There cannot have been many other artists who set out as wholeheartedly to live the life they envisioned in their art as Paul Gauguin did. He lived between two worlds. In this art he held up a mirror to his own civilization, which he despised, and showed an alter native, primitive life in all its simple, naive harmony. But painting it was not enough for Gauguin. He wanted to experience it himself. He wanted to prove that South Sea exoticism was not merely a forced and magical escapism, of the kind that was fascinating his European con temporaries in an age of world fairs and newspaper reports. Gauguin personified a new union of art and life, imagination and order, and in anticipating this predominant 20th century characteristic he became one of the true pioneers of modernism.
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