Broker to South Seas

On Christmas 1888 at Arles in Southern France a young painter with a hooked nose called at the house of his best friend. Police and neighbors, all shouting excitedly, stood before the yellow door. Up rushed the red-faced chief of police.

"What have you done to your friend?" he yelled. "Yes, you know well enough. He's dead!"

Under a sheet upstairs lay the bloody body of Vincent van Gogh minus one ear. Artist van Gogh was not dead but in a cataleptic trance. He had cut off his own ear by way of self-punishment. Paul Gauguin had had nothing to do with it beyond the fact that he had spent Christmas Eve in his friend's company. The two lived to rank among the greatest of French modernists. Both were mouse-poor and half-insane when they died. Both have been made the protagonists of best-selling novels.* Last week Manhattan's Wildenstein Galleries did its best to give Paul Gauguin a memorial show to match the great van Gogh exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art (TIME, Oct. 28).

As an example of exhibition building, the Gauguin show is even better than the van Gogh show. Forty-nine canvases from 25 different collections give the whole story of Gauguin's artistic development, from his pseudo-Monet landscapes of Brittany, done in the 1870's, through the brilliant stalwart nudes of Tahiti, for which the world remembers him, to the nostalgic view of France, painted in the Marquesas in the last years of his life when his eyesight was nearly gone and his feet were rotting away with chronic eczema.

Besides the pictures the show contains an elaborate reliquary. In it are original letters, books from Gauguin's lean library, tattered scrapbooks dedicated to his daughter Aline and a facsimile of the manuscript of his autobiography, Noa Noa, decorated with 40 pages of water colors and wood engravings in his own hand.

The basic difference between the painting of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin is that Artist van Gogh strove to put on canvas the rocketing pinwheels and gaudy flashes constantly exploding in his aching head, whereas Gauguin, whose head throbbed with the same painful lunacy, sought to escape from it in his work. His best pictures have the dark rich colors of Persian rugs. They are as carefully composed as Chinese paintings. Despite the difficulty of obtaining raw materials in the South Seas, he produced more pictures than van Gogh. Many of Gauguin's later pictures were done on prepared flour bags.

Typical of his best work were at least two pictures on exhibition last week: The White Horse, loaned by the Louvre, which shows a long-maned white horse drinking peacefully in a stream while in the background a nude Tahitian girl rides another horse back from the stream to the pasture, and The Call, now the property of Wildenstein & Co. in which three half-clad Tahitians stroll under slender trees against a dark tropical landscape.

Contrary to popular opinion, Paul Gauguin was not the first crack artist to paint Tahiti. That distinction belongs to the father of U. S. mural painting, John La Farge.* Artist La Farge left a brood of talented, talkative descendants and a mass of pictures, but he lacked color for the general public.

Hook-nosed Paul Gauguin, half Peruvian, was born in Paris, spent part of his childhood in the Andes. After brief schooling at a Jesuit seminary in Orleans, he ran away to sea. Chastened by that experience, he returned to Paris, married a Danish woman, did quite well for himself as a stockbroker. On Sundays Broker Gauguin got the smell of counting houses out of his nose by going into the suburbs, painting landscapes. On these trips he met and made friends with Impressionists Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. In 1887 he suddenly deserted wife, family and the stock exchange, skipped to the West Indies to paint. Back in Paris after a few months, he had an exhibition that was a failure, moved on to a Brittany fishing village, met the equally erratic Vincent van Gogh, went to live with him at Aries.

After the ear episode, Gauguin thought it wise to leave his friend. He struggled on in Paris, making many friends, no money, began to talk wildly of escaping from civilization to the peace of the South Seas. The idea inflamed his cafe friends. Somebody pulled wires in the Ministry of Public Instruction and brought out a fine document authorizing Gauguin to make an artistic expedition to the Colony of Tahiti on behalf of the Republic of France--at no salary. A benefit performance was staged at the Theatre des Arts for Gauguin and the equally impoverished Paul Verlaine. Artist Gauguin decorated the theatre with his pictures; Verlaine, Maurice Maeterlinck and Charles Morice wrote special plays; Stephane Mallarme recited Poe's Raven in French. By the time the scenery was paid for there was just enough money left to buy Poet Verlaine 30 drinks of absinthe. Painter Gauguin sold his pictures at auction, went to Tahiti anyway.

Colonial society on that Pacific island was outraged by Artist Gauguin's habit of pasting obscene postcards on his bedroom door, of insisting on public recognition of his native mistresses. In constant trouble with French officials and the police, he moved finally to the Marquesas Islands, built and worshipped a clay idol of his own designing, died, half-blind, on May 8,1903.

* Of Vincent van Gogh, Novelist Irving Stone wrote Lust jor Life (1934). Of Paul Gauguin, Novelist Somerset Maugham wrote The Moon and Sixpence (1919), which by last week had sold over 84,000 copies in the U. S. alone.

* Last week the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a memorial exhibition of La Farge's works.

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