Gauguin: Metamorphoses at MoMA

He was, in short, a Joseph Conrad character to the life, except that Conrad would have cut the next part of the story as too melodramatic for any fiction. Within months of his death, a posthumous exhibition in Paris had made Gauguin a sensation, and he would directly inspire the two greatest artists of the 20th century, Picasso and Matisse, at the most decisive moment of their development.

I once saw a dramatization of Gauguin’s life with Laurence Olivier, about which I remember nothing but the most stunning turn of acting I have ever seen — quite literally, a turn. It’s a scene in which Gauguin decides to give up his business career and devote himself entirely to art. Olivier articulates this moment by having his Gauguin rise abruptly from a table, and, by that simple gesture, turn away from his entire previous life. One sees nothing of his features in this tight shot, but only a sudden, powerful motion of the haunches as he rises up, full of the blind force of his decision.

Of course, in reality Gauguin made that decision over a lengthy period of time, with, one must assume, many moments of frustration, confusion, and self-doubt. But Olivier did capture something essential in the man in that simple movement, the force of a personality in revolt not only against itself but against an entire century. Henry David Thoreau once said he wanted a new heaven and a new earth. Paul Gauguin wanted that too, but he wanted new men and new women as well. And what he couldn’t find, he would create.

Gauguin found in the natives of the Marquesas a people who lived simply with nature and who circumscribed neither sexuality nor child-rearing within the constraints of the atomized bourgeois family. He saw them, too, as dwelling in a world of spirits, human and divine, that brought them frequent dread and required both supplication and banishment. The spirits were unreal, but belief gave them a vitality long extinguished in the formulaic religions of the West.

Gauguin drew, painted, and sculpted the Marquesan idols, partly to shock the lay and clerical authorities, partly to show them as a concretized presence in the landscape, and partly as a mode of religious inquest and experiment. Gauguin freely adopted foreign elements in depicting them, including Christian ones, and invented an idol of his own, Oviri, a rather fearsome creature in female form — his own savage anima, as Jung might say. He also depicted himself as a quasi-divinity or devil, in one notorious painting with a halo above his own head, and in a wood sculpture as a horned devil. As I say, very Conradian.

All of this is familiar enough, but the Museum of Modern Art's large show, mostly the South Sea work of Gauguin’s final decade or so, inverts the usual mode of presenting him. Most often we’re given the paintings with a side dish of the prints, sculpture, and more rarely the drawings, but here the graphic and sculptural work makes up about 120 of the 150-odd objects in the Museum’s sixth-floor exhibition galleries. The result is to focus on the remarkably protean nature of Gauguin’s achievement, one that hasn’t been fully assimilated yet.

Dim, haunting forms

This is particularly true of the prints, many of which are displayed in several states. Gauguin did most of his own printing, but some of it was done by the Parisian printer Louis Roy. The latter dissatisfied Gauguin because the images were too sharp and clear, whereas Gauguin’s own were typically murkier, more opaque, and at times all but illegible. Nothing like this had ever been done, at least deliberately. Gauguin’s own early paintings, whatever their symbolic dimensions, had prized clarity of form and simplicity of color. In the prints, however, he went after the night side of his subjects’ imaginings, the dim forms that haunted the Marquesan psyche. These forms, as Gauguin saw them, were shape-shifting too, a quality he could express in the different iterations the printing process made possible. Gauguin was a technical as well as an artistic pioneer here, and this work was to have great impact on the print medium in the 20th century. But he also excelled, as several examples in the exhibit attest, in the difficult and virtuosic form of the monotype, in which only a single impression is made.

The prints were often preparation or accompaniment to the paintings, which are placed at strategic points in the galleries. Gauguin also repeated a relatively small number of themes in his South Sea art, so that an implied narrative emerges from their iconic imagery. Humans, animals, and deities inhabit the same pastoral landscape as a common ground on which they occasionally interact but mostly go about their separate business. It’s the vision of a lapsed Eden. Gauguin also mixed overtly Christian imagery into his deific figures, much to the scandal of Christian missionaries. A wistful nonbeliever and a god on his own terrain, he made up his own mythology as he went along.

In the last analysis, of course, he knew it was no more than serious play. The one truly weak piece in the show, a sculpted Tahitian Idol, seems with its pale, outsized, Western-looking head set on a stunted female body the deliberate acknowledgment of an ultimate failure. The stockbroker fleeing a civilization he regarded as bankrupt found a world he could only approach with tender irony, and whose destruction he was compelled to participate in even as he made its memorial.

(Above right: Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, 1889.)