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All the same, it was in Tahiti that Gauguin would make the work that opened the way for a later generation of artists to draw connections between "primitive" culture and the most advanced artistic practices. Picasso's road to the radical distortions of Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon was illuminated by the fires of Gauguin's Tahitian nudes. And for that matter, what is the work of Matthew Barney--all those willfully obscure films drawn from a personal cosmology--if not an update of Gauguin's enigmatic myths?
Gauguin had worked out the essentials of his style before he left France. Though he exhibited regularly with the Impressionists, their matter-of-fact imagery, their art of the moment, was exactly unsuited to his aspirations toward an art of classical weight. The gravity of the Egyptian statuary and Hindu stone carvings he loved, their sense of eternity, was not to be found in the picnic scenes that beguiled Monet and Renoir. Even in France, Gauguin had ventured in search of locales in which day-to-day life might still show glimpses of ancient mystery. For a while, the peasant villages of Brittany served as his nearby version of the faraway.
It was there, and during his tumultuous few months of living and working with Vincent van Gogh in Arles, that he developed the elements of his mature style--firmly modeled foreground figures against flat ranges of background color. The pigments are abruptly juxtaposed in the Impressionist manner. Landscape in Gauguin is likely to be a furious collision of hot pink against blue and chrome yellow against vermilion. But he would put behind him the short fluttering brushstrokes that the Impressionists had made their sign of the fleeting moment. Gauguin distilled and abstracted, producing an emotional impression, not an optical one, in which mere realities were transfigured into aggressively simplified color and form.
You see what he was after in one of his first major Tahitian canvases, Manao Tupapau, also called The Spirit of the Dead Watches. The girl lying uneasily on the yellow bedding is his 14-year-old mistress Tehamana. Gauguin had returned home one night to find her stretched on their bed in terror of the darkness, which Tahitians believed was populated by spirits. The seated figure brooding at left is one of them. Over the bed are the starbursts of imaginary flowers that Gauguin contrived to suggest the nighttime phosphorescence that the islanders believed was the visible sign of those spirits.
The girl's pose is an inversion of the reclining European nude--Manet's Olympia flipped. She lies at an improbable angle across the bedding, but the very awkwardness of her position gives her weight within the picture, and by extension, the world. Even when, in The Ancestors of Tehamana, he painted the same girl more conventionally, in an upright and frontal pose and a modest Western dress, he placed her before a stylized background of native spirits and glyphic letters borrowed from the Rongorongo tablets of Easter Island. Those tablets have never been fully decoded. Neither has Gauguin. But the power of his mysteries brings us back to him over and over.