If you strolled down Fifth Avenue last fall [2017], you might have noticed a ten-story-tall nude figure, a reproduction of Paul Gauguin’s “Delightful Land,” covering the façade of Louis Vuitton’s flagship NYC location.
On one side of the building, the sinuous line of a girl’s naked torso plays across the artwork, 50 feet long. Extending a slim arm, the girl presents an unblemished flower to the viewer. Amid the condensed humanity of midtown Manhattan, the girl stands above it all.
The ten-story mural was advertising a high-art collaboration between artist Jeff Koons and Louis Vuitton. Gauguin’s artwork joined a number of other western art works chosen by Koons to be reproduced on purses in the lead-up to the holiday gift-giving season.
But most Fifth Avenue shoppers might not realize that our Louis Vuitton cover girl is likely Teha’amana, a 13-year-old Tahitian whom Paul Gauguin described as his “little mistress with the instinctive ways and the golden body.” Teha’amana was Gauguin’s first sexual partner when he moved to the islands at the age of 43.
Coughing up blood from advanced venereal disease, Gauguin came to Tahiti from France after the pressures of supporting a wife and five children had grown too burdensome. The islands, he expected, would be an inspiring world of cheap living and unconfined sexuality.
In reality, the island’s social and religious landscape had been long-shaped by Christian missions. The “delightful land” he expected to find was nonexistent—a more common sight would be Tahitian girls in neck-high dresses on their way to bible study.
Yet Gauguin still managed to take three “brides,” aged 13, 14, and 15, and create a body of work detailing a mythical world of sexual availability, more fantasy than reality. The nude portraits of his child brides remain some of Gauguin’s most celebrated work.
But in our time, can we turn a blind eye to Gauguin’s well-documented history of predation? Avoidance turns out to be the rule, not the exception, when dealing with Gauguin. The repackaging of an abused girl as a luxury purse betrays a failure by cultural institutions to address the questionable legacies of brilliant artists.
Source.
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letsdothis3 ago
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