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Gauche Gaugin

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by Callen Bair
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Nov 05 2007 12:00am EDT

Gauche Gaugin?

Carol Vogel parsed through the catalogues for Christie's and Sotheby's sales of impressionist/modern and post-war/contemporary art in the New York Times yesterday and planted the suggestion that the Tahitian Gaugin being offered by Sotheby's may have trouble fetching a price within its estimate ($40 million - $60 million) because the woman in the painting is squatting in the water. It looks a lot like she is going to the bathroom, as opposed to, say, bathing herself.

I'll take issue with this. People frequently buy pieces that you might call explicit, vulgar, even offensive. (John Currin's boderline pornographic paintings come to mind.) And sometimes these even make it into the canon of art history — think Manet's Olympia. The Gaugin, by comparison, looks pretty mild.

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Paul Gaugin, Te Poipoi, Photo Credit: Sotheby's

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