BUSINESS ART | INTERNATIONAL | GAUGUIN : MAKER OF MYTH / TATE MODERN
By Nushin Elahi It’s an interesting exercise walking backwards through Gauguin: Maker of Myth, the exhibition that is now drawing record crowds at the Tate Modern in London. Almost like rewinding a film, you see images that you hadn’t noticed before. Although the exhibition is arranged in thematic groups, rather than chronologically, it ends with his island paintings. We have all been fed the myth of Gauguin’s tropical island paradise, of the artist who threw everything away to remain true to his art. In fact, there are few paintings that show the idyll. Two Tahitian Women from New York’s Met is the exception rather than the rule: two beautiful dusky, doe-eyed creatures bearing offerings against a jungle background. More often the islanders are close-faced, their eyes hooded and wary, their look sullen and secretive. They are squatting for their morning toilet by a river, whispering amongst themselves or gazing fearfully at monstrous gods. Their figures are statuesque rather than sensual. Gauguin came to the tropics to escape a conventional life. He had already turned his back on his family to fulfil his own belief in himself as an artist. “I am a great artist and I know it,” he wrote to his estranged wife in 1892 from Tahiti. The search for the primitive had led him to a down-at-heel French colony the missionaries had got to a century earlier. The islanders were clothed, housed and eventually even had electricity – a far cry from the half naked groups he depicts in jungle clearings. Gauguin set about researching 58
their long-forgotten gods and old legends from other European traveller’s tales, and then created his own myth. His determined embrace of a naïve art is still unsettling a century on: the devil crouching in the undergrowth, the monumental female deity Oviri. The constant presence of these ancient forces makes for provocative work, often startlingly modern but seldom the dreamy vision of paradise that he is popularly believed to have created. From this perspective it is possible to see how Gauguin was always searching for the Other. A simple flower study has a malevolent idol crouching behind the blooms; the gentle portrait of a sleeping child shows wallpaper that seems to contain sprites from a dream-world; a devilish-eyed child peers at a bowl of fruit. What appears a simple portrait of an island girl (Tehamana has many parents) takes on another layer when you know it is his teenage ‘vahine’, demurely dressed in European garb, but flanked by images of idols. These conflicting narratives of European culture imposed on a primitive lifestyle permeate his island work, but Gauguin was astute enough as a businessman to realise that the mystique of his art depended on the tropical idyll that Westerners then and now craved. There is little showing Gauguin’s Impressionist beginnings, but many from his stint in Brittany where the Celtic folklore laid the seeds for his later work. His landscapes are exquisite, his simplified style and blocks of saturated colour still uniquely his own, despite the many artists who have been inspired by his work. His religious paintings, from the self portrait as Christ, to the gorgeous almost abstract reds and whites of Vision of the Sermon, the strange use of iconography and landscape in both the Green and the Yellow Christ all prefigure the primitive deities of his Tahiti paintings. This is the first time in over fifty years that London has hosted a major Gauguin exhibition and the incredible range of work covers not only his paintings, but sculpture, carvings and ceramics. Many of his great masterpieces are here, but also lesser known, unusual work. So the ornately carved lintel of his Tahitian home, the ceramic self-portrait as a severed head made soon after Van Gogh’s death, woodcut prints of his books and the work he prized as his best sculpture, the grotesque figure of Oviri, are displayed alongside his oils. They come from all over the world, but a surprising number hail from Copenhagen. As a young French stockbroker, Gauguin took a Danish wife, who fled home with their five children when the market crashed and her 34year-old husband turned his Sunday hobby into a full-time passion. As he told her, he was indeed a great artist, but his work will never have the comfortable delight of the Impressionists. It is challenging, modern and deeply unsettling. Reproductions also never do it justice, so this is one exhibition worth joining the pilgrimage to the Tate. Gauguin: Maker of Myth at the Tate Modern, Millbank, London until 16 January 2011.
Nevermore O Tahiti 1897 (Courtauld Gallery, London) Oil on canvas. Girl in a European Dress