Thursday 17 September 2009

GAUGUIN AT TATE MODERN, NEXT YEAR.


"LIFE BEING WHAT IT IS, ONE DREAMS OF VENGEANCE"
PAUL GAUGUIN, 1848 - 1903.

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NIGHT CAFE AT ARLES, 1888


ANNA THE JAVANERIN, 1893


WOMAN WITH A FLOWER, 1891




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3 comments:

Verge said...

Wasn't the middle one originally subtitled "Flagellons le Singe"?

call me ishmael said...

Dunno, Mr Verge, can't find anything to that effect. He was accused of noncing, wasn't he, Gauguin? But maybe it was just that fin de siecle France was pissed at him lying about in the Sun in the Pacific with half-naked totty.

I just always loved the line: Life being what it is, one dreams of vengeance, a junky outlaw sentiment. Sort of thing Burroughs might have written, after a night on the Rotten Mind Candy.

Verge said...

...and he probably did. Sly old bastard was always nicking other people's stuff ("GETS", he would write in the margin, apparently: Good Enough To Steal - amen to that.)

For example, for far too long I assumed the line in his routine about the Titanic (a skit about the ghastly inverse heroism of the arch shit, the evil purity of a true fuck-you survival instinct) where he lampooned middle America's high moral outrage at the man who dragged up to pass the lifeboats' gender-bar, was Burroughs' own: "This man still lives; surely he was born and saved to set for men a new standard by which to measure infamy and shame." There's a recording of Burroughs reading this, wonderful Crazy Grandad in the Pulpit stuff, and it's stuck in mind, quotable straight from memory, but he'd taken it word for word from a book by one Logan Marshall.

Certainly worth recycling, anyway - imagine a virus that could generate the phrase as a caption every time the Great Ruiner appeared on any screen. Amen to that and all.