THE MID-19TH-CENTURY European mind  agreed with  Darwin who wrote in 1871 that he felt a greater affinity for certain "heroic" monkeys and baboons than for "a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions."

 In the late '80s, Nietzsche was insisting that modern man was degenerate in comparison with the healthy savage, and such painters as van Gogh were convinced that the art of the Japanese showed a level of artistic attainment at least equal to our own. Somewhere between 1891 and 1892 Gauguin believe, having spent less than a year in Tahiti that he had become a primitive man.

In 1892 Gauguin did a painting in which a Tahitian youth chopping at a fallen tree. Behind him is a hut  and Tahitian women walking on a road toward flaming mountains. In the foreground are some ornamental birds. In his diaries, Gauguin tells of going out early one morning to cut trees with a young native. With the cutting of the tree he felt he also destroyed in himself the last vestiges of a civilized man.

That was as much a fantasy as the painting itself, which may celebrate the occasion. But certainly Gauguin was doing his best to live as close to the primitive pattern as he could. His desire to do so resulted from a distaste not only for Western society but also for Western art: he deeply believed that Western art was false, in part because its agenda was to copy mere visual appearances. "We have the truth, when we have a purely cerebral art, as in primitive art." he wrote. To use the Tahitian title he intended to exemplify these "cerebral" artistic truths as it celebrates a way of life to which Gauguin aspired and which he sporadically believed himself to have achieved.

There is a certain tension between primitive art and the primitive reality that he sought to live. This tension in the paintings most familiar to us: the powerful florid works he executed during his two sojourns in Oceanian Tahiti and in the Marquesas Island of Hivaoa where he spent the last difficult years of his epic life.

In Gauguin's embrace of "cerebral'' art, there is something very like Duchamp's repudiation of the "retinal artist" who participated in the Renaissance ideal of arranging forms and colors on a flat surface in such a way as to affect the retina just as it would be affected by the scene or object to which the painting corresponds. In this sense, the Impressionists were retinal artists, concerned as they were with the effect of light and the colors of shadows and the way juxtaposed hues were received by the eye. Gauguin, when wealthy, had collected their work and became their pupil and finally one of them when he showed with the Impressionists in their exhibitions of 1881, '82, and '83. But within a few years his aims were no longer those of Impressionism. He had no use, he wrote to his estranged wife years after he had found his style, for what he derisively dismissed as "those petty chemical persons who pile up little dots."

Gauguin was referring to the Pointillists and, with special contempt, to Pissarro, who had converted to their ranks. He had no interest in optical experiment. ''My artistic center is in my brain and not elsewhere.... I alone am logical." As "logical" and "cerebral" are not terms we would automatically apply to a man who had given up a prospering career as a stockbroker for painting, who abandoned wife and children to eke out a marginal existence, who quit Paris to live as a savage among savages, who believed in his own greatness against the collective opinion of those who thought him merely crazy, and who attempted suicide, it is important to see what he could have meant by them.

In 1888 he wrote from Brittany to Emile Schuffenecker, another stock broker with a passion for painting and some thing of a disciple: ''A word of advice. Do not copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; derive it from nature while dreaming in front of it and think more of the creation that will result. ''This attitude sets him against the Impressionists, certainly, but so does it set him against the one artist whose, power and achievement might be compared with his: Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh, too, dissociated himself from the Impressionists, who would be certain, given their retinal agenda, to find fault with his work. As he himself said, "instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly. 'Gauguin was not concerned with feel, and would have said he used color not arbitrarily but logically.

"Primitive art," Gauguin wrote, 'proceeds from the spirit and makes there, use of nature. The so-called refined art proceeds from sensuality and serves  nature. " The task of the artist was to find deliverance from the ''abominable error of naturalism." For this Gauguin proposed "a reasoned and frank return to the beginning, that is to say to primitive art." And this meant breaking with the entire Western tradition, from Giotto to the Impressionists.

A good place to observe the results of Gauguin's effort to reinvent painting is his Self-Portrait of 1889, in which he shows himself as a saint or perhaps, his gift for unlimited self-pity being what it was, as some kind of martyr. One is immediately struck by the color imagine how shocking it would have looked a century ago! with its planes of pure vermilion, of orange, and of yellow.

Gauguin's views on color had an immense impact on a group of young painters called the Nabis ((after the Hebrew word for prophet Paul Serusier, Maurice Denis, and Pierre Bonnard. Denis records a powerful lesson Serusier received from Gauguin, whom he had met in Brittany in 1888. Serusier was working on a landscape, and Gauguin asked him, "How does that tree appear to you? It's green, isn't it? Alright, do it in green, the finest green in your palette. And that shadow? Isn't it blue'? Well, don't be afraid of making it as blue as possible. Those red leaves, put them in vermilion." For the Impressionists, a tree would never be merely green: it would resolve into countless nuances tones, to be captured in so many dots and touches. So Gauguin's tree would be naturalistic, in that a tree is green rather than purple, but at the same time abstract and symbolic. Once the decision was made to use colors just as they came from the tube pure, saturated, opulent with the rearranged features pointing forward to Cubism. Both sets of properties are derived from primitive art, as are the halo and the snake. Presenting himself as half shaman, half holy man, it is as if Gauguin were bent upon reaffirming the magic that underlies everyday things. And this points forward to Surrealism and to the redemptive potential of art that was to become such a prominent factor in the agenda of nearly every early modernist.

Oddly, though, the combination of these components yields a work that is clearly decorative is very nearly a poster. But "decorative,'' though a term of esthetic abuse in our critical vocabulary, was precisely what the Nabis prized in Gauguin. When Serusier returned from Brittany with, as it were, the gospel of Gauguin, it came as a revelation, and when Gauguin exhibited his new works in Paris in 1889, they were received with ecstasy. ''Here were heavily decorative surfaces, powerful in hue and rimmed with brutal  strokes Denis wrote. In an interview in 1891, Bonnard said, ""Painting, must above all be decorative. Talent shows itself in, the way the lines are distributed.'' Taken as decoration, the Self- Portrait is, an intricate composition of vegetable, human, and animal forms, like a Romanesque illumination. He writes ''The head is solid, but how are you to show that in two dimensions? Put the eye on the far side of the head higher than the one on the near side!" The two sides of Gauguin's face are put on the same plane, but the features are rearranged, as in an African mask.

There is a sense in which what we think of as modern art begins with Gauguin. The flattened planes and pure panes of color point forward to Matisse the shallow space and Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic of  The Nation in 1886 Gauguin left for the first of two trips to Brittany.  Biographers often write that he went there to seek a more primitive way of life. In fact he went there because he had heard it was cheaper and that artists were given more credit, though it was, certainly, a poor and retrograde peasant culture, with an intact folklore, native costumes, and a local language. It was the picturesqueness of the place and the people that brought artists. There was a market for Breton paintings among visitors in the same way that there is a market in the U.S. for cowboy paintings.

All of Gauguin's ideas regarding color, shape, space, symbolism, decoration, and magic are present in these Breton works. Consider, for example, the Yellow Christ (1889). The Christ figure looks as if it were shaped by some primitive carver. It is not, however, a realistic depiction of a primitive Christ- image, but a primitive representation of Christ himself: the three Breton women are not kneeling in front of a statue but in front of a man. Either the Crucifixion is shown as a present reality at the center of  Breton life or Gauguin has painted a vision in which the Breton women see themselves as present at the Crucifixion. Compare this with The Vision after the Sermon (1888), in which the same order of women are shown witnessing Jacob wrestling an angel with golden wings on a red field.

We know enough about Brittany and the Bible to understand that these works are visions but Gauguin's audience had no comparable knowledge of Tahiti, and therefore no way of knowing whether these were fantasies or intended as ethnographic ally accurate. Consider Te Rerioa (1897), painted early in Gauguin's second and final stay in Tahiti. Most of us do not know the Kanaka language, so we don't know that the title means ''The Nightmare" (Gauguin had mistaken the word for "The Dream"). But neither do we know whether the interiors of Tahitian huts were decorated this way or if it is the artist's own hut, in which case we are unclear about the women and the child are they his native family or merely models? Gauguin himself wrote, ''Everything is dream in this canvas; is it the child? is it the mother? Is it the horseman on the path? or even is it the dream of the painter?"

Gauguin's exhibition at Durand Ruel in November of 1893. The critical press howled. "If you would entertain your children, send them to the Gauguin exhibition," one critic wrote: "The attractions include colored images of ape like quadrumanes stretched out on green billiard tables." Pissarro confided to a correspondent, "Renoir and Monet find all this simply bad," adding that Gauguin was "always poaching on someone else's ground; now he is pillaging the savages of Oceania.

The viewer knows that Gauguin's paintings of Tahiti are based on dreams rather than on literal transcriptions of reality. But part of artist's success was due to the fact that a distant art world believed his paintings were authentic depictions. When, near the end of his life, racked with disease, he wanted to return to Paris from the Marquesans, he was told that he could not. "At present you are a unique and legendary artist, sending to us from the remote South Seas disconcerting and inimitable works which are the definite creations of a great man who, in a way, has already gone from the world," he was told by his friend and agent, Daniel de Monfried. "You are already as unassailable as all the great dead; you already belong to the history of art.'' He did pass into art history as a painter of exotics, much as someone else might have gone into it as a painter of military scenes or of peasants. It requires a great wrench of critical imagination to prize apart the postcard quality of the Tahitian paintings and to see in them the same visionary artistic discoveries that we find in Self-portrait, or in the work he had done in Brittany. There is one painting  which shows the artist in many of the dimensions of  his genius paintings, prints, carvings. It is said to be his last painting, done in the Marquesans in 1903, and it hangs in the Louvre. An ornamented hut, amidst native onlookers, tropical foliage, volcanic peaks, and florid skies. Titled Breton Village under Snow, it could have been done at the beginning of his career, when he was still almost a Sunday painter, a bourgeois, a family man with an art collection. Imagine him dreaming of snow, of  tidy fields and fences and bare trees and chill wet skies. It was wrung from the heart of someone who could not go home again, as man or artist.      ENTER THE TROPICS