Word: gauguins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Emile Gauguin, 81, retired construction engineer, elder son of Painter Paul Gauguin and Mette Gad, the Danish wife whom Gauguin deserted to follow a painting career; of bronchial pneumonia; in Englewood. Fla. Although he owned only one of his father's works, a pencil sketch of his mother, Emile Gauguin staunchly defended his father's reputation, in 1941 threatened to sue United Artists if they used any Gauguin art in the movie version of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, claiming that it would identify the disreputable hero with his father (see BOOKS...
NOBLE SAVAGE: THE LIFE OF PAUL GAUGUIN (299 pp.)-Lawrence & Elisabeth Hanson-Random House...
Every reader of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence knows who Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin was: the middle-aged Paris stockbroker who callously turned his back on business and family, fled to Tahiti and became a great painter amid the palm trees and dusky native maids. Devoted Gauguinists have damned the Maugham novel (in which the thinly disguised Gauguin is actually an Englishman named Charles Strickland) as six-pennyworth of moonshine. But they have never managed to scotch it. They never will, because the tale is essentially true...
...Gauguin's latest biographers, the Hansons, are a British husband-and-wife team who have successfully sunk their teeth into some big, meaty subjects, including Necessary Evil: The Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle (TIME, May 19, 1952) and Chinese Gordon (TIME, May 31). Gauguin is an even tougher order, not only because he needs explaining as an artist who helped change the face of painting, but because he has become a symbol of the conflict between art and breadwinnery, artistic duty and normal social responsibility. In their fine study, the Hansons' own sympathy is with the artist...
...symbolist who worshiped at the literary and artistic shrines of Mallarmé and Gauguin, Vuillard brought impressionism into the parlor. Like Manet, Monet and Degas, he covered his canvases with veils of light and shadow. But Vuillard's subjects were domestic-his mother, his friends and the quiet, bourgeois, wallpapered rooms in which they lived. To those everyday themes, he brought the quiet joy of small mysteries...