Gauguin Show at the National Gallery

Monday we met our friend Monica at the National Gallery to see the show of Gauguin Portraits there, which was in Ottawa earlier this year. There has apparently never before been an exhibit of the work of Gauguin that specifically concentrated on portraiture, and we liked it and found it quite interesting.

Yesterday's New York Times ran a story (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/arts/design/gauguin-national-gallery-london.html) about the show, which does not conceal or play down (as so often happened in the past) the facts that Gauguin, who abandoned his French wife and five children to go to the South Seas, engaged in "marriages" to two girls who were only 13 or 14. According to the show's notes and accompanying short film, in the Tahitian culture at the time it was considered normal for sexual activity to begin at such young ages, even though it strikes us these days as predatory and abusive. Clearly this kind of sexual freedom was one of the aspects of Tahiti that Gauguin found appealing, along with the relatively unspoiled Edenic qualities of the place and the people.

From the perspective of our time, his behavior was completely creepy, but autres temps, autres moeurs, and we know that Picasso and Rodin, to name but two, were monsters in their personal relationships and yet they were great artists. I feel the same about Gauguin. The exhibition contained many beautiful and significant paintings, each of them considered a portrait for the purposes of this show even if the focus of a number of the paintings is on something such as a vase of flowers, completely apart from the sliver of face or partial head in the background.

This painting, "Old Man with a Stick," a local from Arles (1888), was one of my favorites in the show. Gauguin "adopted Van Gogh's technique of painting in one sitting," and as a result it is painted very thinly, relying on the roughness of the canvas fabric rather than impasto to provide surface texture.

"Marquesan Man in the Red Cape" (1902) is interesting and unusual for its portrayal of a young indigenous priestly healer using the compositional style of traditional western portrait tradition, so that the subject "appears as any European aristocrat might--at full length, in landscape, a cape draped over his shoulders, with a hunting dog at his feet."

One of Gauguin's Tahitian "wives" was called Tehamana, and in this 1893 portrait she wears the type of dress prescribed by the Christian missionaries there, but she is surrounded by enigmatic floating images related to Polynesian mythology, "merging a colonial present with a mysterious, fictionalized mythic past."