Tahiti - About Paul Gauguin (1893-1895)

Late in 1892 Gauguin packed off a consignment of eight pictures to De Monfreid for exhibition in Copenhagen. When describing to his wife the works he had sent, he explained that in order to cater for all tastes (the Danes were presumably likely to be more conservative than the Parisians), he had selected a mixture of relatively 'doux' or mild, accessible paintings - mainly landscapes and genre figures - and some that he considered to be 'raide' or hard, inaccessible. It is interesting that even in Tahiti Gauguin continued to think of his work in these practical commercial terms; indeed, this obvious concern to provide enough variety to suit all corners of the market helps to rationalize what can otherwise seem a somewhat inconsistently diverse oeuvre.

To aid Mette in handling the critics' questions, Gauguin provided a gloss on the meaning of the works he acknowledged were more difficult, including the important nude Manao tupapau (The spirit of the dead keeps watch), which he valued highly but which he was certain would be misunderstood, and Purahi te marae. He explained, for instance, that the temple in the latter was used for prayers and human sacrifices, relishing, one suspects, the idea of the shudder of horror this would give his European audience. In the case of Manao tupapau, he explained that the fear on the girl's face was due to her terror of the Spirit of the Dead. 'I had to explain this fear with as few literary means as possible,' he wrote, 'as was done in the past. So I proceeded thus. General harmony, sombre, sad, fearful, incoming in the eye like death-knell: violet, dark blue and orangey yellow. I painted the linen a greenish yellow, firstly, because the linen of the native is different from ours (made from the beaten bark of trees); secondly, because it creates, or suggests artificial light (the savage woman never sleeps in the dark) and yet I don't want any lamplight effects (they're common), thirdly, this yellow links the orangey yellow to the blue and completes the musical harmony.'

Manao tupapau is unquestionably one of Gauguin's most beautiful and fully resolved paintings. The flowing lines of the girl's body and the decorative details give it the sensual quality of an Ingres Odalisque, yet the dark, velvety colour range, set off by the jangling yellows of the foreground, and the dramatic tension of the girl's face produce a powerful aura of mystery. Fear of evil spirits and ghosts was common among the Tahitians, the spirit taking the form of the person when alive, hence the strange, brooding figure in the background.

The model Gauguin used was his young bride Teha'amana, a fact he judiciously omitted to mention to Mette. One imagines he had acquired her essentially to further his artistic ambitions and be able to tackle the nude subjects he had planted. He clearly looked on this 'wife' as a dispensable resource, since he planned to leave her behind after a matter of months and move on to the Marquesas islands which, being more remote and more difficult of access than Tahiti, were reputed to be less altered. In retrospect, one might consider that he exploited Teha'amana shamelessly, although such exploitation was widely accepted practice in the colonies. Mamao tupapau exposed her youthful body in a pose which he admitted would be considered indecent had he painted a European model, and he used Teha'amana's very real fears and superstitions about ghosts in order to give his painting its symbolic, mysterious aura. Two years later, having lost all hope of a reunion with his true wife, he wrote about his experience of this strange, short-lived marriage of unequals. The account he produced in Noa Noa was no doubt intended to titillate his male readership to some extent fictionalized, it was written in a flowery manner reminiscent of Pierre Loti's popular novel about his own Tahitian marriage, Rarahu (Le Mariage de Loti), first published in 1879. It is possible that the description was in the hand of Charles Morice, the Symbolist poet who collaborated on the text of Noa Noa. When the first edition in book form was published in 1901, Morice felt under a moral obligation to excuse Gauguin's action in taking such a young bride, adding that a thirteen-year-old Maori was equivalent in maturity to an eighteen-year-old European! Gauguin, who did not hesitate to accuse his fellow colonialists of hypocrisy, was scarcely immune from such a charge himself.

Gauguin needed all his confidence and optimism to see him through the long wait for permission to travel home at French government expense. He had first pleaded penury at the end of eleven months in Tahiti. the bureaucratic delays seemed endless but he was finally granted free repatriation by the Ministry and set sail for France on 14 June 1893. The voyage used up the few remaining savings he had, particularly as he opted to pay extra to travel second class. On arriving some two months later in Marseilles, he was furious to find himself stranded for lack of funds and obliged to await a money order from Paris. As he had explained to Serusier from Tahiti, he was impatient to get back to Paris so that he could 'stir things up a bit'. After the enforced idleness of the sea voyage, the autumn of 1893 was an incredibly hectic period in Gauguin's career. having agreed terms with Durand-Ruel, who thanks to Dega's intervention had for the first time offered to hold a one-man show for Gauguin, not only did he have to stretch and frame the forty-odd canvases he planned to exhibit in a matter of two months, but he needed to ensure full press coverage and court the right sort of audience. To achieve this, having been out of town for over two years, he needed to catch up on all the gossip, find out what had been happening in the art world and see where his reputation now stood.

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He sent a series of haranguing letters to his wife, believing her to have failed him in his hour of need at the port-side and demanding news of the exhibition in Copenhagen, which had taken place at the end of March hat year. He particularly wanted to hear about the critics' reaction and any sales, since on such information hanged his chances of making this second show in Paris a success. He planned to take the city by storm with the complete novelty of the works he had brought with him. He soon learned that only one Tahitian painting had been sold at the Copenhagen exhibition, a variant of Femmes de Tahiti, to Mette's brother-in-law, the newspaper editor and politician Edvard Brandes. (Incidentally, Brandes had already played quite an important financial role for Mette during Gauguin's absence, buying several of the Impressionist pictures that had formerly made up her husband's collection. Gauguin seems to have resented this interference and later tried unsuccessfully to buy back the Cezannes and Pissarros.)

As for the critical reactions, Gauguin may have taken heart that not all the Danish reviews had been unfavourable: the diversity of his talents had been signalled by the press. Whether or not Metter reported fully on the reviews is hard to say. Gauguin may well have been anxious about the inevitable comparison of his works with those of the 'madman' Vincent Van Gogh, since in Copenhagen, for the first but by no means the last time, the two artists' works were shown alongside one another. His worst fears might have been confirmed if word had reached him of the comments made by certain journalists, beside the intensity of life found in Van Gogh's works, his own were variously deed 'pale and weak' and 'routine stuff'. This was hardly surprising given that only ten of Gauguin's recent Tahitian works had been seen in Copenhagen out of a selection of some fifty works, and a high proportion of them had been early canvases.

Another possible reason for Gauguin's jumpiness at this time may have been the publication, during the period of the Frie Udstillung, o extracts from Van Gogh's letters to Emile Bernard, many of them directly pertinent to himself. these extracts had been appearing in the Danish press as well as in the Mercure de France, and although the names of the living artist were obscured, for anyone in the know there was no mistaking Gauguin's identity; the role he had played in Van Gogh's tragic life and no doubt been the topic of much speculative gossip in the Paris cafes during his absence. Emile Bernard, moreover, who had been editing these letters and publishing art criticism in Gauguin's absence, and by implications to exonerate himself, that Gaugin suddenly decided to draft his own recollections of Van Gogh? His short ironic article, which was published in January 1894 in Les Essais d'Art Libre, is notable chiefly for the stress it lays on Van Gogh's 'madness', on his early missionary zeal and acts of Christian charity, on his belief in and apparent ability to work miracles, and his obsession with the colour yellow.

In other respects it must have looked to Gauguin as though circumstances in Paris were favourable to the understanding and appreciation of his new Tahitian works. during his two-year- absence symbolist ideas had gained a wider currency and the standing of his young followers the Nabis had markedly increased. Apart from Paul Serusier and Maurice Denis, this group included such talented members as Edourd Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Paulll Ranson and Ker-Xavier Roussel. The Nabis or Symbolists had been exhibiting their flat, decorative and innovatory works regularly in the gallery of Le Barc de Courteville, the latest dealer to take up the cause of new art, and were being much written about in the symbolist press. Their names were also associated with the emergence of the first experiments in Symbolist theatre pioneered by their actor friend Aurelien Lungne-Poe. His new Theatre de l'oeuvre launched in first season of Scandinavian plays in October 1893. The opening of Ibsen's Un Ennemi du Peuple, with a programme and decor designed by Vuillard, coincided with the opening of Gauguin's one-man show in November, and the two artistic events were judged to be of equal importance by Charles Morice. Certainly, they were destined to appeal to similar sorts of audience and both playwright and painter, at different levels, could be said to be concerned with the individual's struggle to free himself from stifling bourgeois conventions. However, whereas Ibsen dramatized that struggle within a domestic context, Gauguin's brilliantly coloured primitive idylls set forth the goals to work towards, the rewards of achieving that liberation.

Perhaps the greater relevance to Gauguin and to the way in which his works would be seen and interpreted was he fact that just a year and a half before his show opened, the Durand-Ruel gallery had been the venue for the first Salon of the Rose + Croix group, under the leadership of the self-styled Sir Peladan, who had recruited adherents from among Gauguin's own former associates, Emile Bernard, for instance, and Charles Filiger. Exclusively concentrating on mystical, religious and allegorical art, the exhibition had proved a fashionable success. However distasteful Gauguin may have found the naturalistic, academic styles so many of the exhibitors, their success was unmistakably a sign of the times and he must have hoped his own show would awaken the same degree of public interest. He was intrigued and envious to learn that his friend Filiger now enjoyed the patronage of Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, the aristocratic Maecenas and amateur painter and poet who had initially sponsored the Rosicrucian movement. Gauguin was not slow to court the Count's sympathies himself, dedicating a drawing of his own most reproductions in le Coeur Illustre, a new esoteric Symbolist journal the latter was financing.

Roger Marx and Octave Mirbeau were critics from whom Gauguin could reasonably expect continuing support, having been favourably reviewed by them both in the year of his departure. But the untimely death of Albert Aurier in October 1892 had deprived him of an eloquent champion whose philosophical articles carried considerable weight. it was to Charles Morice that Gauguin entrusted the task of writing an introduction to his exhibition cataloque, perhaps exacting recompense for Morice's failure to send out the money raised by the Theatre d'Art benefit performance two years before. Whatever irritation Gauguin may have felt while in Tahiti for his young acolyte was rapidly put aside in Paris.

By the time Gauguin's exhibition opened there had already been a flurry of excited press speculation, as had been done in 1889. Indeed, in the sense that he was still enough of a celebrity for his show immediately to attract considerable attention in the press, Gauguin could congratulate himself that he had timed his return from the South Seas nicely. In their anticipation, such critics aired the cliched views of what Tahiti meant in the public imagination, views formed by reading travel literature and Pierre Loti.

It is not difficult to imagine the extraordinary effect this roomful of canvases must have had on those first visitors stepping in from the cold, November city streets. The consistency of the brightly coloured, flat and decorative style was more apparent than in any previous Gauguin exhibition, but more noticeable still, in almost every paonting the visitor was confrontd with Gauguin's ideal, his 'natural', unselfconscious, primitive Eve. Whether her presence denoted an animal litheness as in the stunningly simple Otahi (the colour and the disposition of the feet cunningly disguising the debt to Degas), or a dark and brooding mystery as in Manao tupapau and Hina Tefatou, or the sheer physical delight and abandonment of Fatata te muti, elegant Parisiennes with their consorts were found to be taken aback by this confident projection of a new rule of beauty. From the insistent use of an unfamiliar language for his titles and the decision to decorate the catalogue with a particularly barbarous woodcut image, Gauguin sought to underline the distance that now separated perspective of his audience. Morice's preface, in all likelihood written under Gauguin's direct supervision, evoked Tahitian legends and presented Gauguin's paintings very much in the terms of Aurier's earlier definition of symbolism, thereby urging viewers not to expect a documentary or realistic approach to the Tahitian subject-matter. It also gave brief explanation of a few of the more abstruse images in the exhibition, Hina Tefatou, for example, and Manao tapapau. Somewhat dubiously, it argued that Gauguin had not gone to Tahiti in search of novel motifs, but because his spirit had strained under the fetters of European ways of seeing. By staying for a lengthy period and living, so Morice claimed, 'as a native', Gauguin had penetrated deep into the hinterland and essence of Tahiti, indeed, was instinctively in time with its primitive character by virtue of his own Inca ancestry. Evasive and misleading as much of this introduction now seems, Morice did at least make clear that Gauguin's comparisons of Mr Pierre Loti', and that he had alternated or even fused with images of Tahiti today images of its former glory - this had been the intention behind Ia Orana Maria, for example.

It is not surprising that, for those who disliked Gauguin's art, Morice's preface could be dismissed also as 'moderniste' and 'decadent'. Seemingly by extension, Morice himself was wrongly described as an 'israelite' in the right-wing journal La Libre Parole, an indication of the irrational anti-semitism already rampant in France on the eve of the Dreyfus affair. Many reviewers, however, took their cue to approaching and interpreting Gauguin's work from Morice's words: Octabe Mirbeau, in L'Echo de Paris, used Gauguin's show as an excuse to heap further abuse on Pierre Loti and to pen another decidedly romanticized portrait of Gauguin's return to savagery, and of his intuitive understanding of the mysteries of Tahiti. As we have seen, Mirbeau was committed to the cause of anarchism and admired Gauguin above all for his rebellious stand against society. such political affiliations had considerable significance given that in the very month in which most of the reviews of Gauguin's show appeared, the latest in a series of violent anarchist attacks on bourgeois institutions was perpetrated: a bomb was planted in the Chamber des Deputes. Felix Feneon was another critic practically as well as intellectually involved with anarchism for which he stood trial and faced imprisonment the following year. Although he had virtually abandoned art criticism at this time, he found time to look at Gauguin's show and to give it a mention in La Revue Anarchiste: 'At Durand-Ruel's, the decorative canvases that Paul Gauguin has brought back from Tahiti - barbarous, opulent and taciturn in character'.

Gauguin's attitudes towards anarchism are difficult to pin down. He appears to have shared many of the basic tenets of the anarchist philosophy - belief in the freedom of the individual, opposition to many forms of state authority, the Church, and so on - although he claimed to be uninterested in and ignorant of politics. But Gauguin was nothing if not opportunistic and for the moment it probably suited and amused him to posture as in anarchist hero. The anti-hero was a pose he had cultivated in his self-portraits, after all, and the extravagant attire he sported on his return to 'civilization', to judge from the amusing gouache painted by Manzana Pissarro in memory of Gauguin's one-man show, was calculated to shock and amaze. yet, in the eyes of committed anarchists like Pissarro and Paul Signac, Gauguin's life-style and now his choice of subject-matter evaded present-day ignominies and represented a 'sell-out' to the bourgeoise, a pandering to a growing reactionary sentiment. Certainly, Gauguin's work had its admirers among a group of conservative patrons of the arts, such as Denys Cochin and Henri Lerolle, and even the support of Degas and Denis may have rendered him suspect in the eyes of more radical artists.

Political considerations aside, Gauguin was no longer a young man and could not afford to be rebuffed by the critics as he had been at earlier stages in his career. It seems that most critics were disposed to take his pictures seriously in 1891 and 1894. Even if they were irritated by the Tahitian titles and inclined to pass over the relevance of the subject-matter, they paid attention to and some were genuinely intrigued by the formal and colouristic daring of his canvases. Only the most conservative critics were still so disconcerted by the synthetic distortions of Gauguin's style, much as they were by other innovative painters working in this vein in Paris, that they failed to see the subjects at all.

Thadee Natanson, in La Revue Blanche, was unsual in having the perception to see through the exotic novelty of subject to the numerous references to more traditional Western art, and indeed he criticized Gauguin for relying too heavily on this apparel of novelty to dispense him from attempting any real innovation in style. In substance, these were the grounds on which certain fellow artists continued to carp at Gauguin's success, notably Pissarro, in whose view Gauguin was now 'stealing from the savages of oceania'. A somewhat more typical review, probably written by Roger Marx, made purely formal, pictorial points, which were reiterated some twenty years later by the influential English critic Roger Fry. Discussing Manao tupapau with exceptional frankness, the reviewer argued that title and gloss here were completely unnecessary, 'perhaps indeed we would be hampered by the author's hidden intentions, if we were obliged to pay heed to them. A young Tahitian girl lies stretched out on her stomach on a sort of bed. . . . Is it a polynesian Olympia that Gauguin has represented here, or is the chosen subject purely picturesque and pictorial, or again should we suppose it to be a precise symbol? I could not say, but this bronze body, so firma nd unified, with its matt flesh, reposing from all activity, is so finely drawn, so broadly painted, so well set off by a decor that is both very brilliant and very simple, that I praise such a work with joy.'

That Gauguin was pleased to be spoken of in these formal, painterly terms is indicated by the fact that this was one of numerous cuttings he collected and pasted into a notebook. He dedicated the notebook to his daughter Aline, surely in itself a clear expression of his need for self-justification and acceptance in the eyes of the child he held most dear, yet a poignant gesture given that his daughter did not live long enough to receive it. He would, perhaps, have been happier still with the comprehensive praise of Fabien Viellard, writing appropriately in L'Art Litteraire, who admired with equal force Gauguin the painter and Gauguin the thinker. He began by enthusing about Gauguin's successful rendering of the enveloping and brilliant sunlight of the tropics, almost as though Gauguin were still working under the banner of Impressionism, and went on to praise his intellectual understanding of the Tahitian people, which he judged comparable to his empathy with the Bretons. But it was Achille Delaroche, writing in L'Ermitage, whose philosophical interpretation most fully satisfied Gauguin and came closest to understanding what he felt he had set out to do. Taking his cue from the approach of Albertaurier, Delaroche set aside all questions as to the real or faked novelty of Gauguin's subject or to the technical and historical origins of his style, and allowed himself to respond to the works on a more purely subjective level, at the level of their 'suggestive decoration'. he was struck by the way in which 'the serenity of these natives, overwhelms the vanity of our insipid elegances, our childish agitations! All the mystery of the infinite moves behind the naive perversity of these yes of theirs, opened to the freshness of things. It makes little difference to me whether or not there is in these paintings any exact reproduction of the exotic reality.' For Delaroche, Gauguin's art had the mysterious power to resolve the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. her at last, in Gauguin's view, was a critic who had shown himself receptive to the magical inner core of mystery he believed his works possessed.

From a critical point of view, Gauguin counted his one-man show a success and, coupled with the flattering comments of contemporaries such as Degas, Mallarime and even, grudgingly, Pissarro, it helped to buoy up his confidence. Although certain commentators, including Charles Morice, have claimed that the Gauguin one-man show was a disastrous venture, there seems no justification for writing it off in this way. The disappointment lay solely in the material outcome. Only eleven of the forty-four pictures were sold. Gauguin justified his lack of sales to his wife, blaming the high prices he had been obliged to ask (2000 to 3000 francs each) in keeping with Durand-Ruel's standards. Neither despondent nor complacent, he judged it necessary and opportune to keep up the momentum of publicity, and he set to work to write a series of articles as well as the partly factual, partly fictional account of his Tahitian experiences which he entitled Noa Noa, an expression meaning 'very fragrant'. this would serve to extend the public's knowledge and understanding of his Tahitian work. for practical and artistic reason, as a way of highlighting the dichotomy between the outlook of a Parisian sophisticate and his own one of primitive simplicity, he agreed to collaborate with Charles Morice on the text. (For Gauguin to pose as the possessor of a raw, primitive sensibility was disingenuous, of course, as Nicholas Wadley has pointed out.) With Noa Noa in mind, Gauguin produced a series of ten woodcuts, his first experiments in a medium he quickly made very much his own. In subject the prints explored themes already treated in his paintings and represent stages in the cycle of life. The chapters of Noa Noa essentially describe Gauguin's feelings and experiences on settling to work as a painter in Tahiti, his limited exchanges with the islanders, followed by his marriage. These personal recollections are interspersed with sections of Tahitian legend, supposedly heard from the mouth of his young bride but in fact copied from these legends that the woodcuts derive their themes. Gauguin cut them up and posted them into the pages of his own copy of the manuscript, often beside watercolours or photographs, thereby creating interesting colleges of imagery and meaning.

Noa Noa gave a purpose to Gauguin's print-making in 1894, but he cannot have failed to observe the growing importance of print-making in general, particularly colour lithography, within the Parisian avant-garde and no doubt felt an urge to keep up on this front. His competitiveness in technical matters and his readiness to experiment and innovate in different media were constant factors of Gauguin's career. The woodcut was a somewhat neglected technique, despite its long tradition, and Gauguin became one of the pioneers of its revival, with such artists as Auguste Lepere and Felix Vallotton. If the consciously crude primitivism of Gauguin's woodcut style was somewhat out of step in the 1890s, it proved an inspiration in the next decade to the German Expressionists. His woodcuts were in a sense simply reversals of his carved wood panels, worked with an ordinary carpenter's chisel and richly inked, creating sometimes suggestively diffuse, sometimes crisp and bold primitive shapes, touched with colour to increase their decorative appeal.

At about this time Gauguin also produced two more important oil paintings of Tahitian subjects, demonstrating that the imagery was lodged in his memory and could be called up at will. Mahana no atua (Day of God) was a fantasy of an ancient Tahitian religious ritual, but the pyramidal design, with the worshippers arranged symmetrically round the central idol, is oddly reminiscent of Ingres's archly classical decoration for the Louvre, The Apothosis of Homer. A similar religious ritual is enacted in the background of Nave nave moe, and early in 1894, shortly after its completion, Gauguin exhibited the canvas next to the works of the Nabis, at one of the group shows organized by the dealer le Barc de Boutteville. In both these paintings and in the bold, full-length portrait of his new model Anna (a half-cast of Indian and Malay origin who passed as Javanese), Gauguin achieved a new level of decorative abstraction and colouristic simplicity, setting off his favourite harmony of pinks and blues with smaller patches of vermilion and chrome yellow.

In a rented studio in the rue Vercingetoris, Montparnasse, the winter and spring of 1893 and 1894 was also for Gauguin a time of socializing, living up to his reputation as the celebrated artist from Tahiti. He painted the walls chrome yellow and his own highly coloured works and carvings created a powerfully exotic ambience, as several of his callers remembered. Through his neighbours the Molards, he met a cultured and lively circle of Scandinavians. He also attended openings in Paris - he was seen at the Salon du Champ de Mars for example - and travelled to Brussels to see the first exhibition of the newly formed Salon de la Libre Esthetique (the successor to the Vingt group), which he reviewed. One characteristically provocative gesture made at this time, was hi offer to donate to the Luxembourg Museum his most prized Tahitian painting, Ia Orana Maria, an offer which was unceremoniously turned down, thus confirming and reinforcing Gauguin's hatred of officialdom.

Quite how Gauguin envisaged his long-term future is hard to say. both he and Mette, in their letters before December 1893, were evidently discussing the possibility of a family reunion, perhaps in a fisherman's cottage on the Norwegian coast. Some time in the opening months of 1894, however, things came to a complete impasse and Mette finally broke off communications. The final straw seems to have been her fury that Gauguin appeared to have no intention of sharing the legacy of 13,000 francs that, fortuitously, had just come his way from his paternal uncle in Orleans.

Certainly, Gauguin's decision to return to Pont-Aven in April 1894 must have been prompted more by nostalgia and a desire to see old friends than by any real intention of producing further Breton paintings. In truth, he had nowhere else to go where he might feel at home. One has the impression that Gauguin relished his notoriety and enjoyed cutting a dash in his strange, exotic attire, with Anna and her monkey in tow. Thanks to the inheritance, he could afford to live more lavishly than before, and there were plenty of young painters, new as well as former recruits to the Pont-Aven school to whom he could hold court about his experiences in Tahiti. From what is known of his behaviour on this occasion, bragging about sexual exploits, getting involved in a brawl with sailors at Concarneau in which he suffered a broken ankle, and then engaging in legal wrangles with the local authorities, he appears to have accepted that henceforth he would live up to the role of the dissolute in which his wife, among others, had cast him. He no longer maintained the pretence of being seen as a respectable family man. The image impressd on the young British artists he befriended, Robert Bevan and Roderic O'Connor, was one of hard-drinking extravagance and cynical disillusion.

On returning to Paris after a prolonged period of immobility, during which he had completed very few paintings, he found his belongings had been ransacked by the faithless Anna (she had left his work intact, however). Gauguin opened his studio from 2 to 9 December, inviting critics to come and admire his newly completed sets of woodcuts and monotypes. An account in the Meroure de France by Julien Leclerq made much of the technical strength of Gauguin's prints and described as 'revolutionary' his new method of making watercolour monotypes, a technique Gauguin had developed in Brittany; the monotype itself, that is, single or double impressions from a heavily inked drawing, was not in fact an untried method, since for some time Degas had been making such prints, and frequently working them up with pastel. But as in the case of Degas, this admirable keenness to try new media was also an indication of Gauguin's reluctance to undertake new subjects at this stage in his career, indeed, it showed his satisfaction with the range of motifs he now had at his fingertips and could work and rework at will.