Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals

by Van Wyck Brooks (Translator), Émile Gauguin (Preface), Paul Gauguin (Artist) "The journals reveal his sincere desire to advocate for the same exotic "primitives” he simultaneously admired and grossly fetishized.” – Lee Ann Norman, Brooklyn Rail Unappreciated in his own lifetime, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) is now recognized as one of the giants of French postimpressionism and a pioneer of early modernism. A rebel in both art and life, he rejected his bourgeois upbringing and comfortable stockbroker's job to devote his life to painting. Eventually, dismayed by the "hypocrisy of civilization" and in search of a primitive idyll, he left Paris and took up residence in the South Seas, first in Tahiti and, later, in the Marquesas Islands. He would never return to Europe. In the final months of his life, he wrote this witty, revealing autobiographical memoir with the request that it be published upon his death. It first appeared in the original French in 1918, and was translated into English