One of the National Gallery of Ireland's prize possessions, Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ is currently on loan to Washington's National Gallery to celebrate the refurbishment of its Italian rooms. In return, it has loaned us one of Paul Gauguin's celebrated Tahitian paintings, Parau na te varua ino (Words of the devil), which goes on view from next Friday - a first for the National Gallery here. Curator Fionnuala Croke has arranged a display that includes work by an Irish friend of Gauguin's, Roderic O'Conor, and by another Irish painter who was drawn to paint tropical scenes, Mary Swanzy.
The life of Gauguin encapsulates the romantic myth of the artist who shrugs off the trappings of Western bourgeois culture and escapes to a life of ease and sensual bliss in the South Seas. After all, he was a stockbroker, he did abandon his family, and his enduring fame rests on the work he made in Tahiti. However, he was a long-established artist by the time he headed south, and there is the highly contentious matter of the sexual tourist aspect of his interest in Tahiti: he lived there for a while with a 14-year-old girl, Pau'ura. Besides which, colonial Tahiti was no tropical Eden. The flipside included sheer hardship, hordes of rats in the roof, paintings eaten by cockroaches, running sores, wounds that would not heal in the heat, syphilis, fever, conjunctivitis, dysentery and, ironically, a spell working as an accountant to generate some income.
Both his paintings and his writings - and he was a talented and productive writer - evade the issue of how Europeanised Tahiti had become even by the time he arrived there, something that eventually drove him on, vainly, to the Marquesas Islands. He was a vocal critic of the colonial administration, to such an extent that there was a three-month prison sentence hanging over him when he died in 1903.
There is nothing escapist about his South Seas work. In fact, the brilliant sunlight casts deep shadows and most compositions are dark allegories about the meaning of life and death, often painted in the midst of immense practical difficulties. Yet his flat patterning of rich colour, his self-conscious adoption of a "primitive" style of drawing and brushwork, his use of woodcuts and wood carving, and even his eclectic symbolism, were immensely influential on the development of 20th-century European art. Picasso, Matisse, the Fauves, the German Expressionists and many abstract painters were greatly indebted to him.
He became friendly with Roderic O'Conor in between sojourns in Tahiti. O'Conor was very good to him - not an easy thing to be, by all accounts, given his notoriously short fuse and general air of discontent. In fact, once when they were walking together along the seafront at Concarneau in Brittany Gauguin, flamboyant in both dress and manner, not untypically managed to get into a fight with some sailors and ended up with a broken leg, which never properly healed and added greatly to his woes.
O'Conor was an astute observer and, like Gauguin, appreciated the importance of Cezanne. As his two featured works demonstrate, he was one of the few painters who could match Gauguin in the boldness of his colour and compositions. Farm at Lezaven depicts a Breton, not a tropical location, but the hot colour and extremes of light and shade make it a suitable companion piece for the Tahitian scene. The still life, also included, takes on a staple Cezanne theme with gusto.
There is no direct link between Mary Swanzy and Gauguin, but she too was an admirer of Cezanne, and Gauguin's influence is evident in the work she made in Honolulu and Samoa in 1923 and 1924. One of her very best paintings, Samoan Scene, from the AIB collection, will form part of the display. An atmospheric evocation of sunlight and lush tropical vegetation, with bathers in a river, there is nothing of Gauguin's psychological darkness about it, but it is a fine painting and a logical accompaniment to his work.
Paul Gauguin's Parau na te varua ino, along with works by Roderic O'Conor and Mary Swanzy, is on view at the National Gallery of Ireland from Friday next.
