Unforgettable Self-Delusion

By ROBERT HUGHES

The harpies of legend, having once gripped an artist, are slow to let go. One of their regular victims has been Paul Gauguin. The image of the painter has been yanked, tugged, tortured and distorted by a succession of novels and films starting with Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence.

Moon provided a legend of the theatrical kind that Gauguin himself invited. Here was an archetypal rebel against bourgeois civilization, who quit a prosperous job on the Paris Stock Exchange to find his true artistic self in Tahiti among brown innocents, baptized anew in coconut milk and liberated from his own and Europe's stale past by primitive ritual.

This Tale of the South Pacific has added enormously to the market value of Gauguin's paintings, but it is false in almost every detail. Gauguin's contact with the Noble Savage served mainly to give him the pox. He spoke barely a word of the Tahitians' language, understood nothing of their rituals and social structures, never ate yams or fish when he could afford tinned asparagus and claret, and was prone to copy his scenes of native life from tourist photographs purchased in the grubby colonial port of Papeete. The most advertised side of the legend is also false. Gauguin's art was neither freed nor even significantly changed by the South Seas. When he left France in 1891, he was no Sunday painter but a mature artist with a circle of admirers that included Van Gogh, Maurice Denis and the Symbolist poets. Tahiti served only to inject new subjects into a vision and manner that had already set. This fact, crucial to an understanding of Gauguin's art, is elegantly documented in a selection of his pre-Tahiti paintings that opens this week at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The show runs from Gauguin's first semi-impressionist works of the early 1870s through a spectrum of influences to the full development of his style at Aries and Pont-Aven in the late 1880s. And it provides useful insights upon one of the more picturesque figures in early modernism, whose career demonstrated that unforgettable images could be drawn from a system of selfdelusion.

Priapic Swagger. Unlike the Impressionists, Gauguin did not paint what he saw: he chose to see what he wanted to paint. And his ideas on what was paintable grew out of other art--from the broad color patches and rhythmic line of Japanese cloisonne and wood block prints, from rural Breton sculpture and the flattened, monumental figures of a French artist he greatly admired, Puvis de Chavannes. Style absorbed him --not only the priapic swagger and ebullience of his own lifestyle, but the pervasive feedback of art style into nature. Even the fierce colors which scandalized some of his contemporaries were meant to be remote from nature. "Imagine," he once wrote, alluding to the purples, reds and chrome yellows he loved, "a confused collection of pottery twisted by the furnace!" In fact, he saw the world through art-colored spectacles.

"It's odd that Vincent feels the influence of Daumier here," he wrote from Aries in 1888, where he was living with Van Gogh. "I, on the contrary, see Puvis subjects in their Japanese colorings. Women here with their elegant coiffure have a Greek beauty. In all events, here is a fountain of beauty, modern style." These are not the sentiments of a primitive. What Gauguin exalted as "primitivism" really meant two things: rejecting illusionism in favor of abstract, decorative color and flat pattern, and a distrust of bourgeois morals and technology. This distrust produced in him a deep nostalgia for a vanished and largely imaginary Paradise. The voyage to Tahiti, like Gauguin's earlier trip to Panama and Martinique, was an attempt to find that Eden in real life.

But the style he took with him was far from primitive. In Aries and Pont-Aven, Gauguin was already flattening his images completely against the picture plane. The colors of In the Garden of the Hospital at Aries, 1888, butt against each other like glowing pieces of tile; and one has only to compare the pot of yellow blooms in Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, 1888, with Van Gogh's own sunflowers to see the contrast between Gauguin's taste for generalization about shape and Van Gogh's obsessive vision of spiky, unfolding life in the flowers themselves. Reacting to the interest in mysticism that reigned in Symbolist circles in Paris (and probably to the curiosity about drugs and trances that had survived in French intellectual life since Baudelaire), Gauguin painted Nirvana around 1889. The sinuous line turned his dwarfish friend Meyer de Haan into a curiously uncertain footnote to Art Nouveau. But The Ham is one of the supreme moments in French still life; not even Cezanne could have surpassed the truth of its firm, dense patterning, the gray table top and smoky red meat held in parentheses between two swathes of orange wall.

Amorous Harmony. Only this magisterial grasp of form could sustain Gauguin's later art through his own sentimentality about primitive life and keep him working against a reality which brutally confounded his expectations. "I shall be able," he wrote to his stolid Danish wife Mette before he left France, "to listen to the sweet murmuring music of my heart's beating in the silence of the beautiful tropical nights. I shall be in amorous harmony with the mysterious beings of my environment." The language reads disconcertingly like a Honolulu tourist brochure. Its abstraction suggests memory at work--one theory is that Gauguin's tropic seeking was an effort to recapture the childish happiness of a time his family spent in Peru as houseguests of a rich uncle --as well as a kind of religious hope. "It seems that Eve did not speak negro, but good God! what language did she speak, she and the serpent?" he demanded in a letter to his fellow painter Emile Bernard in 1889. Adam and Eve, or Paradise Lost, 1890, was the visual counterpart to that question. Gauguin painted its writhing silhouettes of green foliage against an unnaturally dark cobalt sky in France long before he ever saw Tahiti. But there is no difference at all between it and the more elaborate reworkings of primal innocence and guilt that he would produce in the South Seas. All the imagery of Paradise was in his head already. He went there not to see it, but to live it. . Robert Hughes

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