Octave mirbeau gauguin biography

       After a half-century of neglect, there has finally come a belated recognition of the genius and modernity of Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), the "lover of justice" who, according to Emile Zola, had "given his heart to the wretched of this world".

It is high time that people begin to rediscover this immense, multiform, and surprisingly current work, of which only an infinitesimal part has been known until now. In his work – in imitation of his "gods", Auguste Rodin and Claude Monet – Mirbeau sought to revolutionize the way his contemporaries looked at the world.

Mirbeau wants to open our eyes, force us to encounter beings and things, values and institutions, as they are, not as we have been conditioned to see them - or, rather, not to see them. Beginning in 1877, Mirbeau assigned to the writer the task of forcing those who were "willfully blind" to "look at M