Gauguin's Nativity

 

Spotted it yesterday in a precious book of Advent meditations that includes some of the world's great Christian art. It's titled, simply enough, Nativity. In the right background, is a manger scene, meant, I suppose, to link what is happening here with traditional Christmas imagery.

What's clearly stated is the halo around the head of the baby Jesus, but what's also visible--if you look closely--is a similar effect around this particular Mary's head, a halo takes on the color of this Mary's bold Tahitian bedspread, bright yellow. 

If that bright yellow puts you in mind of Vincent Van Gogh, you're won't be surprised to know that Paul Gauguin and Van Gogh were, for a time at least, good friends, fellow artists, and even fellow entrepreneurs--"for a time," however. Their friendship included the time of Vincent's mad self-mutilation, the day he cut off his ear as a bizarre souvenir for a lady of the evening. Both men, like many in the 19th century, were devoted to crackpot lives and therefore didn't make for good friends. Their relationship broke down, as did so many others in the life of Paul Gauguin. 

I suppose this Nativity, showing up where it did in a book of Advent meditations drew me in, in large part because for many years I'd thought of the Incarnation as a divine phenomenon, so not-of-this-world that somehow can--but couldn't or shouldn't--lose its humanness. Christ Jesus, the Word made flesh, is the blessed one because he was, at once (as impossible as it may seem) human and divine. That's the great mystery. This particular Nativity brings us back to earth at Christmas by featuring a Mary unlike any I'd ever seen, a Tahitian girl in a Tahitian bed with a Tahitian midwife attending. 

I was a boy, I believe, when someone mentioned that "no crying he makes" was romantic silliness, because if Christ was a once a child, an infant, he must have shed tears. Babies cry. They just do. They have to. That's the way they grow. Maybe at Christmas more than any other time of year, we'd like our Jesus to be only and wholly divine. 

The history of Western art contains ten thousand Nativities, I'm sure, but the creative context here is a reminder of the once-and-forever arrival, here among us, of the Creator of the Universe, God become man, amazing as that may be.