The Listening Eye: Taking Notes after Gauguin

<p>For the past six years, I have been retracing some of Paul Gauguin’s steps. He led a famously peripatetic life, and I did not attempt to follow him systematically or in the order of his moves. More simply, I took advantage of lectures and conferences and organized vacations so as to see not only his works, as closely as possible, but also the places and things he had seen and sometimes represented.</p> <p>Since this exploration had to be performed over an extended period and in a sequence contingent on extraneous circumstances, it was important that I record it in ways that would allow me to use my observations later, to compare and to interpret them. I did this with the usual techniques of writing down notes and taking photographs but also by making drawings, generally mixed with the notes. Over the past century, the increasingly simple and cheap use of photography has tended to reduce or even eliminate the practice of drawing for art historians, and there is a real competition between the two techniques as regards the time and equipment they require, the type of relation to the model they offer, and the uses to which their products can be put…</p>