Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin: The House of Pleasure

In September 1901 a fifty-three-year-old Frenchman bought a plot of land from the Catholic mission on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas and built a two-storey house on it. He carved a polychrome lintel over the door reading *Maison du Jouir* — House of Pleasure — hung forty-five pornographic photographs he had picked up in Port Said, and installed sculptures at the entrance caricaturing the local bishop and the woman the bishop was rumoured to be sleeping with. He then set about persuading Marquesan parents to withdraw their daughters from the mission school. He had eighteen months left to live, and he was painting some of the most influential pictures of the nineteenth century.

A Stockbroker Who Collected Impressionists

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born in Paris on 7 June 1848, into the year of revolutions. His father Clovis was a liberal journalist whose paper was suppressed; the family fled for Peru in 1850 and Clovis died on the voyage. Paul spent a privileged early childhood in Lima before his mother Aline brought him back to France to work as a dressmaker. His maternal grandmother was Flora Tristan, the socialist writer and activist, whose books he carried with him to the end of his life — a detail that complicates the picture of him as a pure sensualist.

He served as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine and did two years in the French navy, including service off India. In 1871 a family friend, Gustave Arosa, placed him as a stockbroker at the Paris Bourse. He was good at it: by 1879 he was earning around 30,000 francs a year, enough to collect Impressionist paintings and to patronise the men who made them. In 1873 he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad, and over the following decade they had five children.

The Crash

The stock market collapse of 1882 ended that life. Gauguin turned to painting full time, mentored by Camille Pissarro, who brought him into the Impressionist circle; he showed with the group in 1881 and 1882 to dismissive reviews. In 1884 the family moved to Copenhagen, where he failed comprehensively as a tarpaulin salesman. He went back to Paris alone in 1885. He saw Mette for the last time in 1891 and they separated formally in 1894 — a marriage and five children traded, deliberately, for a career that was not yet working.

Pont-Aven, and the Flat Colour

The summer of 1886 took him to Pont-Aven in Brittany, an artists' colony where he became the central figure of what is now called the Pont-Aven School: bold pure colour and Symbolist subject matter. Absorbing Breton folk art and Japanese prints, he arrived at Cloisonnism — flat, unmodelled areas of colour bounded by heavy outlines, named for the enamelling technique it resembles. It was a frontal attack on the entire Renaissance project. Colour no longer described a surface under light; it carried meaning on its own account, and the picture stopped pretending to be a window.

In 1887 he sailed for Panama with the painter Charles Laval, ran out of money, and dug on the canal until illness stopped him. He moved on to Martinique, where disease and poor shelter nearly finished him, and produced perhaps ten to twenty paintings — the first working out of the tropical, indigenous subject matter that would define him.

Arles, Nine Weeks

In 1888 he spent nine weeks in Van Gogh's Yellow House at Arles. The two men argued constantly, and on 23 December Vincent cut off part of his own ear. They never met again but continued to write. Gauguin spent years afterwards claiming decisive influence over Van Gogh's development; the evidence suggests otherwise, since Vincent went straight back to painting from nature rather than adopting Gauguin's method of composing from imagination. It was an early instance of a lifelong habit — Gauguin was his own most energetic publicist, and not a reliable one.

One contemporary stood by him throughout: Degas, who bought his work, pushed him at the dealer Durand-Ruel, praised the 1893 exhibition when the Paris art world was laughing at it, and bought more at Gauguin's failed auction of 1895.

Tahiti

A successful Paris auction paid for his passage, and on 1 April 1891 he sailed for Tahiti, having stopped in Copenhagen to see his family for the last time. Papeete disappointed him — French colonisation had already done its work — so he moved to Mataiea and set up a studio in a bamboo hut, producing *Ia Orana Maria* and *Vahine no te tiare*, and adopting Tahitian titles for pictures like *Manao tupapau*, The Spirit of the Dead Watching.

In his travelogue *Noa Noa* he recorded, without evident discomfort, taking a thirteen-year-old girl named Teha'amana as his *vahine*. She was pregnant by the summer of 1892. He painted her repeatedly and abandoned her when he sailed in 1893, never seeing her again despite returning to Tahiti twice. *Noa Noa* itself, published in 1901, is now understood by scholars to be partly fantasised and partly plagiarised — which is to say that the primary document of Gauguin's authentic encounter with Polynesia is substantially fiction.

The Testament

Back in Paris from August 1893, he held a Durand-Ruel show in November 1894 that sold eleven of forty works at good prices, took a Montparnasse apartment, held a weekly salon in exotic costume, and conducted a public affair with a young woman known as Annah the Javanese. Then it fell apart: he lost Durand-Ruel's backing, his February 1895 auction failed, his ceramic *Oviri* caused a row at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and he fought his wife over an inheritance. On 28 June 1895 he sailed again, reaching Tahiti in September and settling near Papeete as an *artist-colon*.

The years that followed were physically grim. An ankle broken in a brawl in 1894 never healed; open sores on his legs were treated with arsenic. He blamed the climate and eczema; biographers have long suspected syphilis, though there is no direct evidence of it. In April 1897 his favourite daughter Aline died of pneumonia, his landlord sold the land under him, and he overspent on a replacement house he could not pay for.

Out of that year came *Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?*, finished in December 1897 — a vast frieze of figures running from infancy to old age, painted as a summation and, by his own account in letters to George-Daniel de Monfreid, as a prelude to killing himself. He survived. Vollard showed the picture in November 1898 and sold it in 1901 for 2,500 francs.

The Marquesas

A deal with Ambroise Vollard — 300 francs a month against twenty-five unseen paintings a year at 200 francs each, plus materials — finally gave him security, and he used it to go further out, reaching Atuona on Hiva Oa on 16 September 1901 to build the Maison du Jouir.

What he did there was not only paint. He took a fourteen-year-old, Vaeoho, as his *vahine*; she bore a daughter whose descendants still live on the island. He researched the mission school regulations, established that attendance was compulsory only within two and a half miles, and used the loophole to get girls withdrawn. He also, more creditably, refused to pay colonial taxes and urged other settlers to refuse, waged open warfare in print against the gendarmes Charpillet and Claverie over their treatment of Marquesans, and published attacks in the local press and the *Mercure de France*. Claverie sued him for libel and won; the fine was fifty francs.

He wrote steadily as his body failed — *L'Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme*, *Racontars de Rapin*, and the memoir *Avant et après*, finished in February 1903, which settles scores with the bishop, the administration, his wife and Denmark generally, and contains the two sentences that come closest to his creed: "No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both," and "It is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things." By December 1902 he was injecting morphine, then taking laudanum, and his eyesight was going. He died at Atuona on 8 May 1903, aged fifty-four. Almost nobody noticed.

Why Paul Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on one idea, pursued with total conviction: that a painting owes nothing to optical truth. Gauguin's Cloisonnism — flat unbroken colour inside heavy contour, arrived at through Breton folk art and Japanese prints — detached hue from description. A field could be red because the picture required red. Where the Impressionists had refined the recording of light, Gauguin abolished recording altogether and made painting a matter of symbol, decoration and invented interior vision, composing from imagination rather than from the motif in front of him. That single move runs directly into Fauvism, into Matisse, into Picasso, and into most of what modern painting subsequently did with colour; the twentieth century took it and never gave it back.

The counter-case is unusually heavy. His subject matter was obtained through colonial power he benefited from at every step: he sailed on proceeds from the metropolitan art market, bought his Marquesan land from the mission he mocked, described himself as an *artist-colon*, and took as sexual partners girls of thirteen and fourteen — Teha'amana, Pahura, Vaeoho — abandoning them and their children. The primitivism that generated the work was also an appropriation, and *Noa Noa*, the book that sold the myth, was partly invented and partly stolen from other authors. He inflated his influence over Van Gogh. Serious scholarship now holds both facts at once, refusing hagiography while acknowledging that the formal breakthrough was real. It is possible that the two are connected — that the man who felt entitled to take whatever he wanted was the same man who felt entitled to discard four centuries of pictorial convention. That is an explanation, not a defence.

Legacy

His reputation was rebuilt posthumously, largely by Vollard and two Paris exhibitions, and by 1910 the flat colour of Brittany and Tahiti had become the common property of the avant-garde. *Where Do We Come From?* is now one of the most visited paintings in America. The reassessment running through museums since the late 2010s has not diminished his influence; it has simply insisted that the price be listed alongside it, paid mostly by people whose names appear only as picture titles.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Yellow Christ
• Notable work: Manaò tupapaú
• Notable work: When Will You Marry?
• Notable work: Ia Orana Maria
• Movement: Post-impressionism and Pont-Aven School