Gauguin's Intimate Journals

Gauguin wasn't Picasso or Munch. Picasso thought his diary would someday make him even more famous as an important writer who also dabbled in the visual arts. Edvard Munch thought that his poetry-prose journals were as good as his paintings--even the title of his journals "We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth" gives his readers a clue to the seriousness of his private journals. Gauguin didn't consider himself a great writer. He didn't feel that the words he was scribbling were all that important. He said "I should like to write as I paint my pictures,--that is to say, following my fancy, following the moon, and finding the title long afterwards." Gauguin was true to that desire. Also unlike the poetry of Picasso and Munch, a reader doesn't have to carefully parse obscure poetic verses to maybe gain an insight into the mind of the artists. In Picasso's case he loved to write in different languages and in different styles and riddles and often in a stream of consciousness manner. As with his art, he couldn't resist toying with his audience. Gauguin wrote straightforward descriptions of people, places and things that fascinated him. One of the best parts of this book is Gauguin's eyewitness account of Vincent Van Gogh, his housemate's strange behavior. One evening Vincent ran toward him on the street with an open razor in his hand, but stopped suddenly in front of him, bowed and then turned and went home alone. Once there, he cut off his ear, taped up the wound enough to allow him to go out into the streets wearing a Basque Beret pulled down to conceal the missing ear. Van Gogh went straight to a local house of ill repute "and gave the manager his ear, carefully washed and placed in an envelope. `Here is a souvenir of me,' he said. Then he ran off home, where he went to bed and to sleep." The next morning the local police accused Gauguin of murdering his housemate, until Gauguin, who fearing for his own life, had spent the night in a hotel checked the undisturbed body in the blood-soaked bed and discovered his friend to still be alive. The hapless police then called an ambulance, but didn't apologize for their incompetent bungling. Gauguin hated government bureaucrats and felt they, along with the French clergy were exploiting and destroying the pure culture of the South Seas and anywhere else France controlled. This is fascinating, easy-to-read, meandering and very natural journal-diary. It provides lots of fresh and politically incorrect views of Gauguin's world in a very pithy style.

It is impossible to read and re-read GAUGUIN'S INTIMATE JOURNALS and not be inspired to jump into the thrills of creativity and rebellion that sparks greatness in artists. Paul Gauguin's life has been well captured in films, in poems, in numerous biographies, in essays - but none of these supply what these extraordinary journals offer: here is the motivation for the fauvist mind and career and art movement Gauguin sprouted. In these beautifully translated journal entries we learn why Gauguin, a self-taught artist, son of financially secure parents, a businessman able to succeed in the financial world of his era, would leave all of that to first paint in France with the likes of his roommate Vincent Van Gogh and ultimately flee to the Pacific Islands where his unusual and avant-garde painting style set all of the art world into motion to change. Beginning with the preface by his son Emil Gauguin, these journals are accompanied by full page, full color reproductions of some of this finest paintings, works which take on new life when informed by the accompanying words of the artist. This is a splendid book well worth adding to the art library of everyone. Grady Harp, October 05

This is a 'journal'. It's not a diary, nothing so organized, and he claims repeatedly that "This is not a book." Instead, it's a sequence of slightly connected thoughts, anecdotes, and aphorisms. Give the book time, though, it develops into something much more revealing in its second half. Gauguin is known for his abrupt departure from respected commercial and family life into the most primitive world available to him. His son prefaces this book by explaining that the parting of ways was necessary and mutual. This book itself presents a few hints at what drove him out of polite and wealthy society - a distaste for the venal gendarmerie, a contempt for the church, and more. What I found more interesting, though, was his recollections of rooming with Van Gogh and his first-person narrative of the Impressionist revolution in France. He sweetens any bitterness by describing the Tahitian people, as a society, as a system of mores, and as healthy and beautiful human animals. There's a slight self-conciousness here. Gauguin seemed to be writing for some imagined reader, and in fact sent these journals to be published. I feel that not nearly enough is said; what's written here does little to describe the personal angel or demon that drove him to the farthest point on the planet. Still, I value the master's words. I admit that I'm not fond of his art. Still, I acknowledge the place that history has given him, and I feel somewhat more of a person for reading what he chose to write. //wiredweird