Martin Gayford

Pilferer, paedophile and true great: Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery reviewed

The curators tick Gauguin off for his 'colonial' and 'misogynistic' mindset – but the painter might not have disagreed with them

On 25 November 1895, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien. He described how he had bumped into his erstwhile protégé, Paul Gauguin, who had explained to him how artists in the future would ‘find salvation by replenishing themselves’ from the works of remote peoples and places. Pissarro was not convinced. Gauguin, he grumbled, was always ‘poaching’ from someone. Once it had been Pissarro and his fellow impressionists, now it was the native peoples of Oceania.

Plus ça change… Over the succeeding century and a quarter, Gauguin (1848–1903) has frequently been condemned. The magnificent new exhibition at the National Gallery, Gauguin Portraits, is a treat for the eye, full of superb loans, including not only paintings and works on paper, but wildly inventive sculpture in wood and clay too.

Nonetheless, there is an accompanying tone of criticism to which not all famous dead artists would be subject. Even the authors of catalogue essays and wall texts feel obliged to tick him off. Gauguin’s self-portraits, of which there is a superb selection in the opening room, one reads in the catalogue, are ‘self-promotion’, advertisements for himself.

Beside the door of the room devoted to the works of his first period in Tahiti, wonderfully rich and strange in colour, one reads that ‘in Gauguin’s day, European colonial and misogynistic fantasies about Polynesian women were widespread’. But the artist ‘did more than most in acting these out’. He exploited his position as a westerner to ‘make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him’.

It’s all true, and it’s also the case that the views of Gauguin’s various teenaged brides are not recorded (there is, though, a photograph of his Polynesian descendants standing by his grave in the Marquesas). What’s more, Gauguin himself might well have agreed with much of the censure.

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