Art: Unforgettable Self-Delusion

The harpies of legend, having once gripped an artist, are slow to let go. One of their regular victims has been Paul Gauguin. The image of the painter has been yanked, tugged, tortured and distorted by a succession of novels and films starting with Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence.

Moon provided a legend of the theatrical kind that Gauguin himself invited. Here was an archetypal rebel against bourgeois civilization, who quit a prosperous job on the Paris Stock Exchange to find his true artistic self in Tahiti among brown innocents, baptized anew in coconut milk and liberated from his own and Europe's stale past by primitive ritual.

This Tale of the South Pacific has added enormously to the market value of Gauguin's paintings, but it is false in almost every detail. Gauguin's contact with the Noble Savage served mainly to give him the pox. He spoke barely a word of the Tahitians' language, understood nothing of their rituals and social structures, never ate yams or fish when he could afford tinned asparagus and claret, and was prone to copy his scenes of native life from tourist photographs purchased in the grubby colonial port of Papeete. The most advertised side of the legend is also false. Gauguin's art was neither freed nor even significantly changed by the South Seas. When he left France in 1891, he was no Sunday painter but a mature artist with a circle of admirers that included Van Gogh, Maurice Denis and the Symbolist poets. Tahiti served only to inject new subjects into a vision and manner that had already set. This fact, crucial to an understanding of Gauguin's art, is elegantly documented in a selection of his pre-Tahiti paintings that opens this week at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The show runs from Gauguin's first semi-impressionist works of the early 1870s through a spectrum of influences to the full development of his style at Aries and Pont-Aven in the late 1880s. And it provides useful insights upon one of the more picturesque figures in early modernism, whose career demonstrated that unforgettable images could be drawn from a system of selfdelusion.

Priapic Swagger. Unlike the Impressionists, Gauguin did not paint what he saw: he chose to see what he wanted to paint. And his ideas on what was paintable grew out of other art—from the broad color patches and rhythmic line of Japanese cloisonne and wood block prints, from rural Breton sculpture and the flattened, monumental figures of a French artist he greatly admired, Puvis de Chavannes. Style absorbed him —not only the priapic swagger and ebullience of his own lifestyle, but the pervasive feedback of art style into nature. Even the fierce colors which scandalized some of his contemporaries were meant to be remote from nature. "Imagine," he once wrote, alluding to the purples, reds and chrome yellows he loved, "a confused collection of pottery twisted by the furnace!" In fact, he saw the world through art-colored spectacles.