White Sands. Geoff Dyer
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to be there even though I knew it was there. After seeing some paintings twice (Turner’s Slave Ship, Degas’s motionless At the Races) and Bierstadt’s Valley of the Yosemite three times, I began to suspect that I had trudged through every room in the exhausting museum, had been walking in my own footsteps for almost an hour, without even glimpsing the one I had come to see. Eventually I asked one of the attendants where Where Do We Come From? had gone. He looked up from the strange limbo of his station: exhausted, bored out of his mind, wanting nothing more than to take the weight off his feet but, at the same time, eager to respond to any enquiry even though he had already heard every question he was ever going to be asked a thousand times before. The painting was not on display at the moment, he said. It was being restored or out on loan, I forget which. Having thanked him, I trudged away in a state of disappointment so all-consuming it felt like he had put a curse on me, a curse by which the force of gravity had suddenly increased threefold. The afternoon would be redeemed—the curse and weight of the world lifted—by an encounter with a painting by a painter I’d never heard of, had never seen in reproduction and had somehow missed during the earlier, pre-letdown trudge through the museum’s extensive holdings, but at that point, with no redemption in sight, the experience of the missing masterpiece, of the thwarted pilgrimage (which is not at all the same as a wasted journey), made me see that the vast questions posed by Gauguin’s painting had to be supplemented with other, more specific ones. Why do we arrive at a museum on the one day of the week—the only day we have free in a given city—when it is shut? On the day after a blockbuster exhibition has finally—after multiple extensions of its initial four-month run—closed? When the painting we want to see is out on loan to a museum in a city visited a year ago, when the featured show was the Paul Klee retrospective already seen in Copenhagen six months previously? An answer of sorts comes in the form of a droll exchange in Volker Schlöndorff’s Voyager, an adaptation of Max Frisch’s novel Homo Faber, in which Faber (Sam Shepard) asks an African guy when the Louvre is open. ‘As far as I know it’s never open,’ he replies with the wisdom of magisterial indifference. All of which leads to another, still more perplexing question: what is the difference between seeing something and not seeing it? More specifically, what is the difference between seeing Tahiti and not seeing it, between going to Tahiti and not going? The answer to that, an answer that is actually an answer to an entirely different question, is that it is possible to go to Tahiti without seeing it.
I was able, at least, to get a sense of the size of Where Do We Come From? at the Gauguin Museum in the Botanical Gardens of Tahiti, where a full-scale copy now hangs. At the very centre of the painting, an androgynous figure reaches up to pluck a fruit from a tree, though exactly what this symbolises is difficult to say, and there are many other symbols as well. Gauguin was a symbolist, which means his art was full of symbols. Even the colours are symbolic of something, even though they often seem symbolic of our inability to interpret them adequately. Not everyone has had the patience to try. For D. H. Lawrence, who stopped briefly in Tahiti en route from Australia to San Francisco, Gauguin was ‘a bit snivelling, and his mythology is pathetic.’ This visual mythology—a magpie fusion of Maori, Javanese and Egyptian, of anything that appealed to his sophisticated idea of the universal primitive—achieved its final and simplest expression in Where Do We Come From? According to the most important mythic element in all of this (the myth, that is, of the artist’s life), once Gauguin had finished it he tried to kill himself but ended up overdosing or underdosing. When he had come back from the dead, he spent some time contemplating his answers, his answers in the form of questions in the form of a painting. Then, as with almost all the other paintings he’d done, it was rolled up and shipped back to France, leaving him with little evidence of the world he’d created. It is quite possible that some days he woke up and thought to himself, ‘Where did that big painting get to?’ and then, as he sat on the edge of the bed, scratching his itchy leg, he would remember that he had sent it off and would have to start another one. In the Gauguin Museum there are little photocopies of all these paintings with captions explaining where in the world they have washed up: the Pushkin in Moscow, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld in London. As part of the centenary, however, forty works of art were being temporarily returned to the island. Following Pissarro’s bitchy remark that Gauguin ‘is always poaching on someone’s land, nowadays he’s pillaging the savages of Oceania,’ it has been fashionable in recent years to see Gauguin as an embodiment of imperialist adventurism. In this light the return of his works can be read as a gesture of reparation, but it would be a mistake to extrapolate from this, to think that there is a groundswell of support in Polynesia for making the islands independent of France. On the contrary, the fear is that France might one day sever its special connection with Polynesia, thereby staunching the flow of funds on which it is utterly dependent.
After the museum we went to Mataiea and Punaauia (now a featureless suburb of Papeete), where Gauguin lived and where some of his most famous works were painted. I suddenly had the idea that yellow might be a symbol for banana, but apart from that my mind was completely blank and I couldn’t think myself into Gauguin’s shoes, couldn’t see the world through his eyes. As I stood there, however, seeing what he had seen without even coming close to seeing as he had seen, I did get an inkling of the attraction of Islam. Impossible—not even conceivable—that a Muslim, on making the mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, could be disappointed. That is the essential difference between religious and secular pilgrimage: the latter always has the potential to disappoint. In the wake of this realization there swiftly followed another: that my enormous capacity for disappointment was actually an achievement, a victory. The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment (‘I am down, but not yet defeated,’ Gauguin snivel-boasted) was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had of it. When I am no longer capable of disappointment the romance will be gone: I may as well be dead.
A Faaohipa noa i te taime ati
There’s no use putting it off any longer. The unaskable question is crying out to be asked. Not ‘Where are we going?’ but ‘What are the women like?’ Are they babes? No one was more eager to answer this question than Gauguin himself, and the answer, obviously, was yes, they’re total babes in a babelicious paradise of unashamed babedom. Many of Gauguin’s most famous paintings are of Tahitian babes who were young and sexy and ate fruit and looked like they were always happy to go to bed with a syphilitic old lech whose legs were covered in weeping eczema. Of course, he was also a great artist, but they didn’t know this, since at the time he did not have the reputation that he has now, and to see how great an artist he is you have to know something about art, which they didn’t, because they hadn’t seen any. To them he was just a randy old goat who was always trying to persuade them to get their kit off, which they were happy to do even though the killjoy missionaries who had come to the island before Gauguin and converted people to boring old Christianity had got them to cover up their breasts. The missionaries made them wear something called a Mother Hubbard, which was a shapeless and not very flattering frock, but Gauguin knew that underneath their Mother Hubbards they were, as a famous British ad campaign from the 1980s had it, ‘all loveable,’ and their melon-ripe breasts were still there, and were no less nice for not being visible to the naked eye until they were undressed. They might not have known he was a great artist but Gauguin believed himself to be one, right up there with Manet, whose Olympia bugged him in the sense that it goaded him to do a really horny picture of a naked Polynesian woman, ideally one who was only about thirteen, as much a girl as a woman. At first, though, Gauguin didn’t do much painting. He just tried to look and understand what was going on in their heads. He read about Maori art and artists and this helped him understand, but he was an artist, and for an artist looking is its own form of understanding. Earlier visitors to Tahiti had noticed the grace and stillness of its inhabitants, but while they interpreted this as torpor or boredom, Gauguin saw ‘something indescribably solemn and religious in the rhythm of their poses, in their strange immobility. In eyes that dream, the troubled surface of an unfathomable enigma.’ As well as trying to understand what was going on in their heads he was also keen on getting down their pants, and the other colonials took a dim and possibly envious view of this.
That’s how it was in Gauguin’s day. But what about now? I can