The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (17 page)

When Gauguin returned to Tahiti in 1895, he expected to resume housekeeping with Tehura. But she had meanwhile married an islander. Although she did visit the painter for about a week as a sort of hut-warming present, she was frightened by his syphilitic sores and went back to her husband. Gauguin had lost his mate, but many others filled the void. “My bed has been invaded every night by young hussies running wild,” he complained at one point. “Yesterday I had three.” Looking for a “serious woman for the house,” he briefly settled down with a pretty 14-year-old named Pahura, but she was not as stimulating as Tehura. Still, he did a nude of her,
Arii Vahine
(“The Noblewoman”), which he considered “the best I have ever painted.”

In 1901 he moved to a 1 1/4-acre lot on one of the Marquesas, where he built a hut that he decorated with pornographic photos. In a bed into whose wooden frame Gauguin had carved an erotic scene, he slept with virtually any native woman willing to overlook the open sores festering on his legs. Whenever

a new girl entered his hut, he would explore her body underneath her dress and say to her, “I must paint you.” Although his syphilis grew progressively worse, it was a heart attack that eventually killed him in 1903.

Gauguin’s son by Pahura, named Émile, boasted of his illustrious parentage and always hoped to become a painter of some note himself, but he died in poverty at the age of 80, in January of 1980.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“In Europe intercourse between men and women is a result of love. In Oceania love is a result of intercourse. Which is right? The man or woman who gives his body is said to commit a small sin. That is debatable….

The real sin is committed by the man or woman who sells his body.”

“Women want to be free. That’s their right. And it is certainly not men who stand in their way. The day a woman’s honor is no longer located below the navel, she will be free. And perhaps healthier, too.”

—W.A.D.

The Dejected Dutchman

VINCENT VAN GOGH (Mar. 30, 1853–July 29, 1890)

HIS FAME:
Among Dutch painters, Van Gogh, a Postimpressionist, is generally considered second only to Rembrandt. His masterpieces include
The Potato
Eaters
and
L’Arlésienne
.

HIS PERSON:
Born in Zundert, the

Netherlands, Van Gogh was the son of a

clergyman. At 16 he was apprenticed to

art dealers Goupil and Co., working first

in the firm’s office in The Hague and

later at its branches in London and Paris.

After wandering from job to job, he

eventually turned to religion. In 1879

Van Gogh ministered to the poor in Le

Borinage, a Belgian coal-mining region,

until a conflict with church authorities

led to his dismissal. In great despair, he

found solace in painting. From 1880

until his suicide 10 years later he turned

out hundreds of watercolors, oils, and

Van Gogh at 19

sketches. Regrettably he lived to see only

one painting—
The Red Vine
—sold. He lived on an allowance from his deeply devoted brother Theo. Perhaps Vincent’s beautiful ideas were too unorthodox
Painting The Town
/ for his time. For example, he once had a fight with his art instructor at the Antwerp Academy of Art over the proper way to draw a woman. Asked to draw the Venus de Milo, Vincent endowed her with large hips, enraging his teacher, who slashed at the drawing. “God damn you!” yelled Vincent. “A woman must have hips and buttocks and a pelvis in which she can hold a child!”

In 1886 he moved to Paris, where he fell in with such artists as Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. Toward the end of 1888 he and Gauguin lived and worked together in Arles, in the south of France. Although the pair produced prodigious amounts of work, they were temperamentally incompatible, and their love-hate relationship provoked many feuds. During one quarrel, Gauguin refused to eat at the same table with Van Gogh, citing hygienic reasons and their differing outlooks on life. After another heated argument, Van Gogh, jealous of Gauguin’s success with the Arles prostitutes, cut off part of his own left ear. The incident had definite sexual overtones: Van Gogh put the ear in an envelope and took it to a prostitute who preferred him to Gauguin. When the lady opened the envelope containing the bloody ear, she fainted.

Van Gogh suffered recurrent fits of madness, voluntarily spent a year in an asylum, and ultimately committed suicide by shooting himself in the stomach while hiding behind a manure heap in a farmyard. He was 37. His genius was not fully recognized until more than a decade after his death.

LOVE LIFE:
It is quite possible that if Van Gogh had been more successful in love, he would have lived longer—but he might never have picked up a brush.

The failure to find lasting female companionship throughout his life contributed to his breakdown and suicide.

One of Van Gogh’s early bouts of depression followed his rejection in 1874

by Ursula Loyer, his landlady’s daughter. After concealing his feelings for months while working for the Goupil Gallery in London, he suddenly exploded, blurt-ing out his love to a shocked and repelled young lady. He repeated this performance with a second girl, his recently widowed cousin, Kee Stricker Vos, who was visiting the Van Gogh home in Etten. Again he hid his feelings until they erupted in an urgent proposal of marriage. “No! Never, never!” Kee replied and promptly returned to her parents in Amsterdam. This time Van Gogh did not give up so easily. Using borrowed money, he gave chase to Amsterdam, where he barged in on the Strickers during dinner. When he was announced, Kee ran out before he could talk to her. The Strickers tried to be polite, but Van Gogh would not leave until he saw his love. On his third visit, he plunged his hand into the flame of an oil lamp, vowing to keep it there until Kee appeared.

Now more determined than ever to keep this apparent madman away from their daughter, the Strickers bluntly told Van Gogh that his suit was pointless.

By this time Van Gogh was sexually frustrated. “I must have a woman or I shall freeze and turn to stone,” he once complained. Taking to the streets, he discovered that he liked prostitutes, because they were “sisters and friends” to him, outcasts like himself, and would not reject him. Van Gogh preferred faded, slightly older prostitutes whom he could nurture. He soon found the ideal candidate in a pregnant prostitute named Clasina Maria Hoornik, whom he called Sien (“His own”). She and her five-year-old daughter moved in with him, and she soon bore Van Gogh a son, Willem, whom he adored. Much to the shame of his family, Vincent lived with Sien for more than a year and considered marrying her. In return, Sien posed for him (she is the crouched nude figure in the “Sorrow” lithographs) and gave the artist a case of gonorrhea that put him into a hospital bed for more than three weeks. He did not resent this, however, feeling that the rigors of her childbearing were a far greater burden. But the idyll passed, as he saw Sien’s true colors. She was slovenly, bitchy, and usually drunk.

From then on, he no longer referred to her by name, but called her “the woman with whom I live,” or just “the woman.” When she eventually returned to the streets, Van Gogh lost his “family” and left The Hague.

In 1884 Van Gogh had a relationship such as he had never known before.

This time a woman was chasing him. She was Margot Begemann, his next-door neighbor in Nuenen, a dowdy, sexually repressed 41-year-old spinster. She thought the artist was her last opportunity for marriage. Van Gogh compared her to a Cremona violin mangled by inept craftsmen. Yet, whether from pity or genuine affection or both, Van Gogh agreed to marry her. When her parents forbade the union, Margot responded by swallowing strychnine, which Vincent, in the nick of time, forced her to throw up. The marriage never took place.

In 1887 Van Gogh confided to his sister that he was going through a string of meaningless affairs “from which I emerge as a rule damaged and shamed and little else.” He frequented Parisian brothels with friends like Toulouse-Lautrec, had an affair with a female café owner and another reportedly with a 19-year-old boy. He contracted venereal disease from time to time and complained of increasing impotence.

HIS THEORIES ON ART AND SEX:
In a letter to a friend, Van Gogh expounded on the sexual and artistic merits of famous painters and writers.

Degas, he said, “does not like women, for he knows that if he loved them and fucked them he … would become insipid as a painter. He looks on while the human animals, stronger than himself, get excited and fuck….”

“Rubens! Ah, that one! he was a handsome man and a good fucker.”

Delacroix: “He did not fuck much, and only had easy love affairs, so as not to curtail the time devoted to his work.”

And so on about Courbet, Cézanne, and even Balzac.

Van Gogh summed up his comments pithily when he wrote: “Painting and fucking are not compatible; it weakens the brain…. If we want to be really potent males in our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to not fucking much.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
“The world seems more cheerful if, when we wake up in the morning, we find we are no longer alone and that there is another human being beside us in the half-dark. That’s more cheerful than shelves of edifying books and the whitewashed walls of a church….”

—W.A.D., E.K., and A.W.

The Deaf Lover

FRANCISCO DE GOYA (Mar. 30, 1746–Apr. 16, 1828)

HIS FAME:
The leading Spanish artist

of his day, Goya was both prolific and

versatile. His work, much of it executed

with a realism that bordered on caricature, ranged from official portraits of the

Spanish court to gory scenes of war and

torture, to religious themes, to
Los

Caprichos
, a collection of more than 80

etchings satirizing Spanish society,

including demonic depictions of witches;

helpless human beings attacked by

strange, vile creatures; and other phan—

tasms of Goya’s vivid imagination.

HIS PERSON:
Raised largely in

Goya’s
Self-Portrait
, 1783

Saragossa, Goya set out early to become

an artist. His career was one of steady progress—designer of royal tapestries, member of the prestigious Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, court painter to both Charles III and Charles IV—until a near-fatal illness struck in 1792

when he was 46. He lay for a time paralyzed and nearly blind and complained of dizzy spells and funny noises in his head. Physicians diagnosed that he had syphilis. He recovered in about a year but was thereafter stone-deaf.

In 1795 he was chosen to succeed his brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu as painting director at the Academy of San Fernando, but because of his deafness he proved ineffective in the post and accepted instead the title of honorary director. Despite the political upheaval during and after the French occupation of Spain (1808-1814), Goya managed to survive as court painter. Even his sensual “Maja” paintings somehow escaped the wrath of the Inquisition, though formal charges of obscenity were lodged against him. But a crackdown on liberals in 1824 so threatened his security and peace of mind that he took refuge in Bordeaux, France, where he lived and worked in self-imposed exile.

SEX LIFE:
While young, Goya sowed acres of wild oats, and once while studying art in Rome he raided a convent to kidnap an upper-class Italian girl boarding there. This led to a duel, which Goya won, and to a love affair with the Italian girl. In 1773, settled in Madrid, Goya called on a friend he had met during his travels, Francisco Bayeu, who was the official court painter for King Charles IV

and Queen Maria Louisa. Francisco introduced Goya to his sister Josefa, an attractive russet blonde who was disarmingly simple and honest. Entranced by

Goya’s
Naked Maja