Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903) painted people throughout his
career – from his own family to the Polynesian beauties he found in the South
Pacific. This sweeping exhibition brings together more
than fifty works from museums and private collections throughout the world, showing
how the French artist revolutionised the portrait with his intense use of
colour, unconventional symbolism, and lack of flattery or marks of social standing.
As a
young man with a lucrative job as a stock broker he collected art, got to know
the Impressionists, began painting and was invited to exhibit with them. His
early portraits were mostly of family and friends – we see his wife, Mette, in
an evening dress, surrounded by the trappings of a comfortable life. When the
Paris stock market crashed in 1882 he lost his position and decided to paint full time. Having largely abandoned Mette and their five children, he began exploring his own, highly
original ideas about art. Part of his childhood had been spent in Peru, the
home of some of his mother’s relatives, and this left him with a fascination with societies
that to him seemed close to nature. In the years that followed he was
constantly in search of such cultures. The exhibition starts with a room of
self-portraits.
One of his favourite subjects was himself, usually showing the
aquiline nose of which he was very proud. (He claimed it was a sign of Inca
blood through his mother’s side, though in fact her grandfather was not
Peruvian, but a Spanish colonial.) We see him in various guises, even as Christ (above), mostly
reflecting his feelings of isolation as an outsider, and the way his lack of
commercial success made him a misunderstood martyr to his art.
In 1886 in
search of a more ‘primitive’ and ‘pure’ society, he moved to Brittany on France’s
north-west coast (above). However all was not as it seemed –
fast trains had made the area popular with
artists and the ‘peasants’ were happy to dress up in traditional costumes and
perform dances in return for cash. Eventually he moved to the more remote village
of Le Pouldu where he formed a close circle of fellow artists, including the
Dutch artist, Meijer de Haan, whom he portrayed many times. He also met Theo
van Gogh, who in 1988 persuaded him to move to Provence in an attempt to found
another artists’ community there with his brother, Vincent.
In Arles, the two artists worked
intensely, often side by side with the same subjects. Gauguin gave this sketch of Marie Ginoux to Van Gogh, who later used it for a series of portraits. But after three months the experiment
ended badly and Gauguin returned north. Still in search of an ‘unspoiled’
culture, his next move, in 1891, was to the French colony of Tahiti. The trip was
funded by the French government, for whom he was supposed to be recording local
customs. There’s little evidence of this, apart from an invented scene where he
painted the recently-deceased king as a trophy head.
He did, however, enter
into relationships with young teenage girls, marrying two of them and fathering children. One 'wife', Tehamana a Tahura, may have been 13 when they met.
Christian missionaries had been at work there for decades, compelling the women
to wear ‘modest’ dresses based on European models. Gauguin was outraged at this, but featured them in several portraits, including this one of Tahura, which mixes the colonial present with a background of a mythic past.
In 1893 he went
back to France with a trunkful of exotic clothes and full of his experiences.
He painted his studio bright yellow to evoke the atmosphere of the South Seas,
and on a return visit to Brittany portrayed a peasant girl at prayer, wearing a
brilliant yellow ‘missionary’ dress. But his paintings were not a success, and
in 1895 he returned to Tahiti. By this time he was in poor health and had
financial worries. In 1901 he moved to Hiva Oa in the Marquesan Islands, where life was cheaper. Here
he painted what the exhibition terms ‘Surrogate Portraits’, evoking the memory
of friends such as Van Gogh with a still life of sunflowers, and de Haan as a
grotesque devil-like figure beside a serene Polynesian couple.
Gauguin died in 1903 at the age of 54.
His last self portrait is very different from his earlier creations – simple, without symbolic objects or inscriptions.
His legacy is complicated. He seems to have been a difficult person – self-obsessed, restless, short-tempered, and quick to exploit his position as a privileged Westerner to
make the most of the sexual freedom available to him in Polynesia. The exhibition doesn't ignore this, but puts it in context, and invites you to enjoy the explosion of colour he brought to portraiture.
Gauguin Portraits is at the National Gallery, London until 26 January 2020. Admission charge.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/the-credit-suisse-exhibition-gauguin-portraits
