Gauguin in the World

 

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 

November 3, 2024, through February 16, 2025

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the only U.S. venue for an ambitious exhibition of the work of French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Organized by independent curator Henri Loyrette, former director of the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and leading scholar of 19th-century French painting, the exhibition offers new perspectives on Gauguin’s life and work, artistic networks and influences, and contemporary legacies, both artistic and historical. Gauguin in the World will be on view at the MFAH from November 3, 2024, through February 16, 2025. The Houston presentation follows the exhibition’s debut in Australia in June, at the National Gallery of Art, Canberra, in partnership with Art Exhibitions Australia. 

Paul Gauguin, Femmes de Tahiti 1891, oil on canvas, 69.0 x 91.5, Don Countess Vitali, 1923. © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

“Twentieth-century European and American art would never have developed in the ways that it did were it not for Gauguin,” commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “He was the key predecessor to the different strands of Modernism that developed through Picasso and Matisse, challenging what he perceived as a culture that had reached a dead end and renewing it by exploring and embracing non-Western art. Gauguin was controversial in his own time and remains so today. The scope of this exhibition, and the thoughtful, wide-ranging perspectives on Gauguin’s work offered by the catalogue’s authors, promise to illuminate the artist in all of his artistic complexity.”

Paul Gauguin, Trois tahitiens (Three Tahitians), 1899, oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, presented by Sir Alexander Maitland in memory of his wife Rosalind 1960.

“Gauguin in the World will offer an exceptional opportunity to understand the astonishing range of the artist’s achievement,” noted Ann Dumas, MFAH consulting curator for the exhibition. “Fusing influences as diverse as European Old Masters, Peruvian potters, and Egyptian tomb painters, Gauguin created not only sumptuous and richly colored paintings, but also developed entirely original methods of print making, and sculptures in wood and ceramic, dissolving conventional boundaries between art forms. His influence on avant-garde has been profound and continues in our own time.”

Paul Gauguin, Le toit blue or Ferme au Pouldu (The blue roof or Farm at Le Pouldu) 1890, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2024 with the assistance of the National Gallery Foundation

About the Exhibition 
Gauguin in the World chronicles what curator Loyrette characterizes as Gauguin’s “inner quest for elsewhere” through an expansive survey of his work, from its Impressionist beginnings in Paris, through a period of exploration to Denmark, Brittany, Provence, and Martinique, to its culmination in his last years in Oceania, where he created some of his most iconic paintings. While Gauguin in the World is a comprehensive survey of Gauguin’s prolific career, Loyrette underscores that the show’s narrative is constructed from the perspective of the artist’s last works: “When Gauguin landed in the Marquesas in September 1901, he knew that he had reached his journey’s end; he had at last found his ‘true homeland,’ the place to which he had always aspired. In the 20 months before his death, he continued to develop his art while, in his writings, he set out to review his career as a whole. This is the starting point for an exhibition that reveals that introspection and the art that preceded it, returning to the questions that haunted him as an artist—the challenges that he set himself and solved in his quest for his own identity.”

aul Gauguin, Portrait de Madeleine Bernard (Portrait of Madeleine Bernard), 1888, oil on canvas, Musée de Peinture et de Scupture, Grenoble, France. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

The exhibition will be organized across six galleries, presenting the arc of Gauguin’s career from the 1870s through his final years, with half of the exhibition devoted to Gauguin’s work in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. 

Paul Gauguin, Madam Roulin, 1888, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum.

Gauguin in the World includes 150 works of art drawn from 65 public and private collections worldwide, including: Musée d’Orsay, Paris; National Galleries of Scotland; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louvre Abu Dhabi; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; and the Musée de Tahiti et des îles, which is lending both their Gauguins and important 19th-century Marquesan sculptural works. 

Paul Gauguin, Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin, 1889, oil on canvas and panel, The Armand Hammer Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Paul Gauguin, The swineherd, 1888, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Lucille Ellis Simon and family in honour of the museum’s 25th anniversary © Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Paul Gauguin, Still life with Hope, 1901, private collection, Milan © Paolo Vandrasch

About Paul Gauguin 
Gauguin was born June 7, 1848, to a French father, a radical journalist; and French mother of Peruvian heritage. In 1851, the family left Paris following the 1848 revolutions, destined for Peru and his mother’s family there. Gauguin’s father died on the voyage. Gauguin and his sister were raised by their widowed mother in Lima, initially, then France, in Orleans and Paris. Educated at boarding schools in Orleans, Gauguin enlisted at 17 as a pilot’s assistant in the merchant marine to satisfy his military service; he then joined the French navy. After a half-dozen years at sea, he returned to Paris. At 23, he secured a stock-broker job at the French Bourse, later marrying a Danish woman and fathering five children. Financially secure and interested in art, he entered the art world as a collector and patron. After meeting Camille Pissarro in 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, the two struck up a mentor/tutor relationship, and Gauguin began to paint in his spare time. He would submit to the Impressionist exhibitions over the next eight years but achieved little success as an artist. After the collapse of the French stock market in 1882, with his income now lost, Gauguin moved his family from Paris, first to Rouen and then to Copenhagen, where his wife was able to find work. There, Gauguin had a brief, unsuccessful stint as a carpet salesman. Frustrated by his lack of artistic success, Gauguin decided to escape Europe and make a voyage to French Polynesia, where he lived and resumed painting. He returned to Paris in 1893. Two years later, disillusioned by his failed attempts to succeed as an artist, he left France, and his family, for good, and settled in French Polynesia, ultimately at Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. Following years of deteriorating health, Gauguin died on May 8, 1903, at 54. 

Organization 
This exhibition is organized by Art Exhibitions Australia; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Catalogue 

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by exhibition curator Henri Loyrette and featuring his major new essay on Gauguin, the publication will include contributions from Miriama Bono, Norma Broude, Vaiana Giraud, and Nicholas Thomas. 

• Miriama Bono, architect, painter, and director of the Musée de Tahiti et des îles, discusses Gauguin’s work in the context of the Pacific. Her essay views the exhibition as “an occasion for interrogating the posterity of Gauguin’s work among the Pacific populations, and more particularly for Tahitians and Marquesans.”  
• Norma Broude, feminist scholar and specialist in 19th-century French and Italian paintings, encourages an assessment of Gauguin in the context of the legacy of his maternal grandmother, a pioneering feminist and socialist activist, one that “will allow us to recognize the ways in which Flora Tristan’s grandson and his art were positively shaped by his family history and the evolving feminisms of his own era.”  
• Viviana Giraud, longtime official at the Maison de la Culture in Papeete, Tahiti, addresses Gauguin as a writer. “Gauguin’s writings are the least familiar part of his corpus; some were lost, some remained unpublished, and others were misunderstood or ignored. They deserve attention.”  
• Henri Loyrette, former director, Musée d’Orsay and Musée du Louvre, looks back over Gauguin’s life, work, and friendships from the vantage point of the artist’s last, ailing years in the Marquesas, weaving in and out of those key narratives to evoke Gauguin’s own experience: “Gauguin in 1902 in the Marquesas scrolls through his entire life in brief and disordered sequences, like so many freeze frames.” 
• Nicholas Thomas, Australian anthropologist and director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, England, explores the stubbornly irreconcilable facets of Gauguin’s work, from the premise that “paradoxically his art is not well known: Its heterogeneity and complexity have been obscured by the notoriety of the biography.”