LPPM MMV "Gauguin and Eliot and Grossmann"

[Dave Monroe]

"But Siegel wondered how in the hell it was possible
for anyone to sink roots in a town at once as middle
class and as cosmopolitan as Washington. You could
become bourgeois or one of the international set but
this could happen in any city. Unless it had nothing
to do with the place at all and was a question of
compulsion--unless there was something which linked
people like Gaugin and Eliot and Grossmann, some
reason which gave them no other choice; and this was
why, when it had happened in Boston and now maybe even
in Washington, for god's sake, Siegel felt uneasy and
unwilling to think about it too much."  (MMV, p. 5)


"Gaugin and Eliot and Grossmann"

Gauguin

Gauguin, (Eugène-Henri-) Paul (b. June 7, 1848, Paris,
Fr.--d. May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas
Islands, French Polynesia), one of the leading French
painters of the Postimpressionist period, whose
development of a conceptual method of representation
was a decisive step for 20th-century art. After
spending a short period with Vincent van Gogh in Arles
(1888), Gauguin increasingly abandoned imitative art
for expressiveness through colour. From 1891 he lived
and worked in Tahiti and elsewhere in the South
Pacific. His masterpieces include the early Vision
After the Sermon (1888) and Where Do We Come From?
What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98). 

Although his main achievements were to lie elsewhere,
Gauguin was, to use a fanciful metaphor, nursed in the
bosom of Impressionism. His attitudes to art were
deeply influenced by his experience of its first
exhibition, and he himself participated in those of
1880, 1881 and 1882. The son of a French journalist
and a Peruvian Creole, whose mother had been a writer
and a follower of Saint-Simon, he was brought up in
Lima, joined the merchant navy in 1865, and in 1872
began a successful career as a stockbroker in Paris. 

In 1874 he saw the first Impressionist exhibition,
which completely entranced him and confirmed his
desire to become a painter....

[...]

Gauguin's art has all the appearance of a flight from
civilisation, of a search for new ways of life, more
primitive, more real and more sincere. His break away
from a solid middle-class world, abandoning family,
children and job, his refusal to accept easy glory and
easy gain are the best-known aspects of Gauguin's
fascinating life and personality. This picture, also
known as Two women on the beach, was painted in 1891,
shortly after Gauguin's arrival in Tahiti. During his
first stay there (he was to leave in 1893, only to
return in 1895 and remain until his death), Gauguin
discovered primitive art, with its flat forms and the
violent colors belonging to an untamed nature. And
then, with absolute sincerity, he transferred them
onto canvas.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gauguin/

And se as well, e.g., ...

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/gauguin_paul.html

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/gauguin.html

Eliot

Eliot, T. S. (26 Sept. 1888-4 Jan. 1965), poet,
critic, and editor, was born Thomas Stearns Eliot in
St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Henry Ware Eliot,
president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and
Charlotte Champe Stearns, a former teacher, an
energetic social work volunteer at the Humanity Club
of St. Louis, and an amateur poet with a taste for
Emerson....

[...]

Eliot's attending Harvard seems to have been a
foregone conclusion. His father and mother, jealously
guarding their connection to Boston's Unitarian
establishment, brought the family back to the north
shore every summer, and in 1896 built a substantial
house at Eastern Point, in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
As a boy, Eliot foraged for crabs and became an
accomplished sailor, trading the Mississippi River in
the warm months for the rocky shoals of Cape Ann.
Later he said that he gave up a sense of belonging to
either region, that he always felt like a New
Englander in the Southwest, and a Southwesterner in
New England....

[...]

In December 1908 a book Eliot found in the Harvard
Union library changed his life: Arthur Symons's The
Symbolist Movement in Literature (1895) ...

[...]

In the fall of 1911, though, Eliot was as preoccupied
with ideas as with literature. A student in what has
been called the golden age of Harvard philosophy, he
worked amid a group that included Santayana, William
James, the visiting Bertrand Russell, and Josiah
Royce....

[...]

Eliot spent the early summer of 1914 at a seminar in
Marburg, Germany, with plans to study in the fall at
Merton College, Oxford...

In early spring 1915 Eliot's old Milton Academy and
Harvard friend Scofield Thayer, later editor of the
Dial and then also at Oxford, introduced Eliot to
Vivien Haigh-Wood .... in June 1915 he married Vivien
on impulse at the Hampstead Registry Office.... Vivien
refused to cross the Atlantic in wartime, and Eliot
took his place in literary London.... 

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/eliot.htm

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~232/eliot.taken.html

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=18

http://www.bartleby.com/people/Eliot-Th.html

"... Grossmann, a proud and stubborn native of Chicago
who denied the presence of any civilization outside of
Cook County and for whom Boston was worse even than
Oak Park, was in fact, a sort of apotheosis of the
effete and the puritan ...." (MMV, p. 4)


		
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