About the Cover Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). I Raro te Oviri (Under the Pandanus) (1891)

etween me and the sky there was nothing except the high frail roof of the pandanus leaves, where the lizards have their nests, " wrote Paul Gauguin in the autobiographical account of his first visit to Tahiti (1). Under the Pandanus (on this month's cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases) was painted shortly after Gauguin arrived on the islands in search of his famed reprieve from Western civilization. Like many of his contemporaries, Gauguin became disillusioned with industrialized society whose intense focus on material gain seemed to strip life of its spiritual essence. Crushed under the yoke of familial responsibility, bewildered by the prosaic rules of art dealing, and stifled by societal constraints, Gauguin imagined a life uncluttered by the tedium of survival. He longed for a different world, one with just enough depth to sustain his most basic needs. Flat and two dimensional, this world would be filled with vibrant color and would celebrate the human spirit long lost under oppressive layers of cultural complexity and control. While many rebel against civilization and espouse notions of an unspoiled haven, Gauguin set out to embody them in his life and work. A prosperous stockbroker and avid art collector, whose inventory included works by Daumier, Monet, Renoir, Manet, Cézanne, and Pissarro, he abandoned the Paris business scene and his brood of five children to devote his life to art at age 35 (2). Giving up comfort, commercial success, and artistic acclaim, he embraced isolation to know primitive idyll and find the core truth missing from his life. He sought solace at first in Brittany among the peasants of the French countryside and then in the far away islands of the South Pacific, whose promise of paradise on earth lured many others, among them, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Under the blazing sun of the Polynesian islands, where as he put it in his copious writings, " …the material necessities of life can be had without money " (3), Gauguin articulated his artistic sentiment into original work that influenced generations to come. Synthesizing elements of his admired contemporaries , Cézanne, van Gogh, and others, and inspired by Japanese prints, folk art, and medieval stained glass, he created exuberant tableaux charged with sensuality and primal tension. Gauguin's life as adoptive " savage " was one of unrelenting hardship, for the primitive idyll existed only in his inflamed imagination. From the moment …