Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao
In major art historical exhibitions of recent years, a slightly uncomfortable part of the entertainment has been to watch the museum preserve every inch of its turf while gesturing to acknowledge disputes about the legitimacy of the artists or movements represented. In this regard Paul Gauguin requires judicious handling. Adored by a massive public for whom his life story is no less spellbinding than his painted tableaux of an imagined, Polynesian paradise, his significance within the histories of early modernism and late nineteenth century French painting are indisputable. Yet his own written reflections and documented actions betray a man who fully embodied the coloniser’s privilege, to the extent of entering into sexual relationships with Tahitian girls who would, by today’s laws but not those of the nineteenth century, be classed as minors.
Any museum that stages a celebration of Gauguin’s work should be open about these facts, for they are relevant to the pressing issues of our time and to the substance of his work. What’s more, they bring the viewer to a healthy recognition of the discordance that can pervade the encounters art affords us with the people of other times. If Gauguin is accused of acts that we would regard as crimes it ought to be known and if there are contextual factors that should be borne in mind when we make our judgments, they should also be pointed out.
While the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) has not exactly dodged the difficult issues, its current exhibition Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao is resolute in holding them at arm’s length from the 130 artworks lent by museums from around the world. Curated by Henri Loyrette, an ex-director of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée du Louvre, it is a traditional survey of an artist’s self-realisation through their work, beautifully set in rooms that seem hermetically sealed against the hostility Gauguin’s name elicits from some viewers. Text panels make only passing reference to details of his biography that might evoke concern. A catalogue essay by Norma Broude casts him as a proto-feminist on account of his admiration for his grandmother Flora Tristan, a socialist and activist for women’s rights, and cites his written denunciations of marriage as a commercial transaction conducted to the detriment of the female sex.
More helpful in shedding light on Gauguin’s dealings with the people and cultures of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands is a series of podcasts entitled The Gauguin Dilemma, commissioned by the NGA and freely available through its website. Hosted by journalist Sosefina Fuamoli, they clarify the historical record and present an array of contemporary perspectives on Gauguin’s life and work, offering particular insight into how his languorous, nubile figures continue to colour perceptions of Polynesian people and society. In principle the use of bespoke journalism to assess the complex background to a museum exhibition is sound, but it would be interesting to know how many visitors to the exhibition found their way to listening to The Gauguin Dilemma.
As an introduction to an artist’s development, Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao is the latest of many exhibitions in Australia to bring together just enough outstanding works to allow for a fair acquaintance with their subject. None of the very large, very famous paintings in which Polynesian motifs are realised in frieze-like compositions are present, but the show successfully establishes Gauguin as a perpetually evolving, consistently enthralling artist.
Self-portraits from early, middle, and late phases open the exhibition. In the Musée d’Orsay’s sensational Portrait of the artist with ‘The yellow Christ,’ 1890-1891, the forty-two year old artist renders subtle fluctuations of shadow over the whole of the human head, attesting to the remarkable synthesis of form-perception and colour-play achieved in progressive French painting of the late nineteenth century. A selection of robust, atmospheric landscapes in the second room confirms that impressionism yielded a collective, painterly acuity that has rarely been matched before or since, in which Gauguin was a consummate participant. In works like the sun-drenched Apple Trees at L’Hermitage II, 1879, it is clear that custodianship of the French tradition was shifting from the Academy to the impressionists and protégés like Gauguin.
Like Cézanne, Gauguin owed much to Pissarro and was a highly inventive composer on the picture plane, relishing spatial ambiguities wherever he found them. While being desperate to escape the strictures of French culture, the opening rooms of this exhibition—including some key works from the Pont-Aven period—prove that contact with mentors and peers was beneficial for Gauguin. There is no painting from the Tahitian and Marquesan phases—at least in this show—that comes close to The Wave or Seascape with Cow, both painted in 1888, while he was very much a resident of France, for a sheer, disorienting reinvention of our angle of approach to the observed world. There are also hints of the influence he would exercise on a coming generation. The transitions from fiery orange to vivid green in so much of Gauguin’s pre-Polynesian painting anticipate Matisse’s colour experiments of the 1900s. While Østre Anlæg Park, Copenhagen, 1885, is uncannily prescient of the kinds of paintings Bonnard would make in the 1910s.
Life in the Pacific would change Gauguin’s work; at times it would become less subtle, as in the blunt-edged Two nudes on a Tahitian Beach, 1891-1894, in which a pair of female figures and an animal stand darkly against an active sea. Paintings like this must have been immensely appealing to the expressionists of pre-war Germany for their stripping away of pictorial nicety. But the more sustained development of the Polynesian phase was towards an allegorical frame of mind, as Gauguin tried to reconcile in his pictures the dichotomies, he, a European living in the tropics, could not resolve in life. For all of the chromatic depth and deft composition of a late painting such as Te Pape Nave Nave (Delectable Waters), 1898, the melding of Catholic and Hindu deities, placed alongside Polynesian figures, cannot help crowding the stage; after all of Gauguin’s travelling and toil it might have seemed that there was no escaping the conventions of European art.
Yet ultimately there was transformation and in Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao the painting which makes it gloriously evident is the National Galleries of Scotland’s Three Tahitians. Free of religiosity but harnessing all of the precision and nuance the French painter could deploy, it places one male and two female figures in an ambiguous proximity that no longer asks to be explained through reference to the artist’s own story. Dated 1899, the painting’s highness of key and simplicity of design belong more to the twentieth century than the nineteenth and perhaps fittingly for this artist who would not live to see the full flourishing of modernism, the exquisitely handled figures of Three Tahitians seem to exist in a state of suspended time. The question of whether this disarming picture turns Polynesia into a ground for Western painting is one I would answer in the affirmative, yet the ineffable beauty Gauguin finally found not only surpassed his European origins, it is a quality that hardly seems to be of this world.