Seeing Gauguin Whole at Last

By ROBERT HUGHES

No great museum retrospective is just a matter of a "definitive" array of works, or of critical intelligence applied to them, or of a deep curiosity about the artist's life. It is a combination of all three, a vision of how they weave together -- the museum's equivalent of George Painter on Marcel Proust, or Leon Edel on Henry James. Once you have digested it, neither you nor the artist will be quite the same. You have seen the record set straight. Such events cannot be replaced by 50 Helgas.

The Paul Gauguin retrospective, which opened this week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and which, after closing there July 31, will be seen through the fall at the Art Institute of Chicago and in early 1989 at the Grand Palais in Paris, is of this kind. When the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris found they were all planning separate shows on different aspects of Gauguin -- his prints, his Brittany paintings and his Tahitian work -- it seemed obvious to merge the three. The result, thanks to its curators (Francoise Cachin and Claire Freches-Thory in France, Richard Brettell and Charles F. Stuckey in the U.S.), is both a curatorial masterpiece and the most complete view of its subject ever offered in a museum show.

Gauguin's achievement has always been hard to assess because so much of his late work, done between his final departure from France in 1895 and his death on the tiny, remote island of Hivaoa in 1903, was bought en bloc by Russian collectors, ended up in the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum, and has not been seen in the West since 1906. The show contains eleven of these "Russian" Gauguins.

So now at last one sees the work whole -- more than 240 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and ceramics, the outpouring of a protean talent who influenced the course of modern painting more than anyone except Cezanne. One may be half prepared for Gauguin's impact on younger artists after 1900, but to see it in the paint (and the wood) is another matter. Where does that peculiar, dense, purply brown shading of Picasso's early work come from but the bodies of Gauguin's Tahitians? Most of early Matisse seems present in the twining lines and harsh dissonances of red, yellow and green with which Gauguin pictured himself 15 years before in the sardonic Self-Portrait with Halo, 1889. Gauguin's sculpture and painting were basic to German expressionism, and even Henri Rousseau seems to have based his Sleeping Gypsy on Gauguin's goose-pimply image of erotic shame, The Loss of Virginity, 1890-91.

Gauguin is a legendary figure, with all the accretions that entails. His legend was helped by other people's fictions, though Gauguin's own existential posturings as hero, Christ-martyr, magus, savage and artist-criminal lay at its root. For many, the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is still the "real" Gauguin -- a stockbroker and Sunday painter who cracks out of the bourgeois egg, dumps his wife, family and career and hightails it to Tahiti to "find himself" among the breasts and breadfruit. He is part brute and part escape artist, the Houdini of the avant-garde.

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.

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.