'because you Gauguin, piss us off.'
Selina Tusitala Marsh
'Two Nudes On a Tahitian Beach, 1894', 2009
Paul Gauguin's name suggests French sailor slang for penis, and he relished the fact. He would sign works 'P.Go.'. He named a dog Pigot. And, indeed, as his joke seems to admit, not much got in the way of him doing his thinking with his own pigot. At 35 he abandoned a wife and children in Europe to visit Tahiti, more or less as a sex tourist. When he died a little over a decade later in 1903, on his second stint in colonial French Polynesia, he was living in a building in Atuona, Hiva Oa, Te Fenua Enana, with a nameplate he had carved for it, Maison De Jonir, 'orgasm house' if you like (the Musée d'Orsay, where this object is now held, goes with 'house of sensual pleasure'). His biographer Maurice Malingue records that the room to which he would take people back to have sex there was decorated with pornography.
A pig he certainly was. An abusive, racist, misogynist paedophile. In Tahiti and Hiva Oa he 'married' three young teenagers, and had sexual relations with numerous others, all while suffering from the syphilis he had arrived with, coronary complications, of a 'less civilized woman', he sought out 'partners with less sexual experience; thus he conflated the “primitive” with “the child”'. His attitudes were indefensible. A Tahitian woman 'lives almost as do animals', he wrote. '[L]ike she-cats, she bites when in heat and claws as if coition were painful. She asks to be raped.' '[G]iving her a good beating every week [makes her] obey a little. She thinks very poorly of the lover who does not beat her.'
