Arii Matamoe (The Royal End)

Gauguin’s haunting Arii Matamoe, painted in 1892, disrupts the familiar Tahitian idyll, the dream of a tranquil and sensual life in the tropics that had impelled the artist on his voyage to the other side of the globe just a few months before. ¹ The painting is a grisly nature morte, presenting the severed head of a Polynesian male on a white cushion and low-lying table in the richly ornamented interior of a thatched hut. Garnished with bright red and yellow flowers and exhibiting the merest trace of blood on the pillow, the display is ritualistic, ceremonial. Attending the scene is a woman crouching along the back wall in a rigid attitude of despair. A spectral figure, obscured by a bamboo pole screen, lurks behind her, while a third figure surges outward, hand raised to mouth as if broadcasting the death to the bright world beyond, where a pair of quietly downcast figures have gathered. Carved tiki sculptures stand guard at the hut’s threshold, dividing the darkened sanctuary of the dead from the space of the living. Like the inscrutably melancholic et in arcadia ego resounding within the pastoral idylls of the Western classicizing tradition, two words have been inscribed on the room’s interior wall beneath twin skull motifs set within a geometric design itself suggestive of an enormous toothy death’s head: ARii MATAMOE.

Fig. 1. Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903), page 59 of Noa Noa, ca. 1893–1901. Illustrated manuscript. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, inv. no. RF7259; on deposit with the Département des arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre.

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Despite its modest size, Arii Matamoe evidently held some signal importance to Gauguin, who included a photographic reproduction of it in his illustrated manuscript of Noa Noa, one of few such photographs (fig. 1).² He also singled it out for description in an 1892 letter to his faithful correspondent Daniel de Monfreid:

I have just finished a severed kanak³ head nicely arranged on a white cushion in a palace of my invention and guarded by women also of my invention. I believe that it is a pretty piece of painting. It is not quite mine since I stole it from a pine board. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention it, but there it is. One does what one can, and when marble or wood draws a head for you it’s very tempting to steal it.⁴

However true it may be that Gauguin’s pictorial reverie was spurred, in the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci, by the chance designs seen in a piece of wood, the composition of his final work was carefully premeditated: infrared reflectography has clearly revealed a detailed preliminary design (fig. 2).⁵ The painting, furthermore, is so overcharged with symbolic suggestion that his offhand reference to the picture as a “pretty piece of painting” seems rather disingenuous.

Fig. 2. Infrared reflectogram (2008) of Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903), Arii Matamoe (The Royal End), 1892. Oil on coarse fabric, 45.1 x 74.3 cm (17 ¾ x 29 ¼ in.). Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008.5

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Take first the portentous Tahitian title. Arii refers to the high chiefs and upper nobility in traditional Tahitian society. These were the sacred leaders of the dominant lineages, which were traced back to various ancestor-deities. Matamoe is a compound of mata and moe, and it roughly translates as “sleeping / closed” (moe) “eyes / face” (mata). As Carol Ivory has emphasized in relation to Marquesan culture, the head was considered the most sacred part of the body. It was the site of one’s spiritual power, or mana, and, also, in the context of sacred representation, the locus of the power of one’s ancestors. The word mata was used frequently in connection to the face and eye motifs, which, as Gauguin himself remarked, were so pervasive in Marquesan carving and tattoos, as, for instance, in the earplug ornament whose design he adapted in the background of this painting (fig. 3).⁶ “Matamoe,” however, is a somewhat unusual word, and scholars have offered little explanation of its origins. Bengt Danielsson tentatively suggested that a Maori weapon from New Zealand with a design featuring a stylized head with closed eyes supposedly known as a “matamoe” may have been Gauguin’s source,⁷ but there is no proof that the artist ever encountered such an object in Tahiti, or indeed during his brief stop in New Zealand in 1895.⁸ A far more likely source for the word is Pierre Loti’s 1878 novel Le mariage de Loti, which is known to have profoundly shaped Gauguin’s preconceptions of Tahiti. At a climactic moment when the pseudo-autobiographical protagonist encounters the Tahitian widow of his late brother, we read: “‘You are Taimaha, Rueri’s wife?’ / ‘Yes,’ she said again, raising her head nonchalantly. ‘I am Taimaha, the wife of Rueri, the sailor with the sleeping eyes (mata moe)’—that is to say, who is no more. / ‘And I, I am Loti, Rueri’s brother.”⁹ Like Loti, Gauguin used the phrase as a poetic metaphor of death. Combined with arii, it indicates a noble or royal death, or, as the title was translated when the painting was exhibited in Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris in November 1893, la fin royale.¹⁰

Fig. 3. Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903), detail from Studies of a Native Woman and Marquesan Ear Plug, 1891/93. Pen and ink and graphite on vellum, 24 x 31.7 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, inv. no. 1950.1413

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Scholars have consequently argued that the painting alludes to the death of Tahiti’s last king, Pomare V, which happened just after Gauguin’s arrival on the island in 1891.¹¹ As described in Noa Noa, the king’s death for the artist becomes emblematic of the death of traditional Tahitian culture as a whole in the face of European civilization and colonization:

With him disappeared the last vestiges of the ancient ways and grandeur. With him Maori [sic] tradition has died. It is truly finished. Civilization, alas! Triumphed—soldierly, commercial, and bureaucratic. A profound sadness has seized hold of me. To have traveled so far to find this, the very thing I was fleeing! The dream that led me to Tahiti was cruelly disappointed by the present: it is the Tahiti of long ago that I loved. And I could not resign myself to believing that all was lost, that this beautiful race had safeguarded nothing … of its old splendor. But the traces of this so distant and mysterious past, insofar as they still subsisted, how to discover them, alone, without guidance, without any support? To rediscover the extinguished hearth, to rekindle the fire in the midst of all these ashes … ?¹²

If one considers Arii Matamoe as an extension of this rueful meditation on the passing of a once noble and primitive society, what strikes us most is how the picture diverges in its particulars from Pomare’s actual funeral ceremonies, which were decidedly European in tone.¹³ For the lying-in-state, the king was graced with his white admiral’s uniform. A Protestant ceremony was held at the palace. In the funeral cortege, the colonials wore black in keeping with European custom. There was an elaborate triple casket, and classical mortuary iconography was abundantly evident (garlands, fringes, crowns, and the like). For Gauguin, the proceedings degenerated into travesty when the procession culminated at the royal family’s mausoleum:

[The governor] Lacascade made a clichéd speech that an interpreter then translated for the Maori in attendance. Then, the protestant pastor preached. Lastly, Lati, the brother of the widowed queen, responded. And that was it: everyone left, the colonial officials piled into the carts … all this was reminiscent of a return from the races. On the road … the indifference of the French set the tone [and] all these people, formerly so grave, began to laugh again.¹⁴

In connection with the funeral ceremonies Gauguin witnessed, Arii Matamoe does vaguely suggest a formal lying-in-state and the collective mourning of a dead monarch. But it is a death imagined without the European trappings, without the Western mourning and military garb, without the Church and the civil servants, without the disrespectful laughter and the casual indifference of the French. It presents a funerary rite “translated” back into an imagined, pre-colonial “Maori” idiom and infused with the nobility and gravity that Gauguin associated with the Tahiti of the distant past.

The historical circumstance of Pomare V’s death does not, however, begin to account for the detail of the severed head. Here, one might appeal to Gauguin’s amateur fascination with ancient Polynesian culture, stimulated by his reading of secondary sources like J.-A. Moerenhout’s Voyages aux îles du grand océan (1837), which he first encountered in March 1892. Mortuary cults involving decorated skulls, propitiatory sacrifices, warriors’ head trophies, and honorifically preserved Maori heads (moko mokai) have all been invoked as partial explanations for the severed head.¹⁵ Such readings are ultimately misleading, however, since Gauguin never pretended to be an artiste-ethnographe and, by his own admission, brought a strong measure of pure invention to his work.¹⁶ Indeed, Gauguin tended to evoke in his writings only the most vague, general notions of ancient Polynesian religion, describing “sacred crimes,” “ferocious ancient cults,” and “I know not what sacred horror.”¹⁷ It was the dark, atavistic underside of Polynesian culture—the deep, nocturnal reserves of savagery and superstitious fear that he felt he could detect beneath the tranquil surface of everyday life in Tahiti—which he tried to bring to the fore in paintings with titles like Contes barbares (Barbaric Tales) and Parau Hanohano (Terrifying Words).¹⁸ Arii Matamoe functions itself as a kind of fanciful conte barbare, sublime in its exotic mystery and destined to mystify or alienate his Western bourgeois audience. As Gauguin wrote to the painter Paul Serusier at the end of March 1892:

I don’t dare talk about what I’m doing here, my canvases terrify me so; the public will never accept them. It’s ugly from every point of view, and I will not really know what it is until all of you have seen it, in Paris… . What I’m doing now is quite ugly, quite mad. My God, why did you make me this way? I am cursed.

What a religion the ancient Oceanic religion is. What a marvel! My brain is bursting with it and all it suggests to me will certainly frighten people. If they are afraid to have my old paintings in an exhibition, then what will they say about the new ones?¹⁹

Sensationally “ugly,” “mad” paintings like Arii Matamoe were never about promoting knowledge of traditional Tahitian customs. With “ancient Oceanic religion” now subsisting wholly in Gauguin’s fevered imagination, such works were about capitalizing on a projected fear of the strange and the unknown.

As his self-dramatizing letter makes clear, Gauguin never lost sight of his European audience. If Arii Matamoe imaginatively evokes ancient Polynesian death rites, it also taps into recognizably European iconographies. Syncretic in his imagination and working methods, Gauguin did not hesitate to transpose European imagery into a Tahitian context.

Besides the decapitations featuring routinely in old master painting, Gauguin’s severed head would have automatically conjured for French audiences the guillotine, the execution, or “royal end,” of Louis XVI (particularly in 1893, the centenary of that event), and the Revolution’s legacy of capital punishment, which for many critics had lodged a new barbarism in the heart of French society.²⁰ Significantly, Gauguin’s own artistic interest in decapitation was first triggered by his witnessing of the guillotining of a convicted murderer in December 1888.²¹ It was only after that occasion that the motif appears in his art, first in a ceramic jug he fashioned as a self-portrait, with blood-red glazing for gory detailing (fig. 4), and then in a still-life painting that wittily juxtaposes the same jug with a Japanese print of a grimacing warrior brandishing a sword.²² Gauguin’s morbid interest in severed heads was further overdetermined by his place in the French Symbolist milieu of the 1870s–90s, in which a psychosexually fraught imagery of the decapitated Orpheus, John the Baptist, and other legendary figures became pervasive.²³

Fig. 4. Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903), Self-Portrait Jug, 1889. Glazed stoneware, H.: 19.5 cm, Diam.: 12 cm. Copenhagen, Museum of Decorative Arts, inv. no. 962.

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The Symbolist iconography of severed heads, Gauguin’s previous self-identification as a victim of the guillotine, and his wishful posturing as a “savage”—an “Incan,” “Indian,” or “Maori”—combine to suggest that Arii Matamoe had some deeply personal meaning for him and served in his construction of his own artistic myth. Indeed, the fact that the interior he depicts (with its bamboo poles, carpet, and assorted bric-a-brac) closely resembles the kind of abode he would fashion for himself in Tahiti suggests how self-reflexive the painting was for him.²⁴ In this context, the severed head may readily have bolstered Gauguin’s egocentric image of himself as the noble artist-martyr, as the long-suffering victim of the corrupt modern world whose Christ-like suffering and sacrifice was the necessary price to be paid for the artistic regeneration of the future.²⁵ For his Symbolist peers, the severed head also carried connotations of spiritual and artistic liberation from the body and the realm of matter.²⁶ Gauguin certainly presented himself in this way, opposing his investment in a creative, inner vision, frequently signaled by closed eyes in his work, with the material concerns—the financial worries, familial responsibilities, and physical ailments—that tormented and harassed him. The head with “sleeping eyes” could thus have suggested Gauguin’s yearning for a figurative death to the world, for an escape to a tranquil, spiritual life where he could focus entirely on his art.

A reading of the painting in terms of liberation is further reinforced by a climactic episode in Noa Noa. In a celebrated passage, Gauguin follows a Tahitian youth into the jungle in search of some choice wood with which to make a sculpture. Transgressive sexual impulses are awakened in the artist, which he then triumphs over and sublimates in the violent act of chopping wood with an ax. As he presents it, this act is symbolic of his severing of ties with a decadent European civilization and of his transfigurative rebirth as a true “Maori.”²⁷ This narrative arguably resonates with Gauguin’s 1891 painting, Man with an Ax, and with his idyllic 1892 work, Matamoe, which repeats the woodcutter motif on a smaller scale.²⁸ Though the motif of the ax is only questionably present in Arii Matamoe (in the seated figure in the background who holds a tool, possibly a hatchet), the painting suggestively adds decapitation to an associative chain linked in Gauguin’s imagination by a liberative act of severing.

The symbolic ambivalence of Arii Matamoe, with its simultaneous associations of death and liberation, is amplified by its attendant figures and accessories. Gauguin’s pairing of the two central “guardian” figures, one facing inward, one outward, is anticipated by numerous works in which this identical pair is generally understood to represent the basic duality of life and death or some variation thereupon (joy and suffering, constraint and liberation, and so forth).²⁹ The paired tiki figures, witness to Gauguin’s interest in Marquesan carving, have similarly been associated with cosmological cycles of birth, death, and rebirth as Gauguin described them in his Ancien culte Mahorie (1891–92).³⁰ It is not improbable that the juxtaposition of closed and open lotus blossoms above these idols was intended as a further ramification of such mythic oppositions.³¹

The contradictory readings that Arii Matamoe is able to sustain simultaneously testify to Gauguin’s Symbolist emphasis on open-ended suggestion and polyvalence, warding against any neat resolution. Likewise on a formal level, the difficulty of coherently “reading” Gauguin’s work is insistent. One is struck particularly by the bizarre spatial tensions generated by the artist’s introduction of “primitive” moments of iconic frontality and decorative flatness (particularly with the wall and the mask suspended ambiguously between the table and bamboo screen) into the conventional perspectival space-box of the picture (indicated by the receding lines of the carpet and floorboards). The impression is of an abruptly disjunctive space suspended uncertainly between Western and non-Western codes of representation, a space suggestive more of a dream than waking reality, where the accumulated figures, motifs, and morceaux do not bear a necessarily logical or self-evident relationship to each other, but confront the viewer strangely, as a mystery to be divined.

• Scott C. Allan
  Written 2010, revised 2012