A Post-Impressionist masterpiece brings a taste of Tahiti to Tokyo

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897-98

Does this sound familiar? After disappointments in his homeland, a man chooses to relocate to a remote, exotic island on the other side of the world, where he is enchanted by the culture and the women, and where he's also stirred to achieve things he could never have accomplished back home.

I would hazard a guess that this brief outline of the life of the French artist Paul Gauguin is a loose fit with that of many expats here in Japan, including myself. Although, hopefully, in other respects — grinding poverty, sexual relations with girls as young as 13, and death from syphilis — I trust we differ from the troubled Post-Impressionist painter, whose achievements are being celebrated in a show at the National Museum of Modern Art.

If for nothing else, this exhibition is a success because it brings Gauguin's greatest painting and the culmination of his life's work, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98), a sweeping canvas measuring 1.39 x 3.75m, to Japan for the first time. But in addition to this coup, the exhibition also makes a brave attempt to get at the essence of a painter who stubbornly followed his artistic instincts to create mesmerizing art, the quality of which was only fully appreciated after his death.

The problem with Gauguin's work during his lifetime was that he constantly broke the rules, not least by turning his back on Paris and retreating to the island of Tahiti. This may sound strange, as late-19th century French art was all about rule breaking, with the Impressionists, for example, rejecting the artistic canons set by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The irony is that, when it comes to breaking rules, there are always plenty of rules on just how they should be broken.

While painters like Monet and Cezanne revolutionized the way the public saw light and figure in painting, they nevertheless strove to achieve a unified effect in their canvases. Cezanne, for example, constantly distorted motifs and altered color and tone until a harmonious whole was attained. Radical as his paintings seemed, they were essentially a continuation of the classical Greek notion of overall artistic unity.

Gauguin's paintings, by contrast, challenged this Aristotelian sense of organic unity. They are full of discontinuities and disjunctions. Often the various motifs exist with their own sense of space, color, light and even time. Where Do We Come From?, for example, with its ambiguous sources of lighting and its sprawling, rambling composition, is more like a collection of different paintings that just happen to share the same large canvas.

The exhibition traces this disjointed tendency through Gauguin's earlier career, with examples of Cloisonnist paintings, like Two Breton Girls by the Sea (1889), where the bold, flat forms are rigidly separated by dark contours.

The self-sufficiency of the various motifs in Where Do We Come From? is also underlined by tracing their sources and evolution in Gauguin's other work. The origin of the old woman on the far left of the painting is revealed to be a photo of a desiccated mummy from Peru, a country where Gauguin spent time as a child, while the central figure reaching up to pick fruit is based on a photo of a stone relief of the Buddhist character Maitrakanyaka, mutated through a couple of other works at the exhibition: Exotic Eve (1890/94) and Te Nave Nave Fenua ("The Delightful Land," 1892).

Gauguin’s refusal to unify and regiment the elements of his painting in the typical European way results in a leisurely feeling of liberation that chimes well with the Tahitian setting. But the lack of conventional artistic harmony also creates subtle tensions that infuse this otherwise tranquil masterpiece with a magical energy.

Through Sep 23, 2009, National Museum of Modern Art.

C.B.Liddell

Metropolis

31st July, 2009