A setting for a Savior

 

She's lying on a perfectly luminous Tahitian bedspread in a book of Advent devotions that is just plain, thoughtful devotionals amid some of the world's great masterpieces, this first week's meditations by Father John Neuhaus. 

Yesterday, I wanted to say how much I liked Gauguin's take on the Bethlehem story, a birthday that has given birth to more creative work, I'd say, than almost any event in the last two millennia. I wanted to say how refreshed this alluring painting felt, how Gauguin had put a new face on an old, old story. His Madonna is in awe of what has just happened here, having contributed to humankind in ways no one, save her, would even begin to understand. 

Behind her a midwife handles the baby, as Joseph looks down at the child, who is not his own. The cat beside Mary is a thoughtful aside. There in the background is the stable, a manger where soon enough the baby will lie. Nativity refreshes the old images from Luke 2. 

So yesterday morning I thought I'd read up on Paul Gauguin, maybe uncover something of interest in the story of this painting, something worth retelling. From a career as a stockbroker--and a successful one at that--Gauguin drifted into the world of art, where he chose his mediums carefully and eventually settled on a kind of primitivism he'd come to enjoy in the clearly defined lines of the world's most accomplished but unlearned artists. 

And colors--he and his friend Vincent loved to experiment with color. Look at the radiance of the spread. You could turn off the lights and still see it illumined. 

But Gauguin himself was not a nice man. He rarely saw a fight he didn't like and probably start. The prototype for this Madonna of his was one of several very young women he took into his favors--thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-year olds. Today, he'd be serving time for sex abuse. Some question whether or not he died from syphilis; what seems perfectly evident is that late in life he suffered from every possible symptom of that disease. 

He had five children with a wife named Mette-Sophie Gad, who he simply left behind in Denmark when he decided he would be, from that time forward, an artist. The two wrote each other occasionally, but once he'd left--Mette told him that he'd no longer believed what he'd believed when they were married--he really never returned. He was too busy with, too driven by his art.

He had some limited successes during his lifetime, but Paul Gauguin was one of those artists whose work didn't really capture an audience until his life ended, with morphine, amid the pains that resulted from a life too long lived out of control.

As I said, I discovered Nativity in the opening pages of a beautiful book of Advent reflections, where it seemed so very refreshing; but the back story, I discovered, isn't pretty. The identity of the girl on the bed and the man who brushed all that drama on the canvas is such that I thought maybe I'd leave the whole thing alone. Just about everything in the story of Gauguin's Nativity is repugnant, except the work itself. Except the work itself. 

His unique Madonna and child is still a blessing in bright Tahitian color. And, in every possible way, it's is very much a setting for a Savior of the world, isn't it?