Review: “Gauguin in the World” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Gauguin in the World, a revisionist survey exhibition of the Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), features 150 of the influential, talented, and controversial artist’s works, drawn from 65 collections. It was curated by Henri Loyrette, a nineteenth-century specialist who is a former director of both the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay. Loyrette is currently an independent curator. Gauguin served as Europe’s paradigmatic “modern primitive,” an outsider of sorts and a voluntary exile who, ironically, through his actual and symbolic renunciations of Western culture, became a key figure in Western art, one who set the stage for Picasso and a host of primitivizing modernists. Gauguin was a major innovator in the mediums of painting, printmaking, sculpture, and drawings, which are all well-represented in the exhibition, whose only other venue was the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. 

The MFA’s director, Gary Tinterow, noted in a statement: “20th-century European and American art would never have developed in the ways that it did were it not for Gauguin.” Tinterow also calls Gauguin “the key predecessor to the different strands of modernism that developed through Picasso and Matisse, challenging what he perceived as a culture that had reached a dead end and renewing it by exploring and embracing non-Western art.”

Gauguin, who was long the beneficiary of uncritical lionization, has, in more recent decades, been subjected to a thorough-going critique as a boastful liar, a self-mythologizing opportunist, and a sexual predator of girls in their early teens. For a recent, topical example of this critique, see Sasha Grishin’s “Paul Gauguin was a violent paedophile. Should the National Gallery of Australia be staging a major exhibition of his work?” (The Conversation, June 27, 2024). 

Gauguin in the World seeks to rehabilitate the artist somewhat by contextualizing his life and work in socialist, feminist, and non-Western frameworks, particularly in a catalog essay by the noted feminist scholar Norma Broude. I discuss her essay, provocatively titled “Paul Gauguin and his art in the era of cancel culture; reception and reassessments,” just prior to the section devoted to Gauguin’s first voyage to Tahiti. Gauguin in the World utilizes six galleries, arranged chronologically. The final half of the exhibition treats his most important work, which was in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. I follow the exhibition’s chronological order in this review. 

Whatever one thinks of the man, Gauguin, the artist was extraordinarily talented. This is evident not only in his startling originality as a mature artist but also in the rapid and adept manner in which he mastered the avant-garde currents when he was an amateur artist. 

Early Paintings

Gauguin in the World provides a rare opportunity to witness Gauguin’s artistic origins. His career as a stockbroker began in 1872, and in 1873, Gauguin made his first large painting, Landscape, which shows his appreciation of the Realist and Barbizon paintings he had seen in a friend’s collection. 

In his Still Life with Oysters, Gauguin reveals an indebtedness to Manet. His income as a stockbroker enabled Gauguin to collect works by Manet, the Impressionists, and Cézanne, beginning in 1879. These paintings afforded Gauguin the opportunity to absorb various techniques and aesthetics. 

Gauguin first exhibited as an artist in 1876 (an unidentified landscape painting), and in that year, he lent to the Fourth Impressionist exhibition. Gauguin exhibited his own work in the fourth, fifth, and sixth Impressionist exhibitions, and in 1881, the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought some of his paintings. Thus, Gauguin had a very successful beginning as an amateur artist by the time the stock exchange crashed in 1882. When he lost his job in 1883, Gauguin became a professional artist. 

Gauguin’s Still Life with Horse’s Head shows his absorption (and mixing) of Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist techniques. At the same time, the eclecticism of his subject matter is born out by the horse’s head (modeled on a horse from the Parthenon that he had seen in London), and the Japanese puppet and fans (Japanese art and motifs were the rage among the French avant-garde). In his later work, Gauguin likewise habitually mixed European and non-European sources. Additional early paintings in the exhibition show the direct influence of both Pissarro and Cézanne on Gauguin.

Early Sculptures

A rustic frame carved in the early 1880s presages the surface treatment of the artist’s roughly-hewn wood sculptures and primitivizing wood reliefs. 

Gauguin met the ceramist Ernest Chaplet in 1886. Chaplet taught him how to work in earthenware and stoneware. 

Gauguin’s decoration of the planter illustrated above functions almost as a three-dimensional painting. He has endowed his Breton subjects with animated energy — even the fence teems with energy. 

The distortions (such as the proportions of the body) and the stylizations (such as the distended toes) that are featured in Gauguin’s paintings also make their way into the verso of this planter. 

Gauguin’s startling originality is also evident in Jar with Four Feet. In addition to what he learned in Paris, Gauguin also drew on his Peruvian heritage, his childhood years in South America, and his mother’s collection of Peruvian pottery. Peruvian influences include vessels with feet and spouts at the top (or allusions to spouts). 

Primitivism in Brittany and Paris

Gauguin moved to Brittany in Northwest France in February of 1888. His voyages to Brittany served as dress rehearsals for his subsequent moves to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. He spoke and wrote approvingly of Brittany, declaring that it had a “primitive, savage quality.” Formally, Gauguin’s most important developments in Brittany were tendencies to paint in relatively flat, solid, and non-naturalistic modes, with solid areas of color. These tendencies became hallmarks of Gauguin’s personal mode of Post-Impressionism. Gauguin also advocated working from memory rather than before the motif, an artistic choice that conflicted with that of Van Gogh, with whom Gauguin worked for a time in 1888 in Arles. (See my 2022 Glasstire review “Van Gogh’s Symbolic Olive Trees and Landscapes at the Dallas Museum of Art.”) 

The best example of this tendency in the paintings featured in Gauguin in the World is Still Life (Fête Gloanec). The flattened, bright-red oval table top contrasts dramatically with its dark border. 

The large form in the upper right is a Breton cake. On the left, one can clearly make out three pears and an apple, but the other forms seem to melt and bleed into one another. One can make out a blue flower in the center, resting on what must be a field of orange flowers resting on a white cloth. On the far left, there appears to be a ring of half-painted-out pieces of fruit, incompletely absorbed by the flowers and the cloth on which they rest. While the goal of Impressionism was fidelity to the visible (as opposed to the conventions artists had long practiced), Gauguin increasingly broke with the precepts of Realism and Impressionism. He favored bold, bright distortions and prioritized fantasy and memory over direct observation. While an individual Impressionist brush stroke was an attempt to render a unit of visual perception, Gauguin, to varying degrees, often utilized parallel strokes inspired by Cézanne’s “constructive stroke.” One can see traces of them in Still Life (Fête Gloanec). 

Incidentally, Still Life (Fête Gloanec) was made for the proprietor of a pension that advanced credit to artist lodgers. When she expressed her dislike of the painting, Gauguin signed it with the name of another artist. 

Gauguin’s ceramics sometimes found a prominent place within his paintings, as in his Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ. In this painting, Yellow Christ (one of the most important paintings Gauguin made in Brittany) frames the artist on the left, while an effigy vessel (intended for tobacco and referencing effigy ceramics from Peru) frames him on the right. The image on the ceramic is a grotesque self-portrait (Gauguin also created a more realistic one, in which he presents his self-image as a severed head. Given the handling of the head of Christ, it has been argued that Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ is a triple self-portrait. Given the number of times he depicted himself as Christ (even in paintings created in Polynesia), it is not far-fetched to regard Portrait of the Artist with the Yellow Christ as a triple self-portrait.

Lust, carved in Paris before Gauguin’s departure for Tahiti in 1891, demonstrates that his ideas and style were already pre-formed, such that he could have created a “Tahitian period” style without ever sojourning to Tahiti. Gauguin studied Tahitian myth before venturing there, and he attributed this knowledge to young girls he encountered in Tahiti rather than to book-learning undertaken before his voyage. Gauguin brought photographic sources from various cultures that he merged with Polynesian sources (primarily human models, since a great number of the material objects, oral traditions, and active practices had already been destroyed by French colonialism.) His putative quest was to personally experience authentic Polynesian traditions, but they had largely been dismantled. 

The fox attached to the base of the statue Lust also appeared the year before in Be in Love (1889), one of Gauguin’s finest reliefs, where the fox is also represented frontally, below the image of a woman. 

The fox appears to be a Gauguin avatar. It also appears in the drawing Bust of a young girl with a fox (study for The Loss of Virginity) from c. 1891, which is featured in the exhibition (reproduced in the catalog, p. 187). The model, in her twenties, was also Gauguin’s sexual partner. The fox looks at the woman’s head with one paw between her breasts. The painting The Loss of Virginity (likely 1891) is in the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia. 

The human figure in Lust clearly derives from Caribbean Woman, which in turn is thought to have been inspired by the Exposition Universelle of 1889. That world fair, held in Paris, featured Javanese dancers (in full costume, illustrated in the catalog on p. 168) as well as a partial reproduction of the temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. In fact, the Oceanic photographs and objects on view at the fair helped to inspire Gauguin to visit Tahiti.

Thus, the Caribbean context appears to be largely fictive (though Gauguin spent a few months in Martinique in 1887). This mélange of memory and fantasy is a crucial component of Gauguin’s art. Perhaps the strangest elements in this painting are the gigantic, stylized sunflowers, which must be reminiscences of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings. 

The latter had painted sunflowers as a welcoming image for the room he provided for Gauguin in the Yellow House at Arles. Though Gauguin’s relationship with Van Gogh ended in violence (and I hesitate to accept Gauguin’s account because he is not a very trustworthy source), Vincent’s brother Theo served as Gauguin’s primary promoter until his breakdown following Vincent’s suicide in 1890. 

In a November 1889 letter to Theo, Gauguin declared: “You know I have Indian, Incan blood in me, and it comes across in everything I do. It’s the basis of my whole character. I’m looking for something more natural to set against the corruption of civilization.”

Norma Broude’s Revisionist Analysis

Gauguin was the grandson of Flora Tristan (1803-1844), a noted utopian socialist and feminist. Norma Broude links Tristan’s ideas to those of Gauguin. She notes the prominence that Gauguin gave to Tristan in his family history, called Before and After (1903). For Broude, the central question is how to “reconcile the image of the brutal sexist pig and colonial tourist,” a “staple” of the contemporary Gauguin critique, “with the remarkably progressive positions that he took in his writings about some of the central issues that confronted women in his era.” Broude turns a common critique of Gauguin on its head. She takes his focus on women not as a colonialist infantilization and sexualization of the “other” but rather as “a desire to uncover older and alternative forms of social organization that have privileged the female in pre-colonial myth and culture.” Gauguin’s depictions of women in daily life, as well as royal Polynesian women and goddesses (in paintings, sculptures, and texts), are interpreted by Broude as explorations of alternative cultural patterns and hierarchies. 

Broude identifies conflicts at the core of Gauguin’s art and self-identity. They spring from the artist’s “practical need, on the one hand, to aestheticize and sexualize Indigenous people in Polynesia for consumption by Parisian audience and, on the other, his politically clear-sighted response to the imposition of colonialism and its suppression of an Indigenous culture, a culture that had endowed women with social and spiritual power and whose values still survived.” While, as Broude notes, Gauguin behaved as “a privileged white European of his era,” he also endeavored to identify and depict the “profoundly different roles” and the “spiritual and communal powers” women possessed in pre-colonial Polynesia. Finally, given that Gauguin’s construction as a modernist primitive was made by a patriarchal system that used Gauguin to “enhance its own values and its own power” by foregrounding compatible qualities, Broude argues that we should not lose sight of the oppositional, anti-colonial, non-Western values that Gauguin, “however imperfectly,” tried to advance. 

Gauguin’s First Trip to Tahiti, 1891-93

In March of 1891, Albert Aurier anointed Gauguin, the leader of the symbolist movement, in an article in the Mercure de France. Gauguin left France by ship in April and arrived in Tahiti in June. 

Gauguin researched Polynesian culture as best he could, including curio shops in Tahiti (which also had objects from other islands) and a notable private collection. 

Gauguin also brought visual source material to Tahiti, including the above photograph of two Javanese reliefs. 

Gauguin’s generalized nudes owe a great deal to the reliefs from Borobudur, a source that had caught the artist’s attention before his first trip to Tahiti. Note how closely Gauguin’s female nude (except for the left forearm) follows that of the Buddha on the extreme right of the lower register of the Borobudur relief illustrated above. Gauguin has transformed the figure from male to female, and he has endowed it with an androgynous quality (the artist praised the androgyny he found in Tahitian society).

This reworked study, which was originally intended as a cartoon — a full-size sketch to be transferred onto a canvas — was refined in Paris. (Gauguin’s working methods will be addressed below in connection to a sketch dating from 1898.) This reworked study for Te nave nave fenua exemplifies how Gauguin’s works have multiple sources, both conceptually and geographically. 

Women are dancing around an enormous statue. Its stiff pose has been connected to Egyptian art and its scale to statues from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). It’s not all foreign to Tahiti since the head has characteristics commonly found on tiki figures. Several Polynesian objects are included in the exhibition to facilitate comparisons to such imagery in Gauguin’s works. 

The figure of the woman in the above painting derives from a medieval statue of Eve. A robed man with a mask-like countenance kneels behind her, while the red-and-green head of the serpent is in the upper right corner of the painting. Gauguin has essentially given us a biblical scene in Polynesian garb (or déshabillé). This is not surprising, since one of the first important paintings he made in Tahiti was called Hail Mary (1891, not in exhibition). 

The wild colors in the foreground of Parau na te Varua ino could conceivably represent abstracted flowers or water colored by flowers (an interpretation that is advanced in the label), but it is better understood as a utilization of color purely for its expressive power. In Gauguin’s hands, color becomes wholly arbitrary, utilized for effect. This is quite different from the Impressionist project of painting with fidelity to optical experience (which was a way of breaking with academic conventions). Color becomes an abstracting device in Gauguin’s hands. This painting is the fruit of an evolution that can be traced back (in this exhibition) to the flowers on the tabletop in Still Life (Fête Gloanec), where they appear to be transitioning into an almost abstract field of color. 

In contrast to the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), who utilized highly conventional symbolic elements, Gauguin was deliberately and defiantly obscure in his symbolism:

Puvis explains his idea, yes, but he does not paint it. He is Greek, whereas I am a savage, a wolf in the woods without a collar. Puvis will call a picture Purity, and to explain, it will paint a young virgin with a lily in her hand – a hackneyed symbol, but which is understood by all. Gauguin, under the title Purity, will paint a landscape with limpid streams; no taint of civilized man, perhaps an individual (Loren Lerner and Karine Antaki, “Paul Gauguin & The Colonial Myth of Primitivism,” Creating the Modern, Concordia: Concordia University Library: 2024). 

In the above passage, Gauguin emphasizes the civilized/primitive dichotomy he has constructed. Puvis is a rational man of culture who utilizes conventions that go back millennia. Gauguin, on the other hand, has gone savage: he understands and rejects Puvis’ conventional symbolism. Purity, for Gauguin (and I mean his creative process in general and not merely this one imaginary painting), is the rejection of Western conventions, which, by implication, are, at heart, rather simple-minded, readily intelligible formulas that have been deployed over and over again. Gauguin’s symbolism, by contrast, is unique. It is intuitive, it is a higher form of expression, one purged of corrupting influences, and one that is neither produced nor accessed by rational thought. Implicitly, Gauguin is also communicating that his symbolism is not accessible through language since he does not even try to explain it. Why even try to explain the inexplicable? Implicitly, that is a task that only an over-rational Western fool would attempt. 

Hina Tefatou depicts a Polynesian myth wherein Hina, the spirit of the Moon (the woman in the foreground), asks Fatou, the spirit of the Earth (in the distance), to give eternal life to humans (which Fatou refuses). A portion of the pool has been arbitrarily intensified into a solid red. There is no logical, naturalistic reason for this area of color to exist. 

Paris and Brittany After Tahiti, 1893-95

In June of 1893, Gauguin departed Tahiti with 66 paintings and several sculptures and arrived in Marseille in August. He held an exhibition in Copenhagen in June-July, and he began to write his fanciful account of his time in Tahiti, called Noa Noa. Thanks to Degas’ advocacy, he landed a show at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in November, which was critically well-received. 

At the suggestion of the dealer Ambroise Vollard, Gauguin hired a model named Annah la Javanaise, who became his lover. He made strikingly original prints for Noa Noa, reviving the wood cut to create hand-wrought, rustic-looking prints that he hand-printed, which resulted in unique impressions. He subsequently enlisted the printer Louis Roy to print editions. 

The above print depicts a rare example of a custom that was suppressed (by both Catholic and Protestant missionaries) that nonetheless continued to be clandestinely practiced in Tahiti in Gauguin’s time. The Tahitians are dancing the ‘upa ‘upa by firelight. Rather than referring to the dance by its proper name (as he does in the painted version of this subject), Gauguin gives the work a sensational Christian title, one that no doubt reflected the attitudes of the Christian missionaries. His provocative Christian titles do not reflect traditional Tahitian beliefs, rather, they are directed at Gauguin’s European audience. He was more interested in the sensational than the anthropological. 

Roy probably made prints like these with a small press. 

Annah and Gauguin moved to Brittany in May of 1894. After struggling to raise funds, Gauguin departed for Tahiti in July of 1895. During a layover in Australia, he studied Maori art at the Auckland Museum before arriving in Tahiti in September. 

The Second Tahitian Period, 1895-1901

When he arrived in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, Gauguin disliked recent developments, including the introduction of electric light. He moved to a more rural area in November, and he married an adolescent named Pahura in January of 1896. Their daughter died shortly after birth in December. 

In 1897, Gauguin began writing Modern Thought and Catholicism, described by Jane Messenger in the chronology as “a critique of Western culture with comparative references to world religions and belief systems.” 

In April, Gauguin’s daughter Adeline died in Copenhagen. Gauguin suffered heart attacks in October and had poor heart health. These deaths and the artist’s own frailty no doubt played a part in the next painting discussed here.

Desperate, ill, and impoverished, Gauguin claims that he painted Who Are We, What Are We, Where Are We Going?, his magnum opus, in a feverish pitch, a final burst of life energy while standing at death’s door. He insists that his desperation produced a preternatural clarity: “Before dying, I put into it all my energy, a passion so painful, in terrible circumstances, and a vision so clear, needing no correction, that the hastiness disappears and life surges up. It doesn’t smell of the model, of conventional techniques and the so-called rules from all of which I have always liberated myself, though sometimes with trepidation . . .”

Gauguin insisted on the spontaneity of his procedures: “I worked day and night that whole month [December] in an incredible fever. Lord knows it is not done like a Puvis de Chavannes: sketch after nature, preparatory cartoon, etc. It is all done from imagination, straight from the brush, on sackcloth full of knots and wrinkles, so the appearance is terribly rough.” 

Who Are We, What Are We, Where Are We Going? is a large painting, 12 feet long, one that is never lent (a reproduction of the big painting is visible in the installation shot reproduced above). Gauguin imagined the painting as a sort of ruin, “like a fresco on a golden wall with its corners damaged.”

Gauguin also claims that he unsuccessfully attempted to commit suicide after completing the painting. In another letter, Gauguin gave this assessment of his big painting: “I have finished a philosophical work on this theme, comparable to the Gospels. I think it is good.” (The above quotes are from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website page dedicated to this painting.) 

The above study, which is included in the exhibition, gives the lie to Gauguin’s claims about the spontaneous genesis of the big painting. This study precisely maps out the composition. Gauguin’s trees are expressively elaborated in the oil painting; the bottom portions of the figures are placed on a straight line along the lower edge of the painting, and the top border of the sketch is cropped, but otherwise, the degree to which Gauguin followed the sketch is remarkable. Moreover, we can assume that many other studies preceded or accompanied this one. Crucially, this study is squared to facilitate transfer to a larger surface, so it is clearly a working drawing/watercolor. 

So, on this painting, Gauguin worked more like Puvis worked on a mural than he cared to admit. In fact, this traditional way of working was Gauguin’s normal process. Charlotte Hale points out that, throughout his career, Gauguin made preliminary sketches “that formed the basis of more elaborate working drawings using posed models in the studio.” He would then transfer his studies to his canvases by traditional methods: pouncing (poking holes in the contours to transfer them to his canvases), tracing, or squaring (using a grid to enlarge a study in a proportionate manner, as in the case of Who Are We, What Are We, Where Are We Going?) (Charlotte Hale, “Gauguin’s Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Recent Revelations Through Technical Examination,” The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002). 

Hale reproduces the verso of Gauguin’s reworked study for Te nave nave fenua, which shows the pinpricks utilized in pouncing. 

Stylistically, Gauguin’s work done in the South Seas owed much to Puvis. This is no doubt why Gauguin was so critical of him, since Gauguin was extremely concerned with his legacy: he wanted to be respected for his originality as well as his importance. The Barbizon painters and the Impressionists created a vogue for spontaneity before the motif, and working from a squared preparatory drawing had been decidedly passé for decades.

Sidney Tillim underscored Gauguin’s general indebtedness to Puvis in a 1966 review:

They [the Symbolists] were influenced, Gauguin especially, by Puvis de Chavannes, who was both a muralist and a “decorative” painter… if anyone is responsible for releasing the decorative style and the taste for scale into modern sensibility it has to be Puvis and not Gauguin who must, however, be credited with modernizing both Puvis’ nostalgic symbolism and fresco pallor (which, personally, I happen to like very much). Gauguin in fact dreamed of doing “Puvis in color.” Moreover, Gauguin’s manner of dispersing solemnly impassive, silently grave figures throughout a landscape derives pretty much from Puvis. This manner and Gauguin’s art reached a climax in Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (“Gauguin and the Decorative Style,” Artforum, October 1966 vol. 5, no. 2). 

Three Tahitians is an unusually refined painting. Gauguin must have done a great amount of drawing to arrive at this composition, which features three varied figures that are interlocked in a complex manner. The woman on the right is depicted frontally, the man (with a deeply recessed spinal area) is depicted from the rear, and the woman on the left is in the act of turning, seemingly just at the point where she is shifting her gaze from the man to the viewer of the painting.

Three Tahitians has a much more classical flavor than is usual for Gauguin. The faces of the women, in particular, are meant to be beautiful. 

In terms of finish, the skin surfaces are somewhat rough and patchy, even though they are rendered with thin paint, creating an effect like dry pastel. 

The sunflowers in this painting (and in three others made in 1901) reference Van Gogh. The painting in the upper left is a copy of Hope by Puvis de Chavannes, and the washerwoman depicted below Hope references a print by Degas. Gauguin was not a generous person who eagerly acknowledged the importance of other artists. Therefore, I don’t necessarily view his references to the other artists in this still life as acts of beneficence or of magnanimity of spirit. 

In today’s popular imagination, sunflowers are closely associated with Van Gogh, just as they were among the avant-garde when this still life was painted (before Van Gogh was known to the public). Gauguin had a friend send sunflower seeds from Paris so he could grow them in Tahiti. But do these sunflower paintings constitute an homage to Van Gogh or an homage to Gauguin himself?

Writing to André Fontainas in September 1902, Gauguin attempted to take credit for Van Gogh’s signature painting of sunflowers. Gauguin claimed that “following my advice and my instructions, he [Van Gogh] worked quite differently” and created “yellow sunflowers on a yellow background.” As Martin Bailey notes: “This was a complete distortion of the truth,” because that painting had been done in August of 1888, prior to Gauguin’s arrival. Not surprisingly, Gauguin also wrote that in discussing the Dutchman’s “noble nature I am forced to praise myself” (see: Martin Bailey, “Gauguin’s shocking claim: Van Gogh painted the Sunflowers ‘following my advice,”’ The Art Newspaper, December 1, 2023). 

Gary Tinterow also notes Gauguin’s claim to have influenced Van Gogh’s sunflowers (“Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Sunflowers and the Painting Hope by Puvis de Chavannes,” Recent Acquisitions: A Selection, 1986-87, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987 p. 41-42). 

(A portion of this painting was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984 but the painting subsequently returned to the art market.)

Were one to believe Gauguin’s claims, there is good reason to view his 1901 sunflower paintings as a way for Gauguin to bask in his own reflected glory (since he claimed responsibility for the greatness of Van Gogh’s best Sunflower painting). Gauguin was a great admirer of Degas (who also utilized sketches and studies, though he made no effort to hide these practices). But Gauguin chose a very minor example of his work to acknowledge here. I’ve noted several of Gauguin’s criticisms of Puvis above. His reproduction of Hope does not make that painting look particularly impressive — the figure almost seems to be admiring Gauguin’s sunflowers. The Degas and the Puvis reproductions are marginalized, made small, and literally pushed to the side (or pushed aside). They are wan, pallid, etiolated — in contrast to the coloristic brilliance of the sunflowers. Even the wood bowl (quite possibly carved by Gauguin and highlighting his remarkable versatility as an artist) takes on bright, arbitrary colors. By presenting sunflowers in this manner, has Gauguin colonized Van Gogh’s sunflowers in an effort to make them his own? Gauguin has referenced three other artists in this painting, but has he not done so in a manner that presents himself as the star of this artistic firmament? 

In August of 1901, Gauguin sold his property in Tahiti and moved to the Marquesas. He attended Catholic mass on a daily basis, bought land he coveted that belonged to the church, and then quit attending mass. Gauguin built and decorated a two-story house he called the Maison de Jouir (House of Pleasure). The sculpture discussed below served as one of the decorations outside of that house.

Père Paillard and its companion piece, a sculpture called Thérèse, functioned as public accusations. Père Paillard (Father Lechery) was a portrait of Monseigneur Martin, the Catholic bishop. Martin had criticized Gauguin for his sexual relations with young girls on the island, though he — despite having taken vows of celibacy — also engaged in these relationships. One of his partners, in fact, was Thérèse. 

Gauguin depicts Martin as a horned devil. The hypocrisy of his praying pose is exposed by a pair of nude women, one of which is sculpted on each side of the base. The head of one of these female figures is visible in the lower right of the above photograph.

One can see traces of the gold paint accents on the eyes, as well as rough-hewn carved accents over most of the surface of the sculpture. 

Gauguin expressed his desire to return to Paris but was discouraged by his friend, the artist and collector George-Daniel de Monfreid (who would serve as Gauguin’s executor). In a December letter, the latter praised him as someone who has created “disturbing, inimitable works” and who enjoys “the immunity of great dead men, you have passed into the History of Art.” By coming home, in short, Gauguin would kill his myth. Gauguin died in the Marquesas in April of 1903 and thereby preserved his mythic status. 

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An illustrated catalog edited by Loyrette, titled Gauguin’s World: Tona Iho, Tona Ao, accompanies the exhibition. It includes Henri Loyrette’s new essay on Gauguin, as well as contributions by Miriama Bono, Norma Broude, Viana Giraud, and Nicholas Thomas. Jane Messenger’s extensive chronology is particularly useful. 

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Ruben C. Cordova is a curator and art historian. He has reviewed several exhibitions at the Houston MFA for Glasstire: the Neto installation in 2021 “Everything and Everyone is Connected: Ernesto Neto at MFAH”; “Calder-Picasso and Incomparable Impressionism in 2022”; and “Shahzia Sikander’s Extraordinary Realities in 2022.”