National Gallery
7 October 2019 – 26 January 2020
The first-ever exhibition devoted to the portraits of
Paul Gauguin will open at the National Gallery in October 2019.
The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Gauguin Portraits
(7 October 2019 – 26 January 2020) will show how the French artist,
famous for his paintings of French Polynesia, revolutionised the
portrait.
Paul Gauguin, 'Self
Portrait with Yellow Christ', 1890-1, Musée d'Orsay, Paris (RF 1994-2) ©
RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / René-Gabriel Ojéda
This landmark exhibition of major loans from museums and private
collections throughout the world will show how Gauguin used portraits
primarily to express himself and his ideas about art.
Although he was fully aware of the Western portrait tradition,
Gauguin was rarely interested in exploring his sitters’ social standing,
personality, or family background, which had been among the main
reasons for making portraits in the past.
Paul
Gauguin, Portrait of the Painter Slewinski, 1891. Oil on canvas, 53.5 ×
81.5 cm. National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Matsukata Collection ©
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
From sculptures in ceramics and wood to paintings and drawings, an
extraordinary range of media for a National Gallery exhibition, visitors
will see how Gauguin interpreted a specific sitter or model over time,
and often in different guises. A group of self portraits in the
exhibition, for example, will show how Gauguin created a range of
personifications including his self-image as Jesus Christ. Together with
his use of intense colour and his interest in non-Western subject
matter, his approach had a far-reaching influence on artists throughout
the late 19th and 20th centuries including
Henri Matisse and
Pablo Picasso.
'The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Gauguin Portraits' will show how the
artist – inspired by his time spent in Brittany and French Polynesia
from the mid-1880s to the end of his life in 1903 – became fascinated by
societies that to him seemed close to nature. With their folk tale
heritage and spirituality, these communities appeared to him to be far
removed from the industrialisation of Paris.
Gauguin’s inspiration to visit French Polynesia was partly drawn from
the exotic novels of Pierre Loti (whose naval training included a stay
in Tahiti), his photographs of Borobudur sculptures, and Pacific
exhibits he had seen at Paris’s Exposition Universelle in 1889. At the
same time his own upbringing in Peru allowed him to think of himself as
someone who stood outside the European tradition, a ‘savage,’ while the
European artistic and literary circles in which he moved also helped
shape his views towards Tahiti and the Marquesas.
Gauguin’s life and art have increasingly come under scrutiny,
especially the period he spent in South Polynesia. The Gallery aims to
explore this controversial subject matter in the exhibition
interpretation and accompanying programme and to join conversations now
taking place that consider Gauguin's relationships and the impact of
colonialism through the prisms of contemporary debate.
Featuring over fifty works, the exhibition includes paintings,
sculptures, prints, and drawings many of which have rarely been seen
together. These include works from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France; The
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA; The Art Institute of
Chicago, USA.; The National Gallery of Canada; The National Museum of
Western Art, Tokyo, Japan; and The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of
Belgium.
With pictures from his early years as an artist through to his final
visit to the South Seas, the first room of the exhibition will be
dedicated to self portraits; the most numerous of all Gauguin’s
paintings. By making himself his chief subject and by assuming different
personalities these images show Gauguin constantly reinventing himself.
Included in this room is a rough, grotesque self-portrait head with his
thumb in his mouth demonstrating his interest in non-Western
iconography and art, and also his radical experimentation in different
media ('Anthropomorphic pot', enamelled sandstone, 1889, Musée d'Orsay,
Paris).
Room 2 is devoted to the period he spent in Brittany (1884–-91)
where, in the remote village of Le Pouldu, he turned his back on his
life as a Paris stockbroker to become the leading figure of a new
artists’ colony. This room also contains portraits of some of the
friends he had made in Paris and members of his family including
'Mette
in Evening Dress', 1884 (The National Museum of Art, Architecture, and
Design, Oslo).
In paintings such as 'Be Symbolist: Portrait of Jean
Moréas' (1890–1, Talabardon & Gautier, Paris)
and 'Young Breton
Woman', (1889, Private Collection) Gauguin started to push the
boundaries of portraiture by eschewing its usual conventions of
resemblance, flattery, and coherence of time and space.
Gauguin’s fraught relationships with fellow artists are explored in
Room 3, particularly two key friends who, in spite of falling out with
him, remained as portrait subjects for the rest of his life:
Vincent van Gogh
and Meijer de Haan (1852–1895). A group of portraits of de Haan shows
how he became a symbolic cipher within his work that far outlived their
friendship (and the sitter himself), stretching the possibilities for
portraiture into something new across different media, such as the
wooden bust of de Haan (1889–90, National Gallery of Canada).
Room 4 covers Gauguin’s first Tahitian trip (1891–3) where he sought
an escape from ‘civilisation’ yet always with an eye to France, and how
he was trying and failing to break into the Parisian art market from a
distance. As well as including paintings of Teha’amana a Tahura, this
room also tracks his continued experiments in different media, which
made direct reference to the indigenous objects now surrounding him, in
works such as 'Tehura (Teha’amana)' in wood, (1891–3, Musée d'Orsay,
Paris);
and 'Arii Matamoe (The Royal End)', (1892, The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles).
Featuring his return to Paris and Brittany and his second stay in
Tahiti (1893–5), Room 5 will also include works containing distinctly
Tahitian imagery. In a portrait made in Brittany, a young Breton woman
in prayer is shown wearing a Tahitian missionary dress
('Young Christian
Girl', 1894, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown,
Massachusetts, USA);
while in '
Self Portrait with Manao Tupapau',
(1893–4, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) can be seen the painting
'Manao Tupapau
(The Spirit of the Dead Watching)', the print of which will also be on
display (1894, National Gallery of Canada).
Room 6 has a selection of portraits in which Gauguin used symbolic
objects, arranged into still lifes, to stand in for absent figures.
These surrogate portraits had been part of Gauguin’s repertoire from the
1880s, but this room shows how they took on increasing significance
during the isolation of his later years. They include proxy portraits of
Van Gogh, his former friend who had been dead for a decade, which
depict the blooms from sunflower seeds sent from France (such as 'Still
Life with ‘Hope’', 1901, Private collection, Milano, Italy); Gauguin may
have been the first to understand that sunflowers were Van Gogh’s
signature motif and he would be famous for them.
The final room of the exhibition will be devoted to Gauguin’s late
portraits. Despite a recurring illness and a decline in the quantity of
his output, the portrait remained essential to Gauguin’s art in his
final years on the Marquesan Island of Hiva Ooa. His use of portraits to
express his role in local politics is reflected in the form of the
wooden carved sculpture made for the home he built himself caricaturing
the local bishop, as a lecherous devil (Père Paillard, 1902, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).
His last self portrait, perhaps the
simplest and most direct of all, probably made shortly before the end of
his life, aged 55, brings the exhibition to a close
(Self Portrait,
1903, Kunstmuseum Basel).
Christopher Riopelle, The Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800
Paintings at the National Gallery, and co-curator of 'The Credit Suisse
Exhibition: Gauguin Portraits', says:
'Gauguin radically expanded the parameters of portraiture.
He understood how deeply modern art would be the expression of the
individual, idiosyncratic personality, and he realised that the portrait
must serve as the portal to rich, contradictory interior worlds. That
he found the stylistic vocabulary to evoke this complexity is the mark
of his genius.'
Dr Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, says:
“This is the first time that an exhibition focuses on
portraits by Gauguin. Never a conventional portrait painter, his
radical, highly personal vision led to the creation of a group of works
that are striking, moving and at times disturbing. Through paintings,
prints, sculptures and ceramics the exhibition explores how he defined
his own persona in his self -portraits and how he fashioned the images
of friends, lovers, and associates.”
David Mathers, CEO of Credit Suisse International, says:
“We are delighted to be supporting 'The Credit Suisse
Exhibition: Gauguin Portraits' at the National Gallery, London. This
exhibition proposes a new approach to Gauguin by looking, for the first
time, specifically at portraits inspired by those he knew intimately in
the later years of his life. His posthumous fame demonstrates the
lasting impression left on modern art by this enigmatic and talented
figure. Gauguin’s unique relationship with Vincent van Gogh and his
contribution to Symbolism during the turn of the 20th century make this a
fascinating foray into his artistic production.”
'The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Gauguin Portraits' is organised by the
National Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
The exhibition is curated by Cornelia Homburg and Christopher
Riopelle from an initial concept by Cornelia Homburg. Cornelia Homburg
is the guest curator for the National Gallery of Canada, and Christopher
Riopelle is the Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the
National Gallery, London.
