Paul Gauguin has tended to cultivate an image as a somewhat pervy ‘artist-tourist’, travelling to remote lands in French Polynesia painting vivid images of exotic naked women. Indeed, the carved wooden door panels around his native dwelling in the Marquesas Islands, displayed the home’s name ‘Maison du Jouir’, which translates as ‘House of Pleasure’ or ‘House of Orgasm’. This was probably a deliberate provocation to his neighbour, a Catholic bishop – (he resented the fact that in much of the South Seas, missionaries had successfully westernized the lands and stripped them of his romanticised preconceptions of primitivism living on here) – but in order to enter Gauguin’s studio, all visitors would have had to pass under this inscription and through his bedroom. Make of that what you will.
The Tate Modern’s latest blockbuster of an exhibition, doesn’t completely dispense with this image of Gauguin, but it does give the viewer a chance to explore the greater depths to his work, focussing on Gauguin as a storyteller and creator of imaginative, mythical and stylized visions, over Gauguin as simple perv. Instead of the exhibition being arranged chronologically, Gauguin: Maker of Myth is arranged thematically, with each gallery emphasizing the common motifs and ideas that pervaded his work, at various points throughout his career, and at various points across the globe. Themes include Gauguin’s engagement with the familiar and everyday in his still lifes, rural landscapes, and the sacred and religious.
The exhibition characterises Gauguin’s relation with the female form as nuanced and complex. He sought to explain women and their relationship with the landscape, and of his time in Martinique, he wrote ‘what I find so bewitching are the figures and everyday here there is a continued coming and going of black women decked out in all their colourful fiery with their endless variety of graceful movements’. With his female nudes, he intended to suggest a ‘savage luxuriousness of a bygone age’ and so the female form came to embody part of his imaginations of pre-modern existences. In the tropical settings of Martinique and Tahiti, he could present women as timeless figures, their narrative part of enduring myth and folklore.
Gauguin is notable for breaking away from the Impressionist tradition of his time. Lush vegetation, and the warmer climes found at his many travel destinations licensed him to use bolder, more sensuous colours and shift away from the naturalistic conventions that were prevailing in other European art. What’s really captivating about his paintings is that he flattens his composition, and in place of the strong dynamics of perspective, he injects vivid swathes of colour imbued with dream-like intensity. Although he preferred to allow his imagination to guide his paintings in a studio, direct observation still remained important for him, especially given his travels, and his drawings are stripped of redundant analytic detail, and instead emphasize contour, providing highly simplified foundations from which to construct colourful visions for his paintings.
Overall it is difficult to not be enchanted by this display of Gauguin’s paintings. When it’s cold outside, and winter gloom has reduced whatever one can see through the mist to figures from a sombre grey palette, it’s refreshing to be transported to the warmth and comfort of the Tate’s gallery spaces. Also, if you need a further reason to visit the Tate this Christmas vac, Ai Weiwei’s collection of 100 million individually handcrafted porcelain seeds in the Turbine Hall is staggeringly impressive. Tremendously thought provoking, it asks questions about the meaning of the individual within the wider community, and questions about the cultural, economic and political aspects of the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon.
