When Paul Gauguin reached Tahiti in 1891, to become the ‘noble savage’ he always felt he was destined to become (he boasted of having Peruvian blood as proof of his innate primitivism), he found that it had already been transformed into a French colonial outpost. The native inhabitants worshiped in Christian churches, they picked fruit for French companies and they even wore clothing that had been imported from France. Yes, they wore clothing: nary a naked woman was to be found basking among the lush surroundings. He had been too poor to obtain transport to any place French shipping did not go to and was now stuck in a French backwater instead of a pristine paradise.
No matter. He wrote back home to declare he was now shedding his European biases and culture and living the life of a native. He then began creating paintings falsely reflecting what life on the island was like. He went out seeking ‘noble savage’ subject matter and that is exactly what he was going to produce. As Wagner wished to remove his art from a tradition of Christian allegories and morality and reposition it in Nordic mythology and traditions, Gauguin wanted to part ways with a European Christianity that had lost so much of its mystery and mysticism that stale, secular consumerism had been allowed to proliferate in Europe. More than anything, Gauguin was a seeker of a deep, pure and meaningful religious experience and this is reflected throughout his oeuvre.
The conceptions of Tahiti which Gauguin exported were no different from those he had read about in travel books (which had lied about what was over there as well). In the meantime, he began spreading syphilis around the island, regularly paying for sex with teenage girls, oblivious to the harm he was causing to this allegedly primordial community of the uncorrupted. Free, pre-Christian, sexual love tingeing on the mystical did not exist in Tahiti, if it had ever existed anywhere, but that did not seem to matter either.
Gauguin became to the Tahitians a toxic type of European imperialist pollutant, not a valued member of their community, but they could not kill him because he was a French citizen protected by the law. He stayed there regardless, to create his ‘myth’. When he died in the Marquesas (he ultimately had to leave Tahiti because folks got too fed up with him and he with them), he called the place where he lived the House of Pleasure. The guy did not learn his lessons easily. If you are looking for an artistic version of Joseph Conrad’s Kurz in Heart of Darkness, it is, perhaps, Gauguin, but without Kurz’s self-realization of horror at the end.
Sometimes intentions and gestures are better than nothing and this seems to be what has redeemed Gauguin through the ages in the art world. It is not so much what Gauguin did, but what he wanted to do, or purported to do, in the face of the nothingness colonialism had brought to once vital and dynamic parts of the world. The French capitalists and priests had crushed indigenous culture everywhere they had gone and all Gauguin could do was guess what used to be (to his credit he also did extensive research and reading into what life and religion had once been like in Tahiti). Gauguin was very Faust-like in his desire to abandon and transcend and a Faust is never satisfied with what Mephistopheles gives him, as Mephistopheles is often unable to deliver what a Faust truly desires.
The genesis of Gauguin’s ultimate Tahitian conceptual art project occurred in Europe, in Brittany. Here he discovered a type of Christianity that still harbored elements of the old countryside paganism. Elements of magic and folklore, along with this region’s ancient rituals and a deep belief system, sincerely shared by everyone, made life more interesting and compelling. If nothing else, it was different and surprising to Gauguin – the way you might feel the first time you read Frazer’s Golden Bough. It helped maintain a stronger community. There was a creativity, compassion and warmth in this religion that was lost in an industrialized France and it was not reflected in the galleries or museums of Paris. Gauguin sought a lifestyle that engendered myth-making and extreme, extraordinary aspirations.
From Brittany, Gauguin soon sailed to Martinique in the West Indies, where the vibrancy of the remnants of the indigenous population smacked him in the face and his desire to chuck Europe for good and find a place of pristine, non-Christian, non-industrial liberation was firmly planted. Thus, the Tahitian dream took root.
Poor Gauguin, however, lived in a paradoxical world where you had to have lots of money to potentially find real noble savagery. In lieu of buying himself a ticket beyond the reaches of French colonialism (where he would probably have been shunned by real natives and died of insect borne disease or a snake bite), he could only speculate on what he desired and share his longing.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum. Tahitian Women Bathing and Three Tahitian Women.
