NEW YORK - Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) liked attention. He wore funny clothes, said shocking things, painted gorgeous pictures and traveled halfway around the world to get it. His efforts paid off. When he died of syphilis at 54 on an island in the South Pacific, people around the world took notice, and they have been noticing him ever since.
So it's surprising to learn that "Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first major New York-area exhibition devoted to him in more than 40 years. In fact, the show is not major-major, not by blockbuster standards. More than half of the 120 pieces installed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Lehmann Wing are works on paper: drawings, many prints, a few letters. And the final product is neither a full-fledged survey nor a focused theme show.
Instead, it's a little of both. In scattershot fashion, it spans Gauguin's career, starting with a marble bust of his son, Emil, that he carved in 1877, and ending with a frantic, strung-out letter recounting a run-in with island authorities, written a month before his death. In between, along with ceramics, wood sculptures and a remarkable drawing portfolio recently acquired by the Met, are two dozen paintings, half of them among the most beautiful created by any modern artist.
About the artist
As to theme, the show is nominally about how all these objects found their way into public and private hands in New York state, but the true subject is the artist himself.
Like any monomaniac, Gauguin was in the Gauguin business, aggressively, competitively, full time. This was so when he was an aspiring bourgeois stockbroker in Paris in the 1870s, when he become a professional rebel painter in the 1880s and when, years later, he labored to orchestrate his European reputation from several oceans away.
It was a demanding job. It entailed not only creating art of extraordinary quality, but also inventing a persona with which to promote it. This entrepreneurial public role did not require that he be a nice guy, and he was not.
He declared himself a "savage" by birth because, he said, he had South American Indian blood. (He was one-eighth Peruvian.) And he dressed the part. He grew his hair long, wore swashbuckling cloaks, saucy hats and an expression - you see it in the self-portraits - of sly, intimidating disdain.
With people who had power in his life he was alternately seductive and bullying, sometimes violent. He could charm prospective dealers, but Emil carried a lifelong memory of his father hitting his mother and bloodying her face.
Gauguin espoused social justice and to some extent practiced it. But he also endlessly manipulated people - his family, his Polynesian lovers, his fellow artists - including the besotted van Gogh - to his own ends, chief among them to create art and gain fame.
Life and art
Gauguin's work is so thoroughly a vehicle for self-mythologizing that it is almost impossible not to take his life and his art as a piece, which raises complex questions about both.
The Met exhibition, with its somewhat unorthodox form, encourages questions and speculations. As organized by Colta Ives, curator in the museum's department of drawings and prints, and Susan Alyson Stein, associate curator of European paintings, it is not a monumental portrait of a career. It's more like an open notebook, an edited archive, a history in pieces. Chronologically ordered, it mixes masterpieces with memorabilia; it reveals the mechanics of an art and an intellect under construction.
Gauguin developed fast. The still-learning, largely self-taught painter of a Cezannesque still life in 1883 was, half a dozen years later, a highly individualistic artist. By then, he had claimed art as his destiny, separated from his family and begun to immerse himself in exotic environments, with a brief trip to the Caribbean and extended stays in the quaint village of Pont-Aven in Brittany, France.
He painted quite a bit in Pont-Aven. He was, it seems, fascinated by the religiosity of the peasant people and the traces of a pre-modern way of life, visually embodied in the medieval attire of local peasant women. He turned out some of his most innovative early paintings there, including The Yellow Christ (1889), which is in the Met show.
It's a puzzling, provoking picture. It presents Jesus nailed to the cross with three Breton woman in starched bonnets kneeling below. Despite the somber theme, the palette is bright: mustard gold with little red trees. The body of Christ is based on a carved 17th-century figure that hung in a chapel near Pont-Aven, but the face suggests a Gauguin self-portrait. And indeed, he would openly depict himself as Christ in later work.
Is the painting meant to convey genuine religious emotion, or is it a picturesque, primitivist fantasy, or even an inside joke, with its image of the suffering artist surrounded by adoring women? Whom did Gauguin have in mind as an audience for the work: his churchgoing Breton neighbors or sophisticated, secular Parisians? Many of his paintings raise similar questions about attitude and intention. Certainly those he painted in Tahiti do.
Heading for Eden
When he set sail for the island for the first time, in 1891, he was in the market for two things: a liberating personal Eden and a newsworthy stage from which he could pitch the next phase of his career. The Tahiti he encountered was not as glamorous as he might have hoped, with its cosmopolitan, Europeanized population and unspectacular terrain. But this did not matter. The image he sent back to Europe in painting was a coral-and mango-colored never-never land of bursting flowers, available bodies and mystical events.
The Tahitian pictures - paintings, woodcuts, drawings - are Gauguin at his inventive peak; there is nothing else like them in European art, and the Met show has some of the greatest examples. They include the heart-melting Ia Orana Maria ("Hail Mary") with its Polynesian Madonna and child; the startling vision of sexual fear titled Manao Tupapau ("Spirit of the Dead Watching"); and the enigmatic, half-abstract In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse, with its implied narrative of a mystical tryst.
Despite the perfume of fecund, organic life that these paintings exude, they are the result of studious, cut-and-paste calculation. Various aspects of their Tahitian themes are lifted from Italian Renaissance painting, East Asian Buddhist sculpture, European modernism and popular prints, as well as from the wonderful sketches from life that Gauguin constantly made, and in which this show is rich.
Even physically, the work plays with notions of naivete and sophistication. Up close, the toothy surfaces look harsh, the brushwork crude, but from just a few feet away the images have a smooth, superbly resolved graphic power. Finally, although Gauguin was ostensibly depicting religious subjects in some of these paintings, he made it known that his studio models were the teen-age Tahitian girls with whom he lived and by whom he had children - information geared to a European male art audience hungry for escapist dreams spiced with sexual titillation.
In the end, all this manipulating worked. After his death, Gauguin's paintings were avidly collected. (Eight more examples are in another show at the Met, "The Age of Impressionism: European Paintings From the Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen," seen recently at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.) Posthumously, he got the attention he had always wanted: no-goodnik or hero, he's a superstar. And we are heirs to a difficult, provoking, visionary art, which at the Met looks, often for all the wrong reasons, lustrously right.
"Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic" remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, 212- 535-7710, through Oct. 20.