Will Sing You One-O

It was long I lay
Awake that night
Wishing that night
Would name the hour
And tell me whether
To call it day
(Though not yet light)
And give up sleep.
The snow fell deep
With the hiss of spray;
Two winds would meet,
One down one street,
One down another,
And fight in a smother
Of dust and feather.
I could not say,
But feared the cold
Had checked the pace
Of the tower clock
By tying together
Its hands of gold
Before its face.

Then cane one knock!
A note unruffled
Of earthly weather,
Though strange and muffled.
The tower said, "One!'
And then a steeple.
They spoke to themselves
And such few people
As winds might rouse
From sleeping warm
(But not unhouse).
They left the storm
That struck en masse
My window glass
Like a beaded fur.
In that grave One
They spoke of the sun
And moon and stars,
Saturn and Mars
And Jupiter.
Still more unfettered,
They left the named
And spoke of the lettered,
The sigmas and taus
Of constellations.
They filled their throats
With the furthest bodies
To which man sends his
Speculation,

Beyond which God is;
The cosmic motes
Of yawning lenses.
Their solemn peals
Were not their own:
They spoke for the clock
With whose vast wheels
Theirs interlock.
In that grave word
Uttered alone
The utmost star
Trembled and stirred,
Though set so far
Its whirling frenzies
Appear like standing
in one self station.
It has not ranged,
And save for the wonder
Of once expanding
To be a nova,
It has not changed
To the eye of man
On planets over
Around and under
It in creation
Since man began
To drag down man
And nation nation.

By Robert Frost

Without you

My Pillow gazes upon me at night
Empty as a gravestone;
I never thought it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Not to lie down asleep in your hair.

I lie alone in a silent house,
The hanging lamp darkened,
And gently stretch out my hands
To gather in yours,
And softly press my warm mouth
Toward you, and kiss myself, exhausted and weak-
Then suddenly I'm awake
And all around me the cold night grows still.
The star in the window shines clearly-
Where is your blond hair,
Where your sweet mouth?

Now I drink pain in every delight
And poison in every wine;
I never knew it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Alone, without you.

Hermann Hesse

Your Feet

When I cannot look at your face

I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

by Pablo Neruda

Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Breaking with Tradition

          Perhaps the most radical painting of the twentieth-century, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, hangs unobtrusively at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This large canvas, measuring 96" x 92", was to revolutionize modern painting by charting a new way of depicting reality. In 1907 its painter, Pablo Picasso, broke all of the rules that the "artistically correct" learned at the art academies: he disposed of three-dimensional perspective, abandoned harmonious proportion, used distortion, and borrowed from the art of primitive cultures. In fact, the painting was such a revolutionary statement that when the painting was first viewed by some French critics, the painter Derain even suggested to Picasso that he would one day commit suicide for the shame that he had brought on the art establishment          Originally Les Demoiselles was going to be an allegory of venereal disease entitled "The Wages of Sin." In the study for the painting, Picasso sketched a sailor carousing in a brothel amongst prostitutes and a young medical student holding a skull, a symbol for mortality. But the subsequent painting is quite different from the original sketch: only the women appear. And these women are not the traditional nudes that viewers had become so accustomed to in the 1880's when Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec had begun to capture them in the moment of the "parade," whereby prostitutes announced their wares and services to their clients. Nor are these women feminine and beautiful as Ingres’ Venus Anadyomene. Then who are these women in this brothel in Barcelona's Avignon Street and why do they appear the way they do? Perhaps the answers to these questions lie in Picasso's fear of women in general. Their flesh is not depicted as being soft and inviting but sharp and knifelike. In fact, their flesh suggests castration and fear of women. As Robert Hughes implies, "No painter put his anxiety about impotence and castration more plainly than Picasso did in Les Demoiselles, or projected it through a more violent dislocation of form. Even the melon, that sweet and pulpy fruit, looks like a weapon". But are there any other reasons why Picasso gives these women these shocking forms?         

 As an artist living in Paris at the beginning of the new 20^th century, Picasso wanted to find a new artistic language that could express the vitality of the new millennium. Although the world was rapidly changing, artists had not kept pace and were still wallowing in the aesthetic ideas of the nineteenth-century. The real world had radically changed, for it had become mechanized by technology. Moreover, philosophers such as Alfred Whitehead and F. H. Bradley and the physicist Alfred Einstein were altering the way modern man perceived reality: the world of old Newtonian values of absolute space and time was rapidly crumbling. Instead, modern man was being forced to live in a world where there are no simple locations and where all relations are plural. Picasso posed the problem to himself of how to capture this new acceleration of life and consequent plurality of points of view on a canvas. He proposed to solve this aesthetic problem by creating a new way of representing pictorial space.          Since the late 18th century, artists had been re-evaluating the Renaissance's concept of pictorial space, created through the means of linear and atmospheric perspective, whereby a fixed spectator observed a cube of space in which the sense of depth was created by a geometric diminution of objects in scale and in clarity as, apparently, they receded into the distance.. For Picasso, this rendering of space was no longer valid because the "fixed spectator" no longer existed. Now the modern spectator had been transformed into someone who was in constant movement, forced to look at objects from several points of view. Picasso became obsessed with what he regarded as the anachronistic artistic rules governing the representation of three-dimensional form on a flat surface and with reconciling them with the new modern acceleration. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon represents a working out of this reconciliation. His solution was to paint five nude contorted women.          Now let's examine why he would portray them in such a manner. If we examine the seated woman to our right, you'll notice that her face and arms are facing us but her torso, buttocks and extremities are turned away from us. In other words, Picasso lets us simultaneously glimpse at different aspects of this woman that a fixed viewer could not ordinarily do so. In other words, Picasso is trying to show us a composite of this woman from as many different points of view as possible so that we may experience her in her totality. Picasso does the very same thing to the woman standing to our left. If we examine her closely, we will notice that she is ambiguously portrayed. First of all, her face is depicted both laterally and frontally. She is posed like an ancient Egyptian form who looks to the side but whose eye looks directly to the front. Furthermore, if we inspect her body, we will discover something very odd. Her right side is depicted dorsally, whereas her left side is portrayed frontally. It's as if Picasso has twisted her body so that we may get a glimpse of as many aspects of her as possible. In other words, Picasso wants to show us this woman in her entirety.

 In rendering the new reality, Picasso also abandons harmonious bodily proportions. This, of course, was done on purpose since Picasso had been trained at art school how to render the human figure through mathematical proportions. The woman located at the very center of the canvas is quite disproportionate, elongated as though she were a figure out of an El Greco painting. If we focus on her extremities, they seem to go on forever, as if her short-waisted torso was out of context with the rest of her body. And so it goes for the rest of the figures in the picture. Was there any precedent for doing such a thing? Picasso's Les Demoiselles is a homage to Paul Cézanne'sThe Bathers. Not only do both works echo Cezanne's dictum of "the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere," but both paintings distort the human body. However, whereas Cezanne distorts the women in The Bathers in order to bring the viewer into the pictorial plane and to balance the figures and structures within the painting, Picasso does so for a different purpose. Picasso distorts each of these women to show who is in power—that  he can take control and mangle them—and  that, in the final analysis, they still threaten him as human beings.

 But this distortion and use of pure geometrical shapes are not the only elements that Picasso borrows from Cezanne's work. Picasso limits his palette just as Cezanne does because both are concerned more with the rendering of form than with the use of color. To have used more colors than the blues, pinks, ochres, rusts, and grays that he employs would have been distracting. Furthermore, these colors are totally flat, as though to suggest that these women are linearly rendered, "constructed" rather than modeled.          Les Demoiselles is also disturbing in the ghastly and violent way that the women's faces are portrayed. Georges Braque went so far as to say that "Picasso was drinking turpentine and spitting fire". But these women appeared the way they do for very specific reasons. These women are, after all, prostitutes who are cold, calculating businesswomen who dabble in sex for a profit and who practice a "savage" profession. The three women on the left look as though they were made from stone, and, remember, the onlooker is a sexual voyeur who is experiencing sexual anxiety. There is nothing inviting about either of them. Their faces are derived from the pre-Roman Iberian bronzes that Picasso had seen in the Louvre and had been experimenting with since 1906. The two remaining women's faces are borrowed from African sculpture, a jarring juxtaposition. Perhaps one of the reasons why he did this is to suggest the dark, uncivilized nature of the "oldest" profession. Another reason is that these women represent a composite of the Spanish people, descended from native tribes the Iberian peninsula, north Africa, and middle-eastern Jews.  Furthermore, perhaps Picasso is even alluding to the final stages of syphilis, whereby the human face becomes a bulbous mask of thickened skin. But maybe Picasso’s interest in deforming their faces is purely a formal one, a means of negating realism and embracing abstraction and distortion. Nevertheless, this plundering of African art was revolutionary in that Picasso uses it to shock the viewer through brutality and savagery. Painting was never to be the same.

  In the final analysis, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the perfect example of how the worn, accepted traditions of art were questioned and transformed by an artist who was all too willing to be influenced by the intellectual and artistic environment of his times as well as by his own neurosis.

Your Words of Love

I have seemingly missed your words of love, 
Those words that were written in the sand 
And erased by the first wave.
Do you remember, my love? 
I have enclosed them hermetically 
With that last kiss.
And, after that, 
Another kiss 
And another exotic beach 
And another feeling, autumnal feeling, 
Of another ostensible seemingly love
Fulfilled my nothingness...
Among corals and shells, 
Dried by the winds of the sea, 
I awake in following my lost steps, 
Taken by the waves 
And redirected to the great unknown in the sea, 
That great eternal.....
I still love you, 
I love you more, miss you more.
Yes, I still miss you
And I realize that all I can do now 
Is to lodge near the moan of the sea sand, 
Which feels like a silk slipped worn-out dress, 
When I touch it.
And slantingly I elect the oblivion, 
When 
I want to kiss again and again
Your gray-haired temple, 
But, in reverting, I receive only 
The kiss of our child... 

Marieta Maglas

A Brave and Startling Truth

A Brave and Startling Truth

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet 
Traveling through casual space 
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns 
To a destination where all signs tell us 
It is possible and imperative that we learn 
A brave and startling truth 

And when we come to it 
To the day of peacemaking 
When we release our fingers 
From fists of hostility 
And allow the pure air to cool our palms 

When we come to it 
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate 
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean 
When battlefields and coliseum 
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters 
Up with the bruised and bloody grass 
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil 

When the rapacious storming of the churches 
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased 
When the pennants are waving gaily 
When the banners of the world tremble 
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze 

When we come to it 
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders 
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce 
When land mines of death have been removed 
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace 
When religious ritual is not perfumed 
By the incense of burning flesh 
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake 
By nightmares of abuse 

When we come to it 
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids 
With their stones set in mysterious perfection 
Nor the Gardens of Babylon 
Hanging as eternal beauty 
In our collective memory 
Not the Grand Canyon 
Kindled into delicious color 
By Western sunsets 

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe 
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji 
Stretching to the Rising Sun 
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor, 
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores 
These are not the only wonders of the world 

When we come to it 
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe 
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger 
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace 
We, this people on this mote of matter 
In whose mouths abide cankerous words 
Which challenge our very existence 
Yet out of those same mouths 
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness 
That the heart falters in its labor 
And the body is quieted into awe 

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet 
Whose hands can strike with such abandon 
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living 
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness 
That the haughty neck is happy to bow 
And the proud back is glad to bend 
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction 
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines 

When we come to it 
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body 
Created on this earth, of this earth 
Have the power to fashion for this earth 
A climate where every man and every woman 
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety 
Without crippling fear 

When we come to it 
We must confess that we are the possible 
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world 
That is when, and only when 
We come to it. 

Maya Angelou

Danaë by Gustav Klimt

Danaë is an oil painting by Gustav Klimt, created in 1907. The canvas measures 77 x 83 cm, is cataloged as Symbolism (arts)|Symbolism, and is housed in the Galerie Würthle in Vienna. Danaë was a popular subject in the early 1900’s for many artists; she was used as the quintessential symbol of divine love, and Transcendence (philosophy)|transcendence. While imprisoned by her father, King of Argos, in a tower of bronze, Danaë was visited by Zeus, symbolized here as the golden rain flowing between her legs. It is apparent from the subject's face that she is sexual arousal|aroused by the golden stream. In this work, she is curled in a sumptuous royal purple veil which refers to her imperial lineage. Sometime after her celestial visitation she gave birth to a son, Perseus, who is cited later in Greek mythology for slaying the Gorgon Medusa and rescuing Andromeda (mythology)|Andromeda. Many other early portrayals of Danaë were often erotic; other paintings completed in similar style are Klimt’sMedicine (Klimt Painting)|Medicine (1900- 1907), and Water Snakes(1904 – 1907).Payne, Laura. Klimt. Bath, UK: Parragon Publishing, 2004.

KISS: Sylvia Plath / The Colossus

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KISS: Charles Bukowski / As The Poems Go

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GAUGUIN IN THE TROPICS

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The life and works of Paul Gauguin in Tahiti and the Marquises

In the spring of 1891, an elegant and comfortable ship calledOcéanien crosses the Indic Ocean en route to the French colonies in New Caledonia. Its picturesque passengers, divided into three classes under the deck, covered from rich, important functionaries and landowners; to young people of humble origins who traveled to the colonies searching a future that the old France was not able to assure. In other words, the transoceanic ship was sort of a human zoo, a circus with so many actors that nobody noticed the presence of a middle age man with a powerful moustache, who spent the endless hours sitting on the deck, gazing into the horizon. Nevertheless, that anonymous personage who occupied one of the humble third-class cabins was not an ordinary passenger. He was an admired painter called Paul Gauguin, who travelled to Tahiti searching an artistic redemption, a comeback to the primitive and the exotic that could help him to find a way in which his Art could be purified. In his own words, "Occident is rotten (.) and anyone who is like Hercules can find new strengths travelling to far-away places. And coming back one or two years after, solid"
Nevertheless, Gauguin's trip was not exactly a "poor man's odyssey". In fact, he asked the French ambassador to personally welcome him at Papeete 's harbour, as an official guest of the French Government. In addition, Papeete -the Tahitian capital- was not the tropical paradise that it could have been in former times, the exotic and mysterious town found by great travellers like the legendary Captain Cook. No, Gauguin soon realized that such paradise had been killed after many years of civilian, military and religious colonization. However, there still persisted, in those towns far enough from the capital, an important part of the autochthon and primitive culture Gauguin was searching.
WAS GAUGUIN A COLONIZER?
In the last decades, some art critics and historians -much more documented, perspicacious, and of course malicious than in the past- have claimed to have identified in Gauguin's paternalistic attitude during his first years in Tahiti (when he described Polynesians as "meek" and even "fool") some intentions that could be comparable to those of the first colonizers, who aggressively tried to impose to the natives the laws and faith of the Old Continent.
In "Ia Orana Maria (Salve, Maria)" (New York, Metropolitan Museum ), a work created in 1891, his first year in Tahiti, Gauguin transferred the Catholic iconography to the exotic South Pacific. The Madonna, the child, and even the two women in adoration and the golden-winged angel in the background, are clearly Polynesian natives. Here Gauguin introduced the Catholic Faith in the local culture, making the natives the protagonists of the religious scenes. Nevertheless, this painting, whose composition is very different from those of the European tradition, to the point of that we can not determine with certain if it is an "Annunciation" or an "Adoration", is followed by many works in which the ancestral beliefs of the natives are the protagonists, as in "Manao tupapau" ("The spirit of the dead watches you" (Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery), considered by Gauguin himself as one of the masterworks of his first Tahitian period. The artist talked about the painting in these words: " This people have a traditional fear to the spirit of dead people (...) I have represented the apparition as a simple little woman because the girl (...) can only see it as a person that she met, a person like herself".
With this painting, Gauguin progressively abandoned the Catholic themes and began to introduce himself into the native beliefs, although he temporary recovered the Christian themes in some paintings such as "Te Tamari No Atua (The birth of Christ") (Munich, Neue Pinakothek) or "Maternité"(two versions, one in the Ermitage and another sold in 2004 at Sotheby's for $39.2 million). These ancestral beliefs achieved a predominant position not only in his artistic oeuvre, but also in his personality. The Catholic "colonizer" had turned into a ferocious detractor of the Catholic Church, while in his interior he began to accept the primitive native beliefs, as we can see in "The white horse" (Paris, Museé de Orsay), in the supreme "Matamua - in olden times-" from the Thyssen collection, which depicts a legendary valley in the middle of the island, in which its inhabitants "still live as in past times"; or in the many statuettes of Gods and idols that he made in the following years.
IDOLS AND GODS
In the last years of his life in the Marquises, Gauguin wrote about the Polynesian sculpture tradition: "This Art has disappeared because of the missionaries, who have considered that sculpture, decoratation, was fetishism, an offence to God". He was right. In fact, at the end of the 19th century, almost all the ancient Polynesian wood sculptures had been destroyed by the devastating Christian missions. Gauguin embarked on an epic work: to give back to the natives their destroyed mythology.
Unfortunately, almost all of the sculptures Gauguin created in Tahiti were carved in low-quality wood, which caused its premature destruction. Nevertheless, the Orsay Museum in Paris conserves two little statuettes of this creative period: the "Idol of the shell" and the "Idol of the pearl". The date of both sculptures, although inexact, can be situated around 1892. In both figures Gauguin has represented the Polynesian god Taaroa, whose shell contains -according to the Polynesian tradition- the entire universe. But it was in 1894, back in Paris (we will talk about this comeback in the next chapter) when Gauguin created his undisclosed masterpiece in sculpture: the statuette of "Oviri" (Paris, Orsay Museum), a sinister representation of the Polynesian God of the death and the mourning. The figure, which Gauguin called La Tueuse(The killer) is a disturbing female figure of primitive and crude gestures, long hair and huge eyes, which stands over the terrific figure of a dead wolf.
But this iconographic recuperation that Gauguin made is not only visible in the three-dimensional works: in the following years, the artist transferred this "invented" iconography to his paintings, where he did find more possibilities: in the canvas, the gods and idols could change its scale, turning into the main protagonists of the scene ("The day of the gods", 1894); or in spirits as disturbing apparitions ("Riders in the beach", 1902)
THE INTERMISSION IN FRANCE
But Gauguin's life in Tahiti was far from being paradisiacal: in addition to the heartrending solitude and his perennial economic difficulties, it was added, in the last months of 1892, an illness in his eyes, added to constant diarrheas and coughing up of blood that forced him to be hospitalized for many months. Desperate, he wrote to the French Ministry begging him for a repatriation that took place at the end of the following year.
Back at home, and after being hospitalized in Paris in much better sanitary conditions than in the Polynesian islands, (and after receiving the inheritance of his uncle Isidore), his physical and economical situation improved. He rented an apartment in Paris and lived there with Annah the Javanese. In addition, Gauguin exhibited fifty of his works in an important exhibition of modern Art in Copenhagen. In other words, nobody could suppose that Gauguin's adventure in the Polynesia could be repeated.
But Gauguin returned. He returned two years later, after discovering that he had contracted syphilis. He returned after a brawl in which his ankle was broken. He returned after painting in Paris a praise, a fantasy of the Tahitian culture, the masterwork entitled "Mahana no Atua (The day of the gods") (Chicago, Art Institute), in which the goddess Hina is adored by a group of women who dance surrounded by multicolour waters. In short, he returned after realizing that his place was no more among the European people. "What a stupid way of life, the European way of life!" On April 3rd, Gauguin left Europe, never to return again.
"I AM A CRIMINAL" - BACK IN TAHITI
"I want to end my life here, in the solitude of my shack. Oh yes, here I am a criminal, but... what is wrong with that? Michelangelo was also a criminal."
Back in Tahiti, Gauguin felt liberated, free of any artistic or social corset. In his progressive separation from any vestige of the European society, he left Papeete and moved to a sack in the middle of the countryside, perhaps searching that fabulous valley he had depicted in the "Matamua".
Free of these social conventions, Gauguin created a newArtistic Eve using Tahitian women as his model. The artist had never hidden his admiration for Tahitian young women, even for the too young ones (his lover Pau'ura was only 14 years old), and, during his French intermission, he boasted in front of his friends about his conquests, saying that every night several Tahitian girls jumped into his bed "as possessed by evil spirits" (an attitude that gave him a nice syphilis) The female figure is the protagonist in such famous works as "Te arii Vahine (The queen of the beauty") (1896, Moscow, Pushkin Museum), "Girls with mango flowers (or Two Tahitian)" (1899, New York, Metropolitan Museum.)
Another paradigmatical work of this period is the famous"Nevermore" (1897, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London), a work in which the female nude is still visible. Nevertheless, something from the old Europe is still present in the work: the painting pays tribute to the famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe, which Gauguin had listened at the Café Voltaire. However, the raven -main protagonist of Poe's story, in which it is depicted as sinister and menacing- is in Gauguin's canvas not as important as the strong and vibrant female nude.
WHERE DO WE COME FROM? WHAT ARE WE? WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Paul Gauguin affirmed that after painting “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going” he tried to commit suicide. We don't know for certain if that confession was true or not, but it's a fact that just before painting his masterwork, a series of events followed each other in a dramatic sequence, as presaging a tragic end that would happen five years later. First, his economic situation became extremely difficult –however, he rejected an important amount of money offered by the Ministry because he considered it a “charity”- while the syphilis and the alcoholism turned his physical situation into a torture. Nevertheless, the worst hit arrived by mail: in the spring of 1891, a letter informed him of the death of his daughter Aline, age 21. This tragic event provoked not only the break-up with his wife –irrationally accusing her of Aline's death- but also his definitive rupture with any vestige of faith. In a devastating letter wrote that year, Gauguin affirmed: “My daughter is dead. Now I don't need God.”
In such psychical condition Gauguin embarks on the epic mission of creating his artistic testament, a work that resumes all his other creations: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? is not only the most colossal canvas ever painted by Paul Gauguin, but it's also the work that explains the entire philosophical and pictorial doctrine of the artist.
In a striking horizontal format, the canvas follows an inverted chronological order, beginning at the left corner with the heartrending figure of an ancient mummy in fetal position, her ears covered with her hands; while at the right corner, a baby, symbol of the life and the innocence, is surrounded by three Tahitian young women. At the centre of the picture, the figure of a man who takes a fruit symbolizes the temptation of the man. Structuring the canvas in an inverted chronological order, Gauguin seems to point the primitive, the innocent, as the only one way for the artist.
THE LAST CHORD - FLIGHT INTO THE MARQUISES
In September 1901, Gauguin left Tahiti and took up his residence in the Marquises Islands. The reason of this flight is still not clarified: while his admirers suggest that the artist was seeking a new stage to his artistic concerns, many historians have noted that his physical deterioration was so evident that his popularity among Tahitian girls was below zero, forcing him to long periods of abstinence. Anyways, Gauguin established himself in Hiva Da, the main island of the Marquises archipelago, in the lands owned by the Catholic Church. Just before his trip, he painted a beautiful farewell to Tahiti in his " Idyll in Tahiti" (1901, Zurich , E. G. Buhrle collection)
The female figure is still a fundamental part in his artistic oeuvre. In "Contes Barbares" ("exotic legends", 1902, Essen, Folkwang Museum ), Gauguin once again praised Polynesian beauty, depicting two beautiful girls, sitting in an exotic landscape. Behind them, Gauguin represented the figure of his friend Meyer de Hann, a Parisian poet. It is quite curious that the figure of the western man is depicted as a demon with feline eyes and sharpening claws.
Nevertheless, Gauguin was at the time beginning to sense his own death: his physical deterioration was then unstoppable, and the artist was tempted -for the first time in many years- to return to Europe. However, he was still strong enough to paint. His compositions from these last years are full of metaphors for death, as it is evident in his last masterwork, the two versions of "Riders on the beach" (Essen, Folkwang Museum, and Niarchos collection). In this kind of tribute to Degas racetrack pictures, Gauguin represented the riders in an apparently endless beach. The whole picture is filled with the melancholic taste of a farewell, as predicting the artist's own death a few months later: the riders are quietly approaching to the seaside, where a breaker wave marks the limit between land and sea -or between life and death- from where two mysterious, colour-dressed spirits have appeared, perhaps to accompany the spirits in their last trip. The fancy coloured work is Gauguin's pictorial testament and an eloquent ode to the Polynesian way of life.
On May 8th, 1903, in the middle of multiple physical, economical and juridical problems, Gauguin died. The legend, not always veridical, tells that the natives, informed of the artist's death, began to shout: "Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!"

By  G. Fernández