Gauguin’s ‘Phoniness’ Exposed as . . . Genius

Deep down, it is hard to get rid of the suspicion that Paul Gauguin was phony. Did he not, after all, badger our hero Vincent van Gogh into lopping off his own ear? Was he not so concerned about his image that he made his life into a myth so compelling that Somerset Maugham turned it into “The Moon and Sixpence”? Can it be denied that he shrewdly arranged his genes to be so ruggedly handsome that Anthony Quinn would be forced to play him in the movies?

Undeniable.

Is it not true that he was such an egomaniac as to leave his wife and children in the lurch while he lolled off to the South Seas to indulge in indolent art and make babies with dark-skinned teen-age mistresses? Did he not badger his friends for money and trump up an autobiography that is so exaggerated as to be fiction?

Reprehensible.

But so what? If somebody is a great artist, it doesn’t matter if he is a bad guy. But how can that be? Art is the summation and distillation of the personality that made it, so it stands to reason that a tainted character will show up somewhere in the fruits of its labors.

If you learned art history in Southern California a couple of decades back, your initial exposure to an artist like Gauguin was through color slides, reproductions in books and the artistic myths that waft from their texts. In reproduction, Gauguin looks a bit decorative and superficial in his poster-bright fields of pink and lavender, his fondness for Art Nouveau curves and patterned stylizations like the water reflections in “What, Are You Jealous?” Actually nobody was ever that succinct about water again until David Hockney.

Anyway, superficially examined, Gauguin looked superficial. But then came that Sunday afternoon when the young art student needed a quick fix for an assignment to do a free copy of a Post-Impressionist work. Something easy. Ah, Gauguin’s 1894 “The Child-Woman Judith Is Not Yet Breached,” a portrait of his ne’er-do-well Parisian mistress, Anna the Javanese. French artists had a real thing for the exoticism of dark-skinned women in those days. Remember Delacroix’s Near-Eastern odalisques and Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress, Jeanne Duval?

Anyway, Gauguin’s child-woman looked like an easy copy. Pink wall, turquoise armchair, Anna’s brown body and a nice orange monkey.

Copy copy. Holy spit, look at the in-painting in that leg. It’s not brown, it’s full of greens and purples. Copy. The wall’s pink is delicately modulated with all manner of pale blues and light earth tones.

The young art student came away from the work exhausted, suspecting something amiss in his suspicion of Gauguin’s phoniness. A sense dawned that the artist was as subtle as he was bold. The feeling grew as years went by and horizons broadened to include real works in real museums, the Met’s “Hail Mary,” Boston’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” and all the great Parisian holdings now in the Musee D’Orsay.

But first impressions die hard, because sometimes they are right. The missing link was the great acid test, the in-depth retrospective. A lifetime went by. Van Gogh was paraded in depth, as were Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Picasso, Pollock, De Kooning and Julian Schnabel. How could a world exist that surveys Julian Schnabel and not Gauguin?

Vindication at last. A massive survey is on view at Washington’s National Gallery’s East Building until July 31. It will travel to the Chicago Art Institute (Sept. 17-Dec. 11) and Paris’ Grand Palais (Jan. 10-April 20, 1989), but, dammit, it will not go to L.A. Serious artniks in Los Angeles are changing their vacation plans to intersect the exhibition and grumbling that it is about time their town was treated to some of these epochal goodies.

Nearly 300 works span Gauguin’s two-decade career from 1880, when he was a successful insurance broker dabbling in Impressionism, to about 1903, when he died at 54, broke, of a morphine overdose in the Marquesas Islands, ravaged with heart disease, eczema and syphilis. Some think the overdose was no accident.

The avowed purpose of the exhibition is to pry Gauguin loose from his melodramatic image and the interpretations of his Symbolist images and present him as a pure painter. This is admirably rational but ultimately impossible, and thank goodness. A romantic life cannot make a master out of un rapin --a dauber--but we will always be fascinated by the personality of a great artist and the meanings of his work. We’ve already seen that pure formalism leads to scholastic aridity.

Crowds are flocking to the exhibition in uncomfortably large numbers, and the innocent comment most often overheard is, “I didn’t know he made sculpture too.”

Well, he did. Among the early works is a circular high-relief mahogany-and-plaster panel depicting a singer, Valerie Roumi. Among the last is a totem dedicated to Father Lechery and relief panels from Gauguin’s last house on Hivaoao Island, which he called Maison du Jouir--House of Pleasure. The work moves from stylish end-of-the-century decadence to a highly original concoction that is at once distinctive to Gauguin and convincingly primitive. In between we find a series of superb ceramics that are arguably his most original works and possibly the touchstone of his sensibility. (A Southern Californian can’t escape reflecting that our own most original art was sparked by inventive experiments in ceramics.)

Gauguin’s true talisman may be an 1889 Toby jug in the form of a self-portrait. The earless head recalls Van Gogh’s self-mutilation. Streaks of blood-red glaze betray Gauguin’s sense of martyrdom, but most striking is its resemblance to vessels produced by the Moche of Peru.

Gauguin was born in Paris (in 1848), but his family moved to Peru when he was just over a year old. A few months later his father died, followed in short order by his grandfather and great-uncle, leaving him alone with his mother, Aline. Her maiden name was Chazal, and later Paul painted her dark-haired and exotic, like the dusky Lolitas who would always attract him. She died when he was 19 and wandering the world as a merchant seaman.

The artist liked to dramatize his exotic background, which made it seem artificial when it was not. His cultural personality split was real, and he would spend the rest of his life vacillating violently between the civilized, bourgeois half of his background and his feelings of being a savage, abandoned outsider. His marriage to a cool blond Dane, Mette Gad, and his life as a broker represented the first half, but it was his irresistible demons that make him a difficult egotist and a great artist.

Early multiple loss of the comfort and authority of parents certainly left psychic scars. His sense of abandonment and hostility to authority shows in everything from his need to demolish convention as an avant-garde artist to his battles with bureaucrats from the Paris salon to the French functionaries in the South Seas to his need to act as his own father by dominating artistic coteries of young followers.

The seeds of his radical art are apparent in his earliest work. “The Little Dreamer” of 1881 shows one of his children sleeping, her nightgown hiked up, showing pretty, innocent young legs. She slumbers near decorative wallpaper guarded by a Punch doll. It’s a perfectly middle-class Impressionist scene, but it would metamorphose over the years into the great “Manao tupapau,” sometimes called “The Spirit of the Dead Watches.”

The famous painting shows--he said--his Tahitian mistress, Tehura, paralyzed by fears of evil spirits. She is nude but she is the evolvement of “The Little Dreamer.” The wallpaper has become a tapa cloth, the Punch doll has become the tribal spirit statue. The little dreamer, incidentally, was his daughter Aline, named for his mother.

There is the distinct impression that Gauguin’s spiritual quest for the primitive was much more than a cultural adventure. It was an urgent personal attempt to recapture his private primitive self--the child who was left alone and unfulfilled. He was trying to put together a complex emotional package out of fragmented pieces of himself. Of course it’s only a coincidence that part of the time he called his style Cloisonism and part of the time Synthetism.

One of the apparent paradoxes of Gauguin’s art is the way it tries to express the most pagan sort of hedonism and omnivorous sensuality while at the same time repeatedly addressing the artist’s attraction to religious subject matter.

After he abandoned his family in the late ‘80s to paint seriously in Brittany and then Martinique, he pressed his quest for an idyll by painting children in the lovely domesticated landscape. One is called “Children Wrestling,” but one boy appears to be fighting while the other tries to hug him affectionately. Soon after, Gauguin transmuted the theme in the famous “Jacob Wrestling With the Angel.” It is hard not to feel the wrestlers are Gauguin’s loving and hating sides in mortal combat.

Oh, come on. The religious themes may very well come from the spiritual confusion of the fin de siecle . Remember the prevalence of mystical and occult experimental spiritual systems of the time such as Rosicrucianism and Theosophy?

Funny you should bring that up. One thing that is so striking about Gauguin’s Breton religious-theme paintings is that they seem out of whack. Much as he loved the pious peasant women in their nun-like costumes, they clang disharmoniously with the pictures. So does the Christ in “The Yellow Christ.” Somehow Christian liturgy and Gauguin’s evolving style don’t make it together. That is probably a clue to the religious aspect of Gauguin. He was not really temperamentally suited to conventional religion. He was making up his own. He was a forerunner of many things, including Modernism’s elevation of art to a religion in itself. Of course that was before its recent metamorphosis into a branch of economics.

Wait. This exhibition is about Gauguin as a formalist. What about all the important stylistic strides he was making all this time, the radical simplifications based on Japanese, Egyptian and primitive art?

That’s right. That’s important, but who says his formal distillations do not also represent the action of someone trying to simplify and dramatize his life?

Not very many people get it together, not ever. But Gauguin found his Eden in the South Seas. For all its real privations, it was the place that was there before original sin, the place where the sensual and the religious were all one along with the adult and the childish, the corrupt and the innocent. Look at the way he put it together in paintings such as “Near the Sea,” in which the foreground is pure flat pattern and yet does not clash with the gentle monumentality of nude girls bathing.

It’s just amazing how these pictures pointed the way for artists from the gentle Bonnard to the neurotic Munch to the cool joie de vivre of Matisse to the primitivism of masters from Picasso to the German and American Expressionists.

Gauguin wanted to be famous at any price. In the end, it was not his posturing that made him important but his accomplishment. He showed us there is still an Eden to be found inside that is as holy as it is sexy, as peaceful as it is exhilarating. In the end, the furious energy he had used to stave off death seemed to sit back, stroke the arm of its young mistress and say, “That’s OK too.”

He wasn’t a phony after all.