The Austere Heretic

GAUGUIN by Henri Perruchot. 398 pages. World. $6.95.

"I regret what I said to you about Gauguin," the painter Paul Serusier wrote to a fellow artist in 1880. "There is nothing of the humbug about him." Serusier was wrong. There was a great deal of the humbug about Gauguin, as his latest biographer convincingly demonstrates. In fact, it was mainly the humbuggery that gave Gauguin a reputation--long before Somerset Maugham set his pen to The Moon and Sixpence--of being the very prototype of the artist in revolt against his society. Gauguin was aware of his reputation, gloried in it, assiduously cultivated it. And he was such a consummate natural actor, Biographer Perruchot believes, that he constantly-- sometimes disastrously -- deluded himself into believing it.

Perruchot, who has written critical biographies of Manet, Cezanne and Toulouse-Lautrec, tackled Gauguin once before in a 1948 study that he now regards as "superficial and sentimental." His conclusions in the present volume were drawn from long study of Gauguin's private journals and correspondence, conversation with people (particularly in Brittany) who still remember the painter, and, most important, a study of 600 unpublished documents in the library of the late Painter Daniel De Monfreid, who was Gauguin's chief correspondent while Gauguin was in Tahiti.

Lost Paradise. Perruchot is not always convincing as an armchair psychologist, but he makes a good case for the fact that Gauguin was a rebel long before he walked out of his marriage and successful career as a Paris stockbroker at the age of 35. For one thing, he was a stockbroker only by happenstance. When he returned to Paris at 23 after six years before the mast, he casually accepted a minor position in his guardian's brokerage house. Gauguin was a gambler, and while the market continued to rise he prospered; but he was persistently scornful of his colleagues. More important, he was by nature a wanderer--committed half-consciously, thinks Perruchot, to a search for a vision he would never find: "the lost paradise of his childhood in Peru." Gauguin had spent five years there with his widowed mother after his journalist father died. And he remembered Peru as "this enchanted land peopled by a primitive and simple race." He was still looking for it when he died.

Gauguin's strange marriage to Mette Gad, a plump, passionless Danish girl who liked to wear men's clothes and smoke a cigar, has never been adequately explained. Perruchot adds little to the story. They lived together for twelve years and produced five children, yet neither, according to their later testimony, ever had an inkling of what the other was like. By the time their third child was on the way, Gauguin was beginning to send his paintings to exhibitions. Through a meeting with Camille Pissarro, he was drawn into the group of eccentrics known as the impressionists--Manet, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro himself.

A Great Criminal. When he turned his back on business and family to become a fulltime painter, he announced the decision with a typically self-conscious flourish: "Oh, yes, I am a great criminal. What does it matter! Michelangelo was too!" He exchanged his stockbroker's black business suits for a fisherman's blue jersey and high boots, retreated to cultivate a new role--"the austere heretic," in Pissarro's words, who "pontificated and was followed by a train of young men."

Gauguin talked taller than he stood. Actually, he was a little (5 ft. 4 in.) bantam of a man. But he walked Pont-Aven's streets with a nautical swagger, his great jut of a nose tilted in the air, looking like an evangelist pirate captain. He spouted maxims: "A line is colour, since it can only be born from the contour of spaces," or "The ugly can be beautiful, the pretty, never." To his wife, who was supporting the five children at her family's home in Copenhagen, he sent periodic sermons defining his new position ("The difference between us is the difference between the mediocre and the creative").

Gauguin's instinct for self-dramatization came alive most fully after he settled in Tahiti, where he painted some of his most celebrated canvases, took a Tahitian mistress and fathered two children. He saw himself as "a savage returning to savagery," and he was plainly delighted by the effect of his departure, as described to him in a letter from Europe: "You are at the moment that extraordinary, legendary artist who, from the far Pacific, sends disconcerting, inimitable works, the definitive works of a great man who has, so to speak, disappeared from the world."

But as his health became worse (he suffered from eczema, asthma and syphilis) and the demand for his paintings declined, Gauguin saw his withdrawal in another light: he had "buried his talent among the savages; no more will be heard of me; for many, it will appear to be a crime." Despondent, he climbed the slope of a mountain, swallowed arsenic and waited to die. But his stomach failed him: he merely became ill and had to climb down again, "condemned to live."

Hatred & Vengeance. It is Perruchot's belief that Gauguin's obsessive concern with how he appeared to the world sapped his powers after his retreat to the South Seas (where he spent six years in Tahiti and the last 18 months of his life in the Marquesas). He wasted the last year writing Before and After, a hysterical book of self-declared "hatred and vengeance" directed against his wife and the Danes. It was an ironic last word for the "austere heretic."

Gauguin died of a heart attack in 1903 in his hut on the island of Hiva Oa. A sale of his possessions was held after an "expert" in Papeete had rummaged through the watercolors and drawings, throwing most of them "on the rubbish heap--that is, their proper place." Among the surviving papers was a fragmentary note reading, "I am now down and out, defeated by poverty." It was sold in Paris in 1957 for $1,430.

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