Creativity Quote by Paul Gauguin

Gauguin’s line lands like a backhanded compliment aimed at two targets at once: the romantic myth of the artist and the bourgeois notion of “useful” talent. “Excellent cooks” aren’t amateurs; they’re competent, grounded, productive. In other words, they’ve mastered a craft that reliably nourishes other people. Then comes the sly little tragedy: they’re “spoilt” by going into “the arts,” a phrase that makes art sound less like a vocation than a contagious environment.

The subtext is classic Gauguin: suspicion of civilization’s polish, contempt for respectable pathways, and a need to cast art as a kind of beautiful ruin. He isn’t praising culinary discipline so much as weaponizing it. Cooking stands in for the stable life he repeatedly abandoned - career, family, obligation - and “the arts” become the seductive force that turns competence into restlessness. It’s a self-portrait disguised as a joke: the artist as someone who can’t simply be good at something; he has to be undone by ambition, desire, or metaphysical hunger.

Context matters because Gauguin was a former stockbroker who chose the high-drama exit: Paris to Brittany to Tahiti, chasing “primitive” authenticity while participating in colonial fantasy. Read that way, the quip also exposes an uncomfortable truth about modern art culture: it converts practical skill into identity theater. The cook feeds; the artist performs estrangement. Gauguin’s cynicism is that the arts don’t just refine you - they spoil you for ordinary life, and then sell you that loss as destiny.