![]() ![]() His 1892 Te Faaturuma (Boudeuse/Brooding Woman) shows exactly this. Gauguin is great at interiority, at painting a woman in the act of thinking. We don't look to Gauguin for psychological portraiture, but it is there nonetheless. It is there in a ham and a few shallots on a plate in a window in the corpse-like supine girl in a Breton field, a fox held in her arm, a wedding party approaching across the fields in the lowering haystacks under a sky brightened by light from the ocean in all those young women thinking unknowable thoughts on beds and couches. It gives us the peculiar atmospheres, the unearthly light over the Breton landscape, the static silences and frozen gestures, the strangeness and sadness, the melancholy and yearnings in his art. The quality of Gauguin's art that is "off" and strange – even a bit mismanaged – is also its strength. The criticism has been a necessary corrective to the unsustainable myth of the artist as protean genius beyond the mores of time, place and society. Gauguin has been both championed and reviled by art history, by feminism and critiques of colonialism. He returns again in the work of Peter Doig and Chris Ofili (both now living in Trinidad, having distanced themselves from London, as Gauguin did from Paris). He is there, like Zelig, walking beside expressionism and neo-expressionism, various tides of fanciful romantic figuration and colourful abstraction. Like Kandinsky, he spawned some truly awful art, but also provided inspiration to Picasso, for Demoiselles d'Avignon and the heavy-shouldered, big-footed nudes of the early 1920s. Then comes a weird painting of puppies drinking milk from a saucepan among cups and pears, a hovering overhead view that looks like it might have been painted by Francis Picabia or Matisse. We look at them looking, and we look at the fruit, too, as if the squint-eyed girl, Laval and ourselves might each find the answer to some mystery there. In the second, the painter's friend Charles Laval peers at another table set with fruit. In the first, a young girl peers over a table-top set with Cézanne-like fruit. Touching portraits of the artist's sleeping children are followed by two strange pictures. With its direct and inexpressive plainness, the 1903 portrait reminds me of Egypto-Roman funerary portraiture, and of Luc Tuymans's portraits, derived from hospital photographs, of querulous men with hidden diseases. Soon to die of a heart attack (he had several), he looks out grimly, in glasses, stripped of style and pose. In his self-portraits, Gauguin flips from naturalism to caricature, and then in his last year, about to be imprisoned for non-payment of taxes, as an ordinary man. What, we ask, would we use it for: a chalice or a gravy boat? The severed head, with a ruby red glaze of blood about its neck, is in the form of a stoneware jug. Conscious of his striking looks, he paints himself as hero of his own life (once, he portrayed himself as the protagonist in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables) he depicted himself as Christ and sculpted himself as the decapitated John the Baptist. Here he is, bullish, guarded, saintly, pensive, dying. Beginning with portraits, this exhibition shows us that his self-invention was of a piece with his painting and sculpture. He personifies the idea that the artist is as much an invention as the art itself. His art is a hodge-podge of inconsistent and seemingly incompatible styles and manners, half-digested and invented myth, symbols, stories and allusions. Gauguin's sense of himself as an artist was multiple and various. Not to mention the syphilis, the abandonment of his family, the brawling and insufferable self-aggrandisement, or his taking, in middle age, barely adult Polynesian lovers. It's the Tahitian women, the dusky flesh, the foetid jungle, the yearnings for lost paradise and innocence, the animism and the return to nature that have put posters of his work in a million bedrooms. The Gauguin myth, of course, also accounts for his popularity. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |