Art: Unforgettable Self-Delusion

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Amorous Harmony. Only this magisterial grasp of form could sustain Gauguin's later art through his own sentimentality about primitive life and keep him working against a reality which brutally confounded his expectations. "I shall be able," he wrote to his stolid Danish wife Mette before he left France, "to listen to the sweet murmuring music of my heart's beating in the silence of the beautiful tropical nights. I shall be in amorous harmony with the mysterious beings of my environment." The language reads disconcertingly like a Honolulu tourist brochure. Its abstraction suggests memory at work—one theory is that Gauguin's tropic seeking was an effort to recapture the childish happiness of a time his family spent in Peru as houseguests of a rich uncle —as well as a kind of religious hope. "It seems that Eve did not speak negro, but good God! what language did she speak, she and the serpent?" he demanded in a letter to his fellow painter Emile Bernard in 1889. Adam and Eve, or Paradise Lost, 1890, was the visual counterpart to that question. Gauguin painted its writhing silhouettes of green foliage against an unnaturally dark cobalt sky in France long before he ever saw Tahiti. But there is no difference at all between it and the more elaborate reworkings of primal innocence and guilt that he would produce in the South Seas. All the imagery of Paradise was in his head already. He went there not to see it, but to live it. · Robert Hughes