Today is the birthday of Paul Gauguin, French artist. He was active in the second half of the 19th Century and painted in the post-Impressionist style, which was characterized by an experimental use of color and folk-art influences. (MoMA published a catalogue of Gauguin’s work, which you can see/get here.)

He did extensive traveling for an artist and caught the traveling bug at an early age. As a baby, his family voyaged to Peru. His father hoped to take advantage of his wife’s distant wealthy relations and restart his career as a journalist from afar. While on route, however, Gauguin’s father suddenly died of a heart attack, leaving his wife with almost nothing besides her infant son and toddler daughter. 

Fortunately, the Gauguins were welcomed into the arms of family, and ended up living a fairly luxurious lifestyle, attended by maids and servants, as their relations were politically powerful in Peru.

But it was not to last. Conflict in Peru broke out, and the family fell from power, the Gauguin family retreating to France, once again, nearly penniless. 

After attending school and joining the Navy, Gauguin worked as a stockbroker and became quite successful. He lived in an artsy neighborhood in Paris and would run into Impressionists painters at cafes and the many art galleries around. He purchased artwork by new artists and began painting in his spare time. He met Camile Pissarro and the two became friends, painting together in Pissarro’s garden on Sundays. Pissarro introduced Gauguin to other artists as well. 

In 1882, the stock market crashed and Gauguin and his wife and six children moved to Copenhagen to pursue business.  Gauguin was unsuccessful in his business ventures and decided to devote himself full-time to art. This was good for his painting career but ended up being terrible for his marriage. His wife had married a well-off stockbroker, not a struggling artist.  She became the main bread-winner as a tutor to diplomats and essentially kicked Paul out of the house.

The traveling began as Paul set off for Central America and the Caribbean. He spent time on the island of Martinique in a hut drawing inspiration for his paintings from the nature, native people, and beaches of the island. 

Returning to France for a short time, Gauguin befriended Van Gogh. Gauguin had a reputation as a pugnacious fellow, and although the letter correspondence between the two artists was friendly, in person the pair were volatile, Gauguin claiming that van Gogh once attempted to attack him with a razor. 

Gauguin would spend the rest of his days painting, quarreling with his wife via letters and traveling to and from Tahiti, which he considered an escape from European artificialities. Gauguin, who said “Art is either plagiarism or revolution” died in 1903 at the age of 54 in Tahiti. He achieved moderate success as an artist during his lifetime, and it wasn’t really until after his death that his work and his life achieved the notoriety it enjoys today. 

And today is the birthday of Gwendolyn Brooks, American writer and educator. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 for her book of poetry Annie Allen. Brooks was the first African American to receive a Pulitzer. 

She wrote about life in urban Chicago in a way that readers admired. She did not attempt to hit anyone over the head with a deeper meaning or a moral, rather she wrote what she saw, passing no judgment, though sometimes she couldn’t resist making an ironic joke. On the origins of her work, Brooks said: "I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material."

 

Sara Teasdale

 

They came to tell your faults to me,

They named them over one by one;

I laughed aloud when they were done,

I knew them all so well before,—

Oh, they were blind, too blind to see

Your faults had made me love you more.