The Post-Impressionist artist and writer Paul Gauguin led an extraordinary, troubled and restlessly itinerant life; he came late to painting and spent most of his last decade in the Pacific islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas.
In Gauguin in Polynesia, author NICHOLAS THOMAS retells Gauguin’s story for a 21st-century audience, giving greater consideration to the Pacific contexts of his experience, and Pacific perspectives on his art and his legacy.
Read on for an extract …
The port of Papeete, on Tahiti’s north coast, is dominated by the soaring mass of ʹOrohena, its summit typically obscured by rafts of cloud that roll and shift over the mountain as the day advances. The Vire reached the harbour during the night.
Self-portrait at Lézaven, 1888
Credit: National Gallery of Art, Washington (1985.64.20). Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon / National Gallery of Art, Washington
On 9 June 1891, early in the morning, Gauguin disembarked with Captain Swaton. As if to conceal his longstanding yearning to live and work in the tropics, he wandered ashore ostentatiously wearing a cowboy hat, with ‘un grand air de profond dédain’, exhibiting utter disdain. He immediately caught the attention of Tahitians in the vicinity, who were struck by his shoulder-length pepper-and-salt hair. They laughed, pointed, and called him taʹata vahine, that is, man-woman; they associated him with māhū, the Tahitian variation on the third-sex, trans identity that had long been part of customary life across Polynesia.
Women and children, curious and amused, followed behind, as the two men were welcomed by Edouard Jénot, a young lieutenant who lived close to the harbour. He invited them back to his nearby home, busied himself getting them settled, and shooed away the Islanders who still hung about, apparently fascinated by the sheer oddity of the artist.2
Gauguin was lucky. Jénot was sociable, hospitable, and himself fortuitously interested in painting. Over subsequent days, he helped both men find accommodation, introduced them to officials and others, and continued to host them frequently. During his first weeks and months in the colony, Gauguin visited often, not least because he hoped to learn some Tahitian. As Jénot himself had only been in the islands for eight months, he must have been linguistically gifted, but he struggled to pass on his fluency.
Gauguin proved an irritatingly forgetful pupil, prone to mix up syllables, and incidentally incapable, Jénot complained, even of spelling his friend’s name correctly. Writing many years later, he noted that one of Gauguin’s manuscripts, cited in a memoir by the artist’s son, often quoted an expression ‘O natu’, which supposedly meant ‘whatever’, ‘I don’t care’ or ‘too bad’. The remark, frequently heard in day-to-day Tahitian conversation, should in fact have been ‘noa atu’. Writing to Mette a month or so later, Gauguin wished he had her memory and quick ability with languages.
Paysage tahitien, 1891
Minneapolis Institute of Art. The Julius C. Eliel Memorial Fund / Minneapolis Institute of Art
It is a truism of Gauguin’s story that the artist, who had been entranced by Pierre Loti’s evocation of a voluptuous paradise, was bitterly disappointed to find, on his arrival at Papeete, a French colonial town. That Gauguin was shocked by Tahiti’s modernity is not, however, in evidence in anything the artist wrote at the time. The source for the notion is rather the book written after his return to Paris, in part composed in the rooms on rue Vercingétorix.
In the opening pages of Noa Noa, Papeete is said to be just Europe – ‘the Europe I thought I was rid of ’, and still worse, a caricature of European society pervaded by colonial snobbery. ‘It was not what I’d come in search of, from so far.’ This wording, moreover, appears only in the Louvre manuscript, revised by both Morice and Gauguin three years after the event.
The idea that Gauguin had been brutally disillusioned fits absolutely with the story he wanted to tell, that has for too long been uncritically reproduced in standard commentary. A New York Times feature echoes a thousand others in affirming that ‘His disappointment on arrival was profound. Tahiti was Europeanised [and] visually unspectacular’; the same claims have been made in the catalogues of Gauguin blockbusters at leading art institutions.
There is no doubt that before leaving Paris, Gauguin had succumbed to the idealistic misrepresentations of Loti and of colonial propaganda, but he also had previous experience of French colonial society in Martinique. And on the voyage out, he had encountered French Oceania in Nouméa in New Caledonia, and then spent weeks at sea with people coming and going from Tahiti. If only from conversation overheard during meals, Gauguin must have had a fair sense of the character of life in Papeete well before his ship reached the port.
What has become a famous denunciation of the ‘puerile and grotesque’ imitation of European life which supposedly made the colony so oppressive, was largely after the fact, and totally rhetorical. As a writer, Gauguin indulged himself philosophically, he advocated for his art, and he crafted anecdotes. He also engaged, almost instinctively, in polemic. Perhaps he’d never read any of his father’s journalism, but his own style is often uncannily reminiscent of Clovis’s.
It is no accident that Gauguin cites the ridiculousness of the governor, notes that everyone around him shared his stupid conceptions, and goes on to disparage the colony’s inauthenticity. The comment is not to be taken at face value, but advanced Gauguin’s claim to be different and distant from colonial mediocrity. In fact, on their first meeting, he was cordially welcomed by the colony’s chief officer, and he went on to dine, drink and dance with French militaires, officials and traders. The man who partied in settler society was aloof from it only in hindsight.
It is anyway more intriguing that Gauguin acknowledged in the succeeding passage in Noa Noa, that his initial impressions were superficial. He arrived just before the death of Pōmare V, the last king of Tahiti, and was not only a witness to the public funeral, but, being an artist, was asked by one of the colonial officials to assist with the decoration of the palace for the ceremonies.
Merahi metua no Teha’amana (Teha’amana Has Many Parents), 1893
Art Institute of Chicago (1980.613). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Deering McCormick / Art Institute of Chicago
Gauguin says that he pointed the officer towards the queen, Marau, who was distributing flowers and fabrics around the royal reception room. His perception was that she approached the task with extraordinary grace, making an objet d’art of everything she touched. He admits that at first he had seen her just as an ordinary mature woman, and only subsequently appreciated her imposing, Polynesian identity. Her form, he belatedly sees, is statuesque, her strong horizontal shoulders and head somehow recall the Trinity, he perceives her eyes as full of passion, bestowing radiance upon everything around her. Just as, he imagines, Tahiti itself had emerged from the sea, its plants and flowers illuminated for the first time by the sun.
Gauguin’s conflation of queen and island and his evocation of the opulent tropical environment as an exotic woman all too obviously rehashed the romantic stereotypes first articulated in the narratives and images from the eighteenth-century voyages of Bougainville and Cook and later repeated by many artists and writers, notoriously including Loti. If Gauguin’s painting did nothing more than reproduce that vision, it would not deserve attention today. But even his clumsily florid expression in Noa Noa reveals more than already tired stereotypes. This is so, because it is a response to the commanding personality of an individual, who he realizes that he initially misrecognised.
Marau, who was 31 at the time, was dismissed by some colonists as a ‘half-caste Jewess’. Her father was indeed an English trader and a Jew; her mother was Oehau, the ariʹi (chief or head) Taimaʹi, of the prominent Teva clan; those disparaging her mixed ancestry overlooked the fact that, in the Society Islands, titles, rank and land could be and often were inherited through the mother, hence there was nothing anomalous in Marau becoming a chief of the highest rank, possessing not only elevated status, but also considerable political clout. And she was deeply knowledgeable regarding Tahitian tradition, which she researched not least in order to affirm the status of her own ancestors; hence she was the primary source for, in effect the co-author of an important history of the islands compiled by the Harvard professor and descendant of a ‘founding father’ of the United States, and two presidents,
Henry Adams, who had left the island shortly before Gauguin arrived. When Gauguin acknowledged her mana, he conceded that Tahiti was actually not faux-Europe, not a caricature of the metropole, but a place still shaped by Polynesians, a place animated by their imaginations and strategies. And Gauguin similarly acknowledged that the aesthetic of the realm, at a time of royal commemoration, was nothing he had the capacity to contribute to. That aesthetic was bestowed, rather, by arrangements of textiles and flowers, which (he did not know) had deep histories in Polynesian ceremony and performance, and remained potent and vibrant under the new circumstances of colonial society.
Ia Orana Maria, 1891
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (51.112.2). Bequest of Sam A. Levisohn, 1951 / The Metropolitan Museum of Art
His first letters home betray no shock of disillusion. To the contrary, he writes to Mette of ‘un pays merveilleux’. And it would have been astonishing if a European susceptible to nature, let alone one who had already been entranced by the tropical environment of Martinique, did not find Tahiti marvellous. Even in the 21st century, the plants, palms, sea, mountains and light are not spoilt by a surfeit of building and traffic; the place is enduringly, arrestingly beautiful. Yet Gauguin’s response was not merely to the natural environment.
In the aftermath of Pōmare’s death, he was affected especially by the village choirs which sang in turn through the night. ‘These people are extraordinarily gifted musically … it’s impossible to imagine any greater harmony … Not one false note.’ He was impressed, too, by what seemed an absolute silence at night. Now and then a big leaf might be heard falling, suggesting the movement of a spirit. He found himself surrendering, relinquishing agency, resting in the stillness. ‘All the trouble of life in Europe exists no longer; tomorrow it will be the same; it will be the same until the end.’ And the mode of life of the people enchanted him. They sang, ate and went from place to place… it was absurd to call such people savages. Such, in fact, were Gauguin’s responses to Tahiti during the weeks following his arrival.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
He is a professor of anthropology at the University of London.
A native of Sydney, Australia, he has traveled extensively in the course of his Pacific research and has curated several exhibitions on the history, art, and culture of Oceania.
Nicholas Thomas is Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmith’s College, University of London.
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