#HOLD THE LINE TROPE FREE#

Gauguin’s biographers commonly assert that her name was Teha’amana she was reportedly 13 when Gauguin pursued her, eventually giving her syphilis and impregnating her. In his 1892 painting Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching), a nude girl lies on her front, staring up at the viewer, on display and seemingly terrified. Less appealing, however, is his documented proclivity for the young girls who served as his lovers and frequent subjects of his work. As Gauguin himself predicted, he has become more of a myth than a man. His devotion to his artistic vision at all costs-his quest for creative paradise-has continued to intrigue us well into the 21st century. Despite his disappointment with how much French colonial rule had corrupted the island, Gauguin’s fascination with Polynesian culture and what he referred to as its “primitivism” characterizes much of his best-known work.

#HOLD THE LINE TROPE FREE#

“All the joys-animal and human-of a free life,” he wrote, “are mine.” Once a successful stockbroker in Paris, Gauguin told the French newspaper L’Echo de Paris before he left for Tahiti that he was rejecting the stifling “influence of civilization” to devote himself to art and pleasure.

Reading Paul Gauguin’s fictionalized travelogue, Noa Noa, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d stumbled upon an artist’s idyll when he arrived in Tahiti in 1891.

Hold the line trope