Layers of Meaning

Gauguin's Paradise from the NY Times

A New York Times article by Holland Cotter has exposed the myth that Gauguin found paradise in Tahiti and lived in paradise happily ever after. It seems that there was much more to the traditional story of Gauguin as the banker who abandoned his family and home, driven to paint a primitive beauty and retreat from "everything that is artificial and conventional."

There are some head-turning revelations in this article: "Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) thought of himself as a questing hero. He may even have imagined himself a saint, though he wasn't. In fact, he was in many ways a dreadful man, a bully, a whiner, a conniver, a sexual opportunist who would hit on your wife or your daughter or your son the minute you left the room." Nope, that is not the man that we studied in art history class (though I did wonder why everyone in paradise was young and beautiful.)

Most surprising and possibly most instructive is the revelation that Tahiti was not a pristine paradise in Gauguin's time, but rather was a colony repressed by Westernization. "Tahiti was Europeanized, visually unspectacular (at least what he first saw of it) and expensive. Scant traces of indigenous religion remained; Christian missionaries had seen to that. But what could he do? Turn around and go back? Go back to what? So he stayed and set about creating the Tahiti he wanted in his art."

What we see is not the Tahiti of the late 19th century, but rather the Tahiti that Gauguin sought. He never found it, so he created it. The article professes that Gauguin invented this Tahiti for commercial reasons, but what if he invented it just for himself? What if an artist creates paradise just because they need it?

This tale reminds me of the author Anne Dillard, famous for her Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Dillard has managed to focus on the beauty and wonder of her surroundings, to the degree that most folks never guess that she has written about a small, now polluted, creek that wanders through suburban Roanoke, Virginia. How much, as artists, do we create our own reality?