his work indicate that Gauguin could escape neither himself nor his times. His Breton and Tahitian women are not the simple, beautiful figures they appear at first to be; they are heavily cloaked in images that arise out of the artist's complex notions of God, woman, and man; of innocence, sin, and evil; of birth, copulation, and death. Paul Gauguin's dramatic transformation from successful stockbroker and respectable family man into painter and savage has long been clouded in mystery and legend, much of it created by the artist himself. In this searching biography, Andersen dispels at last the romantic haze surrounding Gauguin's life and career, presenting us with a realistic psychological portrait and a completely original and consistent study of the artist's intricate use of symbolism.