Jennifer Tosti-Kharas
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Yeah, so before he was the celebrated world-renowned artist that we know today, Paul Gauguin was a workaday stiff.
He hated this job, which required him to sort of dress up, put in long hours in the office.
And he had this sort of, let's call it a side pursuit, maybe not quite a side hustle, but he certainly had this interest outside of work, which was art and both making art and collecting art.
He was in a situation that so many people do find themselves where essentially to try to make a living, to try to support your family, I mean, truly in a subsistence way, he was casting about for any job he could find.
This is part of the power of this story in the sense of, what if then, to escape this drudgery, I made a radical break?
Might I be better fulfilled or more fulfilled elsewhere?
And in a way that's a lot closer to my passions.
Paul Gauguin took a move that a lot of us wouldn't.
So after trying various attempts to move in new cities, he left everything, truly chucked it all, upended his life and moved to Tahiti and pursued his art full time.
So we know now posthumously he was extremely successful.
And again, he's one of those names that if you can name a few painters, famous painters, he's likely one of them.
would be hard not to say that again given the level of fame notoriety perhaps infamy but you know that he's that he's enjoyed so paul gauguin was so influential not only on his peers so people like vincent van gogh but on you know generations of artists to come not least of which was pablo picasso so
Art historians have drawn a direct line from the oceanic iconography and styling.
You know, it's not completely naturalistic.
It's somewhat abstract representation of form in Gauguin's Tahitian figures and the work of Picasso and Cubism.
So in terms of his impact on art today as we know it, it's been massive and
Therefore, it's very hard to look and say that this gamble didn't pay off.