A life gone South Seas

Paul GAUGUIN has always been an emblem of that great fantasy of running away to a desert island, with exotic girls to part the seas of a middle-aged man’s discontent and welcome him to paradise. And the post-Impressionist has long been a poster boy for the artist’s penchant for leapfrogging the Earth in search of inspiration.

Gauguin was born in 1848, raised in Paris and Peru, and traveled in the military before returning to Paris to begin a conventional life as a husband, father and stockbroker. But when the French stock market collapsed in 1883, the 35-year-old devoted himself to his art. And in 1891, tired of the life he’d created in gray, late 19th century Paris, he devoted himself to himself, leaving his family behind and taking off for Tahiti.

It was not as he imagined, of course -- already tainted by tourism, for one thing. But it was the beginning of what he had been looking for -- filled with color and surprises. So he set about in some ways to capture the already lost romance of the place. He spent all but two years of the next decade there, before moving in 1901 to the South Seas island of Hiva Oa, where he died in a hut a few years later at age 54.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death, the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais has mounted -- with the cooperation of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston -- “Gauguin-Tahiti: Studio in the Tropics.” The blockbuster exhibition focuses on the last turbulent five years of the artist’s life, in which Gauguin -- stricken with syphilis, broke, depressed -- managed to work up a storm. The show runs through Jan. 19 before traveling to Boston, where it will run from Feb. 29 through June 20.

“Gauguin-Tahiti” includes 200 drawings, prints, paintings, engravings, pastels, illustrated manuscripts, carvings and objets d’art that might have inspired the artist, as well as photographs to provide artistic and ethnographic context, from museums and private collections around the world.

The exhibition reunites paintings that have not been hung in the same museum in a century and attempts to show both the sources of Gauguin’s inspiration and his appropriation of Polynesian culture and his search for the “savage” (his word).

Works from his first Tahitian sojourn include two important wood sculptures, “Be in Love and You Will Be Happy” and “Be Mysterious,” and a host of paintings and other works that document his vision of the South Seas. His illustrated notebooks, including “Noa Noa,” can be seen, page by page, on computer screens that display the pages like a short film.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the giant ambitious tableau “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,” which has left the United States for the first time in 50 years (it was last seen in France in a 1949 exhibit celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Gauguin’s birth).

Gauguin shipped the painting, with eight or nine smaller, related works, to Paris for an exhibit in 1898. Curators for “Gauguin-Tahiti” were able to reunite seven of the works to display alongside the painting, which the Boston museum restored for the exhibition.

Gauguin was attempting to answer questions about art with this seminal work, including “Where does a painting begin and where does it end?” He wrote: “At the moment when extreme feelings coalesce in the depths of a being, at the moment when they burst and the entire thought spurts out like lava from a volcano, is that not the sudden birth of a work, a violent birth if you like but a great and apparently superhuman one? ... But who knows when the work began in the depths of that being?”

The painting is considered one of Gauguin’s masterpieces -- if he didn’t say so himself: “I wanted, before I died, to paint a big picture I had in mind,” he wrote, perhaps self-consciously, to a friend, “and I have worked feverishly night and day all month. It was all dashed off, directly with the tip of a brush, on a piece of sacking full of knots and rough bits, so it looks terribly crude.”

“That must be completely false,” says Serge Lemoine, the mild-mannered, professorial director of the Musee d’Orsay, who organized the exhibition. “One doesn’t improvise a painting that is 4 meters long.

“One doesn’t improvise a composition as complex as that or paint a tableau like that in a fit of inspiration. It took several weeks to paint that, meaning that he had time to think about it, n’est-ce pas?” He laughs. “Au contraire, a painting like that is entirely the fruit of calculation. We think about the idea, then about the composition, we make studies of each part, for each figure, and then we decide the format, and roll out the canvas -- that’s days and days of work. And then once the composition is in place, it would take weeks and weeks just to paint it.”

‘Artistic testament’

Gauguin was presenting not only an ambitious painting that would pose fundamental questions about art, but a grandiose mise-en-scene that would feed the myth of the inspiration that strikes artists like lightning, dictating their oil paintings and novels and symphonies from on high. After he finished the painting, which he called his “artistic testament,” he downed arsenic and lay down to die.

The suicide was a flop, but the painting -- with its attempt to trace humanity from beginning to end -- was a success. “Gauguin had a very precise idea of what he wanted to present,” Lemoine says, “and he had the means -- to uproot himself, to isolate himself. To find other sources of inspiration, he had to go to another world. Of course, he had all sorts of other psychological problems, but that’s not what’s important at base. His work nourished a lot of art in the 20th century.”

Some critics have put forth the provocative theory that the great Gauguin painted mere postcards of Tahiti, that his model’s faces are spiritless, that he was not even a very good painter.

“He invented something completely new,” says Lemoine, dismissing Gauguin’s critics as “people who don’t know anything about painting.” He seems to regard such sentiments as malicious gossip about the man, not the painter: “It’s not important how he lived, but the paintings that we can see on the wall.”

Gauguin, like many artists, became more famous after his death -- in this case, a large exhibition of his works caused a sensation the year he died. “Naturally he was more famous after his death,” Lemoine says, “but he didn’t live in Europe. Renoir stayed his whole life in Paris and the Ile de France; Monet was very famous right away and earned a lot of money right away. Gauguin wanted a different destiny. The real question is, are the paintings good?”

He pauses and smiles the smile of a professor returning to his thesis. “Where did he come from? What was he? Where was he going?”