Paul Gauguin was not only a genius as a painter, I get the feeling he was probably a lot of fun to hang out with. Certainly more than his friend Vincent Van Gogh, who was always living in dark, depressing places and arguing with people and getting insulted that people didn’t love him enough and whatnot.
Does this look lesbian? Oh. Yeah. I guess it does.
Van Gogh started off as a preacher, but he kind of sucked at it. He had the religious fervor, all right, but he never really communicated well with people and all of his parishioners could tell at a glance that he was a couple of shades short of a full pallette.
Gauguin started off as a stockbroker, but once he started painting he got more and more obsessed with it and eventually his wife threw him and his easels and brushes and paint covered smocks and all that stuff out the door. Maybe it was the painting, maybe it was alcohol and whores, I don’t know. Wikipedia is bowdlerized and I’m not doing any real research, but he did like the ladies.
Him and Vincent really didn’t live together that long, less than 3 months, but that was the time of the famous argument which ended with Vincent cutting off his ear. Historians differ, it’s really hard to know why Vincent did it, because he was nuts and there’s no figuring out why a crazy person does stuff. Some say the two argued over art, some say they were secret lovers ( I doubt that. No real evidence that either of them was homosexual), some say Vincent was trying to impress a lady. My theory is that he was insanely jealous of Gauguin, because Vincent had to pay models extra just to get naked in front of him because he was so weird and scary, and Gauguin got laid all the time, because he was a good looking dude and actually fairly sociable.
Anyway, after that, Gauguin sailed off to the islands of the Pacific where he produced his greatest work and had love affairs with lots of 13 year old Polynesian girls. Van Gogh kept getting better and better as an artist but also progressively more insane until one day he just up and put a bullet through his head. 13 years later, Gauguin died of syphilis.
Crazy Lady Susan Burns
Anyway, it seems to me that Gauguin had a way of pissing people off just because some depressed, miserable people can’t stand to see anybody else having a good time. His wife. Van Gogh. And Susan Burns, an American lady with crazy eyes and repressed urges (hey, we’ve all got ’em) who attacked a Gauguin painting in a D.C. museum yesterday, saying it glorified lesbianism and she wanted it burned. The painting was behind glass, another museum patron grabbed her, and no harm was done.
She told police she works for the CIA and has a radio in her head.
Anyway, if you were to ask me what famous person from history I’d most like to party with, I think Paul Gauguin would have to be pretty high on the list.
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