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PAUL GAUGUIN
Te Reroia (1897)
Oil on unprimed hessian
95cm X 130 cm / 37 1/2 in X 51 1/4 in

Gauguin lived in Tahiti for two periods from 1891 to 1893, and 1895 to 1901, so Te Reroia was
executed around the middle of his second stay. Although born in Paris, much of Gauguin's early life, from 1849-1855, had been spent in Peru, and, later, traveling ex-tensively first as a merchant seaman and then with the navy between 1865 and 1871. His early travels gave him both a taste for the exotic, and a restlessness which he never over-came. During the 1870s he worked on the Paris stock exchange, losing his job during the financial slump of 1883.

He had taken up painting as an amateur in 1873, but by 1879 was already exhibiting with the Impressionist group, albeit against the wishes of some of the members. Through his guardian Gustave Arosa, Gauguin met the Im-pressionists, and from 1879 he occasionally painted with Pissarro, whose style and ap-proach had a marked influence on his early development. Gauguin also worked with Cez-anne in 1881, but his enthusiasm for discover-ing what he thought to be Cezanne's 'secret' method made Cezanne both angry and resent-ful. Despite Gauguin's consistent argument that the younger generation of Symbolist painters were all dependent on his totally innovatory style, he himself was highly eclectic, using sources as widely disparate as Far Eastern Buddhist and Asiatic art, the Greek Parthenon frieze and Manet's Olympia (1863). He had photographs from these and other sources with him in Tahiti, and wrote of them that 'when marbles or wood engravings draw a head for you, it is so tempting to steal it.' Gauguin clearly had the feeling that such borrowings were in some way wrong, making his art less original or casting doubt on his own creative abilities. However, such practice was common, and all his borrowings were transformed in his work, resulting in a completely personal style.

Gauguin's rejection of decadent Western society, and turning to what he considered the more genuine, naive simplicity of life in the South Seas, was symptomatic of a broader cultural disillusionment in Europe at that time. The Symbolist movement in art and literature can in general be seen as a reaction against the ills of the industrial society, which artists saw growing up around them, and an urge for a more introspective, contemplative ideal. Neither Gauguin himself, who was a sophisticated European intellectual, nor his art, can be con-sidered primitive as such. Yet, by choosing to live among so-called primitive peoples, and by embuing his art with emblems and meaning derived from various non-European and non-Christian sources, Gauguin sought to express his belief in the importance of natural innocence and simplicity. With pessimistic horror he watched Western civilization spread, relent-lessly imposing its own ideas and destroying original civilizations wherever it went. The primitive life that Gauguin hoped to find in Tahiti, and had read about in idealized guide-books before he left, had long disappeared from the French colony by the time he arrived there. Gauguin's understanding of Polynesian culture and rituals came from historical textbooks taken out with him, because Christian mission-aries had already destroyed the indigenous cul-ture. The reflective melancholy of Gauguin's art represents both his own mood, and a pessi-mistic view of the times in which he lived.

Early in Gauguin's career, the critic Felix Feneon, reviewing the last Impressionist exhi-bition in 1886. had remarked upon the 'dull harmony' of his paintings, which resulted from the muted close tones of his colors. The un-natural, almost dream-like quality produced by his colors, is apparent in Te Reroia, painted 11 years later in Tahiti. They give to the painting the quality suggested by the title, which means 'Daydreaming'. On 12 March 1897, Gauguin wrote to his friend Daniel de Monfried about this painting, saying 'Everything about this pic-ture is dreamlike: is it the dream of the child, the mother, the horseman on the track, or, better still, is it the painter's dream?" Unlike the Impressionists, Gauguin did not seek to repre-sent the surface appearance of things in his painting. Instead, like the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme, Gauguin sought the essence of reality in his art, the individual's experience of the object, rather than its ex-ternal characteristics. Gauguin's painting was anti-naturalistic because he tried to depict his conception of the world, not simply his perception of it.

Gauguin's technique was often dictated in part by external factors. He was frequently short of money, and had to use whatever mat-erials came cheaply to hand. His paint surfaces
- often deliberately meager - were sometimes thin because he had inadequate supplies of paint. He had already begun to experiment with rough, coarse canvases, which could express a rugged primitive or ethnic quality, with van Gogh in 1888. However, in Tahiti, his use of hessian fabric was sometimes the result of financial hardship. The unprimed sacking support in Te Reroia adds to the so-called bar-baric qualities Gauguin admired, its hairy sur-face is distinctly visible among the delicate colors of the paint layer.

Gauguin reacted against what he considered to be the self-conscious virtuosity of Impression-ist handling, preferring to apply his colors with little gestural inflection, in broad areas of subtly modulated hues. He often added wax to his paints, to increase their matness and the smoothness of his surfaces. It would have been easier to handle wax-filled colors in the warm Tahitian climate, where they would remain malleable, whereas they would become too stiff to paint with in the colder environment of northern Europe. The paint is thinnest at the 5 contours, where dark Prussian blue or dark earth red was used to outline the initial compo-sitional structure. These lines were in places reworked and reinforced later, after the forms had been built up. Thus it is at the contours too that the rough canvas shows through most ,, strongly, although it gives a tapestry-like effect to the entire picture.

Parts of the background, such as the right half of the floor, were applied first with a palette knife, giving a surface flatness, then overworked in thin translucent color with a brush. The somber tones of the interior con-trast with the view through the door, executed in more brilliant hues which enhance the dream-like atmosphere of the room.

Gauguin's final years were spent on the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific. Although his work was greatly admired by fellow artists during his lifetime, it was only after his death that he finally achieved the widespread fame he had coveted so strongly.

This work, executed by Gauguin in Tahiti in March 1897 six years before his death, has a brooding melancholy which is evident both in the muted, broken colors and the strange, unreal light. The external world through the door appears as a picture on the wall, distinguished by its brighterhues. The figures are treated as ; simplified, statuesque forms, the one to the fore especially Buddha-hke in both pose and enigmatic gaze. The dark sinister symbolism of them urals and the carvings on the cot evoke the dream world suggestedin the title.

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