Word: gauguin
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...Internet does now. It both charmed and unnerved them. It brought to painting a novel immediacy, but it also gave back a world that felt weightless and unstable. What we now call post-Impressionism was the inevitable by-product of that anxiety. Artists like Seurat and Gauguin searched for an art that owed nothing to the stale models of academicism but possessed the substance and authority that Impressionism had let fall away...
...Destitute and unwell, the painter lived on Hiva Oa in his two-story thatched Maison du Jouir, or "House of Bliss." A former stockbroker, Gauguin had left his wife and five children years earlier to pursue his artistic dream at the end of the earth. (One of his letters home explains: "Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.") He took up with various Polynesian women, and his freewheeling ways made the local missionaries livid. Less than two years after his arrival, he was dead...
...Hiva Oa's tiny main town of Atuona is where you'll find the Paul Gauguin Cultural Center, tel: (689) 927 897, a museum that opened in 2003 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of his death. Galleries are adorned with reproductions of Gauguin's work and writings from his famous Tahitian period. Full-figured island women in bright colors glow from the muted walls. The rooms are themed around Gauguin's quotes such as "escaping to reach art" and "becoming part of a primitive culture...
...back of the museum is a reconstruction of the Maison du Jouir, complete with a reproduction of Gauguin's elaborate front-door frame that reads in French: "Be mysterious ... Be loving and you will be happy." A wax figure of the artist with palette eerily stands at one end of the house...
...Later, I watch the sunset from the infinity pool of the isle's token nod to tourism, the Hanakee Hiva Oa Pearl Lodge, www.pearlresorts.com. I realize that I can make out the hillside Calvaire Cemetery, where Gauguin's grave site is lovingly festooned with flowers. As vivid stars begin to pop out of the sky, I think of the painter's words: "Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity...