This essay was thought provoking. There's been a lot of reaching further back in history to judge people who lived then by current standards. I wonder about the fairness of it. Tracing the thought process into prehistory, at some point we arrive at totally barbaric behavior, cannabalism, massive polygamy by leaders, casual murder. Civilization, fairly recently, moderated some of these practices, but obviously not all. Humans are, what? barely human. I happen to collect digital art, and have decent copies of work by many of these now-vilified painters. I've learned about their lives as I've gone along, and many were controversial even in their time (e.g., Egon Schiele). I'll try to make a distinction here, which may be arbitrary. I don't much like Picasso. His cruelty and misogyny comes through in his work. Even his respectful portraits have a kind of mocking quality about them. But I rather like Schiele, who, through his own distorted lens, somehow captured the spirit of his models. Perhaps he actually liked women. Gauguin seems overrated to me. I like maybe one or two of his paintings, mostly from the early 1880s when he was still in France imitating Cezanne and van Gogh. Nothing from his Polynesian period appeals to me.