If Paul Gauguin, leaning across his celestial easel, had happened to glance
down at that moment, he’d have cracked a cynical smile.
Twenty Americans in vibrant Tommy Hilfiger leisurewear, hands gripping
state-of-the-art Olympus cameras, swarmed across his grave site on a slope
high above the Pacific. They had panted up the hill from the village of
Atuona, on Hiva Oa in the remote Marquesas Islands, to the little cemetery
where Gauguin has lain for 103 years in a grave of ugly black boulders
marked with his own statue of a wild woman, Oviri, Tahitian for savage.
The Americans grappled for position, some with one foot up on the modest
headstone and a triumphant grin, as though they’d just bagged a trophy lion.
I’m not sure they knew much about Gauguin, except that his paintings sold
for millions at places like Sotheby’s and he’d run off to the South Seas to
paint pubescent girls after first seducing them.
And yet Gauguin could scarcely sell a picture during his lifetime. Here was
the painter who rejected the “disease” of civilisation, who fled Europe and
even Tahiti in his search for his ideal of the noble, savage state. Now,
rich folks from the west were fighting each other to videotape his grave.
The Marquesas, an archipelago of 12 high, wooded islands, are among the most
remote pinpricks of land in the world, about 900 miles northeast of Tahiti
and 4,000 miles from the nearest continent, South America. Even in today’s
French Polynesia they are regarded as the back of beyond, but their beauty
is legend: the bold, rock-bound coasts where surf beats against towering
cliffs; the secret interiors dominated by mountains swathed in swirling
cloud, where there are Tabu temples half-suffocated by jungle, and stone
gods almost as massive as those on Easter Island.
Remote was what Gauguin wanted. He arrived in Hiva Oa in 1901 on the steamer
Croix de Sud, after six days’ sailing from Tahiti. He unloaded his canvases
and trunks into a native canoe and was rowed ashore. He had conned the
Catholic church into believing he’d repent his dissolute ways, so it agreed
to sell him a 700-franc piece of beachfront. Here he built his studio out of
bamboo and palm fronds, calling it Maison du Jouir, the house of pleasure —
which kind of gave the game away. Beside the entrance he carved “Be amorous
and you will be happy”.
WE ARRIVED here the same way Gauguin did. His steamer anchored in the same
bay, Baie de Tahauku, so that he could land in the village of Atuona. There
was no harbour then and there isn’t still. We sailed in on the Aranui III,
an 8,000-ton freighter that voyages monthly to these lonely islands to
unload supplies. It also takes passengers.
When Gauguin set foot on Hiva Oa, the natives viewed his long hair and velvet
suits with mirth. Today, they are very organised in the art of playing host
to Europeans and Americans. A little ukelele band on the quay heralds our
whaler, smiling children drape garlands of gardenia around our necks, and we
are invited to clamber into Toyota 4WDs so that we might be carried like a
conquering army to the village.
Gauguin is big business in Atuona. A guide points out the wooden colonial
store where he bought his rum and turps. Inside, they sell Gauguin tropical
biscuits and Gauguin perfume. Across the road is a faithful replica of La
Maison de Jouir, and a Gauguin museum lined with forgeries of his most
famous paintings.
Here I met his great-great-granddaughter, or one of them (he fathered
countless children; his favourite age for a mistress was 13), a handsome
woman with a gardenia headband who proudly showed me a copy of Gauguin’s
portrait of her ancestor. Stupidly I asked her name. She said it was
Tevahinuwaatuaiteruru a Teanau — “but you can call me Josette”.
Atuona forgot Gauguin almost as soon as he was buried, but latterly the
village has done rather well out of him. It is trim and prosperous, with a
small military base and airfield, one luxury hotel, the Hanakee Hiva Oa
Pearl Lodge, and comfortable bungalow pensions to accommodate
visitors drawn by his legend. One of them, the Belgian singer Jacques Brel,
is also buried here.
When the Aranui drops anchor and the passengers descend, the natives set up
stalls heaped with wood carvings and colourful pareus, and do terrific
trade. So do the restaurants, with their signature dish of wild pig baked in
an earth oven.
Until quite recently, civilisation stopped just beyond La Maison de Jouir. But
now you can make a two-hour ride to Lapona, through forests of palm and
mountains shaped like witches’ hats, to visit an awesome ancient marae,
a temple reclaimed from the jungle. There are five giant Tiki gods here —
squat, ugly, frog-faced stone effigies, somehow made even more demonic by
the chopping off of their grotesque penises, an act performed by offended
missionaries decades ago.
GAUGUIN WOULD not have approved. But whatever the enduring worth of his
colour-saturated paintings of naked, beautiful, almost expressionless
Tahitian wahines, perhaps his greatest value to our modern age is not as a
painter at all.
He was a failed stockbroker, and there can hardly be a City worker hunched
over their computer who doesn’t dream of fleeing their responsibilities and
escaping to a desert island to pursue a life of indolence and pleasure. Paul
Gauguin dared to make that leap, and he stands as a metaphor for the
possibility of change; for personal reinvention.
When Gauguin died penniless on May 8, 1903, Hiva Oa’s priest seized his
remaining canvases and burnt them in public as “the obscenities of a sad
character, enemy of God and all that is honest”. God knows what they would
be worth today, but Paul Allen, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft,
recently paid £20m for Maternity, a pretty average example of his art.
I think all this has escaped Rita and Elaine of New York City, as we head back
to the Aranui. They appear more interested in handicrafts. Rita has bought a
native wooden paddle for the wall of her apartment in TriBeCa, which she
reckons will be the most impressive paddle seen in Manhattan since the
Indians sold the island to the Dutch.
Before boarding the whaler to surf back to the ship, she pauses: “If I headed
back to the shop now, there wouldn’t be anybody there and we could get stuff
wholesale.”
She sounds like a character in a Neil Simon play. You can take the girl out of
New York, but you can’t take New York out of the girl. She hasn’t mentioned
Gauguin all day.
Travel details: the Aranui (www.aranui.com)
sails monthly from Tahiti to the Marquesas, carrying cargo plus up to 200
passengers. The front half is cranes and containers, while the stern is
devoted to cabins, sun decks and a swimming pool. The 14-day voyage can be
booked through Strand Travel (020 7766 8220, www.strand
travel.co.uk) and costs from £2,770pp, full board. Expect to pay about
£900 for Air New Zealand (0800 028 4149, www.airnewzealand.co.uk)
flights from Heathrow to Tahiti, via Los Angeles, also bookable through
Strand Travel.
For information on the islands, call 020 7202 6378 or visit www.tahiti-tourisme.co.uk.
