..so before I died I wanted to paint a large canvas that I had worked out in my head, and all month long I worked [on Tahiti] day and night at fever … - Paul Gauguin

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?

Life at Papeete soon became a burden. It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off — and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization. Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?

"Is there a recipe for making beauty? The schools give recipes, but they do not beget works that make people exclaim: " How beautiful that is!