Gauguin Tahiti

The sumptuousness of the materials in the exhibition Gauguin Tahiti embodies the richness of Paul Gauguin&#146;s creativity and vision. Deceptively simple, the exhibition is organized chronologically. Curators George Shackelford and Claire Fr�ches-Thory and colleagues have laid out the gallery almost like the twelve stations of the Cross, with representative, singular, and key oil paintings by Gauguin supplemented at each step with cultural artifacts, such as indigenous wood carvings and tools, ethnographic photographs, original letters and artist notebooks, ceramic pottery and myriad woodcut prints by Gauguin. Everything in the show contributes to deepening the viewer&#146;s understanding and physical experience of Gauguin&#146;s masterpiece (owned by the Museum of Fine Arts), Where Do We come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?


Gauguin&#146;s figurative paintings–the nudes, the portraits, the stylized pairings and clusters of Tahitians&#151;often draws upon the austere nobility of indigenous New World art. The Woman with a Flower (1891), a portrait of the first native Tahitian woman to pose for him, bears a terra cotta face, blunt, noble, chunky, suggesting Peruvian pottery. Gauguin employs a primary color palette of bright yellow, fiery red, and thick blue. He had already rehearsed his vision of &#147;savage&#148; nobility in rustic studies of Brittany.



In the foreground a pair of peacocks walk past. The painting has also been called Sleeping Eyes, possibly weaving a connection between the male peacock&#146;s tail feathers and the symbolic presence of death. The image states many of the contradictory and enigmatic tendencies in Gauguin&#146;s art: the rich, complex color palettes, the blending of &#147;savage&#148; (non-European native) and Christian symbolism (jungle as garden of Eden) in visual rhythms, the pictorial idealization of happiness&#151;noble, self-unaware, sexually self-possessed natives. Gauguin identified himself as a &#147;savage,&#148; neither at home in metropolitan Paris nor in the relatively un-Europeanized native settlements, and he painted dreamscapes, seeking less to find than to create a vision of earthly paradise in the French Pacific.


Like a hippie precursor, Gauguin pursued women, drink, and artistic creativity. In his self-portraits he poses taut-jawed, cocksure, and triumphant. A Lebenskunstler of the first order, Gauguin clearly took his own advice&#151;be mysterious and be in love. The apparent inability–or unwillingness&#151;to differentiate between fantasy and reality both doomed his tragic bohemian experiment in living (he died poor, alcoholic, and probably from complications of syphilis) and guided his re-enchantment of the world through his art.