Books: Measure of the Man

GAUGUIN IN THE SOUTH SEAS by Bengt Danielsson. 336 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

Posterity appreciates Paul Gauguin more than his contemporaries did. While he lived, the museums of his native France coldly refused him wall space. Until his death in 1903, his canvases found mostly a rude or indifferent market; later the bidding began to spiral out of sight: a single Gauguin was knocked down for $364,000 at Sotheby's in 1959. Posterity, in short, has caught up with Gauguin's notion of his own indisputable greatness. The matter of the Gauguin legend, however, is disputable, and this book ably succeeds in separating the facts from the romance.

Indecent Exposure. Bengt Danielsson is no art critic but an anthropologist who accompanied Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition to Polynesia, succumbed to the charm of the South Seas and moved his family to Tahiti in 1956. There he bumped into the legend of Gauguin, who spent his last years in Tahiti and in the nearby Marquesas and whose grave on Hiva Oa Island surveys the Pacific. Danielsson soon discovered what was for him an astonishing fact: none of Gauguin's many biographers had ever bothered to measure the legend in the place where so much of it was made.

The figure of Gauguin that takes shape here is that of a man whose posthumous reputation stands in heavy debt to his dramatic self-exile to the South Seas. By the time Gauguin arrived in 1891, his style had already been formed, his competence proved; nothing he did thereafter materially changed or improved either. Seeking in a Rousseauean state of nature the simple truths he wanted to paint, Gauguin found instead a culture already changed by a century of Western influences. Papeete, the capital, was any ugly French town. Gauguin's models dressed more decorously than he: when he bathed in the raw, a gendarme fined him for indecent exposure.

Gauguin did not always rely on available models. The studio of Charles Spitz, then Tahiti's only professional photographer, supplied him with inspiration for his art. His Pape Moe (The Mysterious Water), which shows a Tahitian boy drinking from a mountain spring, was painted from a Spitz photo. In la Orana Maria, one of his best-known canvases, the Tahitian figures strike poses deriving entirely from a photograph of a Javanese-temple frieze that Gauguin had brought from Paris.

Instead of absorbing his elected milieu, Gauguin largely rebuffed it. In an area where food could be plucked from trees and the sea, he exhausted funds on potatoes, canned asparagus and claret imported from France. Nearly all of the native-language titles affixed to his paintings betray his ignorance of the tongue. He learned little of the native myths, committing to canvas misconstructions so gross that Tahitians would have laughed if they had understood them. To the end of his days, he painted human figures on the guideline checkerboards, like graph paper, that steady the novice's uncertain hand.

Uncoached, Undazzled. Gauguin in the South Seas should surprise readers who have been accustomed to the legend of the man inspired by Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence and propagated by art dealers. Moreover, Biographer Danielsson stands in no perceptible awe of his subject's artistic stature.