Tropical paradise
Sebastian Smee is seduced by the Tahitian art of Paul Gauguin
Elalse seduction is not something we like
to equate with great art. But it's a feeling, a suspicion, that presses in on you when looking again at Gauguin, as we are invited to do by a spellbinding new exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, marking the centenary of Gauguin's death.
Drenched in a kind of lurid, late-in-theday Romanticism, Gauguin's Tahitian paintings have not only had to contend with becoming postcard clichés in the manner of, say, Van Gogh's sunflowers or Degas's dancers; they have taken on the appearance, in many people's eyes, of pictorial prototypes for 19th-century colonial rapaciousness and 21st-century sex tourism.
All the same, I remain very keen on the pictures themselves — more so than ever, in fact, after this exhibition, which pulls together Gauguin's Tahitian paintings, as well as carvings, woodcuts and sculptures, from great collections such as the State Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Metropolitan in New York and the Courtauld in London. How intoxicating they continue to look! How refreshing their invitation to drink in visual experience without having to police ourselves as we do so!
By nature a boastful, easily aggrieved man, Gauguin threw himself into painting in the early 1880s after a fitful career in finance. After several impecunious years spent painting in Brittany and Arles (where he and Van Gogh had the spat which ended with Van Gogh hacking into his own ear), his first experience of a tropical paradise was in 1887, when he spent four, dysentery-wracked months in Martinique.
Undeterred, he went to Tahiti four years later, after reading an official government handbook which described the Tahitian woman thus: 'With her large, dark eyes. her almost excessively full lips and her marvellously white and regular teeth, she looks so sweet and innocently voluptuous.' Enough: Gauguin was away. But Tahiti, for all its orgiastic, three-in-a-bed pleasures, liberated him from neither illness nor poverty. At the end of his first stay there he wrote: 'After the disease of civilisation, life in this new world is a return to health.' It was an ironic, even nauseating declaration from a man who would spend so much of his time in Tahiti suffering ulcers, heart attacks, and advancing syphilis, which he callously spread around among numerous teenage lovers.
Nonetheless, no amount of finger-wagging can alter the fact that Tahiti had a crucial and captivating effect on Gauguin's art. The overwhelming sensation in these paintings is of an erotic stillness, suffused by a warm, aromatic fug of silence. One walks through the exhibition with the uncanny sensation of being simultaneously watched and ignored. The sly, uninsistent presence of animals in almost every picture contributes to the mood of closed-in strangeness.
Gauguin saw himself as an artistic revolutionary, a primitive and something of a messiah into the bargain CA martyr is often necessary for a revolution,' he wrote in one typically maudlin letter). His pictures are filled with displacements of Christian mythology on to Tahitian settings, but with the meanings often subtly inverted, so that a woman plucking fruit in an Edenic setting — the central motif of Gauguin's masterpiece and this show's climactic work — 'Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?' — is seen not as a prelude to the Fall but as a sign of innate human harmony with nature.
Gauguin was not as unbound from inherited European clichés about 'primitive' art as he liked to think (Matisse and Picasso would take more radical steps in this direction five years after Gauguin's death). Rather, his art drew on a wide variety of ideas and sources which were already thick on the ground in late-19thcentury France. His brand of Symbolism was strongly influenced by the Arcadian neoclassicism of Puvis de Chavannes, the off-kilter compositions of Degas, the mysticism of Odilon Redon, and the erotic immediacy of Manet, as well as Buddhist temple friezes, pornographic photographs, Japanese prints, Polynesian decorations and Egyptian, Greek and Renaissance art.
That Gauguin could distil all this into an art of such vivid simplicity is one key to his greatness. The other is temperament: 'I seem to have a need for STRUGGLE,' he observed, 'to hew things out with blows like a mason.' His pictures idealised an often sordid reality, no doubt. But they gain their extraordinary charge from a soft-pedalled dissonant note, a sense of erotic well-being teetering on the edge of a bad turn.
Gauguin: Tahiti is at the Grand Palais, Paris, unti119 January 2004,
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