Delphi Complete Works of Paul Gauguin, page 3
The painting portrays a naked Tahitian girl lying on her stomach. An old woman is seated behind her. Gauguin said the title may refer to either the girl imagining the ghost, or the ghost imagining her. The artist later explained that one night young Teha’amana was lying in fear when he arrived home late: “...motionless, naked, belly down on the bed: she stared up at me, her eyes wide with fear... Perhaps she took me, with my anguished face, for one of those legendary demons or spectres, the Tupapaus that filled the sleepless nights of her people.”
In December 1892 Gauguin wrote to his wife Mette, neglecting to mention that the girl in question was his lover, “I painted a nude of a young girl. In this position she is on the verge of being indecent. But I want it that way: the lines and movement are interesting to me. And so, I give her, in depicting the head, a bit of a fright.” He then needed to find a pretext for the girl’s emotions. At first Gauguin explained that the old woman was the subject of her fright, but later in his account in Noa Noa he decided to name himself the subject of her fear. The girl’s fear is therefore believed to be a response to Gauguin’s aggressive behaviour.
When Gauguin exhibited Spirit of the Dead Watching at his largely unsuccessful 1893 Durand-Ruel exhibition, several critics noted the compositional similarities with Manet’s Olympia. Thadée Natanson, a founder of La Revue Blanche, called it the “Olympia of Tahiti”, while Alfred Jarry, more pointedly, dubbed it “the brown Olympia”. It failed to sell for the 3,000 francs he asked for it, despite favourable reviews from critics, including Edgar Dégas. The painting was included in his unsuccessful 1895 Hôtel Drouot sale to raise funds for his return to Tahiti, when he was obliged to buy it in for just 900 francs. Subsequently, he left it in the care of a dealer, who failed to sell it. By 1901 it was with Gauguin’s new dealer Ambroise Vollard, with whom he had reached an arrangement that allowed him a measure of financial security in his final years.
Gauguin reprised the theme in a pastel (from which there are two counterproofs recorded), in a lithograph, and in several woodcuts, one of which is part of the innovative suite of woodcuts he prepared for Noa Noa. The pastel was completed on the reverse of a fully worked pastel study of Annah the Javanese.
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A photograph by Charles Georges Spitz, c. 1888, often reproduced as a portrait of Teha’amana, although there is no evidence to confirm this.
Charcoal study of Teha’amana, c. 1891-3, Art Institute of Chicago
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
Gauguin produced two paintings under this title: one now held in Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie, while the other, the following plate, is housed in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg. It is unclear in the canvas who is posing the question and the insistent gaze of the woman in the immediate foreground, suggesting direct communication with the spectator, creates further uncertainty. The question may encapsulate the artist’s struggle to explain his reasons for leaving Tahiti imminently. The bountiful tropical scene, featuring beautiful young local girls, exotic fruit and clement weather adequately represent the pleasures he would be shortly leaving behind. The mother and child symbol to the right implies that he would also be abandoning any prospect of a new family life with his young vahine wife.
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Stuttgart’s Staatsgalerie version
ANNAH, THE JAVANESE WOMAN
In August 1893, Gauguin returned to France, where his Durand-Ruel gallery exhibition was a moderate success, selling at quite elevated prices eleven of the forty paintings exhibited. He set up an apartment at 6 rue Vercingétorix on the edge of the Montparnasse district frequented by artists, where he began to conduct a weekly salon. He affected an exotic persona, dressing in Polynesian costume, and began a public affair with a young woman still in her teens, “half Indian, half Malayan”, who was infamously known as ‘Annah the Javanese’. She most likely soothed his nostalgia for faraway lands and people.
Gauguin decorated his new home with chrome yellow walls, hung with his paintings and those remaining works from his collection by other artists, including Cézanne and van Gogh. The decoration also included numerous Polynesian works, which he had brought back, especially idols carved in unknown red, orange or black woods.
In spite of her exotic name, the thirteen-year-old Annah was in fact Singalese and the artist opted to portray her beside her pet monkey Taoa, adding to the exoticism of the piece. The Tahitian inscription on the painting, which may be translated as ‘the child-woman Judith is not yet breached’ is believed to refer to Judith Molard, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Swedish sculptor that lived in the same building as him. Initially, the mother had allowed Gauguin to paint her daughter in the nude, but soon changed her mind and stopped the painting. In her place he chose to represent Annah, imbuing the replacement model with the brazen challenge of Manet’s Olympia.
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Gauguin, Alfons Mucha, Luděk Marold, and Annah the Javanese at Mucha’s studio, 1893
Gauguin, c. 1895, playing a harmonium at Alphonse Mucha’s studio at rue de la Grande-Chaumière, Paris
NEVERMORE
Following an ill-fated trip to the seaside at Concarneau, accompanied by Annah the Javanese, Gauguin suffered tragic consequences. A group of local children had taken to throwing stones and calling insults at the artist’s lover. When Gauguin seized one of the children, the boy’s drunken father, who was lounging outside a tavern, saw the incident and set upon Gauguin fiercely. He received a terrible beating, resulting in a broken ankle. The incident would affect Gauguin’s health for the rest of his life. By the time he was well enough to return to Paris, he found that Annah had fled their home, taking all their possessions with her. His health rapidly worsening, with the onset of latent syphilis now affecting him, he quickly sold enough of his paintings to earn him enough money to make a final desperate voyage back to the Pacific islands. His isolation in Paris had become so bitter that he had no choice but to try to reclaim his place in Tahiti society.
Gauguin arrived in Tahiti in September 1895 and was to spend the next six years living, for the most part, an apparently comfortable life near, or at times in, Papeete. During this time he was able to support himself with an increasingly steady stream of sales and the support of friends and well-wishers. He built a spacious reed and thatch house at Punaauia in an affluent area ten miles east of Papeete, settled by wealthy families, in which he installed a large studio, sparing no expense.
For the first year at least he produced no paintings, having decided to concentrate his efforts solely on sculpture. Few of his wooden carvings from this period survive, most of them collected by Monfreid. When he resumed painting, he reprised his long-standing series of sexually charged nudes, as seen in the famous paintings Te tamari no atua (Son of God) and O Taiti (Nevermore).
‘Nevermore’, a refrain from The Raven, a famous poem published in 1875 by Edgar Allan Poe, reflects the depression that the painter suffered in 1897. A recitation of Poe’s poem was given at the dinner held in Gauguin’s honour before his departure for Tahiti. In the poem, the bird of the title, visits a poet on a cold winter evening, repeatedly croaking “Nevermore”. Although Gauguin denied that the ominous appearing bird in the background of the image bore any resemblance to Poe’s creation, the inscription in the upper left is a clear reference to the poem and demonstrates Gauguin’s interest in literary subjects.
The model was Pahura, his new vahine wife, this time aged fifteen. The artist had been excited about the birth of their girl, but she died shortly afterwards, casting the parents into depression. We can see Pahura’s wide eyes peer off into the far distance, lost to the world in her unending grief. A sombre setting is established in the murky palette and unsettling symbols scattered throughout the scene. The two figures behind the headboard hover like malevolent spirits, their ambiguous nature adding to the unease.
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WHERE DO WE COME FROM? WHAT ARE WE? WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Gauguin’s health took a decided turn for the worse and he was hospitalised several times for a variety of ailments. The shattered ankle from the seaside visit to Concarneau was worsening, the open fracture having never healed properly. Now painful and debilitating sores that restricted his movement were erupting up and down his legs, which he treated with arsenic. Gauguin blamed the tropical climate and described the sores as “eczema”, but his biographers agree this must have been the progress of syphilis. The locals around him thought he was suffering leprosy and avoided the artist; only Pahura remained true, nursing him through his sickness.
It was during this time that he produced one of modern art’s most enduring and enigmatic masterpieces, which bears the protracted title: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
During his student days at the Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, just outside Orléans, the teacher for his Catholic liturgy class was the Bishop of Orléans, Félix-Antoine-Philibert Dupanloup, who had devised his own catechism to be lodged in the minds of the schoolboys to lead them towards proper spiritual reflections on the nature of life. The three fundamental questions in this catechism were: “Where does humanity come from?” “Where is it going to?”, “How does humanity proceed?”. Although in later life Gauguin was vociferously anticlerical, these questions from Dupanloup’s catechism obviously had lodged in his mind, and “where?” became the key question that the artist explored in his work.
Gauguin indicated that the canvas should be read from right to left, with the three major figure groups illustrating the questions posed in the title. The three women with a child represent the beginning of life. The middle group symbolises the daily existence of young adulthood. The final group to left represents “an old woman approaching death appearing reconciled and resigned to her thoughts”; at her feet, “a strange white bird...represents the futility of words.” The blue idol in the background apparently represents what Gauguin described as “the Beyond.”
In 1898, Gauguin sent the painting to Georges-Daniel de Monfreid in Paris. Monfreid passed it to Ambroise Vollard along with eight other thematically related pictures shipped earlier. They went on view at Vollard’s gallery from November to December 1898. The exhibition was a success, although the large canvas received mixed reviews. The critic Andre Fontainas of the Mercure de France acknowledged a grudging respect for the work, but thought the allegory impenetrable without the inscription and compared the painting unfavourably to the murals of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who had died recently. Vollard had already purchased the other works as a job lot from Monfreid for 1,000 francs, but refrained from purchasing the larger work and had difficulty selling it on.
Charles Morice two years later tried to raise a public subscription to purchase the painting for the nation. To assist him, Gauguin wrote a detailed description of the work, concluding with the messianic remark that he spoke in parables: “Seeing they see not, hearing they hear not”. The subscription nevertheless failed. Vollard eventually sold the painting for 2,500 francs in 1901 to Gabriel Frizeau, of which Vollard’s commission was perhaps as much as 500 francs. In time, the painting was consigned and sold to several other Parisian and European merchants and collectors, until it was purchased by the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York City in 1936. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acquired it from the Marie Harriman Gallery on 16 April 1936.
Gauguin considered the following plate his masterpiece and the grand culmination of his life’s work and ideology as an artist. He was in despair when he undertook the painting, mourning for his favourite daughter Aline, who had died tragically from pneumonia earlier in the year. Oppressed by debts, Gauguin planned to kill himself on finishing work on the canvas. He subsequently made an unsuccessful attempt with an overdose of arsenic, after climbing to the top of a nearby hill. Four years later, suffering the grim final stages of syphilis and addicted to morphine, Gauguin was extremely weak and in constant pain. He resorted once again to using morphine and died suddenly on the morning of 8 May 1903.
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The artist’s final self portrait, 1903, Kunstmuseum Basel
The Paintings
The town hall in La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, Loiret department, north-central France — Gauguin was sent to the prestigious Catholic boarding school Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, where he spent three years. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Loriol Institute in Paris, a naval preparatory school, before returning to Orléans to take his final year at the Lycée Jeanne D’Arc.
THE COMPLETE PAINTINGS
Gauguin’s paintings are presented in chronological order and divided into decade sections, with an alphabetical table of contents following immediately after.
CONTENTS
1870’s
In the Forest, Saint-Cloud I
In the Forest, Saint-Cloud II
Landscape
Forest Path
Clearing I
Clearing II
On the Farm I
On the Farm II
Waterside Houses
The Cail Factories and Quai de Grenelle
Landscape with Poplars
Le Port de Grenelle II
Mette Asleep on a Sofa
Pears and Grapes
Port de Grenelle I
The Seine at Pont d’Iéna. In the Snow
The Seine in Paris
The Seine in Paris between the Pont d’Iéna and Pont de Grenelle
The Seine Opposite the Quai de Passy
Bouquet of Peonies on a Musical Score
China Asters, Hat and Book
Daisies and Peonies in a Blue Vase
Flowers in a Vase with a Musical Score
Port de Javel I
Port de Javel II
Still Life with Oysters
Autumn Landscape
Man with a Toque
Portrait of a Child (Aline Gauguin?)
Portrait of Claude Antoine Charles Favre
Portrait of Ingeborg Thaulow
Still Life with Jug and Red Mullet
Chicken Coup
Landscape with Factories
Woman Embroidering
Apple Trees at l’Hermitage II
Apple Trees at l’Hermitage III
Country Church
Garden under Snow I
Geese on the Farm
Haystacks
The Market Gardens of Vaugirard
Riverside
Winter Landscape, Effect of Snow
1880’s
Flowers and Carpet
Houses, Vaugirard
The Makings of a Bouquet
Mandolin on a Chair
Still Life with Fruit Plate
Study of a Nude, Suzanne Sewing
Wood Tankard and Metal Pitcher
Banks of the Oise
The Family in the Garden, rue Carcel
Flowers and Carpet
Interieur avec Aline Gauguin
Interior of the Painter’s House, rue Carcel
Party Wall
Pissarro’s Garden, Quai du Pothuis, Pontoise
Pond with Ducks
Portrait of a Woman
Still Life with Oranges
Vase of Flowers and Window
Vaugirard Church by Night
Young Girl Dreaming
At the Window
Blue Barge
Bouquet of Flowers
Chou Quarries at Pontoise I
Chou Quarries at Pontoise II
Chou Quarry, Hole in the Cliff
Corner of the Garden, rue Carcel
Flowers and Books
Flowers and Japanese Book
Gratte Coqs Path
Mountain Landscape
River Bank in Winter (study)
Aline Gauguin and One of Her Brothers
Dahlias and Mandolin
Double Portrait of a Young Girl (Mademoiselle Lafuite?)
Farm in Osny
The Garden in Winter, rue Carcel
Ingeborg Thaulow
La Groue Farm, Osny
Osny, rue de Pontoise, Winter
Osny, the Gate, Busagny Farm
Poplars, Osny
Snow, Rue Carcel
Stream, Osny
Street, Osny
Tomatoes and a Pewter Tankard on a Table
Two People on a Sofa
Village Street, Osny
Abandoned Garden, Rouen
Apples, Jug, Iridescent Glass
The Artist’s Children, Impasse Malherne
