The French postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin arrived on board the Vire in Papeete, Tahiti, late at night. His first vision was of “strange fires, moving in zigzags on the sea” and rising in the darkness behind them a pitch-black jagged cone. Gauguin recorded this and other vivid impressions of his 1891-93 stay in his Tahitian journal, “Noa Noa.” His voyage from Marseille to Papeete had taken 63 days. By the time he arrived, he was in a state of “feverish expectancy.” His agitation was generated not simply by Tahiti as a much-anticipated destination but by its place in his life as a signifier of new work. This would be the beginning of a new journey into the creative soul.
I was reading Gauguin’s “Noa Noa” on my own journey to Tahiti this past April, on board the cruise ship Ovation of the Seas. My interest began pragmatically. This slim volume of anecdote and reflection would be flesh on the bones of my lecture on Gauguin, the first in a series of six seminars I was delivering to passengers on the Ovation. I chose Gauguin as one of my subjects because he was an intriguing trailblazer who ran away to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands to produce his most avant-garde work. The Ovation was stopping at Papeete, which made the choice of Gauguin as a subject feel inevitable. Little did I realize how transformative this selection would be. I had come to see Gauguin as a narcissistic, colonizing misogynist. I’m not sure these perceptions have shifted greatly, but my understanding of them has. My grasp of Gauguin has deepened, and I have a new appreciation of the power of personal narrative (in this case “Noa Noa”) to connect us to an individual and of the power of a visceral experience of place to transcend time and make history feel real.
By the time his ship nosed its way into the still water of Papeete Bay, Gauguin’s background and wanderlust had already made him a global citizen.
Gauguin was born in 1848. When he was a young child, his family moved from Orleans, France, to Lima, Peru, where he grew up speaking Spanish. His mother was Peruvian, which partly motivated the move to Lima. Gauguin was enchanted by the rich odors and intense colors, flavors and sounds of his heritage. It was civil war in Peru and his paternal grandfather’s ill health that eventually prompted the family’s return to Orleans in 1854. Gauguin stayed in France until, at 17, he joined the merchant marine to continue his travels abroad. He roamed the world for six more years before returning to France and the warm welcome of his wealthy guardian, Gustave Arosa.
Arosa introduced Gauguin to the world of Parisian privilege and to the work of some of the most progressive painters of the day. Gauguin inherited family money, and with Arosa as his benefactor connecting him to powerful people, he enjoyed one of the most settled periods of his life. In 1872 he met Mette-Sophie Gad, a Danish governess whom he married the next year and with whom he had five children. He took a position as a stockbroker with a prominent firm and used his expanding fortune to become an art collector and dealer as well as to take art lessons himself at the renowned Academie Colarossi.
Gauguin’s decade of a prosperous and relatively sedentary life ended devastatingly in 1882 with the collapse of the French stock market. He lost his position overnight, and the value of his art collection plummeted. His recovery plan was to convert his amateur art status into cash by becoming a professional painter. Prior to the stock market crash, Gauguin had exhibited with an avant-garde group of painters in the fourth, fifth and sixth impressionist exhibitions. His peers in these shows included Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Yet Gauguin’s modernist agenda meant his work had limited mainstream appeal.
To please himself and his more progressive art audience, Gauguin began to travel. Initially, he left his family intermittently to find subjects that would sell. By 1886, he had given up all pretense of any family life and embraced the freedoms of a peripatetic painter. That summer he escaped Paris to stay at the Pont-Aven artists’ colony in Brittany. In this remote region, with its rugged Atlantic coastline, rustic landscape and religious inhabitants, he found the essence he was looking for.
“I love Brittany,” he wrote to a friend. “I find wilderness and primitiveness there.” At Pont-Aven he began to make the changes that would catapult his practice into a new, more experimental, paradigm.
Central to this shift, also, was Gauguin’s stay with Vincent van Gogh in 1888 at an artist colony in Arles. Gauguin would spar with van Gogh in heated artistic debates until they parted acrimoniously three months later. At Pont-Aven and Arles, Gauguin was looking to capture the elemental qualities of his subjects by using simple outlines, strong colors and bold, confrontational compositions. In the late summer of 1888, he would produce “Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling the Angel),” his most modern work yet. The painting shows a sermon brought to life in the minds of a group of Breton women leaving church. The view is across the heads and shoulders of these women wearing the traditional winged headdress, and the viewer sees what they see in their imaginations. Jacob is wrestling an angel in a field of vivid red grass. Gauguin uses color symbolically, and his figures are outlined in black; a technique adopted from Japanese wood-block prints.
Gauguin knew he had created something special when he finished the canvas. “I think I have achieved in the figures a great simplicity, rustic and superstitious,” he wrote to van Gogh. He felt his advances were fueled by the “primitive” aspects of French peasant life. His travels through regional France had been in search of this “pure” unchanged world of traditional customs, costumes and religious beliefs.
The decision to voyage to the French colony of Tahiti in 1891 was a global extension of his earlier explorations. Gauguin’s plan was to immerse himself in the life of the Tahitian people, whom he referred to as Māori. Living intimately with a pure Polynesian race, he believed, would help release him from the corrupting shackles of civilization. He saw himself as innately a “savage” and claimed that his mother had Incan ancestry (though there is no evidence this was the case). This savage element was part of his personal myth: that he had a primitive core that could be released in his art when he lived close to other “primitives” and painted them. He was convinced that his best creative work came from this untamed state. Papeete would be his Polynesian utopia.
Gauguin was shocked by what he found when he arrived. His untouched traditional society turned out to be contaminated by “Europe — the Europe which I had thought to shake off,” he wrote in his journal. But this was aggravatingly worse. It was a Pacific copy, full of “grotesque” imitation to the point of “caricature” and “colonial snobbism.” Gauguin found that the dream that had brought him to Tahiti was “brutally disappointed by the actuality. It was the Tahiti of former times which I loved. That of the present filled me with horror.”
But Latin culture did not simply overlay the settlement of Papeete — it was hardwired in Gauguin himself. His Catholicism is there in “Hail Mary (la Orana Maria)” (1891), the first major work he produced after his arrival. Instead of depicting a Tahitian story, Gauguin brings a Judeo-Christian lens to what he sees. In a letter to his future biographer, George-Daniel de Monfreid, Gauguin described the scene, “An angel with yellow wings reveals Mary and Jesus, both Tahitian, to two Tahitian women, nudes dressed in pareus, a sort of cotton cloth printed with flowers that can be draped from the waist.”
And when he saw Queen Marau grieving for her recently deceased father, King Pomare, a great Tahitian chief, he thought of the “Triangle of the Trinity.” He described her as statuesque and likened her arms to “two columns of a temple, simple, straight … with the long horizontal line of the shoulder, and [her] vast height terminating above” in the tip of the triangle. He saw Tahiti and its people through Western eyes. The white sand beaches and lush vegetation became his tropical “Arcadia,” while Tahitian women were the subjects of his many bathing images, one of the oldest and most common visual tropes in Western art. The civilization Gauguin went so far to escape arrived with him as a stowaway in his mind.
Tahiti did free Gauguin to see color differently, however. The seasonal skies of Europe that promised leaden winters full of gray days were gone. The daring red field of “Vision After the Sermon” was replaced by a phosphorescent palette of dazzling Tahitian color. Everything radiated light — simple and majestic. “The landscape with its violent, pure colors dazzled and blinded me,” he recorded in “Noa Noa.” He observed the movement of orange sails on the blue sea and the effect of serpentine metallic-yellow leaves against the purple soil, and was enchanted by the golden figures of islanders swimming in the brooks and on the seashore. In Tahiti, Gauguin realized his potential as a colorist.
He was in Papeete less than three months before he felt compelled, in September 1891, to set up a studio in Papeari on the far side of the island. There he felt free from civilization at last. “I am far, far away from the prisons that European houses are. A Māori hut does not separate man from life, from space, from the infinite.” The hut walls were open and above his head was a simple roof of pandanus leaves. Gauguin was learning to live in harmony with silence, with “my beautiful solitude and my beautiful poverty.” His solitude, however, included the presence in his hut of a young “vahina,” or woman.
In Papeete, the role had been filled by a girl with some European ancestry. This is what made him “put her aside.” “It was her half-white blood … I felt that she could not teach me any of the things I wished to know, that she had nothing to give of that special happiness which I sought.” Gauguin treated young pubescent girls like his property — as models, concubines and housekeepers. He gave them status in Tahitian society because he was a white man from Europe and syphilis because he was a frequenter of brothels in France. Initially, he had qualms about the ages of the young girls he took as “wives”; ultimately, he rationalized his behavior and justified the liberties he took.
Gauguin abandoned his wife and five children in France, the women from his extramarital affairs, the four children he conceived out of wedlock and the girls he lived with in Tahiti. He saw women as things to be used and then discarded when they had served their purpose.
On a walk from his studio in search of a wife, Gauguin met a girl he called Tehura, known in her village as Teha’amana. She would become his live-in model and housekeeper. Teha’amana didn’t speak much but could be obstinate over things she cared about and knew to be silent when he was painting. Gauguin was jubilant about this new relationship. His life was “filled to the full with happiness,” he wrote in his journal. “Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.” His bliss, he believed, was the outcome of living with a Tahitian girl on an island paradise. He noted in his journal that Tahitian vahina were very different from Latin women. “Thanks to our cinctures and corsets,” he wrote, “we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman … complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development.”
In contrast, he saw vahina as being closer to nature and more animal-like in their instincts. These were positive qualities, according to Gauguin, but his underpinning attitudes were racist and exploitative.
Teha’amana was the subject of some of Gauguin’s best work. There are sketches, prints and paintings, including one of his finest and most well-known oils, “The Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau)” (1892). In this image, Gauguin’s teenage “wife,” Teha’amana, lies full length and naked on a bed, watching in terror for the Tahitian spirit of the dead. This work is full of symbolism and anxiety. Gauguin captures not only the effect of Tahitian mythology on an impressionable girl but also the insecurities Teha’amana faced as an artist’s muse. She is immobile, “lying face downward flat on the bed with eyes inordinately large with fear,” he recorded. Gauguin’s prismatic palette reveals Teha’amana’s golden body, the bed’s emerald-green base, partially covered by a printed fabric of swirling yellow hibiscus forms, and a pink sheet. The Spirit of the Dead, dressed in black, waits menacingly at the foot of the bed. Gauguin loved the idea that he was picturing Teha’amana’s superstition in its purest form.
Gauguin hated what colonizing French culture had done to Tahiti. He saw the suppression of Tahitian customs, spirituality and traditional beliefs as reprehensible. In his eyes, Tahitians were a dying race, and he was ashamed of the damage France had already done. Gauguin separated himself as much as he could from Westerners and lived like the Tahitians. “Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground,” he announced in his journal. “My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling away from me little by little.” He would live with Teha’amana for close to two years and produce 66 unique canvases before he returned to France. Gauguin exhibited his Tahitian works at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris, where his work was acclaimed, but only 11 of 44 canvases sold.
In his journal, Gauguin recorded that one of the reasons for returning to France was his family, but after a stay of nearly two years he left without seeing his wife and children. He did not contribute financially to his wife in France or the “wife” he left in Tahiti.
In June 1895, he departed for Papeete once more. Again, Gauguin wanted to escape the trappings of civilization, moving to the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in 1901. His poor health would heavily affect his second visit. He was now dependent for pain relief on morphine. His eyesight was failing and his body weak. Gauguin died in his house on May 8, 1903, aged 54. He was buried in the Catholic Calvary Cemetery in Atuona, on Hiva Oa.
Gauguin’s art historical legacy was enormous. He would influence Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and the whole movement of fauvism (1904-07). And his work would live on in subsequent generations of artists inspired by his subjective color and simple, expressive rendering of form.
His art also resonates in the collective consciousness. When I arrived in Papeete I realized that Gauguin’s images were my first introduction to Tahiti and its people. It occurred to me that I had seen these things initially through his eyes, through the hauntingly beautiful pictures of his imagined paradise. His paintings framed my way of seeing Tahiti and by extension all of French Polynesia. Pablo Picasso once said, “Art is the lie that makes us realize truth.” Gauguin’s imagined Tahiti offered me insights and made me hungry to explore these amazing islands. He described the power of the Tahitian landscape in “Noa Noa.”
“To the left was the wilderness with its perspective of great forests,” to the right, “always the sea, the coral reefs and the sheets of water.” He pictured this land in words and images and shared them with the world.
I was visualizing his paintings as we drove around the island. Some Australian passengers on the cruise very kindly invited me and my partner to join their guided tour. Their traveling companions couldn’t make it and there were spare seats in the van. Papeete had clearly continued its Western trajectory, looking very much like a modern city. This impression was confirmed by familiar brand names and the ubiquitous McDonald’s sign that flashed past the van window.
One of the first items on our itinerary was a visit to the Gauguin Museum at Papeari, where he lived during his first visit to Tahiti. The museum was presented to the Territory of French Polynesia in 1965 and has been closed for renovation since 2013. This project appeared to have been permanently abandoned. The gates there hang slumped on their hinges, windows have been boarded up, and its white walls are coated in thick black mold. The museum’s Wikipedia site told us that it once held original documents, photographs, reproductions, sculptures, engravings, gouaches, sketches and wood-block prints. The rooms are now empty and all the visitors gone; there is a sense of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Ozymandias” in this fallen monument to one of Western art’s great leaders.
But Gauguin’s jagged mountainous cone is still there, a backdrop to the coastline, and his brooding forest with its “eternal shadows,” a forest he gained firsthand experience of when he hiked into the center of the island. “It is a mad vegetation, growing always wilder, more entangled, denser,” he wrote in his journal, “it has become an almost impenetrable thicket.” Nature was all-powerful in Gauguin’s day and still is.
There is now a history of Indigenous cultural regeneration — something Gauguin would have celebrated. We visited, with our guide, the site of the Arahurahu Marae, a large black dry-stone structure built as a stepped square with a surrounding wall and an altar to host ritual celebrations. The archaeological site of Arahurahu was restored in 1953 and has been used ever since to hold the Heiva Nui festival, which celebrates the consecration of an “arii,” or supreme chief. Arahurahu is used for public festivals and private worship. The large stone Tiki figure that guards the entrance is covered with frangipani flowers laid on its rough volcanic surface — worshipfully and for good fortune. Indigenous Tahitians use this sacred place as they have always done.
Also, there are signs of an escalating desire for self-determination among the Indigenous people of French Polynesia. In New Caledonia, bloody riots have recently pushed things close to civil war. The catalyst for the crisis was a proposed constitutional change that would allow French residents who have lived in New Caledonia for a decade to vote in provincial elections. The fear is that this will dilute the vote held by the Indigenous Kanak people and tip the balance of political power in favor of French nationals. Tahiti has not experienced the same sort of violence, but there is an ongoing push across French Polynesia for greater Indigenous autonomy.
As Gauguin’s boat moved away from the wharf at Papeete in June 1893, he saw Teha’amana for the last time. She had been up many nights weeping and now she was exhausted — sad, but resigned to his departure. She would find another husband in his absence and begin a new life. Gauguin was leaving confident that his Tahitian works would captivate French audiences the way the Tahitians had him. Tahiti and its people had changed Gauguin. “I am leaving, older by two years, but twenty years younger; more barbarian than when I arrived, and yet much wiser … in the art of living and happiness.”
When I left Papeete onboard the Ovation the one thing I could truly claim was that I knew Gaugin better than when I arrived. To my mind, it was still reprehensible that he groomed young girls and used people callously and calculatingly to further his artistic aims. But I did come to understand (if not forgive) his motivations and appreciate some of his remarkable insights: the fact that he despised the Westernizing influence of France; that he was ashamed of colonization and grieved over the loss of traditional Tahitian culture; that his search for the “primitive” in French Polynesia was really a search for the “primitive” inside himself; and that this was an essence he desperately wanted to express in his art and give to the world.
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