The Paradise syndrome Paul Gauguin and the eternal quest for happiness BY JEFFREY GANTZ

May the day come (and perhaps soon) when I can retreat to the woods of an island in Oceania, to live there in ecstasy, in tranquility, and for art. Surrounded by a new family, far from this European pursuit of wealth. There in Tahiti I could, in the silence of beautiful tropical nights, hear the sweet murmuring music of my heart beating in loving harmony with the mysterious beings of my surroundings. Free at last, with no thought of money, to love, sing, and die." So Paul Gauguin wrote to his wife, Mette, in the summer of 1890. The following year, he left Paris and sailed to Tahiti in search of those beautiful tropical nights and that loving harmony.

"Gauguin Tahiti," which opened at the Grand Palais in Paris last September and comes to the Museum of Fine Arts this Sunday, is a chilling portrait of the pursuit of a paradise that’s always somewhere else. It also reminds us what a polymath and a paradox Gauguin was. The almost 200 items that make up the show include not just oil paintings but watercolors, drawings, lithographs, woodcuts, wood carvings, stone carvings, and all manner of accomplished experimentation from an artist who was largely self-taught. The paradox is that the man who was always moving on to the next utopia made art in which he kept retreating into his own fantasy world. In the end, that was the only paradise Gauguin found.

He was born in Paris on June 7, 1848, but within six months his father, the political correspondent for Le National, moved the family to Peru, where his wife had relatives. Clovis Gauguin died en route, in the Strait of Magellan, of an aneurysm; Gauguin, with his mother and sister, remained in Peru until 1854, and that was the first life he knew, exotic rather than European. Aline Gauguin returned the family to Orléans and then Paris; Paul, after failing to show up for a Naval Academy exam, entered the Merchant Marine in 1865 and sailed all over the world for the next six years (he was in India when he learned of his mother’s death, in 1867). By 1872, he had returned to Paris and become a successful stockbroker; in 1873, he married a Danish woman, Mette Gad, and over the next 10 years they had five children. Gauguin began to collect Impressionist art and to do some painting himself. After the French stock market crashed, in 1882, he determined to support his family as an artist.

He never did, of course. They moved to Rouen because it would be less expensive than Paris, but after six months, Mette took the children to Copenhagen and Paul embarked on his quest for the real and the true. In July 1886, he joined the Pont-Aven artists’ colony on the south coast of Brittany. In 1887, he and his artist friend Charles Laval set off for Panama; they wound up working on the Canal before making their way to Martinique. Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven in 1888, then spent the last two months of the year in Arles with Van Gogh. Back in Brittany in 1889, he moved from Pont-Aven down the coast to Le Pouldu in search of less-trodden artistic by-ways, but already he was dreaming of the tropical paradise that he described in his 1890 letter to his wife. When in 1891 he did arrive in Tahiti, he found the main town of Papeete too colonial; he soon moved to Mataiea, 50 miles away. In 1901, he moved on to Hiva Oa, in the Marquesa Islands; at the time of his death two years later, he was having thoughts of remote Spain.

What he sought in his life he realized in his art. His martyr streak surfaces in an 1888 self-portrait he sent to Van Gogh, Les misérables, in which he depicts himself as Victor Hugo’s embattled Jean Valjean. In Autoportrait à l’auréole/Self-Portrait with Halo, a decorative panel he made the next year for Marie Henry’s inn in Le Pouldu, his halo’d head emerges from yellow angel wings, but it’s set against the same blood-red buckwheat-kernel ground he’d used in his 1888 masterpiece La vision du sermon (La lutte de Jacob et de l’ange)/The Vision After the Sermon (Jacob and the Angel Wrestling); he’s holding a snake, and two apples hang next to his head. In the 1889 Le Pouldu paintings Le Christ jaune/Yellow Christ, Le Christ vert (Calvaire breton)/Green Christ (Breton Calvary), and Le Christ au Jardin des Oliviers/Christ in the Garden of Olives, Jesus’s features are Gauguin’s. An 1896 painting is titled Autoportrait, près du Golgotha/Self-Portrait, near Golgotha.

Then there’s his search for paradise in an eternal feminine that got eternally younger. The 1888 portrait Madeleine Bernard attests to his fascination with Émile Bernard’s 18-year-old sister; he was frustrated when she fell for Charles Laval instead. The model for the 1891 painting La perte du pucelage, ou Éveil du printemps/The Loss of Virginity, or Awakening of Spring was his 20-year-old mistress Juliette Huet, whom he left pregnant when he departed for Tahiti. The model for many of the best-known works from his first Tahitian sojourn was his 13-year-old vahine Teha’amana. When he returned to Paris, in 1893, he took up with a 13-year-old he called Annah la Javanaise, and she was the model for Aita tamari vahine Judith te parari/The Child Woman Judith Has Not Yet Been Breached, whose title alludes to the 13-year-old stepdaughter of his composer friend William Molard, a girl whose (jealous?) arguments with Annah are said to have come to blows. He took a new 14-year-old vahine on his return to Tahiti in 1895, and another when he moved to the Marquesas.

But everything about Gauguin’s art was fantasy. Breton women in the 1880s scarcely wore white collars and coiffes except at pardons; the four figures in the 1886 La danse des quatre Bretonnes/The Dance of the Four Breton Women have dressed up for the occasion. The foreground figure in the 1888 Arles painting Vendanges à Arles (Misères humaines/Grape Harvest at Arles (Human Misery) who’s seated with her face in her hands in a pose of utter dejection (sexual guilt?) was inspired by a Peruvian mummy; the woman with the gray apron is from Le Pouldu, and the two figures bent over in an attitude of gathering seaweed are from Pont-Aven, though Gauguin depicts them harvesting grapes in Provence. Nuit de Noël (Bénédiction des bœufs)/Christmas Night (Blessing of the Oxen), which he began in Paris in 1894 and was found after his death in the Marquesas, combines elements from Egypt (the oxen), Borobudur in Java (the shrine figures), Pont-Aven (the landscape), and Le Pouldu (the women). "I want to create a simple art," he told journalist Jules Huret, of L’Écho de Paris, on the eve of his 1891 departure from France, but nothing in his art had been simple up to that point, and it became only more complex when he reached Tahiti.

AT THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, "Gauguin Tahiti" snakes through the Gund Gallery in much the same way every other blockbuster has. The familiar jutting mini-walls create mini-galleries that frame the different sections: Gauguin’s first stay in Tahiti, 1891 to 1893; his return to France, 1893 to 1895; the return to Tahiti; the creation of his MFA-owned masterpiece D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?/Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? in 1897-’98; the move to the Marquesas. The predominant wall color is cream, but there’s also a muted brick red and a muted marine blue. In the first room, Tahitian artifacts are planted in a sea of Mexican beach pebbles; farther on, you can see pages from Gauguin’s Tahitian "diary" (real life spliced with fantasy) Noa Noa/Fragrance opening one after another on a Samsung video screen.

At the Grand Palais, the show, in a greater variety of spaces, had more shape, and the location of the Noa Noa screen, in the center of a darkened room and surrounded by designs from the book, made for more-comfortable viewing. Everything built toward D’où venons-nous? as the culmination of Gauguin’s achievement, the great painting that most Parisians have never seen (it didn’t go to the big Washington-Chicago-Paris Gauguin show of 1988-’89). In Boston, where D’où venons-nous? is no novelty, the painting has its own room, along with associated material (art work, a photo, Gauguin’s letter to Daniel de Monfreid), but it’s just a crest in the wave of the artist’s South Seas experience. And though the MFA’s traditional chronological approach doesn’t require much imagination, here it highlights the changes in Gauguin’s art — and his life — between 1891 and 1903. The MFA show is a less confusing journey than the catalogue, which with its multiple, sometimes overlapping essays and chaotic arrangement of photos (the French version is somewhat better) offers more information than insight; the reproductions are superior to the French catalogue’s, however, and at 380 pages, the MFA volume is well worth the price ($65 hardcover, $40 paperback). The wall texts could do more: in the first room alone, the one for La perte du pucelage doesn’t tell us that the model for this woman who’s lost her virginity was Gauguin’s mistress, or that the supine pose alludes to Émile Bernard’s painting of his sister in Madeleine au Bois d’Amour/Madeleine in the Bois d’Amour, another woman whose virginity Gauguin had designs on; and the text for Ia orana Maria/Hail Mary doesn’t point out that the painting is an Annunciation (that’s the angel Gabriel with long dark hair and yellow wings at the far left) as well as a Nativity. When I saw the show last week, it was still being hung, to the tune of "Born To Be Wild" and "Mrs. Robinson" on a workman’s radio, so I didn’t view the finished product.

That first room, with its photographs of Tahitian life and its artifacts (stone carvings, a club, a pair of stilts) and two seminal bas-relief linden-wood carvings, reminds us (as do the Tehura/Teha’amana head and the Hina-and-Fatu cylinders farther on) that there was more to this artist’s South Seas adventure than just painting. Gauguin described the 1889 Soyez amoureuses vous soyez heureuses to Bernard as "the best and the strangest of what I’ve done in sculpture. Gauguin (as a monster) seizing the hand of a protesting woman, saying to her: Be in love and you will be happy"; to Van Gogh, then in the asylum at St.-Rémy, he wrote that "the people look sad, in contradiction to the title." They do indeed, especially the Peruvian mummy figure. Does she represent the sexual guilt imposed on women by civilization? Or is her horrified look the realization that being in love does not make you happy? The 1890 Soyez mystérieuses/Be Mysterious shows an Ondine-like woman from the rear, emerging from the water, with a face of ambiguous disposition on either side of her. It’s Gauguin’s credo, visible even in the 1889 Paysage avec deux Bretonnes/Landscape with Two Breton Women that hangs in the ante-room: though close examination reveals that the woman on the right is eating, she still seems to be praying. The MFA has created an appropriate if perhaps unintentional irony by hanging La perte du pucelage opposite Ia orana Maria, one representing the loss of virginity, the other birth without the loss of virginity, one alluding to Bernard, the other to Botticelli and Borobudur.

Gauguin fused the two figures to create the Madonnas of Vahine no te tiare/Woman with a Flower, Vahine no te vi/Woman with a Mango, Merahi metua no Teha’amana/The Ancestors of Teha’amana, and Te nave nave fenua/The Delightful Land. They’re his hymns to beautiful bodies, free spirits, and free love during his initial years in Tahiti. Otherwise, it’s not exactly paradise. Unlike their Breton predecessors, his Tahitian women — he paints very few men — seem disconnected from one another, each lost in her own world. The title of Te faaturuma/The Brooding Woman speaks for itself. The two women of Femmes de Tahiti (Sur la plage)/Women of Tahiti (On the Beach) seem frozen in mid argument, as do the pair in Aha oe feii?/What? Are You Jealous? In E haere oe i hia?/Where Are You Going?, the two women in the background seem to be spying on the foreground figure, and there’s more obvious tension among the three foreground figures in No te aha oe riri?/Why Are You Angry? Even the women of Nave nave mahana/Delightful Day look apprehensive. As opposed to what Van Gogh turned out in Provence, Gauguin paints few "beautiful tropical nights" (perhaps Arearea/Joyousness and Pastorales tahitiennes/Tahitian Pastorales) and not much loving harmony, either. Manaò tupapaú/The Spirit of the Dead Watching, the prone version of La perte du pucelage, exposes the buttocks of Teha’amana, inviting both the penetrating male gaze and Lacanian commentary.

Still, the gaze, if not the commentary, is deflected by an ambiguous perspective that finds the bedded Teha’amana slipping off the bed and Gauguin once again eluding interpretation. Upon his return to Tahiti, he paints Te arii vahine/The Noble Woman, a palpable reference to Manet’s Olympia (with the black servant replaced by a black dog) in which the woman covers her genitals with a cloth while looking openly and sensuously at us; she’s available for a price, but it’s respect, not money, that she wants. She’s not part of the show, unfortunately, and neither is Te tamari no atua/The Child of God, a counterweight to Manaò tupapaú in which Gauguin’s lover Pahura is shown supine and clothed after delivering a child; it’s birth to the earlier painting’s sex and death. But the 1897-’98 Vairumati and the 1899 Deux Tahitiennes/Two Tahitian Women are here to attest to the new direction Gauguin was taking in his depiction of women: less amoureuse, more mystérieuse, openly sensual without inviting sex. Vairumati also appears at the left of D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? As befits a painting whose top corners suggest a palimpsest of Christianity over Buddhism, it reads from right to left, with a central androgynous (add breasts and it becomes female) figure who, reaching up to pick a piece of fruit, represents both Eve and Tantalos. The blue statue is the moon goddess Hina (another layer of religion?); the miserable old woman at the far left is the Peruvian mummy from Vendanges à Arles and Soyez amoureuses, any sexual guilt long since expiated but her hopelessness undiminished. The painting brings together and spews forth countless other Gauguin works, all meditating on the title questions, none offering any answers.

Despite building his "Maison du Jouir" ("House of Pleasure") and luring at least one 14-year-old girl away from Catholic school to become his vahine, Gauguin himself didn’t find those answers in the Marquesas. He suffered from syphilis, and his health, which had been bad for some time, deteriorated further; meanwhile his art became more erratic. The figures of L’invocation/The Call, Femmes et cheval blanc/Women and White Horse, and Cavaliers sur la plage/Riders on the Beach have hardly any weight or substance. The two women of Et l’or de leur corps/And the Gold of Their Bodies, on the other hand, are palpable in their nakedness, frank in their sensuality, and unyielding in their independence — figures to be admired (worshipped?) rather than seduced. And Gauguin reached new heights of complexity — and perversity — in his 1902 work Contes barbares/Primitive Tales, for whose presence in this show Boston can thank George T.M. Shackelford. (The MFA was scheduled to get only Cavaliers sur la plage from the Museum Folkwang Essen; when Shackelford attended the Paris opening of "Gauguin Tahiti" and saw Contes barbares, he decided Boston had to have it, and when he was told that Essen would send only one painting, he arranged to get Contes instead of Cavaliers.) The cross-legged sitting woman in the center was probably inspired, once again, by Borobudur; Tohotua, the red-haired woman at the right, was also the model for Femme à l’éventail/Woman with a Fan (which Essen sent to neither Paris nor Boston). She leans toward her companion even as she invites you to admire her. Behind them to the left crouches a man with red hair, red moustache, and claw toenails: it’s Jacob Meyer de Haan, the hunchback artist who helped Gauguin decorate Marie Henry’s Le Pouldu inn back in 1889. In the portrait Gauguin painted of him for the inn, he’s the demon of temptation confronting Milton and Carlyle; in another Gauguin portrait from that year, he’s backed by Ondine and the Peruvian mummy. Yet Marie Henry was his lover and not Gauguin’s. Is Contes barbares Meyer de Haan’s reward or Gauguin’s revenge? What are we indeed?

"Gauguin Tahiti"

At the Museum of Fine Arts February 29 through June 20.