Private view

For all his questing, boastful talk, Paul Gauguin lived a blighted life. It came to a premature end 100 years ago in the Marquesas islands in a two-storey hut Gauguin had dubbed the "House of Pleasure." By the last few months of his life, it reeked so badly from the rotting sores on the artist's ulcerated leg that hardly anyone would go near him. Vaeoho Marie-Rose, his pregnant, 14-year-old Marquesan "wife," had left him nine months previously to return to her father, a Marquesan chief.

In the House of Pleasure were a harmonium, a violin, some of Gauguin's own pictures, a prized collection of 45 pornographic photographs, and various reproductions of western and oriental art. A multi-panelled carving above the entrance to his studio announced: Soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses ("Be amorous and you will be happy").

One shudders to think what kind of amorousness Gauguin thought he was capable of at the time he carved it. He had a laudanum habit. He had deliberately taken an arsenic overdose five years previously, which failed to kill him. He suffered eye infections and fainting fits, and he had heart trouble. He was destitute. Rats had gnawed his roof and many of his works had been eaten by cockroaches. A favourite - albeit abandoned - child had died in Denmark. And the cause of Gauguin's eventual death was slow-moving syphilis, which he probably contracted from a prostitute in Martinique on his very first "exotic" adventure in 1887.



The 100th anniversary of the awful end to Gauguin's mostly thwarted life is being celebrated in Paris with a blockbuster exhibition of his Tahitian paintings. It is, despite all the misgivings one may reasonably have about the man, a beautiful, vivid show. Something about Gauguin continues to be compelling, although it is very hard to say what.

While there is so much in Gauguin's art to talk about, there is little to hold aloft as indisputably great. In Tahiti, where he painted and carved his best works, he honed a remarkable synthesis of styles and influences. The result was a flickering interplay of robust innovation and flimsy derivation. Nonetheless, the innovations and something about Gauguin's mood, his rhetoric, his desire to get back to a tabula rasa, were influential for some time after the artist's death. Even today, when the rhetoric sounds hollow, it is hard to deny the works' peculiar, dreamy beauty.

Of course, more than an excuse for making pictures, Tahiti was also an idea, a dream which Gauguin nursed stubbornly against all the rhythmically crashing incursions of reality. This dream, which fed into both the work's greatness and its slightness, was coddled in a heightened, humming layer of sexual fantasy. So one of the things the Grand Palais show makes you wonder about, far more than Gauguin's ideas about art and religion, is sex.

Today, we talk about sex incessantly, but we hardly ever really talk about it. We discuss it as a domesticated caricature, or in terms of social exchange, or as pornography. The thing we seem incredibly reluctant to acknowledge is the fundamental, glittering promise of sex: that it can release us from all that.

At the heart of Gauguin's "exoticism" was a deep-rooted, perhaps infantile, sexual yearning. Sex promised him a genuine, yet transitory, escape. Its sensations, however brief, could trump those of pain and obliterate all those exhausting stories which serve as scaffolding to our jerry-built selves (stories which in Gauguin's case must have been particularly exhausting, so consistently did they fail to admit reality). "I was exhausted by the male role of having to be strong and protective," he admitted at one point, "of having to have broad shoulders, just to support everything. Just for once, to be the weak one, who loves and obeys." To judge by his letters, sex functioned as a way of harking back to that childish sensation of cocooned delight which is always being coarsened, if not erased, by the compromises and insecurities of responsible adulthood. His behaviour in Tahiti - it is easy for us to see now - was not only childish but cruelly rapacious; it was not only naive but unfeeling; both self-worshipping and self-despairing, often in the most fruitless, counter-erotic ways.

But fruit did also come of it all, in the peculiar form of these paintings and carvings. Are they fraudulent, then, just like Gauguin's exotic dream?

To me, partly, yes. But sometimes, when I am looking at the best of them - which are filled with half-revealing expressions, unyielding bodies and all sorts of ambivalent hues - I feel Gauguin hoped his art would serve not so much as a wish fulfilment, but as the very opposite: an antidote to the yearnings which dominated and eventually ruined his life.

He was certainly capable of painting weak and silly fantasies. But he could also do something more provocative and true. His best paintings invite you to feel his erotic dream as a vivid, intensely seductive state; not by presenting it clearly and unambiguously, but by inflecting it with controlled amounts of "interference" - with reality, which can offer its own kind of escape.