Art: Echo from Elysium

When Paul Gauguin, seeking escape from the rigors of civilization, arrived in Tahiti in 1891, he fell in love with the island and its people. One Tahitian in particular intrigued Gauguin: a golden-skinned girl of 13 named Tehura. Gauguin, who had left a lawful wife and five children in Europe, settled down with Tehura to a South Pacific existence: “Happiness inhabited my home. Each morning it rose radiant with the sun; the golden hue of Tehura’s face filled the house with joy and light . . . and [she] gave herself to me ever more loving and docile. I am embalmed with her!”

This Elysian union in time produced a son, Emile Tai, who grew up like the other native children. He never learned to read or write, took a native wife, settled himself as a vegetable dealer in the village of Punaauia, seven miles from Papeete. All that Gauguin’s son knew of his father (who died in 1903) were vague stories told him by his mother. For almost 50 years, the outside world paid little attention to what had happened to Gauguin’s native family.

Early last year a French painter who was working in Tahiti noted the fascination with which native children crowded around his easel. He distributed paper and crayons to the children, and his example was later followed by the local French administration.

Last week the results of this largess were on view in Paris’ Pedagogical Museum. Among some 300 childish works done by boys and girls in France’s Pacific possessions were nine drawings of special interest: they were done by six of the eight grandchildren of Paul Gauguin and Tehura. The most promising talent among Emile Tai’s children was that of eleven-year-old Adolphe, whose dark browns and blues could, by only a slight stretch of imagination, be made to recall his grandfather’s mastery of color. But the real tear-squeezer of the show was twelve-year-old Célina Tai’s crudely drawn portrait entitled (after a couple of false starts) “Mon grand-père Paul Gau-Guin,” and copied from a Gauguin self-portrait.

No responsible critic in France would get far enough out on a limb to credit any of Gauguin’s Tahitian grandchildren with having inherited their grandfather’s genius.* But France-Soir, yielding to a temptation to sentimentalize, proclaimed that the children’s efforts “revealed striking gifts that only heredity could explain.”

* Though there is evidence that some artistic talent was passed on to the children and grandchildren of Gauguin and his Danish wife Mette: son Jean René, 72, is a noted Copenhagen sculptor, and son Pola, 70, an ex-painter, is now an art critic in Oslo. Among the grandchildren: a promising painter and a maker of woodcuts.