Art - Richard Cork follows Gauguin's doomed but fruitful pursuit of happiness
Convinced that western civilisation had become rotten, Gauguin set sail for Tahiti in April 1891. He left behind his wife and five children, just as recklessly as he had abandoned his business career in the Paris stock exchange a decade earlier. Tahiti was to him "an enchanted land", and he dreamed of transforming his art in this remote, supposedly idyllic locale. Stirred by memories of his blissful Peruvian childhood, he carved two polychrome reliefs just before his long voyage. Naked figures undulate on their burnished surfaces, intertwined with an ecstatic inscription urging everyone to "be loving, you will be happy".
He was, without doubt, desperate to leave France. A photograph of Gauguin, in the opening room of the revelatory exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, reveals a weary man who looks older than his 43 years. At the same time, he produced a melancholy self-portrait looming in front of his own painting The Yellow Christ. Gauguin clearly identified with the plight of the crucified martyr, and hoped that Tahiti would somehow enable him to achieve a new beginning.
Any fantasies he harboured about discovering paradise on the island were soon destroyed. Only three days after Gauguin arrived, the last king of Tahiti died. His death coincided with the disastrous decline of the French colony, long since stripped of its traditional culture. Plagued already by the syphilis that killed him only 12 years later, Gauguin soon became restless and began applying for repatriation to France. But the art he made after settling for a while on the island's seductive south coast was outstanding.
Ia Orana Maria, a large and boldly coloured painting where Mary and Jesus take on a frankly Tahitian identity, is enlivened by an angel with radiant yellow wings. Although Gauguin was not a Christian, he aimed at inventing a new kind of spiritual art. Drawing on Maori carvings, Easter Island sculptures, the reliefs on the Temple of Borobudur and much else besides, he fused western art with the heretical form-language of alternative cultures across the world.
He also moved, with exemplary freedom, between different media. Gauguin was a formidable sculptor, and in the Paris show his own sparingly carved wooden bowl is displayed in front of a painting called The Meal. Here the same vessel occupies a central, inviting position on a table heavy with flaring red bananas and other, equally swollen, Tahitian fruits. Three young islanders are seated beyond: a girl in the middle and two boys eyeing her on either side. The image is filled with an enigmatic sense of expectancy, and the figures seem unable to reach out and consume the irresistible food in front of them.
The whole notion of forbidden fruit excited Gauguin's imagination during this early Tahitian period. In one mood, he painted a long-haired young woman who leans enticingly to one side, grasping a plump mango in the palm of her upraised right hand. She smiles, as if pleased with her role as a temptress. But Gauguin could easily shift from brazen sensuality to a darker mood. He called another, even more beguiling woman Delicious Earth, and showed her standing naked in a landscape heavy with rich foliage and the flamboyant wings of exotic birds. Solemnly fingering the stalk of a flower, she looks dangerous as well as enticing.
With Gauguin caught between the urge to savour a liberated life of pleasure and the guilty suspicion that he would eventually be punished for self-indulgence, his Tahitian work became more and more haunted. Later, in 1892, he painted a naked adolescent sprawled on a bed at night. Her dark flesh, flecked with orange on shoulder, buttock and heel, looks even more beguiling when contrasted with the pale yellow sheet beneath. But she cannot sleep. Pressing both her hands hard into the pillow, she glances back as if aware of a menacing presence behind. Gauguin called the painting The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch, and he included an ominous figure who gazes, in implacable profile, towards the girl. The presence of this black-draped spectre counters the festive frieze of fruits and flowers painted, with decorative exuberance, along the side of the bed.
The ominous intensity of this painting doubtless reflects Gauguin's involvement with Teha'amana, the 13-year-old Tahitian who became his bride. Yet he wrote about the picture in a very impersonal way, stressing the "musical part: undulating horizontal lines; blue and orange harmonies, linked with yellows and purples (their derivatives) and lit by greenish sparks". This, the most abstract side of his art, was the element that proved most influential on the emergent generation of artists in the early 20th century. Gauguin organised his pictures with the musical freedom of a composer, even if their figurative subjects remained clearly evident throughout his career.
The early Tahitian canvases amounted to Gauguin's finest sustained body of achievement, but they aroused little interest when he exhibited them in Paris. They seemed so removed from the western tradition, even though Gauguin relied for several poses on reliefs of humans and horses carved for the Parthenon frieze. The stillness of these images belie the mounting agitation he suffered, however. After returning to Tahiti in 1895, he found that his health was further deteriorating. Teha'amana, understandably terrified by the suppurating sores on Gauguin's body, ran away from him. Although another 14-year-old girl replaced her, interludes of happiness alternated with suffering and despair. His depression worsened in 1897, when he heard that Aline, his favourite child, had died of pneumonia. Stricken by an acute shortage of money, as well as conjunctivitis, he succumbed to a succession of heart attacks.
The quality of his work, always uneven, plummeted. For a while, he seemed unable to bring anything to a satisfactory conclusion. But Gauguin, paradoxically, ended up galvanised by his afflictions. Later that year, he executed by far his largest and most impressive work. Simultaneously impelled by a feverish mood and combating the urge to kill himself, he spent a month working incessantly on a wide, frieze-like canvas inscribed with a bewildered title: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
The outcome has not been seen in Europe for more than half a century. But its owner, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, has now lent the painting to Paris, and its dominating presence makes the exhibition unmissable. Apart from two brilliant gashes of yellow where Gauguin has written the title and his own signa-ture, it is a penumbral scene. Tree-trunks writhe beside the ocean and almost everything appears shrouded in shadow. After a while, though, figures become discernible in the gloom. On one side, a baby lies asleep on the ground. Exuding innocence as well as vulnerability, this diminutive figure might seem to personify hope. But Gauguin counterbalances it on the other side with an old woman who crouches with an anguished expression. She looks defensive, as if expecting dire consequences to follow the action carried out by the central figure in the painting.
This strangely androgynous Tahitian, clothed only in the slimmest of loin-cloths, stretches up to pluck fruit from a branch. Gauguin must have intended an echo of Adam and Eve in Eden, and the woman seated nearby appears to be shielding herself from possible retribution. The air of martyrdom increases when we realise that the central figure's pose also hints at crucifixion. But Gauguin multiplies the layers of religious reference by including a pale blue idol who raises both arms in an attitude of benediction.
Even so, the gesture seems incapable of alleviating the overall sense of fore- boding. It even affects the cats, goat and an extravagantly plumed bird detectable in the darkness. Shaded by foliage, a maternal woman clasps her companion by the shoulder as they walk through the shadows, lost in a struggle to contemplate their unknowable fate. But the most powerful part of this picture is inhabited by two young women. Seated in the foreground, they lean, faces on hands, and gaze out inquiringly, straight at us. They suggest that Gauguin aimed to challenge viewers to grapple with the imponderable questions raised by the images painted on his rough-textured canvas.
Here, three years before the century's end, he finally admitted that his reckless pursuit of nirvana had ended in perplexity and loss. After trying unsuccessfully to commit suicide with arsenic, Gauguin lived on until 1903. But his powers as an artist had waned, and they did not receive widespread recognition until three years later, when a monumental survey of his work was staged in Paris. It proved hugely influential, stimulating many young painters and sculptors in their search for an art driven by dreams, traumas and, in Gauguin's own impulsive words, "the right to dare everything".
"Gauguin-Tahiti" is at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris 75008 (00 33 1 44 13 17 17) until 19 January
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