PAUL GAUGUIN incarnates in its purest form what so many people have been faking for the past three generations. Here was the first, and perhaps the grandest, of the Great Refusers. In this creature of Gargantuan appetites and legendary cussedness, who turned his back on Western bourgeois culture, we may plausibly discern the spiritual father and grandfather of everyone from Duchamp and Pollock to Julian Schnabel and Joseph Beuys. When so many of the vanguardists of his day had settled down into a comfortable middle-class existence, Gauguin was traveling to the ends of the earth in search of a ...
