American Khmer Rouge

[Thai Dyed]

I will let this speak for itself, but I can't help but feel that Pol Pot would have been right at home with this woman. The amazing thing is that these people are rapidly becoming so ordinary in America and elsewhere. Indeed, "It's bad for the children" has even become a gay mantra.

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washin ... ne-harman- (http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/04/06/gauguin-painting-attacker-aided-lee-hamilton-jane-harman-)

"I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it's very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned." -- Susan Burns

[attachment=0:15t9nz9n]gauguin.jpg[/attachment:15t9nz9n]

[thonglor55]

... I can't help but feel that Pol Pot would have been right at home with this woman ...This poster continues to show a pathetic ignorance of Pol Pot and all he did.

John E. Gedo: The Inner World of Paul Gauguin

In a manner probably unparalleled since Caravaggio in the high art of the West, Gauguin made overt references to homosexuality in these works.

We may best gain entry to the meaning of these startling paintings for their creator by considering that a number of these works depict female homosexuality, that is, scenes that, according to anthropological sources, Gauguin at the turn of the century could not have witnessed in Polynesia. Perhaps most explicit on the score of lesbian activities is the painting Two Women; as if to settle any doubts on the part of a squeamish public, Gauguin placed his familiar fox-devil in the open doorway of the hut where the two lovers embrace. тАж According to Brettell, Gauguin, in part by attempting to tempt them with pornographic images, recruited Marquesan girls to his "House of Pleasure" to participate in orgies. In this sense, he had become the agent of the devil, and his contemporaneous efforts to counteract the missionary work of the Christian clergy parallels the imagery of this painting. It is even possible that such lesbian scenes may have been staged I the "House of Pleasure" at Gauguin's behest.

Two Women is paralleled in theme by the lyrical masterpiece Primitive Tales. As already noted, here the fox-devil assumes the guise of Meyer de Haan, while the pull of religious ideals is represented through the pose assumed by one of the female protagonists, that of a seated Buddha. It is true that no overt sexual activity is represented in this painting, but the allusion to de Haan, as well as the Buddha reference, suggests that memories of Gauguin's homosexually tinged relationship to van Gogh provide the unconscious source of this image. If so, males have been turned into females, and it is the dark-haired Gauguin who is given the role of the Buddhist ascetic, while the red-haired van Gogh is portrayed as the beautiful, sexual temptress. ...

In other words, Gauguin's unfortunate childhood was bound to leave him with longings he would experience as forbidden homosexual temptations. The artist's behavior through the age of 50 shows that overt homosexuality was unacceptable to him; because of his deteriorating health, however, it became increasingly difficult for Gauguin to deal with the problem of passive longings by projecting it onto women, as he had done previously. Hitherto veiled references to perversity now began to occupy a central and overt position in his subject matter, including depictions of both male and female homosexuality. At the same time, the artist's actual behavior apparently changed in the direction of various perverse enactments, although he continued to function as a heterosexual.

We cannot retrospectively answer the question of what determined Gauguin's inability to come to terms with his homosexual impulses. The evidence of the adult artist's progressively bolder commitment to pedophilia, however, lends credence to the postulation that, in the context of feeling abandoned to тАЬsavageтАЭ servants during his mother's sojourn in Peru, the child Paul Gauguin may have lent himself to sexual exploitation. Such a loss of innocence is certainly suggested by the fact that, in his painted summa theologica, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Gauguin depicted the person biting into the apple of the Tree of Knowledge as a young child. Perhaps it was the necessity to forget such a childhood trauma that made it unacceptable to Gauguin to be sexually passive vis-├а-vis other men. At any rate, his inner needs led him to paint a great mythic cycle on Eden before the Fall, inhabited almost exclusively by women, children, and domestic animals. (Source: Jerome A. Winer, The Annual of Psychoanalysis, vol. XXII, 1994)

http://www.paintingall.com/images/P/Paul-Gauguin-Where-do-We-Come-From-What-are-We-Doing-Where-are-We-Going-Oil-Painting.jpg
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?


David Bowman: Paul Gauguin's erotic life

Because we were interested in the lure of the erotic, we discussed Gauguin's possibly monstrous sexuality with biographer Nancy Mowll Mathews.

Would you say he was bisexual?

Yeah. In practice he certainly was. [Pause] Let me back off a little bit. When you say, "Would I say he was bisexual," my first response is that I think he found men more interesting, more compelling. But I don't have any evidence that he acted on that. And we certainly have plenty of evidence that he slept with women. So in an erotic sense, I think both men and women appealed to him. I would say men more often, but women at some times as well. I think he loved to have children. God, the man had a lot of children. He loved the whole idea of someone getting pregnant and showing the world that he still had it.

Gauguin is definitely not politically correct for the 21st century. He liked 13-year-old girls ...

No, that's never sexually politically correct. Absolutely.

You don't make a lot of moral judgment on Gauguin in your book.

This is what I would say about pedophilia or abuses in his sexual relationships: I think in practice it is abominable and should never be perpetuated against unwilling or too innocent people, children or whatever. I think what I admire Gauguin for -- I think I can say this -- is when he put these odd and unpredictable twists of sexuality into his art that actually ended up enhancing it. So even people who would say, "Absolutely not. We can't have the sexualization of children" or "We can't have any glorification of violence within a marriage or a sexual relationship" -- the way Gauguin used those themes in his art ended up being quite compelling.

Can you think of an example of sexual violence?

He did a whole series of Eves in the late 1880s. In one that he did in 1889, Eve is covering her ears and crying out. And he did a wood carving which is usually translated into English as "be in love," but it actually means "be a lover." What's happening is, the self-portrait -- a creature -- has his hand grasping the woman in a kind of gesture of forcefulness. It's the ugliness and monstrousness of this relationship between the man and the woman that is violent, and yet the title, "Be a Lover and You Will Be Happy," is even more perverse. It's not what we think of being in love, all this useless romance. This is hardcore physical force. And ugliness. And this is what Gauguin thinks will make you happy. You know it is frightening. And you want to recoil from it. But as a work of art, it's amazingly compelling as is that earlier Eve which is transformed from the biblical Adam and Eve story where Eve tempted Adam in the fall of man kind of thing. In Gauguin's painting, the snake is a predator. A rapist. He is about to introduce sexuality in Eve's life in a way that frightens her.

I'd love to hear you do a take on his painting "The Loss of Virginity" [the naked girl lying in a field with a fox on her shoulder].

This again is a theme which is very near and dear to his heart -- a young woman who is introduced to sexuality. Her introduction is something that isolates her and isn't part of sanctioned marriage. And on her shoulder is the fox that we presume is the creature that deflowered her. Now a fox in Asian mythology is a creature that turns into a woman in order to seduce a man. In the painting the creature who has been seduced is a woman, so you're very confused about the sexuality that has taken place. The morality of the painting is not clear like most Victorian paintings. Gauguin's painting is one that we're allowed to like. We're encouraged to like and embrace all the bizarre turns that this notion of sexuality has taken. When I look at Gauguin I feel quite comfortable condemning the sexual act or behavior of Gauguin in respect to real circumstance -- I feel very free to be judgmental about his leaving his wife, and not supporting his children, and seducing young women and all that sort of thing -- yet when I look at his art I think he manages to infuse all of these unpredictable notions of sexuality and eroticism, and enliven what could be a fairly standard and fairly boring kind of painting. Does that make sense?

http://dir.salon.com/story/sex/gallerie ... index.html (http://dir.salon.com/story/sex/galleries/2002/08/02/gauguin/index.html)

[Beachlover]

LOL. Read this bit:

"I feel that Gaugin is evil... it's very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned. I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you."

Hey, Thai Dyed... I think we found your soul mate! :occasion9:

[ftj_taw]

LOL. Read this bit:

"I feel that Gaugin is evil... it's very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned. I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you."

Hey, Thai Dyed... I think we found your soul mate! :occasion9:

I find this article posted by Thai dyed interesting and informative. Turning it into a personal attack seems kind of puerile.


This poster continues to show a pathetic ignorance of Pol Pot and all he did.

I agree this is Hyperbole and a half. However, calling it a hyperbole sounds better to me then "pathetic ignorance".

I don't think either of you would talk this way in person. Honest question, are you two one and the same?

[thonglor55]

Honest question, are you two one and the same?Yes, how clever of you to spot that.