Down and Out in Tahiti
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow Down and Out in Tahiti Somerset Maugham was right: Gauguin's was the perfect life for a successful roman d'aventure. It had all the necessary ingredients: radical...
...There are difficulties: he is unable to persuade the French Colonization Society to pay his passage to the island as a "serious-minded settler...
...the artist is too often a convenient peg for hanging out a number of works from the Museum's permanent collection...
...He notes that the exhibition "is neither comprehensive nor fully consistent but, taken as a whole, it reveals major aspects of Gauguin's art and influence...
...His final years in the islands are a sad story...
...His success with this venture restores his old illusions...
...The story begins in an unlikely place-the Bourse...
...But government officials decline his services...
...He takes the precaution, however, of enlisting a party of his more affluent painter friends-Emile Bernard, Schuffenecker, Meijer de Haanin setting up a tropical studio...
...Papeete, the Tahitian capital is a provincial backwater...
...I shall soon be leaving for Tahiti, a small South Sea island where it is possible to live without money...
...In some remote outpost, with a minimum of official duties, he reasons, he will have time to paint and adequate funds...
...With their five children, the couple moves from Paris to Copenhagen: Mette Gauguin has relatives there who can be counted upon to look after the family during those lean days that any serious artist must expect...
...But Danielsson's book seldom ventures into the critical arena on Gauguin's art, and the Guggenheim exhibition, while attempting to sketch in the ramifications of Gauguin's style, is not definitive...
...When the market turns bad, during the financial crash in the early 1880s, he has his opportunity...
...He hires himself out, hypocritically, as a polemicist for local political factions editing a monthly paper called The Wasps...
...To raise the money for his trip, he plans a public sale of his paintings...
...Only the timely death of a rich relative provides him with the return fare...
...More and more, he chafes at the dullness of his routine life...
...I am determined to forget my miserable past, paint freely as I like without thought of fame, and in the end die out there, forgotten by everybody here in Europe...
...the man who quits civilization for good can hardly expect to do handsomely the second time round...
...Finally, they agree to separate for a time...
...In 1889, after seeing the Javanese Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle, he hits upon the idea of getting himself an appointment in Indo-China, one of the newer French colonies in Southeast Asia...
...The value of Danielsson's book is that it teaches us how much the illusion cost...
...The illusion he clung to of an ideal life waiting for him on some further island colored his art...
...Suffering from an advanced case of syphilis, he wears long trousers to cover the sores on his legs, but the young native girls still shun him, fearing that he has leprosy...
...He writes to his wife about the new paradise where he will be able to live off "ecstasy, quiet and art far from this European struggle for money...
...With the skill of a publicist, he sees to it that glowing accounts of his art and his prospective Tahitian journey are placed by the right critics in the right papers...
...His letters are pitiable: hinting at suicide, pleading for money, complaining of his treatment at the hands of shabby officialdom...
...The local officials, in spite of his mission officielle, are unresponsive to his art...
...Gauguin was, on occasion a powerful artist, and, despite the disastrous personal consequences of his escape to the islands, it was the one move that perpetuated his art...
...Later, on reading a glowing account of life in Oceania published in a government handbook, he decides to settle on the island of Tahiti...
...The imaginary, primitive Tahiti he continued to seek was in itself a tinned delicacy...
...How much he dominated or was influenced by the circle of PontAven and Nabi artists remains debatable...
...His present reputation is the result of a wellcultivated legend...
...Recurrent illness makes him dependent upon the doctor in town, his lack of money makes him a slave to the arrival schedules of the slow mailboats and the journey to Papeete in a decrepit public coach is expensive...
...The living is expensive...
...But what an ironic picture: the romantic savage, in the midst of plenty, dining off tinned foods at exorbitant prices because he finds the native diet insipid and unhealthy...
...He was a bold colorist, a crude and vigorous draughtsman, but he was, chiefly, an artist of special effects-in the theatrical sense of the term...
...Gauguin is, at the moment, a much overrated artist...
...The significance of his Tahitian work is that he had, at last, found a subject matter that could compensate for the unevenness of his style...
...After a few months, he moves to another part of the island, settling down with a young native girl...
...An anthropologist who has lived in Tahiti since 1956, Danielsson has had access to official records and oral information from survivors who knew Gauguin...
...Gauguin returns to Paris...
...There are young girls available, but they are addicted to pleasure, gossip and Chinese restaurants and, family ties being strong, the possessor of a proud young vahine may find himself buying presents for parents and godparents as well...
...This talent worked as consummately with a yellow Christ in a Brittany wheat field as it did with golden native girls among thickets of hibiscus...
...it has as its hero a well-to-do broker's agent who takes a fancy to art...
...He was something of a pasticheur, a purveyor of modern trends rather than an initiator in the sense that C?©zanne was...
...The coincidence of Danielsson's book and an exhibition, Gauguin and the Decorative Style, currently installed at the Guggenheim Museum-the one dispelling the legend, the other assessing his art-ought to afford a major reevaluation of Gauguin and his influence...
...An exhibition of his Tahitian work at Durand-Ruel does poorly...
...His relationships with public officials become more rancorous...
...His finances are so low, however, that he is obliged to plead for repatriation at the government's expense...
...He had written earlier to the Danish artist J. F. Willumsen: "As for me, my mind is already made up...
...After two years in paradise, Gauguin arrives in Marseille with only four francs in his pocket...
...A public sale meant to drum up the money for his return to the islands is a disaster...
...Disease, despondency, real and imagined slights, are his daily bread...
...To this viewer, the Guggenheim exhibition is a case of summer fare...
...But in that bourgeois milieu, Gauguin finds it impossible to be creative...
...The rest, as Bengt Danielsson points out in an informative book, Gauguin in the South Seas (Doubleday, 336 pages, $7.95), is bitter anti-climax...
...When he returns, they will take up their life together and begin "a new marriage...
...His wife remains in Copenhagen...
...As a Sunday painter, he meets a number of vanguard artists who encourage him in his vocation...
...The promise of an exhibition in Copenhagen with a room devoted to his paintings and Van Gogh's makes him optimistic about the reception of the work he has managed to do in Tahiti...
...His letters to his friends and benefactors back in Paris are a litany of hints and demands to bail him out of his financial difficulties...
...he wants to make art his profession...
...He gives us a far more real and interesting figure than the legend allows...
...No place appears to satisfy his quest for an idyllic life...
...His life becomes a race between painting and progressive bodily decay...
...Still, he is not free from European civilization...
...Lawrence Alloway's demurrer in the catalogue introduction takes a cautious view...
...The native population is already corrupted by European ways and diseases...
...From that point on, his life is one of fitful independence...
...Of the 48 paintings and prints by Gauguin, there are too few that are impressive enough to give him the stature that an exhibition of this kind requires, and among the selected works by his contemporaries and followers, there are some curious choices...
...His wife, under pressure from relatives who think that her husband should adopt a more sensible profession, becomes difficult...
...A L?©ger abstraction, Mural Painting, dating from 1924-25, for example, has more to do with Cubism than with the longevity of Gauguin's influence...
...Becoming a racist for no reason other than prestige, he barnstorms against the influx of the Chinese population and makes a good many enemies...
...He persuades his wife to go along with his new career...
...He dies in one of the Marquesas islands under circumstances that suggest suicide...
...In his hands, a relatively refined style like Art Nouveau becomes gross, the painterly tensions of Impressionism break down in desultory application...
...his friends beg off for one reason or another...
...There are the inevitable quarrels and backbiting...
...In the end, he decides to go it alone and manages to wangle a mission officielle which, although it does not carry a stipend, will bear the weight of authority among colonial officials...
...The raw thing left a bitter taste in his mouth...
...He soon squanders his money and is reduced to living from hand to mouth...
...The sale, however, raises his hopes and he convinces his wife that his work in Tahiti will assure his future success...
...In pursuit of cheap living and suitable subjects he moves about restlessly-first to Brittany, then to Martinique, then to Aries...
...He pieces together a living out of odd jobs and favors cadged from friends...
...Gauguin, however, arrives in the islands 50 years too late for his primitive Eden...
...It had all the necessary ingredients: radical changes in fortune, a setting that ranged from the centers of civilization to the last outposts of primitive life, a series of exotic amorous encounters, and a bitter final retribution of the kind that sets our collective conscience at ease...
Vol. 49 • August 1966 • No. 17
