Seen through Sunglasses

Among the foreign laborers who helped dig the Panama Canal was a hawk-nosed, angry-eyed Frenchman named Paul Gauguin. For about $4 a day he swung a pick ax, and earned enough money to go on to Martinique. Gauguin was beating a strategic retreat from the sun-spangled Seine of eight-Century French Impressionism to the blue and blood-red lagoons of Hivaoa in the Marquesas.

Paris had been kind to Gauguin the dashing young sailor, Gauguin the successful banker and stockbroker, and even to Gauguin the diffident "Sunday painter." But at 35 he quit his job and left his wife and five children in order to paint full time. Then Paris was different. It was, said Gauguin, "a desert for a poor man."

Three years later, in 1886, Gauguin tried to find new security in the hedged, rock-buttressed fields of Brittany, and succeeded only in learning how to compose his paintings better. In Aries, where he went to visit his friend Vincent van Gogh, he learned something about translating sunlight into arbitrary colors (chrome yellow, red-violet). Said he in his journal: "Though the public had no suspicion of it, two men were performing there a colossal work that was useful to them both." The work ended when Van Gogh went mad, chased Gauguin down the street with a razor, then went home and sliced off his own ear.

Even in the South Seas, Gauguin found plenty to contend with. Among his problems: syphilis (contracted on his last night in Paris), meddling officials (who disapproved of his interest in the native girls and native rights, once jailed him for three months), extreme poverty (failing to sell the pictures he sent back to Paris, he had to count on occasional presents from his Paris friends). But he used the mingled depths of the Pacific sky and sea and the Persian-rug colors of the land to turn his escape from civilization into a wonderful enrichment of Western culture.

Gauguin without Maugham. A Manhattan gallery last week put on the best Gauguin show yet seen in the U.S. (including 40 paintings and 44 prints and drawings). Not included: the Boston Museum's 14-by-5-ft. masterpiece entitled Whence Do We Come? What Are We? Whither Are We Going?, which Gauguin painted on burlap sacks after trying to poison himself in 1898.

The paintings were good enough to make most visitors forget Somerset Maugham's smoothly dramatic Moon and Sixpence--which borrowed many of the circumstances, but few of the inner realities, of Gauguin's life.

Gauguin had gone far beyond the hurried lyricism of Claude Monet (whom he once collected), but he seldom banged the brasses like his fellow pioneer Van Gogh. His island landscapes had a muted harmony which reminded U.S. eyes of moist June afternoons seen through Polaroid sunglasses. The honey-colored people who lived in them possessed the gentle strength and warmth of his models, the wooden stiffness and empty-eyed thoughtfulness of their idols. Each painting was an elaborate, somber tapestry of colors that no other artist had yet dared to weave.

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