'Gauguin the Alchemist’ is how the organisers of the exhibition at the Grand Palace in Paris try to construe the character and the achievements of an artist who lived a stormy and tumultuous life, leaving behind him an unaccountable assortment of creations —paintings, ceramics, wooden sculptures and engravings. These artworks are impossible to be classified in a single category even more than a century after his death.

Nothing in his life was ever peaceful. Born in Paris in 1848 to a Mexican princess and a French journalist father, Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin had all that a young man belonging to a bourgeois family could dream of. He finished studies and began his life as a naval officer with many soldierly achievements to his credit. At the age of 23 he suddenly left the navy and took a job as a broker at the Paris Stock Exchange.

A brief encounter in 1871 with impressionist painter Camille Pissarro would change Gauguin’s life forever. Now a married man and father of two children, he would live an enigmatic and complicated life for the next many years — handling shares at the stock exchange during working hours and painting, furiously obsessed, in his spare time.

An exhibition reveals aspects of Paul Gauguin’s enigmatic but inexhaustible quest for artistic ingenuity

Gauguin’s life between 1882 and 1885 could be described the way you look at it; a disaster for the family despite his promising professional career, or full of great artistic achievements. He would quit his job — and soon enough his wife and children — to devote himself entirely to artistic creation. He would move to the northern city of Rouen and work on about 50 canvases, individualistic in style but nevertheless described as impressionist paintings because of Gauguin’s closeness to the movement.

By this time recognised as a promising young artist, a little bit of patience could have brought peace and success to Gauguin’s life; but his restless temperament would once again force him to move overseas — to Panama and Martinique Island, then back in France to Arles in the south where he would make friends with Van Gogh. The two worked together for a while but finally their friendship fell apart in 1888 and Gauguin this time travelled to Brittany to settle down for a short while in Pont Aven with a group of impressionist painters.

In a letter to his painter friend Emile Bernard he would describe his agony: “I am getting sick and tired of this civilisation, these rules and regulations, this repetitive routine. The obsession of a frenetic pursuit into the mysteries of creativity is driving me crazy.”

Gauguin invented his own techniques. He would throw stones in a blazing fireplace and hammer them into desired forms describing the process as, “Nature is nothing but material. The creator is the artist himself.” He would write in another letter: “With a bit of imagination an artist can turn stones into metals, even into diamonds!”

The artist eventually rejected the civilisation he was born and brought up in and took a long voyage in 1891 on a merchant ship to the island of Tahiti. He found his ultimate satisfaction in painting scenes of the beaches and woods, populated by animals and birds as well as by women and men shown naked most of the time.

He painted, but also worked on wooden sculptures and stone engravings. He would devise a technique that allowed him to create many copies of his watercolours. His inexhaustible energy would lead Gauguin to start writing a book Noa Noa that means ‘fragrance’ in the Tahitian language.

Now cut off from the Western world and entirely devoted to natural surroundings, Gauguin would continue working at a mind-boggling pace in Tahiti, creating oil paintings, watercolours, wooden and stone sculptures and writing another book Té Rerioa (The Dream).

But the world was also changing at its own pace. Tahiti, by now a French colony, was frequently visited by soldiers, bureaucrats and — now and then — by tourists. Gauguin was once again impatient. In 1901 he discovered a remote archipelago even further south called Marquesas. He moved to the tiny and totally uninhabited island of Atuona where he built a house and a studio with his own hands, decorating it with his wooden and stone sculptures and paintings. This would prove to be his final residence but also his much sought after paradise.

Paul Gauguin died in Atuona on May 8, 1903.

“Gauguin the Alchemist” is being displayed at the Grand Palace, Paris from October 11, 2017 till January 22, 2018

The writer is an art critic based in Paris. ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 3rd, 2017