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Paul Gauguin: Rebel as Glorious Artist
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14574 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1988 |
2,126 Words |
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Marla Prather
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The popularity of Paul Gauguin has probably never been greater than it is today. The recent spate of articles, monographs, luxury manuscript facsimiles, and even a major motion picture, not to mention ever-rising auction prices, bear witness to our preoccupation with the life and art of this nineteenth-century painter. This year three major museums, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, have joined forces to launch the most comprehensive survey of Gauguin's art ever mounted. Opening May 1 at the National Gallery with nearly 240 works on view, The Art of Paul Gauguin travels to Chicago in the fall and to the Grand Palais in Paris early next year.
Although there have been major retrospectives of Gauguin's work in this century, the most important having taken place in Paris in 1906, three years after the artist's death, there has not been a major survey of his art in this country since 1959. The current exhibition has drawn upon private and public collections around the world, including Europe, North and South America, Australia, the U.S.S.R., Polynesia, and Japan, making it possible to exhibit together works which have rarely, and in some cases never, been seen side by side. Gauguin was a highly experimental printmaker, ceramicist, and sculptor, and the exhibition will highlight his diverse talents in these mediums as well as in painting. The works of art have been carefully selected to represent every phase of Gauguin's life as an artist, from the earliest Impressionist canvases to the last pictures produced on the remote island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas.
Legendary Life
Our continued fascination with this artist is due in great part to the intriguing details of his now legendary biography. In many ways, he has defined for the twentieth century the very notion of the bohemian artist. Deliberately shirking the responsibilities and comforts of middle-class life in Europe and a promising career as a stockbroker, he risked anonymity, poverty, and illness in the islands of the Pacific. His rebellious temperament constantly placed him at odds with official authority. Throughout his life, he was dogged by poor sales and inadequate public recognition, and he never lived to witness the success of his art that we now take for granted.
However, the legend of Gauguin's life is as much of his own making as it is that of subsequent romanticized biographies. He was an accomplished, prolific writer who hated leaving the explanation of his pictures to professional art critics, a breed for which he harbored little but contempt unless they were his friends and disciples. In addition to a voluminous correspondence and several articles on art in the French press, he has left behind a number of beautifully illuminated manuscripts. Theoretical, anecdotal, and largely autobiographical, these writings provide invaluable insights into the workings of a commanding intellect, but they can occasionally be unreliable sources of truth. The authors of the catalogue which accompanies the exhibition have aimed to separate fact from fiction by depending wherever possible on trustworthy documentation from contemporary sources and, ultimately, to concentrate on the works of art themselves, which speak so eloquently for the man who made them.
Gauguin's unorthodox life as a painter was preceded by an equally exceptional youth. Born in Paris in 1848 to a left-wing journalist father, who died when
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