Art: Backward Look

“I always had a yearning to run away,” confessed Painter Paul Gauguin in his Intimate Journals. “At Orleans, at the age of nine, I set out for the forest of Bondy—carrying a handkerchief filled with sand slung on the end of a stick over my shoulder. The picture of a traveler with bundle and staff . . . had always intrigued me.”

In 1895, Gauguin, then 46, ran away for the last time. His destination: Tahiti. Behind him he left a France indifferent to his revolutionary paintings with their red roads, violet fields and yellow trees. Abandoned, too, were his five children and the embittered wife who had never understood the creative fury driving her husband from his prosperous position as stockbroker and banker to poverty and restless wandering.

In the South Seas, where he found several sloe-eyed mistresses, Gauguin was soon wracked by syphilis, recurrent attacks of influenza and an agonizingly persistent form of eczema. Sharp-tongued and truculent, he became embroiled in endless quarrels with his fellow Frenchmen, finally retired to an isolated island of the Marquesa group. There he hoped “that the completely savage atmosphere and solitude will, before I die, inspire me with a new fire of enthusiasm which will renew my imagination and put the finishing touch to my talent.”

Last week Frenchmen could see many of the products of Gauguin’s last eight tormented years, as well as earlier works. The Louvre, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth,* had worked long & hard to collect from all over the world the paintings which best represented the renegade Frenchman’s art. Fifteen hundred visitors trooped through the Orangerie every day to inspect the pictures of sable-skinned, expressionless Tahitians lounging somnolently along lush tropical shores, the earlier canvases of rolling Breton hills plotted out in poster-clear patches of color. Critics hailed the exhibit. Said one: “The best retrospective show ever staged in France.”

On one wall hung his last picture, sold at a Papeete auction after his death in 1903 for 7 francs. Amid the warm splendors of his South Sea island retreat, truant Frenchman Gauguin had taken a nostalgic backward look, painted from memory a wintry’ Breton village scattered along a low, snow-covered horizon.

* A year late (Gauguin was born in 1848) because of the time it took to assemble the show.