Gauguin’s Tahiti: The Dream and the Reality
Emi Matsui
2
In spring 1891 Paul Gauguin, who had worked as a
stockbroker, found himself without a means of earn a living
because of the stock exchange crash in Paris. He decided to
make a career of his passion for painting and headed for the
South Sea island of Tahiti. He fled the old world for his
imaginary idea of paradise; once there he was disappointed by
how European everything was, so he painted as an escape. The
art of Gauguin was highly concerned with the power that color
and abstract forms have on the imagination, which was especially
true of his Tahitian works.
Post-Impressionism was born out of the reaction against
Impressionism that occurred in the 1880s. This idea is supported
by the following:
…Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, artists who were
‘interested
in
the
discoveries
of
the
Impressionists only so far as these discoveries
helped them to express emotions, which the objects
themselves
evoked’.
The
Impressionists’
3
dependence on nature, on the objective recording
on visual experience, gives way to a search for the
‘emotional significance that lies in things’. And
this is to be achieved by a simplification of design
that is immediately disconcerting.1
Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon, (fig.1) which was painted
in 1888 was one of the works that he considered to be key during
his artistic development process. Emile Bernard claimed that
his Breton Women in a Meadow (fig.2) also from 1888 was an
influence for Gaugiun’s piece, since the two were more or less
contemporary competitors.
This is a claim that has been
extensively argued by critics. Priority will always remain a
possible claim, but evidence suggests that the two pieces are
nearly exact contemporaries. Those two works are the same size
and format and appear very similar because both are simplified
in design, bold in color, and relatively flat has led to the
simplistic conclusion that one must have been derived from the
4
other. “They differ in important ways formally and conceptually.
Bernard used a Cloisonist style, reminiscent of medieval
stained glass and Japanese prints, and unified disparate
elements in a rhythmic design, In his painting, Gauguin
emphasized sculptural forms and spatial tensions to stage a
psychological drama.”2
Japanese prints are usually cited in order to explain the
schematic, flat compositional arrangements of Gauguin’s images
after 1888. In Breton Boys Wrestling (fig.3) in 1888, he
increased the tilt of the ground plane so that there was no
horizon and the pale bodies modeled in red light stood out
against the unified green of the glass.
He prepared this
painting in a full-scale drawing of the wrestling figures from
the model, squared for transfer; but he placed the figures in
a spatial setting derived from Japanese ukiyo-e prints.
Paint samples from Gauguin have not been taken or analyzed.
His terms describe color rather than naming actual pigments.
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In Vision of the Sermon, he used the exception of vermilion for
the field, chrome yellow no.1 for the angel’s wing, chrome
yellow no.2 for its hair, ultramarine for its robe and viridian
for the foliage of the tree. This list suggests that Gauguin’s
palette had not changed significantly since 1886. It was not
mentioned in his correspondence until 1900 that green earth was
part of his palette in 1879, 1886, 1888 and later. Critics
suggest that perhaps the artist discovered this inexpensive
natural
earth
pigment
at
a
local
supplier’s
in
Arles;
appropriately, he used it as a subtle bluish-green, glaze-like
layer over the white ground. He boldly juxtaposed a vermilion
red field with viridian green foliage. Under the apple tree,
pink flesh takes on a greenish cast, and white coifs have green
and pink highlights. The dramatic change in style visible in
this painting was the result of a more concentrated use of color
in larger unbroken areas; Gauguin signaled the change by
qualifying the colors as intense, pure, or violent.
In
order
to
deal
with
the
disappointment
of
the
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nonexistence of the Tahiti of his imagination, Gauguin created
his dreams on canvas. In the late nineteenth century, the
unspoiled natural primitiveness of Tahiti survived only in
areas that resembled reservations, under the rule of French and
British colonialists. Gauguin settled in one of the native
villages and painted to ward off the disappointment and
resignation. The resulting pictures used glowing colors and
resplendent surfaces that were less an account of a given
reality than the projected dream of a European weary of
civilization.
Gauguin predicted that color would play a more important
role in modern painting. He would be the right man to lead such
a movement, since he had already proven his capacity to respond
to tropical light and color in the works he had brought back
from Tahiti. He painted Woman with a flower, (fig.4) which was
his first portrait of a Tahitian model in 1891. This suggests
a desire to portray the Tahitian physiognomy naturalistically,
without the blinkers of preconceived rules of beauty laid down
7
by a classical culture. Naturalism as an artistic creed, though,
was anathema to Gauguin; it made the artist a lackey of science
and knowledge rather than a god-like creator.
In Hail Mary (fig.5) he offers one of the clearest
instances of the use of this collection of source material and
reveals the complex fusion of observation and artifice that made
up his working method. This large canvas was the most
highly-wrought composition he produced in his first year in
Tahiti, and the first where he departed entirely from an
observable subject to enter the realm of fantasy. This was the
only picture of expressly Christian content painted during the
Tahiti sojourn, for all its exotic, luxuriant setting and
Tahitian figures. Gauguin was not yet in a position to essay
a subject from the traditional native religion. The two praying
figures were direct borrowings from figures on the stone-carved
relief on a temple in Java, which he admired for its examples
of primitive religious art. This also provided him with the
stylized foliage that forms a decorative band above their heads,
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masking the more naturalistically treated mountains. There are
signs of indecision on the canvas, such as the late blocking
out of the globular-shaped fruit in the foreground still-life,
and
the
awkward
insertion
of
the
angelic
messenger,
particularly, when set against the monumental strength of the
Virgin and Child.
The meaning of “Hail Mary” is still a puzzle in the view
of Gauguin’s known opposition to the work of the Christian
missionaries. “Was he making an ironic comment on the way in
which Catholicism had been altered and mollified in the process
of being assimilated into the lives of the Tahitians, its
message understood only in terms of simple, positive images that
were in any case part of their daily experience-motherhood and
childbirth, for instance?”3 Certainly, the introduction of the
Christian concept of sin particularly sin relating to matters
of sexual and material possession, which anthropologists agreed
was
absent
from
traditional
native
beliefs,
was
widely
9
recognized as one of the most traumatic aspects of Tahiti’s
colonization by Europeans. It appears that Gauguin was most
likely making on oblique comment on this.
During his second stint in Tahiti in 1896, Gauguin, who
was in poor health, nearly broke, severely depressed and
planning to commit suicide, painted what he envisioned as a
summation of his art and life. He was disillusioned by the real
or
imaginary changes that seemed to have taken place during his
absence, though he had always fought against what he saw as the
encroaching “westernization” of the islands. He painted Where
Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (fig.6) in
1897. The woman, child and dog in the right foreground
symbolized birth and the innocence of life. The figure near the
center tries to pick a fruit from the tree of knowledge in an
attempt to understand the meaning of life, while in the left
foreground “an old woman approaching death reconciled and
resigned to her thoughts” is joined by “a strange white bird
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that represents the futility of life.” In the right middle
ground, two standing clothed figures betray the sorrow that
life’s knowledge can bring. The idol to the left expresses the
forces that rule humankind’s primitive passions. Gauguin
congratulated himself on the rich and sonorous coloration in
this painting, the dark blues and greens giving a jewel-like
prominence to the clusters of bright reds, oranges and pinks
that are so characteristic of Gauguin’s Tahitian palette. The
abstraction of Gauguin’s colors and forms plays an important
role in communicating his content and demonstrates how far he
has moved away from Impressionism.
Gauguin’s goals for himself as an artist included:
abstracting ideas from nature, using intangible ideas through
material form, conveying hidden meanings in his works by means
of parables that can only be understand in the light of his
involvement with literary symbolism. Although Gauguin had to
deal with the disappointment of the nonexistence of the Tahiti
of his imagination, the art of Gauguin was highly concerned with
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the power that color and abstract forms, which he had in mind
overriding musical rhythm of form and color and created his
dream on canvas.
1 Alan Bowness, Introduction, Post-Impressionism, edited by House, John
and Mary Anne Stevens (New York: Harper & Row, 1817) 10.
2 Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski and H. Travers Newton Jr, Technique and Meaning
in the Paintings of Paul Gauguin (United Kingdom: Cambridge UP, 2000) 101.
3 Belinda Thomson, Gauguin (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987) 146.
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Bibliography
Bowness, Alan. Introduction, Post-Impressionism. By John House
and Mary Anne Stevens. New York: Harper & Row, 1817.
Denvir, Bernard. Gauguin, Letters from Brittany and the South
Seas. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992.
Metken, Gunter. Gauguin in Tahiti. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1992.
Thomson, Belinda. Gauguin. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987.
Wasiutynski, Vojtech Jirat., and H. Travers Newton Jr.
Technique and Meaning in the Paintings of Paul Gauguin.
United Kingdom: Cambridge UP, 2000.
13
(fig.1)
14
(fig.2)
15
(fig.3)
16
(fig.4)
17
(fig.5)
18
(fig.6)