I came across this article in the Washington Post about an exhibition at the National Gallery on Gauguin titled "Maker of Myth." It reminded me of what Professor Blythe was saying in class about the somewhat romanticized (?) life of Van Gogh influencing or being core to some interpretations of his work.
Here Philip Kennicott discusses a curatorial attempt to move away from biography to focus on Gauguin's "production as an artist" back now to a revised interest in narrative and biography, or as stated by the author:
If "Paul Gauguin: Maker of Myth" has a thesis, it is that in undoing the old Gauguin mythology, too much important information was taken off the table. But it is also arguing with the old "modernist" or formalist fetish for Gauguin..."Paul Gauguin: Maker of Myth" is a move towards grappling with both the art and "the exotic, troubled and fascinating life that has attained almost mythological proportions...But Gauguin still awaits a proper understanding...The worst thing about phrases such as "narrative strategies" is that they reduce biographical data to a post-modern stew of moral relativity: Fraudulent self-promotion becomes "self-mythologizing"; theft becomes playful appropriation; the repeated rape of a child - for what else can you call sex with a girl who wasn't mature enough to consent or economically or socially powerful enough to refuse - becomes something grouped under the theme "fictions of femininity."
Van Gogh & Gauguin "Romanticized" (?)
Friday, February 25, 2011 Posted by companion personLabels: art
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