‘Gauguin: Portraits’ at the National Gallery, London, until 26th Jan 2020: ★★★☆☆
Gauguin has been out in the cold for a while now. At this juncture in the twenty-first century, to praise a upper-middle class man who abandoned his family of six to become a painter and who proceeded to fetishise the culture of Polynesia to the point of engaging in sexual relations with minors (in western eyes) and fictionalising their society, seems counter to the direction in which the study of art has been moving.
So for the National Gallery to choose now for a large solo show of Gauguin’s work, the first one ever staged of his portraits, is surprising – but, I for one, am very glad they have. Despite his many worrying transgressions, I have always had a soft spot for Gauguin. Nobody before or since has managed to make such a vibrant pallet quite so uneasy and unsettling but at the same time exciting and exotic. This show displays that nicely.
The first room presents a series of self-portraits that span his development as an artist – a calling he only turned to full-time aged 35. In each work he gives himself a persona – The Painter, The Outcast, The Exotic Exile, and even Christ. We see his bold, flat, colourful later style emerge from the foundations of a Pissaro inspired post-impressionism.
The great highlight of this room being the triple self-portrait, ‘Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ’ (1890-1). A wonderful example of art within art, this painting not only contains one of his most striking self-portraits but also, flanking it in the background, two further self-re-imaginings – a cropped view of another canvas showing a lurid, yellow Christ on the cross, and on the right a primitivist ceramic jar both displaying features that are unmistakably Gauguin’s. (Said ceramic is also displayed in this room, meters from its 2D counterpart!)
Later rooms chart a similar developmental course but through his views of others, including an impressive, if a touch derivative, set of early portraits of his wife and children, his debt to, and acquaintance with, Degas is quite obvious although the image of his wife, Mette, goes beyond much of Degas output in its sweeping texture.
This is a show in which the artist is omnipresent, not only in the many evocations of those bulging eyes set between his distinctive hooked nose, but also in every portrait of friend, foe, or family. Gauguin understood that none of us see the same world as each other and so his paintings become records not of nature finely observed but rather of his vision and sensation – in this way, every work becomes as self-portrait.
In 1891, after finding not even the wilds of Brittany ‘savage’ enough for him, Gauguin made for the colony of French Polynesia and the island of Tahiti. What he wanted was the purity and rawness of a native culture, what he found was an island already thoroughly westernised by the French colonists and missionaries.
Dealing with Gauguin’s Tahitian works has always posed a challenge to art historians. How are we to interpret these visions of a ‘primitive’ culture that have been so filtered through Gauguin’s western ‘civilised’ idiolect? The National Gallery presents them in a defensive tone, arguing that Gauguin was striving to protect and record a native culture that was being quickly over written by the colonial and church authorities. And it is true that Gauguin’s sentiments lay with the natives over the French but does that excuse the liberties he took?
Two of the best works in the show help to illustrate this interpretation, ‘Woman with Mango’ (1892) and ‘The Ancestors of Tehamana’ (1893) leap out due to the personalities of their sitters – suddenly they have one! In so many of Gauguin’s Tahitian works, the neutral, emotionless faces detach the subjects from reality and add an uncomfortable voyeurism – almost like specimens for analysis. But these two women are different, they know they are being painted and are seemingly enjoying that fact. The cheeky, enigmatic expression of ‘Woman with Mango’ rivals the Mona Lisa.
However, that uncomfortable reality still lingers, the generic, ‘ethnic’ looking symbols in the background of ‘The Ancestors of Tehamana’ are entirely invented by Gauguin and the striped dress is one imposed by the missionaries to ‘preserve the modesty’ of the natives. That’s all to say nothing of the fact that Gauguin had taken the 14 year old sitter to be his ‘wife’. All things the National Gallery highlights but fails to convincingly confront.
There is no denying that these works are extraordinary – if one can put aside the deeply problematic undertones. ‘Barbarian Tales’ (1902), another title to make you wince and one of Gauguin’s final love letters to the south Pacific, stands out as one of the great expressions of colour and travel in early twentieth century art.
At the very end of the show we are once again confronted (and that is the word) by a self- portrait, this one completed in the final months of the artist’s life. All the personas have dropped away and we finally see the man. Weakened by illness, aged by the sun, this quiet, intense image tells you all you need to know about Gauguin: a man with an uncompromising vision both in his art and how he lived his life.
Morgan Haigh 