2023-09-23 18:43:38
He called himself “savage,” even though he moved in circles that could hardly be described that way. He grew up among the cream of society, He became rich as a stockbroker and then changed that world for the intellectual and artistic world.. Even when he abandoned the civilization he knew in search of “humanity in childhood,” he chose a French colony in which he would benefit from the privileges of the colonizer. But there was something that marked him as a relative stranger in his European circles. Eugene-Henri-Paul Gauguin, The French artist whose work inspired an entire generation of artists, had a bit of Peruvian in him.
His maternal great-grandfather, Mariano de Tristán y Moscoso, was born in Arequipa, in what was then the Viceroyalty of Peru, within an aristocratic family of those who used to be called ‘illustrious’. Although he loses some luster by noting that that great-grandfather’s brother refused to hand him over to his grandmother, the prominent feminist Flora Tristan, the estate he had inherited from his father. This despite the fact that Flora, desperately in need, made the long trip from Paris to Peru to claim what belonged to him.
15 years earlier, in 1848, when Flora had already died and the situation in France threatened her family, her daughter Aline Chazal He embarked with the same direction and purpose. He had with him his daughter Marie and a baby: Paul. And her husband accompanied her Clovis Gauguin, a republican journalist vulnerable to political persecution, who planned to start a newspaper in Lima. But He died on the way.
Gauguin, who would call himself “the savage of Peru”, playing the harmonium (circa 1890)GETTY IMAGES
Aline disembarked in the port of Callao as a devastated 23-year-old widow and was taken in by her powerful great-uncle, Juan Pío Camilo de Tristán y Moscoso. Don Pío was a man proud to be a descendant of the Borja of Valenciain whose lineage there were many popes and cardinals, and even a saint.
Although he was born in Arequipa, he boasted of having pure Spanish blood and had been the last viceroy of Spain in Peru. Despite having fought against Liberator Simon Bolivar, with the triumph of independence he changed sides and held high political positions in the new country. It was he, the same one who years ago received Flora with kindness, but kept her inheritance, who offered Aline, the daughter of the disinherited woman, a home for as long as you wanted.
It was like this Paul Gauguin He spent his first years in Peru, an experience he never forgot. Although borrowed, it was a princely life surrounded by luxuries, which took place during one of the most prosperous times in the country, thanks to the guano trade.
The Tristán y Moscoso family, already one of the wealthiest and most influential in the country, enjoyed even more privileges since the wife of President José Rufino Echenique was the daughter of Don Pío. So, despite having left behind a comfortable life shared with the circle George Sand -authors, musicians and intellectuals- in France, Aline and her children did not exactly live in that paradise far from the vices of a decadent civilization. which Paul Gauguin would later long to find.
But that did not stop him from being exotic in the eyes of the Old World, eyes that the future artist only discovered when he returned to his birthplace, since his first steps, although on Italian tiles, were taken between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes.
He spent those years that scientists call formative, surrounded by cultures, customs, nature, colors, melodies, aromas and flavors different from those of his French peers. And part of it accompanied him even upon his return to France, in the pre-Columbian art form that his mother fell in love with, even though at that time he was despised by the Lima elites among whom they lived.
The collection of ceramics and silver figurines that Aline amassed would later inspire Gauguinexpressing himself in works such as reproductions of huaco-portraits of the Moche culture with his face sculpted in clay.
On the right, in his “Self-portrait with Yellow Christ” (1889), a ceramic self-portrait in the Mochica styleGETTY IMAGES
That return to France was also precipitated by political unrest. The Tristán y Moscoso family fell into disgrace, and by the time President Echenique was being overthrown in Lima in 1855, Gauguin, his sister, and his mother were on their way to Orleans, his late father’s native land.
He was 7 years old, and since then, despite having spent years as a merchant and naval sailor, and many others as a pilgrim in search of his place in the world, he would never return to Peru. But Peru never left him.
in his book Before and after, which he finished three months before he died, wrote: “I remember that time, our house and a host of events; of the presidential monument and the church, whose dome had been added later, all of it sculpted in wood. I can still see our black girl, the one who according to the rules had to bring the mat to the church to pray. Also to our Chinese servant, who knew how to iron clothes so well.”
“At that time in Lima, that delicious region where it never rains, the roof was a terrace […]. How graceful and pretty my mother looked when she put on her Lima dress, with the silk mantilla covering her face, and leaving only one eye exposed, that sweet and imperative eye, so pure and tender! I can still see our street, where the garbage came to eat the garbage. Then Lima was not like today, a great sumptuous city.”
He never painted Peru, except with wordsbut his connection with that place that, as it is said, saw him grow up, was key when he abandoned his comfortable life as a stockbroker and family man in 1883 and recreated himself as an artist, and especially a few years later, when he moved away from impressionism towards a own style that he called synthesis.
The self-proclaimed “storyteller” was not only redefining his art but himself and claimed indigenous blood from those parts as his own, despite being very aware that not a drop of it ran through his veins. “If I say that On my mother’s side I descend from Borja de Aragón, viceroy of Peru, they will say that it is not true and that I am pretentious,” he wrote in 1903 in Before and after.
“Still life with apples, pears and ceramics”… pre-Columbian (1889)GETTY IMAGES
And perhaps they would have said that, since he had been presenting himself as someone very different for decades, in writings, interviews and letters, such as the one he wrote to his wife, Mette-Sophie Gad, in 1899. “Since my departure, to preserve my moral strength , little by little I closed my sensitive heart […] There are two natures in me, the Indian and the sensitive. The sensitivity disappeared, which allows the Indian to walk very straight and firm.”
Or the one he sent to his friend Émile Schuffenecker a few months later, in which he described his painting Children fighting like “totally Japanese” for [la palabra ‘francés’ tachada] wild from Peru”.
In one addressed to Theo van Gogh, Vincent’s brotherstated: “You know that I have Indian blood, Inca blood in meand that is reflected in everything I do… I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on savagery.”
“Self-portrait with palette” (right), painted in 1893-4 after the portrait on the left but with more “Indian” features GETTY IMAGES
It was his personal myth. For him, to be “savage” meant to be someone uncorrupted by society and therefore capable of pure vision. Even though it was a fable, He lived in pursuit of that ideal, which he never found; But along the way, he developed his own style with innovations that were the seed of the development of 20th century art.
His legacy was immense, and is evident, for example, in the use of the lines of the Danish Edvard Munch and of color in painters of the Fauve group such as the French Henri Matisse.
Its iconography and simplified style inspired Pablo Picasso’s appreciation of African art which led to Cubism. And although he did all this through works created in lands very far from Peru, that does not mean that what was Peruvian was always absent. Sometimes he appeared discreetly in his paintings, but other times, frontally and imposingly, in the form of a woman.
He met her in Paris, and their meeting was imagined more than a century later by the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa in his novel Paradise in the other corner (2003). “In 1878 the Museum of Ethnography was opened in the Trocadero Palace. […] You remembered, above all, a mummy that was more than a thousand years old., with long hair, very white teeth and sooty bones, from the Urumbamba valley. Why did she cast a spell on you with that skull you called Juanita, Paul?
The mummy of Chachapoya from the Museum of Man in Paris. GETTY IMAGES
We do not know if he called her Juanita, but it is true that those remains of a human being – stunned after death in the fetal position at the beginning of life and with an expression of anguish on his face – cast a spell on him.
So much so that that mummy of the culture Chachapoya (9th-15th centuries), which is still exposed in what is today called the Museum of Mansettled forever in his personal imagination and appeared again and again in his works, whether painted in the French countryside…
“Vintage in Arles or Human Miseries”, (1888)GETTY IMAGES
…or carved in wood…
“Fall in love and you will be happy” (in or after 1895).GETTY IMAGES
…and even on the far left of his masterpiece:
Detail of “Where we come from, who we are, where we are going” (1897)GETTY IMAGES
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