Disdain Challenges Gauguin’s Legacy
LONDON — “Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?”
That’s the startling question visitors hear on the audio guide as they walk through the “Gauguin Portraits” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The show, which runs through January 26, focuses on Paul Gauguin’s depictions of himself, his friends and fellow artists, and of the children he fathered and the young girls he lived with in Tahiti.
The standout portrait in the exhibition is “Tehamana Has Many Parents” (1893). It pictures Gauguin’s teenage lover, holding a fan.
The artist “repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls, ‘marrying’ two of them and fathering children,” reads the wall text. “Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him.”
Born in Paris, Gauguin spent his early years in Peru before returning to France. He took up painting in his 20s and set sail for Tahiti in 1891. Gauguin spent most of the 12 remaining years of his life in Tahiti and on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa.
In the international museum world, Gauguin is a box-office hit. Yet in an age of heightened sensitivity to issues of gender, race and colonialism, museums are reassessing his legacy.
A couple of decades ago, an exhibition on the same theme “would have been a great deal more about formal innovation,” said Christopher Riopelle, a co-curator of the National Gallery show. Now, everything must be viewed “in a much more nuanced context.”
“I don’t think, any longer, that it’s enough to say, ‘Oh well, that’s the way they did it back then,’ ” he said.
The show was co-produced with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and opened in Ottawa in late May. A few days before the opening, the museum’s newly appointed director, Sasha Suda decided to edit some of the wall texts. Nine labels were changed to avoid culturally insensitive language.
Elsewhere, his “relationship with a young Tahitian woman” was changed to “his relationship with a 13- or 14-year-old Tahitian girl.”
The show should “have addressed these issues in a more open and transparent way that connected with contemporary audiences,” Ms. Suda said in an interview. Addressing “blind spots” in the work of historical artists “could make those artists more relevant,” she added.
To other museum professionals, re-examining the lives of past artists from a 21st-century perspective is risky.
“The person, I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work,” said Vicente Todolí, who is the artistic director of the Pirelli HangarBicocca art foundation in Milan. “Once an artist creates something, it doesn’t belong to the artist anymore: It belongs to the world.”
Yet Ashley Remer, a New Zealand-based curator who in 2009 founded girlmuseum. org, an online museum focused on the representation of young girls in history and culture, insisted that in Gauguin’s case the man’s actions were so egregious that they overshadowed the work.
“He was an arrogant, overrated, patronizing pedophile, to be very blunt,” she said. Even to his admirers, Gauguin invites questioning. “I love his paintings, but I find him a little bit strange,” Kehinde Wiley, an African-American painter who described Gauguin as one of his idols in a 2017 interview, says in a National Gallery film. “The ways we see black and brown bodies from the Pacific are shot through his sense of desire. But how do you change the narrative? How do you change the way of looking?”
To ensure that Gauguin’s artistic legacy is not besmirched by his “marriages” to underage girls, these relationships should be covered in exhibitions, said Line Clausen Pedersen, a Danish curator who has put on several Gauguin shows. With each exhibition, “another layer is peeled off the protection of history that he has somehow enjoyed,” she said. “Maybe the time is ripe to take off more layers than before.”
“What’s left to say about Gauguin,” she added, “is for us to bring out all the dirty stuff.”