Creativity Quote by Paul Gauguin

A line like this only sounds absolutist if you ignore the bruised ego and historical pressure behind it. Gauguin is drawing a hard border to defend the artist as a breaker of spells, not a polite craftsperson improving on yesterday. In late-19th-century Paris, “originality” was becoming a moral category, and the Salon system still rewarded technical fluency over aesthetic mutiny. Gauguin had lived that compromise: a stockbroker-turned-painter who fled bourgeois respectability, he needed a slogan sharp enough to justify desertion.

The punch is the false binary. “Either/or” is rhetorical violence: it turns the messy continuum of influence into a courtroom verdict. “Plagiarism” isn’t literal theft so much as complacent inheritance - the comfortable recycling of approved styles, subjects, and hierarchies. “Revolution” isn’t a manifesto with bullets; it’s a demand that art reorganize perception, that it make the viewer feel the world has been re-skinned.

Subtext: Gauguin is also laundering his own borrowings. His work freely cannibalized Japanese prints, medieval iconography, and, most controversially, Polynesian imagery filtered through a colonial gaze. Calling the only alternatives “plagiarism or revolution” reframes appropriation as bravery, and failure to break new ground as moral rot. That self-serving edge is part of why the line still stings: it captures the modern art world’s hunger for rupture while exposing its hypocrisy. We want art to look unprecedented, even when it’s stitched from other people’s cloth.