FRENCH POSTCARDS.(Metropolitan exhibit 'The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections')

A year before Paul Gauguin died, in 1903, from complications of syphilis in the Marquesas Islands, he wrote that he had a "fondness for running away." As a nine-year-old in Orleans, he recalled, he decided one day to light out for the forest after seeing a picture of a vagabond carrying a packed handkerchief on a stick. The boy filled his own handkerchief with sand, and set forth. "Watch out for pictures," Gauguin said at the end of the tale, giving it a moral that seems double-edged: beware the power of romantic images to banish common sense; but attend to it, too, and relish the sorcery. For Gauguin, running away was a theatrical act: his celebrated solitude in the South Seas played beautifully, making him a figure of scandal and envy among the bourgeois collectors who bought his sensual visions of escape. In a letter that he wrote to a friend from Tahiti in 1897, he made a shrewd prophecy: "A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up." Gauguin anticipated a culture that would be less avid for art than for sensational artistic personas. His legatees in this vein include Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and Jeff Koons. Viewed with the right squint, the art world of recent decades can appear to teem with little Gauguins.

A scrappy but rewarding show at the Metropolitan, "The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections," is the painter's first extensive exhibition in New York since the last Met show of Gauguin, in 1959. The title perpetuates an old colonial-era myth about the distant Arcadia in which Gauguin created his pictures of seductive, savage innocence. The notion of a South Seas paradise was bunk already a century ago, by which time Polynesia had become ruinously civilized. The native population of the Marquesas had fallen from an estimated high of eighty thousand to three thousand when Gauguin arrived there from Tahiti, in 1901. Encouraged by customs that lightened paternal obligations, he fathered at least four children with island women--adding to the five he had abandoned, along with his much abused Danish wife, in the mid-eighteen-eighties-- but his life in the Tropics was scarcely idyllic. He had the kind of petty runins with local authorities that dog arrogant misfits in resort towns everywhere. But no disappointment prevented him from baiting the wishful imaginations of Europeans.

Gauguin entered the world of advanced art as a collector. One-eighth Peruvian--one of his mother's ancestors had been a colonial viceroy--he spent his early childhood in Lima. At the age of seventeen, he began six years of seafaring in the French merchant marine and Navy. In Paris, he took comfortable jobs in finance and set up as a conventional paterfamilias. A passionate hobbyist in drawing and carving, he bought paintings--starting with three by Pissarro and proceeding to works by other Impressionists and by Cezanne. His tangy personality got him welcomed in studios. Degas and Manet both urged him to take his own art seriously, and for several years he was a protege of the fatherly Pissarro. Not long after the stock market crashed in 1882, he cast his lot as a painter. Academically unschooled, he belonged to the first generation of artists who built their styles on the airy notions of the avant-garde. Throughout his career, whenever his inventiveness flagged, the influence of Degas and Cezanne visibly took charge.

Gauguin was not nice. He was a liar and a braggart, a competitive manipulator of weaker men, and a self-pitying wife beater who lusted after pubescent girls. Eventually, he alienated most of his allies. The drama of his relationship with van Gogh is complex. It's hard to say whether Gauguin's cruelties or the Dutch artist's deluded infatuation with his friend played a greater role in van Gogh's razoring of his ear, in 1888, but even Gauguin's later fond remembrance of the superior painter reeks of self-centeredness. "I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting," he wrote in his memoir, "Before and After."

The Met's exhibition demonstrates how hard collectors in New York fell for Gauguin--and without a great deal of discrimination--starting with the 1913 Armory Show. Significantly, the Tahitian works on the ...