Word: gauguin
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What photographer satisfied the biographical requirements for an artist better than Edward Weston? Like Gauguin, he made a mid-life lunge for the southern latitudes, putting family and studio on hold while he pondered the cactus in Mexico. His "commercial" portrait work he churned out with contempt, all but using one hand to press the shutter and the other to hold his nose. And among his remarkable inventory of lovers were the kind of women who not only danced naked for his camera but brought along their own finger cymbals...
...maestro of this process was Matisse. He was a mature painter of 48 when he started his first working sojourn in Nice after 1916. Just as Gauguin had carried his style preformed with him to Tahiti, so Matisse took his to the Cote d'Azur. One would logically expect that given the tremendous efforts of ! abstraction and integration that had gone into his work from his fauve paintings of 1905-06 to The Moroccans of 1916, nothing he did thereafter would seem trivial to art historians. Yet such was not the case. Most accounts of Matisse's life treat...
...being lost each day yet never seem to lose their paradisiac allure. Take Bali, for example, the Indonesian tropical garden visited this spring by President Reagan and the world. Every intruder on the island quickly registers its palm- fringed beaches, magical dances and golden native beauties out of Gauguin and then remarks that all these delights are being corrupted by a camera- toting crush of alien surfers, satyrs and souvenir hunters. The single most changeless feature of Bali, indeed, is this litany of laments. " 'Isn't Bali spoiled,' is invariably the question that greets the returned traveler," wrote Miguel Covarrubias...
...ocher blooms like hydrangeas or brains, the green, yellow-fringed leaf spears, the oversize blue foxgloves--look forward to Paul Klee. But the black woman with her glittering eyes, wreathed in obedient snakes, has to be the purest evocation of the colonial sublime in French painting--like a great Gauguin without the sex appeal. It makes one realize what distances separate the routine from the inspired, even among "innocent" visionaries...
More recently, New York City's Museum of Modern Art created a minor controversy when the director of its department of painting and sculpture, William Rubin, had the work of a few early modern masters, among them Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, refitted in no-frills borders. Part of Rubin's rationale was that undistracting borders would help to clarify continuities between the early modern painters and their inheritors, from Picasso through Johns, whose work elsewhere in the museum is likewise in simple frames. "Very successful," says Thomas Messer, director of the nearby Guggenheim Museum, which...