In 1891, when he had since had his fill of Paris of its constipated moods, its bourgeois proprieties and its hostil-ity to him, the 43-year-old Gauguin wrote to the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro: "More than ever I am convinced that there is no such thing as exaggerated art. And I even believe that there is salvation only in extremes." The extreme he would go to was Tahiti, where, while looking for paths beyond the exhausted conventions of Western art, he would make some of its greatest works. "Gauguin Tahiti" which opens this week at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts after a hugely successful run at the Grand Palais in Paris, is one of the largest exhibitions ever mounted of those wild, influential canvases and carvings. Beautifully organized by George T.M. Shackelford of the Boston MFA and Claire Freches-Thory of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, it reaches a wide-screen crescendo with the Boston MFA's great canvas Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Gauguin's wall-length summation of his personal universe.
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