Paul Gauguin - To Cancel or Not?

 My knowledge of Paul Gauguin is neither extensive nor deep, but I know of him and have some ideas in my head of what his art is like.

I knew enough about his legend to know Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence drew on Gauguin for inspiration. Gauguin has embarrassed us for over a century.

Reading Sarah Moorhouse's Turning Savage to Create a New World (Los Angeles Review of Books) taught me something new (Gauguin was anti-colonialist), and gave me a bit to think about.

It seems to me that what is immoral now about the past is because we have learned from the past's immorality. Marrying a 13-year-old may have been legal then, it is now distasteful, as we know the harm done to that 13-year-old by that marriage. Humanity's enlightenment is never fixed; what Gauguin thought was enlightened, is not what we think as enlightened.

Appreciating the art does not mean endorsing what we now deplore in the person. The art is the best of the artist, and improves us. Surely, we are enlightened enough not to fall into the puritanical trap of condemning art for personal failings. Otherwise, we would have no art. Talk about iconoclasm.

sch 6/11