The Voyage of Spectacle

Besides the lush terrain and striking mountain peaks, Hiva Oa is best known for the beautiful and historical Calvary Cemetery and two famous personalities buried there:  Paul Gauguin and Jacques Brel.

Born in 1848, Paul Gauguin painted in France and Denmark in the impressionist and post-impressionist styles.  Despite friendships and working relationships with very prominent artists such as Pissarro, Cezanne, and Van Gogh, Gauguin himself personally saw very little success or acclaim as a painter.  Eventually, his wife and five children were taken in by her family as Gauguin was unable to financially support them.  Gauguin became increasingly disillusioned and disgruntled with the European art scene calling it imitative, conventional, and lacking depth.  Additionally, Gauguin suffered from severe depression and survived a suicide attempt. 

Frustrated, alone, disenfranchised, and destitute, Gauguin sailed to the South Pacific looking for a more simple life in paradise to revive his creative juices.  After producing many paintings in Tahiti, Gauguin moved to Punaauia, Hiva Oa where he painted the masterpiece, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” in 1897.  He died in 1903 in Hiva Oa and is buried in Calvary Cemetery. 

Other parts of Gauguin’s legacy are far less rosy.  Beyond abandoning his family and his seeming ambivalence about surviving two of his own children, he is also widely considered to be a raging alcoholic, a perverted hedonist, and an unabashed seducer of teenage girls.  He referred to his home in Hiva Oa as the “House of Pleasure.”  He died of syphilis at age 54 after sharing that special gift with many young Polynesian women.  Just before he died, he was convicted on a disagreement with the church, sentenced to three months incarceration, but died before he served his penance.

Nonetheless, we tromped through Calvary Cemetery until we found his well maintained but otherwise modest gravesite.  Many people leave little notes or baubles in his honor.  I just know that he is rolling over in there due to the god awful painting someone left there.      

We also hit the Gauguin museum in Atuona which was recently remodeled and quite nice.  The museum houses reprints of most of Gauguin’s great works along with information regarding the originals and a detailed timeline of his life.  The museum also has reprints of the frequent letters exchanged between Gauguin and his wife, Mette.  Reading those letters, I got the sense that he was kind of the melodramatic tortured artist type with an extremely healthy ego regarding his contributions to the craft of painting.

Even though I personally think that Gauguin was kind of a weirdo scumbag, I must admit that while standing at his grave, I felt a distinct connection to greatness … as much as when I stood arms length from originals by Gauguin, Pissarro, Cezanne, Monet, Degas, and the great Van Gogh in the Museum D’ Orsay in Paris.  Impressionism is an extremely impactful period in art, and in history.

Check out the Tahitian works by Gauguin in three second intervals set to the music of the Tahitian choir singing “Oparo E Oparo E.”