Many of the painters associated with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism were by nature, seekers. Creators who saw things visually just a bit differently from many of their predecessors.
And while these last-name-only-needed visualizers like Van Gogh, Pissarro, Cézanne, Monet, and Manet and were seekers, one of their group perhaps went out a bit further, both geographically and thematically: Paul Gauguin (1848-1903).
Next month, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts will host the only U.S. stop of the massive retrospective Gauguin in the World, organized by independent curator Henri Loyrette, former director of both the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay in France.
Gauguin in the World will feature paintings, prints, sculptures, and writings that encompass the artist’s entire career. With a heavy emphasis on and narrative flow from the art created and inspired by his later-in-life journeys to and residencies in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands.
It will show, as Loyrette says in a press release, Gauguin’s “inner quest for elsewhere.” The more than 150 works were brought together from 65 public and private collections around the world, and showcase Gauguin’s bold use of color, sometimes unusual subjects, and Symbolist themes.
“Ours is a very big show, and Loyrette is very distinguished. It does set at a different angle because he’s focusing on Gauguin at the end of his life. A colorful and disjointed life,” says Ann Dumas, the MFAH’s consulting curator for this exhibit. “Gauguin is defining his identity all through his career as an artist, and that’s a very strong thread. And that’s [reflected] in the places he went.”
Paul Gauguin had mixed French and Peruvian ancestry, and by his late 20s was a married father of five with a promising career as a stockbroker. But he became enthralled by Impressionist art and began to create his own works, though he met with mostly commercial failure as he continued to move around countries.
After an initial trip to French Polynesia before returning home, he later decided to abandon his family, leave for good and spent the last years of his life living in Tahiti and Hiva Oa in the Marquesas before dying at the age of 54 after years of poor health.
And while he did spend time in Paris, it seems that he was much more at home away from urban centers in places like the more rural Brittany, even before his Polynesian times.
“He liked seeing people live simple, unspoiled lives, and he had that constant questing for an ideal existence. A kind of paradise that took him to the end of the world,” Dumas says. “Although by the end, even he thought that Tahiti has been too developed by the Colonialism of the French, which is why he went to the Marquesas.”
Though the artist was still dependent on the Parisian public and art circles to show and sell his work, even if many found his stuff “too exotic.” At least then.
Dumas says that Gauguin was also interested in the “spiritual side” of Tahitian culture and people, even giving his painting titles in the language while exploring religious themes. At least prior to the arrival of Christian ministries who began to convert the Tahitian people, and of which Gauguin did not approve.
Similarly, there are many art aficionados today who do not approve of some other things that Gauguin was up to there, including having sexual relations with several teenage girls. And there is that proclivity in his artwork of all those topless native women.
Trying to look at, reevaluate, and tsk tsk artists who lived centuries ago with a 2024 lens is, as always, fruitless. But Dumas is aware of how the artist and his work can come across in the era of #MeToo and Cancel Culture.
“This is a very thorny issue. He was a bit of philanderer, and he liked women…by certain factions of modern society, he’s heavily criticized. And some people think we shouldn’t show his work at all because he was so morally reprehensible,” Dumas notes.
She adds that the prior stop of this exhibit in Canberra, Australia, caused some controversy and especially among women. And she says this issue is addressed somewhat in the exhibit’s labels and catalog.
“They weren’t children, he wasn’t a pedophile. They were very young adult women. We think that on the whole the relationships were consensual. And at the time in Tahiti the custom was that if you were in a partnership with someone, you had an eight-day trial period where either person could leave. And some of these young women did leave, they had agency,” she says.
“Also, the age of consent at the time, both in Tahiti and France, was 13. So what Gauguin was doing was not illegal. I know that sounds like I’m trying to whitewash, but it was a different time and a different culture.”
Still, from a strictly art perspective, the work of Paul Gauguin still appeals. “He delves into these deeper layers in his work, and I think that’s why it has resonance today,” Dumas says.
Finally, if at the end of the exhibition Dumas could take one piece home with her, what would it be?
“Well, it’s not an obvious one, but it’s from his first Tahiti period and called The Large Tree. In the background is a 19th century Tahitian house with the walls made of bamboo with a thatched roof and these women in the foreground in a friezelike sequence,” she says.
“The whole composition is bathed in this dreamy light, and I think it’s such a good example of what he does with the Tahitian themes.”
Gauguin in the World runs November 3, 2024-February 16, 2025 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Foundation Galleries in the Audrey Jones Beck Building, 5601 Main. For more information, call 713-639-7300 or visit MFAH.org. All-access tickets are $24 every day except Thursday when they are $10.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
