Art: PAINTER OF PASSION

The amorous passion of a Maori courtesan is something quite different from the passivity of a Parisian cocotte—something “very different!

SO wrote a French stockbroker named Paul Gauguin, who left his wife and secure career and went in search of the very place of love. He found it with the Maoris of Tahiti, and many of his pictures, such as the woodcut opposite, attest the artistic success of his quest. But it was a therapeutic disaster to himself; he died in the islands, of syphilis, malnutrition and a failing heart. Last week some 200 of his works, including 75 of his prints, went on show at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, which will move to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in April, helps make the great romantic a classic.

Gauguin’s paintings are universally admired for the colors of a world sun-filled and yet without glare, various and yet disciplined like the rainbow. His woodcuts—generally printed in no more than two colors each—are far less known, but rightly emphasized in Chicago’s show. Gauguin’s Here We Love evokes that shadowland beneath the waterfall from which no traveler returns unchanged. His picture of a night-time bonfire conference is ominous with invisible evil (see below). Gauguin could create natural atmospheres with colors, and could create supernatural ones with ink alone.

Paul Gauguin ended his career on the Paris Bourse in 1883, at the age of 35. His death two decades later, in the cerulean and blood-red land and seascape of the South Pacific, was watched over by honey-colored friends. Once when a Tahitian man named Totefa respectfully told him that he “could do things which other men were incapable of doing,” Gauguin rushed to his diary and wrote: “I believe Totefa is the first human being in the world who used such words toward me. It was the language of a savage or of a child, for one must be either one of these—must one not?—to imagine that an artist might be a useful human being.”