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Article: Paul Gauguin in the vanguard.
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- November 7, 1988
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1988 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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PAUL GAUGUIN incarnates in its purest form what so many people have been faking for the past three generations. Here was the first, and perhaps the grandest, of the Great Refusers. In this creature of Gargantuan appetites and legendary cussedness, who turned his back on Western bourgeois culture, we may plausibly discern the spiritual father and grandfather of everyone from Duchamp and Pollock to Julian Schnabel and Joseph Beuys. When so many of the vanguardists of his day had settled down into a comfortable middle-class existence, Gauguin was traveling to the ends of the earth in search of a sunny place to die.
It should perhaps be pointed out that this was ...