Gauguin show reflects exotic tastes

NEW YORK, Aug. 12 (UPI) -- Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin -- linked in friendship, rivalry, and betrayal -- are the star-crossed favorites of Post-Impressionist art, and mounting a show of their work separately or together, as the Art Institute of Chicago did recently, is like money in the bank for any museum these days.

Van Gogh has had several exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum in recent years but Gauguin has not had one there in more than 40 years. That oversight has been corrected with a current Met show of 120 paintings, pastels, sculptures, woodcarvings, ceramics, drawings, prints and letters from the hand of the artist, half of them from the museum's own collection, the rest from other collections in New York State both public and private.

"Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic" is unlike any previous monographic show of the artist in that it covers his work in all the far-flung locales where he lived and painted and all the variety of media in which he worked. It also includes several letters Gauguin wrote about his travels and the cultures that inspired him, a rare portfolio of his Breton drawings recently acquired by the Met, his calling card, and an invitation to the first Paris exhibition of his Tahitian paintings in 1893.

The paintings, of course, dominate the show. A number of them from private collections, have rarely, if ever been seen by the general public. These include "The Wave" (1888), painted in Brittany, and "Young Man With a Flower" (1891) and "Te Poipoi (Morning)"(1892) painted in Tahiti, as well as an arresting 1894 self-portrait of the artist, brush and palette in hand, glancing slyly sidewise as though sizing up his subject.

Gauguin pictures himself with hair long, his ruddy face mustached and goateed, wearing a astrakhan hat and blue cloak over a priest-like jacket and collar, very much the attire of a Bohemian who had, as a museum wall label says, "left his family and a career in finance to live like a native on an island in the South Seas." Appropriately, the background of the self-portrait is coral red.

Other unfamiliar material in the show includes an intricately carved walking stick depicting a female nude made during his stay in Brittany and impressive relief carvings on an attached pair of coconuts and a wood panel from his last home in the Marquesas Islands, where he died in 1903.

There is show-within-a-show of woodcut prints of South Seas subject matter on delicate Oriental papers and a rare series of zincographs on canary yellow paper. His portrait bust in marble of his son Emil is exhibited near a painted stoneware vessel in the shape of a grotesque head.

Gauguin was of mixed French and Peruvian blood and he like to boast that he was a "savage" because of his Indian ancestry (one-eighth). He was a master manipulator, having as his victims his Danish wife whom he abandoned with their five children, artist friends such as Van Gogh, the Paris art dealer he bullied from half a world away, and his unsophisticated South Sea island lovers. He could be violent, and Emil would remember his father bloodying his mother's face years after the event.

But he did have supreme talent as an innovative painter, always seeking fresh, exotic imagery, and as one of the great colorists in the history of art, and he was second-to-none in self-promotion, creating his own alluring image and going after fame in any manner he could, even brutally. That he achieved his goal cannot be questioned since his art is still a potent magnet for the public today, almost 100 years after his death.

This exhibit does not set out to prove Gauguin's pre-eminence in modern art, but it does make it possible for the artist's fans to see some of his greatest paintings brought together in one show. These include his Polynesian Madonna and Child, titled "Ia Orana Maria," his frightened Tahitian nude woman spied on by a menacing spirit, "Manao Tupapau" (Spirit of the Dead Watching), and his serene depiction of women carrying flowers, "Two Tahitian Women."

Gauguin was not above borrowing themes and even imagery from many sources including Japanese prints, Northern European Expressionism, Buddhist sculpture, and Renaissance religious art. He sometimes painted Christ in his own image, as though he himself were a suffering martyr. One of these paintings is in the show, "The Yellow Christ" (1889), depicting the crucifixion with three Breton women kneeling at the foot of the cross.

Legend has it that the Christ figure was inspired by a 17th century crucifix displayed in a chapel in Pont-Aven, where Gauguin worked from 1888-1889. The imagery is typically flattened and the colors bright despite the tragic theme. It would seem Gauguin was as fascinated by the religious faith of the Breton peasants as he would be later by the religiosity of Polynesians, although he himself was not particularly religious.

The enigmatic qualities of Gauguin's personality and art are part of his fascination. For a good read that will throw fresh light on the artist and his influence on 20th century art, a lavishly illustrated book has been published to coincide with the exhibition which runs through Oct. 20: ("The Lure of the Exotic," Yale University Press, 256 pages, $39.95, softcover $24.95).