That racist colonialist Paul Gaugin

When I was a youngster, a professor, who later became a close friend, taught me how to look at Gaugin’s Tahitian nudes.

He pointed out the artist’s subdued palette and unusual perspectives, along with the stylistic tribute he paid to native art. Above all, he shared his own optic discovery, which I would have been incapable of making on my own.

Gaugin’s paintings appear flat, said my older friend. But if you focus your eyes on the centre of the composition and stay motionless for a while, the picture will miraculously acquire so much depth as to appear almost three-dimensional.

The next day I went to the Pushkin Museum and put that observation to a test. And sure enough, after a minute or two the painting turned into what decades later got to be called a virtual reality show. New planes of vision opened up, drawing me into the midst of the composition, as if making me a part of it.

Decades have ticked by since then, but the lesson I learned that day has stood me in good stead, and not only with Gaugin – for that matter not only with painting. Great masters, whatever their art, never limit themselves to a single plane, just one dimension. They always protect their depths from a casual glance, demanding that their viewer, listener, reader become their co-author, or else co-conspirator partaking in the mystery known to few.

Try my friend’s trick next time you look at a Gaugin nude, see if it works for you the way it worked for me. It may or may not. But, acting as my late friend’s conduit, I am only trying to convey my general understanding of how cultured people should talk about art.

The curators of London’s Courtauld Gallery disagree. That’s not at all what one should look for in a Gaugin painting, specifically in one of his most celebrated works, Nevermore, depicting the painter’s Tahitian mistress Pahura.

Obviously those scholarly chaps couldn’t have decorticated every aspect of Gaugin’s work in the information panel they attached to it. So they singled out what they saw as the most important aspect (just as my friend did, all those years ago):

“Instead of the unspoilt paradise he had imagined, he found a society corrupted by decades of colonialism. That did not prevent him from taking advantage of his position as a European coloniser. Pahura was one of the teenagers that he took as his ‘wives’. The widespread racist fantasy of Tahitian girls as sexually precocious led to their unabashed exploitation.”

A minor point first. My trusted dictionary defines fantasy as “the activity of imagining impossible or improbable things.” But since Gaugin actually slept with those girls, that activity was very much real, and neither impossible nor improbable.

Believing that young Polynesian girls were sexually available would have been racist if a) that indeed was a racial fantasy, which it wasn’t, and b) if that belief was based solely or chiefly on their race, which it wasn’t either. So that’s just woke gibberish, with no substance to it whatsoever.

The same goes for Pahura’s precocity. She was 15 at the time, which in the 19^th century wasn’t regarded as all that sexually precocious even in Europe. Girls routinely got married in their early teens, which presupposed some sexual hanky-panky.

In French Polynesia, which at the time was regularly devastated by deadly epidemics, Pahura’s life expectancy would have been somewhere around 30. Hence she had already lived about half her life when she became Gaugin’s mistress. Counting from the other end, she was no more sexually precocious than a modern English woman in her early 40s.

All that is neither here nor there, compared to the staggering vulgarity of describing a work of art in such terms. This, in the language of the Beatles, is ‘back in the USSR’.

At the time my friend was teaching me things about Gaugin, the only art form permitted in the Soviet Union was ‘socialist realism’. Paintings were assessed not on their aesthetic merits, of which typically there were none, but on the politically correct message they communicated.

Rosy-cheeked, fully dressed collective farmers dancing around a tractor, or little girls swearing allegiance to the Hammer and Sickle were in. Nudes were out for Soviet painters – as the then-Culture Minister Furtseva explained, “There is no sex in the Soviet Union”.

Shostakovich was castigated for failing to convey such visual images in his music; Pasternak, for a similar oversight in his poetry. On the other hand, painters, musicians and writers who toed the line were hailed as immortal geniuses, even though, with very few exceptions, they were incompetent.

After spending my first 25 years in that dystopic hell, I developed a heightened sensitivity to similar perversions popping up elsewhere. My nose begins to twitch whenever self-serving vulgarians reduce the greatest achievements of the human spirit to a session of ideological indoctrination.

Yet no heightened sensitivity is required these days to detect what’s in plain view: our culturati and literati are waging a war of annihilation on the greatest culture in human history. When they can’t ban works of art – an inability rapidly becoming extinct – they do their utmost to vulgarise them with inane comments.

At least in the Moscow of my youth there were still men like my late friend, who could steer youngsters in the right direction. Today his typological equivalents are knocking off woke labels for great paintings.