Hiva Oa

In one @b_a_l_l_h_a_u_s post, Harden stares cryptically out of the frame, eyes full of secrets, next to Paul Gauguin’s “The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa.”

Gauguin spent most of the 12 remaining years of his life in Tahiti and on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa, cohabiting with adolescent girls, fathering more children, and producing his best-known paintings.

Early on in his 32,000-mile journey, his dual passions were sated as he approached Mount Temetiu, which rises from Ta’a Oa Bay on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas.

Those purchases, such as Gaugin’s “Magician of Hiva Oa,” are on display in the show, as is a Picasso portrait of a picnicking family, “La Famille Soler,” that is exhibited next to a gauzy, traditional painting by Rodolf Otto of a German peasant family of parents and children to illustrate the Nazi taste for more sentimental, realistic works.

The French impressionist returned to Paris and then in 1891 travelled to Tahiti, whose people he would eventually paint in sprawling works, and settled on the island Hiva Oa.