TWO GAUGUINS COME TO LIGHT | April 27th 2008

Christie's 

There was a dark side to Gauguin's Tahitian idyll. Christie's is selling two works by this passionate and destitute impressionist master. They are examples of the most colourful and accessible work of the late 19th century, according to Fiammetta Rocco, Books and Arts editor of The Economist ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

Paul Gauguin may have earned his living for many years as a stockbroker, but he was at heart an adventurer.

Though he longed to be an artist, Gauguin refused to study painting, preferring to learn from other painters. He drew with Pissarro, who became a close friend, and with Cézanne. In his work you see clear echoes of the others who revolutionised painting at the time: Corot, Daubigny, Millet, Renoir and Monet.

So it is perhaps not surprising that when Gauguin found himself ignored and destitute in France even after exhibiting with the other Impressionists, he turned against "everything that is artificial and conventional" in Europe and sailed, first to Martinique and then to Panama. He finally settled in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, where he could live simply and inexpensively, and paint in his increasingly primitive style.

Gauguin's idyll inspired some of the most colourful and accessible work of the late 19th century. But there were tensions too. Gauguin idealised the gentle Tahitian women, the child-brides that fulfilled his fantasies of unrestrained and unstigmatised love. "But the mocking line about her otherwise pretty, sensual, and tender mouth warned me that the real dangers of the adventure would be for me, not for her..." he wrote in "Noa Noa", his memoir of Tahiti.

Gauguin was already suffering from syphilis, which caused him unexpected and terrible bleeding. He sold little work locally, and lived from mailboat to mailboat, waiting for scrappy remittances from his dealer in Paris. This was not what was expected of a white man in Polynesia, and Gauguin left his first lover when she grew frustrated at his inability to give her the money and status that was expected from a relationship with a European man.

Yet these tensions also fed Gauguin's art. On the surface his paintings seem to portray simple figures dressed in colourful fabrics, leading simple lives. But there is a mysteriousness at the heart of his work, which is why his paintings draw you to look, and look again.

By 1892, Gauguin had been in Tahiti for more than six months. He had moved from Papeete, the capital, to a rented house in Mataiea, a smaller town on the southern coast of the island. There he painted a series of pictures: a man with a flower behind his ear, his clipped moustache a contrast to the curling frangipani; two women asleep on the floor; two more sitting quietly together, and another lying naked on her front seemed to epitomise the gentleness of native life.

And then he began "Te fare hymenee" (pictured above). In it there are many people gathered in some sort of village hall. They appear to be waiting for a ceremony to begin. It seems to be night-time, although you cannot see outside. All the women are dressed in the "Mother Hubbard", the shapeless shift that European missionaries insisted Tahitian women use to hide their bodies.

The man on the left may be a self-portrait; his back is turned, which sets him apart from the huddle of women filling the rest of the painting. And behind him, vaguely rendered, is a man in white robes, who appears to be a priest, perhaps even a European Christian.

And then there are the two women, who unaccountably are sleeping through it all. Gauguin thought deeply about symbols. The women with their simple pareos pulled around their heads, their untroubled dog beside them--all of this highlights the extraordinary sense of trust and intimacy that emanates from the painting.

Many of the small paintings that Gauguin reworked into "Te fare hymenee" are well known. "Parau api, Quelles nouvelles?" is in the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden and "Manao tupapau, L'esprit des morts veille" is in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Only two remain in private hands, which is why the appearance on the market "Le rêve, Moe Moea" is so significant. The painting does not appear in Wildenstein's 1964 catalogue of Gauguin's work perhaps because it remained in a private collection in Tahiti for many years. It has never appeared at auction.

"Te fare Hymenee" has twice been sold at auction in the past three decades; in New York in 1982 and again at Sotheby's in London in 1989, when it fetched $12.5m. By pitching its current estimate, nearly 20 years later, at $10m-15m, Christie's is being very cautious.

But they will be thinking of Sotheby's sale last November, when two Gauguins, which like "Te fare Hymenee" date from 1892, raced to a nail-biting finish. "Te poipoi, Le Matin" sold for an astonishing $39.2m, although the estimate had been even higher, at $40m-60m; and "Paysage aux trois arbres", which had been estimated at $9m-12m, failed to sell at all.

"Te fare Hymenee" (estimate $10-15m) is lot 28 in Christie's Impressionist and Modern sale in New York on May 6th. "Le Rêve, Moe Moea" (estimate $4m-6m). is lot 44 in the same sale.

(*Fiammetta Rocco writes the Art.view column on economist.com, and is the author of "The Miraculous Fever-tree".)