Seeing Gauguin Whole at Last

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Such an image of Gauguin, as Stuckey and Brettell show by exhaustive research, is mostly moonshine. The brute of fiction was not only a superbly intelligent painter but also a writer who left, as Brettell points out, the "largest and most important body of texts, illustrated and otherwise, produced by any great artist in France since . . . Delacroix . . . That he has always been treated as a businessman-turned-artist rather than an artist- turned-writer shows the extent to which his literary achievement has been undervalued."

As this show vividly proves, Gauguin was an artist of extraordinary powers long before he sailed to the South Seas from Marseilles in 1891. By then, most of the basic obsessions of his work were in place: he had already "found himself" in Brittany, presiding over a small colony of lesser artists like Maurice Denis and Jacob Meyer de Haan, amid the ritual dolmens and the stolid squinting peasants -- an exotic tribe with its own language and religious customs, an enclave that seemed closer to the earth than the rest of France.

The story of self-creation told by the early work is just as surprising as anything in his Tahitian years. By 1880 the Sunday painter in his 30s had become a tardy impressionist, imitating Pissarro's landscapes and Mary Cassatt's moppets. After ten years of work in Paris, Brittany and with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin was making his first real masterpieces, like The Ham, 1889, a still life that pays homage to Cezanne and Manet while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness, and Yellow Christ, 1889, with its startling extremes of yellow and orange. This painting of peasants adoring a wayside crucifix was also, perhaps, an allegory of Gauguin's opinion of himself: Christ's face is his schematic self-portrait, and the Breton women may stand for Gauguin's followers in Pont-Aven.

Always in the art world, as in a madhouse, there are bad painters who obstreperously claim to be prophets. Gauguin was that discomfiting figure, a great artist with little modesty who made good on strident prophetic claims. He saw himself as both Christ and savage, sacrificial lamb and initiator of cultural mayhem. The whole tangle of the "primitive," so basic to early modernism, begins with Gauguin -- not in Tahiti but in Brittany, "savage and primitive," he wrote, where "the flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting."

His ambitions were Wagnerian. Gauguin thought in terms of large didactic and decorative cycles. He dreamed of making a "total" work of art subsuming architecture, painting and sculpture -- hence the "Studio of the South Seas" that he set up in rue Vercingetorix in Paris after he got back from his first Pacific sojourn in 1893, and the "House of Pleasure," with its lewd carvings and mottoes, that he built in the Marquesas. Tahitian myth was as literal a gift from the gods to him as Valhalla had been to Wagner. Gauguin was no anthropologist but a romantic looking for pity and terror among the vestiges of a lost Golden Age. Certainly his flight to the Marquesas was inspired by a wide reaction against Western cultural surfeit, against an industrial France fixated on money and "development." But the life he forged from his discontents, though not without moments of bathos, was deeply courageous. He tried what others in the Paris cafes only talked about.