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Beverly Kai
Jun 21, 2002, 6:50:42 PM6/21/02
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Copied from the New York Times.
June 21, 2002
ART REVIEW | PAUL GAUGUIN
A New York Bouquet of Gauguin
By HOLLAND COTTER
aul Gauguin (1848-1903) liked attention. He wore funny clothes, said
shocking things, painted gorgeous pictures and traveled halfway around
the world to get it. His efforts paid off. When he died of syphilis at
54 on an island in the South Pacific, people around the world took
notice, and they have been noticing him ever since.
Advertisement
So it's surprising to learn that "Gauguin in New York Collections: The
Lure of the Exotic," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first
major local exhibition devoted to him in more than 40 years. In fact,
the show isn't major-major, not by blockbuster standards. More than half
the 120 pieces installed in the Met's Lehmann Wing are works on paper:
drawings, lots of prints, a few letters. And the final product is
neither a full-fledged survey nor a focused theme show.
Instead, it's a little of both. In scattershot fashion it spans
Gauguin's career, starting with a marble bust of his son Emil that he
carved in 1877, and ending with a frantic, strung-out letter recounting
a run-in with island authorities, written a month before his death. In
between, along with ceramics, wood sculptures and a remarkable drawing
portfolio recently acquired by the Met, are some two dozen paintings,
half of them among the most beautiful created by any modern artist.
As to theme, the show is nominally about how all these objects found
their way into public and private hands in New York State. Patterns of
collecting always make an interesting topic, but one about sociology as
much as art and perhaps better suited to an exhibition catalog than to
the gallery wall. Such is the case here.
In fact, the true subject is the artist himself. Like any monomaniac,
Gauguin was in the Gauguin business, aggressively, competitively, full
time. This was so when he was an aspiring yuppie stockbroker in Paris in
the 1870's, when he become a professional rebel-painter in the 1880's
and when, years later, he labored to orchestrate his European reputation
from several oceans away. It was a demanding job. It entailed not only
creating art of extraordinary quality, but also inventing a persona with
which to promote it. This entrepreneurial public role didn't require
that he be a nice guy, and he wasn't. He declared himself a "savage" by
birth because, he said, he had South American Indian blood. (He was
one-eighth Peruvian.) And he dressed the part. He grew his hair long,
wore swashbuckling cloaks, home-boy hats and an expression — you see
it in the self-portraits — of sly, intimidating disdain.
With people who had power in his life he was alternately seductive and
bullying, sometimes violent. He could charm prospective dealers, but
Emil carried a lifelong memory of his father's hitting his mother and
bloodying her face. Gauguin espoused social justice and to some extent
practiced it. But he also endlessly manipulated people — his family,
his Polynesian lovers, his fellow artists, including the besotted van
Gogh — to his own ends, chief among them to create art and gain fame.
Is it misguided to view a art through the personality of its maker, or
vice versa? This is the old who-was-Shakespeare question. But Gauguin's
work is so thoroughly a vehicle for self-mythologizing that it is almost
impossible not to take his life and his art as a piece, which raises
complex questions about both.
The Met exhibition, with its somewhat unorthodox form, encourages
questions and speculations. As organized by Colta Ives, curator in the
museum's department of drawings and prints, and Susan Alyson Stein,
associate curator of European paintings, it isn't a monumental portrait
of a career. It's more like an open notebook, an edited archive, a
history in pieces. Chronologically ordered, it mixes masterpieces with
memorabilia; it reveals the mechanics of an art and an intellect under
construction.
Gauguin developed fast. The still-learning, largely self-taught painter
of a Cézannesque still life in 1883 was, half a dozen years later, a
highly individualistic artist. By then, he had claimed art as his
destiny, separated from his family and begun to immerse himself in
exotic environments, with a brief trip to the Caribbean and extended
stays in the quaint village of Pont-Aven in Brittany.
He painted a lot in Pont-Aven. He was, it seems, fascinated by the
religiosity of the peasant people and the traces of a premodern way of
life, visually embodied in the medieval attire of local peasant women.
He turned out some of his most innovative early paintings here,
including "The Yellow Christ" (1889), which is in the Met show.
It's a puzzling, provoking picture. It presents Jesus nailed to the
cross with three Breton woman in starched bonnets kneeling below.
Despite the somber theme, the palette is bright: mustard gold with
little red trees. The body of Christ is based on a carved 17th-century
figure that hung in a chapel near Pont-Aven, but the face suggests a
Gauguin self-portrait. And indeed, he would openly depict himself as
Christ in later work.
Is the painting meant to convey genuine religious emotion, or is it a
picturesque, primitivist fantasy, or even an inside joke, with its image
of the suffering artist surrounded by adoring women? Whom did Gauguin
have in mind as an audience for the work: his church-going Breton
neighbors or sophisticated, secular Parisians? Many of his paintings
raise similar questions about attitude and intention. Certainly those he
painted in Tahiti do.
When he set sail for the island for the first time, in 1891, he was in
the market for two things: a liberating personal Eden and a newsworthy
stage from which he could pitch the next phase of his career. The Tahiti
he encountered wasn't as glamorous as he might have hoped, with its
cosmopolitan, Europeanized population and unspectacular terrain. But
this didn't matter. The image he sent back to Europe in painting was a
coral-and-mango-colored Never-Neverland of bursting flowers, available
bodies and mystical events.
The Tahitian pictures — paintings, woodcuts, drawings — are Gauguin
at his inventive peak; there is nothing else like them in European art,
and the Met show has some of the greatest examples. They include the
heart-melting "Ia Orana Maria" ("Hail Mary") with its Polynesian Madonna
and Child; the startling vision of sexual fear titled "Manao Tupapau"
("Spirit of the Dead Watching"); and the enigmatic, half-abstract "In
the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse," with it's implied narrative of a
mystical tryst.
Despite the perfume of fecund, organic life that these paintings exude,
they are the result of studious, cut-and-paste calculation. Various
aspects of their Tahitian themes are lifted from Italian Renaissance
painting, East Asian Buddhist sculpture, European modernism and popular
prints, as well as from the wonderful sketches from life that Gauguin
constantly made, and in which this show is rich.
Even physically, the work plays with notions of naïveté and
sophistication. Up close, the toothy surfaces look harsh, the brushwork
crude, but from just a few feet away the images have a smooth, superbly
resolved graphic power. Finally, although Gauguin was ostensibly
depicting religious subjects in some of these paintings, he made it
known that his studio models were the teenage Tahitian girls with whom
he lived and by whom he had children — information geared to a
European male art audience hungry for escapist dreams spiced with sexual
titillation.
In the end, all this manipulating worked. After his death, Gauguin's
painting was avidly collected. (Eight more examples can currently be
seen in another show at the Met, "The Age of Impressionism: European
Paintings From the Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen.") Posthumously, he got the
attention he had always wanted: no-goodnik or hero, he's a superstar.
And we are heirs to a difficult, provoking, visionary art, which at the
Met looks, often for all the wrong reasons, lustrously right.
``Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic´´ remains
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street,
(212)535-7710, through Oct. 20.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
Metropolitan Museum of Art
June 21, 2002
ART REVIEW | PAUL GAUGUIN
A New York Bouquet of Gauguin
By HOLLAND COTTER
aul Gauguin (1848-1903) liked attention. He wore funny clothes, said
shocking things, painted gorgeous pictures and traveled halfway around
the world to get it. His efforts paid off. When he died of syphilis at
54 on an island in the South Pacific, people around the world took
notice, and they have been noticing him ever since.
Advertisement
So it's surprising to learn that "Gauguin in New York Collections: The
Lure of the Exotic," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first
major local exhibition devoted to him in more than 40 years. In fact,
the show isn't major-major, not by blockbuster standards. More than half
the 120 pieces installed in the Met's Lehmann Wing are works on paper:
drawings, lots of prints, a few letters. And the final product is
neither a full-fledged survey nor a focused theme show.
Instead, it's a little of both. In scattershot fashion it spans
Gauguin's career, starting with a marble bust of his son Emil that he
carved in 1877, and ending with a frantic, strung-out letter recounting
a run-in with island authorities, written a month before his death. In
between, along with ceramics, wood sculptures and a remarkable drawing
portfolio recently acquired by the Met, are some two dozen paintings,
half of them among the most beautiful created by any modern artist.
As to theme, the show is nominally about how all these objects found
their way into public and private hands in New York State. Patterns of
collecting always make an interesting topic, but one about sociology as
much as art and perhaps better suited to an exhibition catalog than to
the gallery wall. Such is the case here.
In fact, the true subject is the artist himself. Like any monomaniac,
Gauguin was in the Gauguin business, aggressively, competitively, full
time. This was so when he was an aspiring yuppie stockbroker in Paris in
the 1870's, when he become a professional rebel-painter in the 1880's
and when, years later, he labored to orchestrate his European reputation
from several oceans away. It was a demanding job. It entailed not only
creating art of extraordinary quality, but also inventing a persona with
which to promote it. This entrepreneurial public role didn't require
that he be a nice guy, and he wasn't. He declared himself a "savage" by
birth because, he said, he had South American Indian blood. (He was
one-eighth Peruvian.) And he dressed the part. He grew his hair long,
wore swashbuckling cloaks, home-boy hats and an expression — you see
it in the self-portraits — of sly, intimidating disdain.
With people who had power in his life he was alternately seductive and
bullying, sometimes violent. He could charm prospective dealers, but
Emil carried a lifelong memory of his father's hitting his mother and
bloodying her face. Gauguin espoused social justice and to some extent
practiced it. But he also endlessly manipulated people — his family,
his Polynesian lovers, his fellow artists, including the besotted van
Gogh — to his own ends, chief among them to create art and gain fame.
Is it misguided to view a art through the personality of its maker, or
vice versa? This is the old who-was-Shakespeare question. But Gauguin's
work is so thoroughly a vehicle for self-mythologizing that it is almost
impossible not to take his life and his art as a piece, which raises
complex questions about both.
The Met exhibition, with its somewhat unorthodox form, encourages
questions and speculations. As organized by Colta Ives, curator in the
museum's department of drawings and prints, and Susan Alyson Stein,
associate curator of European paintings, it isn't a monumental portrait
of a career. It's more like an open notebook, an edited archive, a
history in pieces. Chronologically ordered, it mixes masterpieces with
memorabilia; it reveals the mechanics of an art and an intellect under
construction.
Gauguin developed fast. The still-learning, largely self-taught painter
of a Cézannesque still life in 1883 was, half a dozen years later, a
highly individualistic artist. By then, he had claimed art as his
destiny, separated from his family and begun to immerse himself in
exotic environments, with a brief trip to the Caribbean and extended
stays in the quaint village of Pont-Aven in Brittany.
He painted a lot in Pont-Aven. He was, it seems, fascinated by the
religiosity of the peasant people and the traces of a premodern way of
life, visually embodied in the medieval attire of local peasant women.
He turned out some of his most innovative early paintings here,
including "The Yellow Christ" (1889), which is in the Met show.
It's a puzzling, provoking picture. It presents Jesus nailed to the
cross with three Breton woman in starched bonnets kneeling below.
Despite the somber theme, the palette is bright: mustard gold with
little red trees. The body of Christ is based on a carved 17th-century
figure that hung in a chapel near Pont-Aven, but the face suggests a
Gauguin self-portrait. And indeed, he would openly depict himself as
Christ in later work.
Is the painting meant to convey genuine religious emotion, or is it a
picturesque, primitivist fantasy, or even an inside joke, with its image
of the suffering artist surrounded by adoring women? Whom did Gauguin
have in mind as an audience for the work: his church-going Breton
neighbors or sophisticated, secular Parisians? Many of his paintings
raise similar questions about attitude and intention. Certainly those he
painted in Tahiti do.
When he set sail for the island for the first time, in 1891, he was in
the market for two things: a liberating personal Eden and a newsworthy
stage from which he could pitch the next phase of his career. The Tahiti
he encountered wasn't as glamorous as he might have hoped, with its
cosmopolitan, Europeanized population and unspectacular terrain. But
this didn't matter. The image he sent back to Europe in painting was a
coral-and-mango-colored Never-Neverland of bursting flowers, available
bodies and mystical events.
The Tahitian pictures — paintings, woodcuts, drawings — are Gauguin
at his inventive peak; there is nothing else like them in European art,
and the Met show has some of the greatest examples. They include the
heart-melting "Ia Orana Maria" ("Hail Mary") with its Polynesian Madonna
and Child; the startling vision of sexual fear titled "Manao Tupapau"
("Spirit of the Dead Watching"); and the enigmatic, half-abstract "In
the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse," with it's implied narrative of a
mystical tryst.
Despite the perfume of fecund, organic life that these paintings exude,
they are the result of studious, cut-and-paste calculation. Various
aspects of their Tahitian themes are lifted from Italian Renaissance
painting, East Asian Buddhist sculpture, European modernism and popular
prints, as well as from the wonderful sketches from life that Gauguin
constantly made, and in which this show is rich.
Even physically, the work plays with notions of naïveté and
sophistication. Up close, the toothy surfaces look harsh, the brushwork
crude, but from just a few feet away the images have a smooth, superbly
resolved graphic power. Finally, although Gauguin was ostensibly
depicting religious subjects in some of these paintings, he made it
known that his studio models were the teenage Tahitian girls with whom
he lived and by whom he had children — information geared to a
European male art audience hungry for escapist dreams spiced with sexual
titillation.
In the end, all this manipulating worked. After his death, Gauguin's
painting was avidly collected. (Eight more examples can currently be
seen in another show at the Met, "The Age of Impressionism: European
Paintings From the Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen.") Posthumously, he got the
attention he had always wanted: no-goodnik or hero, he's a superstar.
And we are heirs to a difficult, provoking, visionary art, which at the
Met looks, often for all the wrong reasons, lustrously right.
``Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic´´ remains
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street,
(212)535-7710, through Oct. 20.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
Metropolitan Museum of Art
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