Gauguin's isles of inspiration

PAPEETE, Tahiti -- In 1891, the painter Paul Gauguin arrived here after a 69-day journey at sea, seeking a more ''primitive" way of life than he'd had in Paris -- or Martinique or any of the other places he had visited on his quest.

In a letter he wrote shortly after his arrival, he rhapsodized about the Tahitian people: ''They sing, they never steal, my door is never closed, they do not kill. And they are called savages!"

Last month, I arrived in Papeete after an eight-hour flight from Los Angeles, shamelessly using the big ''Gauguin Tahiti" exhibition that opens today at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as an excuse for a trip I had always wanted to take.

True, no one considers the little Gauguin Museum in Tahiti the equivalent of, say, the immense museum in Amsterdam dedicated to van Gogh. For one thing, there are hardly any Gauguins in it. None of the houses where Gauguin lived during his stays in French Polynesia, which totaled over a decade, are still standing.

Gauguin's paintings and French Polynesia are both saturated with the islands' distinctive blues, neither a namby-pamby baby blue nor an almost-black navy, but a host of vibrant shades between. People tend to come away from Gauguin's 1897 masterpiece ''Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?," which has been in the MFA collections since 1936, thinking it a ''blue" painting. Inch for inch, it's really not, but it's that color that somehow sticks in your mind.

Tahitian blues are first evident on the Air Tahiti Nui plane to Papeete. The uniforms worn by the exceptionally hospitable crew are made of floral-patterned Tahitian cloth, in deep, aquatic shades. Crew members also wear the island's signature flower -- the small, fragrant, white Tiare Tahiti -- tucked behind their ears, and they put them behind passengers' ears as well. A versatile bloom, the Tiare Tahiti is used in traditional medicines and cosmetics.

Le Meridien, a gorgeous hotel complex in Papeete, resembles a traditional Tahitian village writ large. The bamboo and thatch used in the architecture, and the many pools, palms, and waterfalls, are Edenic. The spiky branches of a lone thorn tree seemed the only potentially unpleasant things in sight. Gauguin, while more a general spiritualist than a practicing Christian, frequently used Christian symbols, and the image of a crown of thorns came to mind.

The cocks started crowing before dawn; soon other birds joined the multipart chorus, reminiscent of all the birds Gauguin painted, some of them elusive symbols he did not want decoded.

The first full day on the island brought more thoughts on religion. The Gauguin Museum uses photographs, texts, artifacts, and just a tad of actual art to chronicle the painter's life on the island. While presenting much information, the museum sanitizes the story by omitting reference to his island love affairs with copper-skinned vahine, as Tahitian women are called, even though they're in all the Gauguin literature and are the subjects of many of the paintings themselves.

Outside the museum are several tiki brought here from other locations. These are carved stone spirits thought to become angry when moved, yet so potent that they are relocated anyway in the hope that they will bring good fortune. In their new homes, a fresh set of site-specific superstitions grows up around them.

Or at least that's what one of the guides said. There was some difference of opinion among them about the survival of the old ways and beliefs. Some traditions have been preserved in mutated form. The dance and drumming shows at the hotels, unabashedly touristy but fun nonetheless, feel like the empty shells of once-important ceremonies.

Gauguin arrived in Papeete just when the last native ruler, King Pomare V, was dying. While the painter was, and remained, euphoric about the people of Polynesia, he hated the European encroachment he witnessed.

''Tahiti is becoming completely French," he wrote to his wife. ''Little by little, all the ancient ways of doing things will disappear. Our missionaries have already imported much hypocrisy and they are sweeping away part of the poetry."

''The missionaries" is the most frequent reply one gets when asking Tahitians why the indigenous culture is to this day enduring a drawn-out death.

''We used to have many gods and one religion; now we have many religions and one god" is a popular summation of the situation. By Gauguin's time, the Europeans already had changed the dress code of a place where women always had gone bare-breasted: The mumu coverup is still referred to as ''missionary dress." Westerners also have changed the built environment. The architectural elements least in harmony with the island are the church spires that pierce the blue sky: Once you leave the relative congestion of Papeete, that sky is rarely interrupted by anything else man-made.

There's more French influence in the miniature buildings outside homes. They look like birdhouses or mailboxes, but are actually for the daily delivery of baguettes, freshly baked in the Parisian style. A good baguette is welcome most places on the planet, but in Tahiti, where trees are heavy with an enormous variety of fruits (breadfruit included) and ''going fishing" means wading into the lagoon and picking up fish, foreign cuisine seems unnecessary. The abundance of food made me wonder about Gauguin's missives to Paris, complaining that he was so poor he had next to nothing to eat.

Bora Bora is a short shuttle flight from Papeete, but a world away in lifestyle. Even though Bora Bora wasn't one of Gauguin's Polynesian homes, it seemed to me closer than Tahiti to what he was looking for. Arriving there, I started to understand the motivation behind Gauguin's island-hopping in search of a place that hadn't been corrupted by Europeans. Bora Bora has been tastefully corrupted. Hotels ring the lagoon, but they're all done in the indigenous style. Clusters of individual bungalows with thatched roofs and bamboo walls stretch into the water, supported on stilts. Bungalows at the Intercontinental look much like the ones photographed in Gauguin's time. Only Gauguin didn't have the ''magic" coffee tables the Intercontinental bungalows boast. Their glass tops and the glass-covered hole cut in the floor underneath allow you a view of fish, sand, and that brilliant blue water. If you find it irresistible, you've only to step out the back door to experience world-class snorkeling, with a dazzling variety of fish and coral.

My best Bora Bora day began with the sarong-clad Patrick Tairua picking me up in his outrigger (motorized but picturesque nonetheless). Son of a village chief, Tairua is a guide by day and a fire dancer by night, entertaining tourists by twirling torches. He is also a fierce defendant of the remnants of the traditional lifestyle his family practiced here for generations; Tairua even makes ritual human sacrifice sound reasonable. The victims of this long-gone practice were usually criminals, he says, comparing their execution to capital punishment.

He also has strong views on tattooing. It used to be that the first-born son of a family was tattooed head to foot with images that told the family history. If the tattoos became infected and the boy died, it showed he wasn't fit to be the chosen one in the first place. Patrick's tattoos are in traditional patterns, and he has unkind words for his friends who opt for Harley-Davidsons on their biceps instead.

We headed into the lagoon, with its patchwork of blues corresponding to the depth of the water, to feed sharks and stingrays. Tairua tossed large chunks of fish to sharks bearing an odd resemblance to that classic Chanel shoe: beige, with black tips, or in the case of the sharks, black gills. Once sated, the sharks moved on, and we descended from the boat into the waist-high water to feed the stingrays. They turned out to be eminently pettable. They're soft and like rubbing up against people; the dangerous-looking tails are scratchy, but that's all.

''Motu" means small island, and while many of the motus around the lagoon are owned by hotels, others are private. Tairua's family owns one. It stretches between the lagoon and the ocean, where he walks out to the reef to pick up lobsters. (You spot them by their bright eyes, he says.) A hotel chain has bought the neighboring motu and is pressuring him to sell his, for more than $1 million. So far, he has refused.

When we returned from our stroll around the property, Tairua's relatives had a feast for us. Lifting the banana leaves off the hole in the ground that acts as oven, they revealed a host of delicacies: breadfruit, a chicken and spinach stew, plantains, and more, with a mahogany-colored, crunchy-skinned, roast suckling pig the star attraction. We loaded our plates and proceeded to the table, which was knee-deep in the lagoon. Tairua said we would eat with our fingers, and demonstrated the napkin substitute, sloshing a greasy hand in the water. Dozens of little fish swarmed around our legs and we fed them bits of pork. The question arose: Is a fish fed on pork kosher? We pondered such grave matters as we polished off the Moet & Chandon that is one of the good things the French have brought to the island.

The purest place I saw on Bora Bora, the one that most reminded me of Gauguin's quest, was Mount Otemanu, at the heart of the island and visible from all parts of it. It isn't a particularly high mountain (2,380 feet), but its elaborate silhouette, blanketed in velvety green, commands the landscape. Often its peak is shrouded in clouds. It is aloof and inaccessible. While the proliferation of resorts threatens to leave very little beach undeveloped, the mountain seems safe for now: Its volcanic stone is so fragile that it crumbles if climbed, and the climber goes down with it. In this weakness lies its strength.

Gauguin was hardly the only creative soul smitten by French Polynesia. (He left briefly in 1893, returned the next year, and died in 1903 in the Marquesas Islands.) The list runs from Henri Matisse to James Michener to Marlon Brando. Of all of them, though, Gauguin is probably the one best known for his association with the South Pacific. Tahiti has a Gauguin restaurant, a Gauguin park, and a Gauguin cruise ship. You wonder what the artist who came here to enjoy a simple life would have thought of having his name used as a marketing tool.

Painters who come here now and paint just what they see risk being banal. Unable to compete with the gorgeous reality, they turn out the kind of postcard-level work that is for sale all over the islands. Gauguin, already a master when he arrived, didn't succumb to the beauty of the place. While it took the atmosphere, the light, the inhabitants, and the flora and fauna of the islands to inspire some of the most gorgeous paintings of the era, the artist also referred to Borobudur, the Indonesian temple, and to other art around the world in his ''Tahitian" paintings. For a great artist, an actual scene can be merely a starting point. The Tahiti Gauguin painted never really existed -- except in the artist's own imagination.

Christine Temin can be reached by e-mail at c--temin@globe.com.