Artist or Monster? A Massive New Gauguin Exhibition Draws on Colonial Legacy to Limited Success | Paul Gauguin

LWhat does this have to do with a problem like Paul Gauguin? The radical experiments of the 19th-century French masters with color, space, and syncretic symbolism made him a canonical artist. Yet it is Gauguin the monster, not Gauguin the artist, who occupies most of the oxygen in today’s discussions. It is Gauguin, purveyor of primitivist fantasies, emblem of French colonialism in the Pacific, and pedophile and syphilitic sex tourist who married children as young as 13, who looms large in the public consciousness.

The National Gallery of Australia has clearly come to grips with this legacy in the run-up to its winter blockbuster, Gauguins World: Tna Iho, Tna Ao. It is the first major Gauguin exhibition in Australia, featuring more than 130 of the artist's works drawn from collections around the world.

The exhibition’s curator, Henri Loyrette, a former director of the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre in Paris, clearly did a lot of bureaucratic work to acquire the works. The show represents an incredible effort and a remarkable result. For almost any other artist, the NGA would have been content with an unqualified victory lap. Yet the gallery finds itself in a difficult situation, with conflicting messages that oscillate between jubilation, ambivalence, and polemic.

Some of these messages are directly addressed to Pacific artists. A podcast accompanying the exhibition opens with the question, “What immediately comes to mind when I say Paul Gauguin?” with the answer: Argh! Over the course of four episodes, the podcast presents Gauguin as a productive, if deeply charged, challenge to historical legacies rather than a figure of blind cancellation.

The space that leads directly into the Gauguin exhibition is evidence of this. Gauguin’s singular narrative here gives way to a dialogue in the form of the collaborative work SaVge Klub: Te Paepae Aorai Where the Gods Cannot Be Fooled, made in 2024 by the artist Rosanna Raymond, a physically and symbolically imposing installation that rises high from the gallery walls. First conceived in 2010, the SaVge Klub takes its name from the 19th-century gentlemen’s clubs in London, where, Raymond explains, they parodied Indigenous cultures. Featuring a rich diversity of Pacific works from both the NGA’s historic collection and the SaVge Klub collective, the installation almost overwhelms your vision, transforming a space of parody into a space of celebration.

Raymond's intervention ends where the Gauguin exhibition begins. As is often the case for a monographic exhibition, the French artist's name is heroically inscribed on the entrance to the institution and the exhibition. The possessive title of the exhibition could not be clearer: we are entering Gauguin's world.

The first room is filled with Gauguin’s self-portraits. In Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ (dated 1890-91), Gauguin is shown next to a painted image of Jesus. In the next work, Self-Portrait (Near Golgotha) from 1896, he is seen wearing a white robe and casting an existential gaze, continuing his canonization. Yet it is the last painting, Portrait of the Artist by Himself from 1903, painted the year of his death, that has the most dimension and depth, despite its thin layers of paint.

Here, the white canvas and blue underpainting intermittently show through the surface of the work, threatening to destroy the fragile painted illusion and the image of the artist. But while these portraits are diverse, in their assembled configuration they are ultimately unified in the reproduction of a well-known art historical trope, presenting Gauguin as the canonical protagonist whose psychology must be pondered and fetishized by all passersby.

In the next room, Gauguin disappears, as does his loaded symbolism and obsessive chromatic experimentation. Instead, we are faced with some of his early works, rendered in a muted palette and impressionistic style. Several works recall Camille Pissarro: Landscape from 1873 and Apple Trees at the Hermitage from 1879. In both cases, Gauguin seems absent. It is a smart decision on the part of the curator to begin with the atypical and the sober, because the artistic innovation in the rest of the exhibition seems all the more striking and pronounced.

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The following rooms take a material turn and highlight the techniques of artistic creation: ceramics, engraving and wood sculpture. Here, the exhibition does not quite stick to its own loudly proclaimed signage. Half of the works in the Gauguin and Engraving section are not engravings; ceramics, too, occupy a relatively modest part of the Gauguin and Ceramics room. I barely noticed three monotypes in Gauguin, Woodcut and Monotypes.

The titles of the rooms, which refer to processes, are in some way a curatorial maneuver. They represent a deception that keeps the gallery visitors focused on the much safer idea of ​​technique and allows them to forget the man who produces the work.

The last two rooms of the exhibition are more explicitly devoted to Gauguin’s stay in French Polynesia and are treated with a touch of obvious lightness. The curators’ texts acknowledge, but do not address in depth, the artist’s colonial or predatory heritage, leaving the viewer caught up in the seductions of Gauguin’s brush. Make no mistake, his works are the 1899 masterpiece The Three Tahitians, Gauguin's works, which are of absolute aesthetic splendor, attract attention above all. The problem is that, in the space of this same splendor, Gauguin fixes on a primitivist fantasy, which depicts Tahiti as a mythical land, prisoner of a pre-modern Edenic state.

The last work I see as I leave the exhibition is Gauguin's painting Tahitienne II from 1898.. This makes me stop dead in my tracks. Not because of the quality of the painting but because of the pose. Gauguin took and reversed the pose of the oriental fantasy painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1814, Great Odalisquewhich depicts a naked woman in a Middle Eastern harem.

Loaded with sexual connotations and ideas of possession of the imagination otherIngres’s painting is one of the most famous works in the Louvre, a work that hangs in the curator’s former office and which he no doubt knew intimately. Yet Gauguin’s obvious reference to this fantasy and its sexual politics is not mentioned on the nearby wall plaque, which merely lists the painting’s title and date. Here, omission replaces critical commentary.