Art: Seeing Gauguin Whole at Last

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Gauguin was never the most limpid allegorist, and even his Breton work, like Self-Portrait with Halo, could be fairly inscrutable. But his fiercest intent was to go beyond mere pleasure in painting. How he would have despised the imagery of Club Med hedonism that so many people still expect in his work! The "optimism" of Gauguin's brilliant, moody color is a myth. His sensuality is shaded by transience and the fear of cultural extinction. The folkways of Tahiti were vanishing under French colonization long before Gauguin arrived. But Tahiti reinforced what he wanted to do in Brittany -- to paint grand moral allegories that spoke of human fate and wove together the mundane and the mystical. Alas, the summation of these efforts, the 1897 mural titled Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, could not be lent to this show from Boston.

He tried to create new myths out of the most eclectic elements -- ironically, the kind of overview that only European colonialism, which he despised, makes possible: Buddhism, Hinduism, Oceanic legends, Christianity, symbolist fancies, the nostalgia of Poussin and the despair of Poe. And his pictorial sources were just as varied. However much Gauguin promoted himself as a man of instinct, his work is a cultural palimpsest. A high-born vahine displays herself in the pose of a Cranach nude; Manet's Olympia re-echoes through the Tahitian bodies. Gauguin copied poses from a large stock of photographs he took with him to the Pacific. Some of his greatest Tahitian works are in part reflections on other paintings. Te rerioa (The Dream), 1897, with its silent meditative figures in a strange, frieze-decorated room, is a distant reprise of Delacroix's Women of Algiers. But that is also what lends Gauguin's Tahitian work its magical tension -- the layering of cultural memory into ecstatic sight. A great artist's eye is never "innocent."

If there is an absolute originality in Gauguin, it lies in his color, for which no amount of reproduction prepares you. It is saturated, infinitely subtle, full of the stateliest assonances and most risky contrasts; its range of emotional suggestion is immense, from the dusky peaches and ochers of Woman with a Fan, 1902, to the slightly poisonous grandeur with which the yellow cushion intrudes among the dark creamy browns and blues of Nevermore, 1897. "I wished to suggest by means of a simple nude," Gauguin wrote to a friend about this painting, "a certain long-lost barbaric luxury. It is completely drowned in colors which are deliberately somber and sad; it is neither silk, nor velvet, nor muslin, nor gold that creates this luxury, but simply the material made rich by the artist."

Colored mud, transcending itself. One may wonder if any painter in the last century put more meaning into his sense of color than Gauguin; and while one is under the spell of this show, it seems quite certain that none has.