Paul Gauguin’s first major Tahitian canvas, “Ia Orana Maria” (“Hail Mary”) is a painting that should be seen at the Met, if you can get there.
My wife Peggy and I can’t. But we visited the painting anyway, not once but twice, in the form of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle featuring “Ia Orana Maria.” We painstakingly put it together, took it apart, and just now, a year or so later, put it together again.
Would Gauguin have approved of our approaching “Ia Orana Maria” or any of his paintings this way, by assembling a puzzle of it? Then jumbling the pieces up again?
I can speak only of the pleasure Peggy and I have had, twice now, in watching the painting slowly materialize before us out of its fragments. As if the painting itself were both a dream and a reality. One that, with each reassembling, grows more enigmatic, more, if you will, puzzling.
Of course we have a reproduction of the painting on the puzzle box itself, so there’s no puzzle about the image we’re trying to assemble, or re-assemble. But each time that we’ve begun sorting out the puzzle’s edge pieces, I’ve had to ask myself a question—a question that might sound trivial but which I think gets at the heart of the painting’s mystery.
My question was (and remains): What exactly are the “edges” of “Ia Orana Maria,” given that the “edge” at the bottom left corner contains a prominent gold rectangle announcing the painting’s name? Normally, that label would be attached to the painting’s frame or to the wall mounting behind. As a puzzler, I was glad to have such an easy spot to begin assembly. Getting it quickly in place made the labor of piecing together the other edge pieces a little less tricky and burdensome. But the labor itself forced me to slow down and ask a further question I might not have asked if I were peering at the painting quickly and over the tops of heads and shoulders at the Met.
This further question is: What is the effect of Gauguin’s asserting the name or label “Ia Orana Maria” within the painting itself? (Gauguin followed this practice in many of his subsequent Tahiti-inspired paintings.) For me, at least, the effect was to disabuse me of any assumption I might bring to the painting that I was looking at a “realistic” image. If the edge of the painting includes what should normally be outside the painting—the painting’s name or label—,then what becomes of the painting’s edge? Normally a picture’s edge marks the division or boundary line between the picture and the world (the world as the “reality”) outside it. Yes, “Ia Orana Maria” still retains a boundary, an edge, but outer reality has become part of the inside reality when the edge, the outside, is part of the inside.
There’s an obvious paradox here that unsettled me and forced me to look carefully at what began to emerge slowly from the jumble of pieces still left to us. Whatever does emerge will be a picture—I know that from the box cover—but a picture of what? Or better: a picture in what sense? Not a picture of a mirrored, realistic world, not an image safely contained within rigid boundaries, but a picture of a world already penetrated by its boundaries, by its edges: already looked at, already named, already assembled, and perhaps to be disassembled, and reassembled in new forms. A picture not so different, at least in its tentativeness as a picture,—maybe not so different from those jumbles of parts Peggy and I had scrambled, unscrambled, scrambled, and unscrambled again.
The sorting process of the interior pieces that inevitably follows a jig-saw puzzler’s fixing of the painting’s “edge” led us right away to the bright reds of the Virgin’s wrap (or Tahitian pareu) and the olive tones of her and her child’s complexion. But as we slowly assembled these areas and similar salient areas (the bananas, the blue river—or is it a path?) we struggled to “place” these areas in a three-dimensional space. Gauguin gestures at elements of perspective, but figures seem to occupy a space without volume or depth. As if the visual field is crowded into the foreground. Yet somehow the painting’s vitality isn’t depleted by this foreshortening. Instead, it is enhanced.
For Sue Prideaux, the author of a brilliant new biography of Gauguin titled Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, “Ia Orana Maria” squirms with this vitality:
“The Virgin Mary is a contemporary Polynesian girl. Standing on the near bank of a river, she has a red pareu knotted around her body. The Christ child is balanced on her shoulder, as children were carried locally. Christ is naked, and Polynesian. His golden halo merges with hers. Around her feet spread fans of red bananas. Behind her, a blue river runs in a horizontal line. Two bare breasted vahines take the place of the traditional wise men, as they cross the river to worship, coming towards her with their hands clasped in prayer. On the far bank of the river, the Angel of the Annunciation, dressed in a lavender-colored Mother Hubbard, swoops down through the flowery jungle that tangles round her outsize gold and blue wings. Gauguin has taken the fundamental legend of Christianity and synthesized it through a multi-racial lens.”
But Prideaux elsewhere highlights another, seemingly paradoxical aspect of this dynamism: its monumentality. The frontal, foreshortened figures, their ritualistic motionless presentations, are based on a photograph Gauguin owned of a bas-relief of gods in the Javanese temple of Borobudur. Not only does foreshortening of perspective bring Gauguin’s iconic figures into an eternal present. Foreshortening also blends those figures into their backgrounds. For example, the angel with yellow wings so merged with the leaves surrounding her that Peggy and I have assembled the angel twice now without recognizing her. And what about the blending of syncretic religious symbols? Mary and the Jesus as Tahitians? Their likeness to friezes in the temple of Borobudur? These blendings and mergings flourish in a common imaginative world whose boundaries overlap our perceptions of it.
What was Gauguin’s purpose in creating—especially in his Tahiti-inspired works—paintings at once mesmerizing and unsettling in their focus and spirituality? He gives us a hint in an interview he gave before leaving France in 1895 for his final return to Tahiti:
“Every feature in my paintings is carefully considered and calculated in advance. Just as in a musical composition, if you like. My simple object, which I take from daily life or nature, is merely a pretext which helps me by a definite arrangement of lines and colors to create symphonies and harmonies. They have no counterparts at all in reality, in the vulgar sense of the word; they do not give direct expression to any idea, their only purpose to stimulate the imagination—just as music does without the aid of ideas or pictures—simply by that mysterious affinity that exists between certain arrangements of colors and lines in our minds.”
Prideaux declares in one place that “Gauguin’s talent lay in synthesis, suggestion, and disjointedness.” “Ia Orana Maria” is back now in her puzzle box. Only the disjointedness remains, literally so, as the chaotic assortment of tiny cardboard shapes that, God willing, Peggy and I will assemble again someday so that the synthesis and suggestion will again surprise and stimulate us.
After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.
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