What to do with a problem like Paul Gauguin? The 19th-century French master’s radical experiments with color, space, and syncretic symbolism made him a canonical artist. But today, the one that consumes the most oxygen in discussion is not “Gauguin the artist,” but “Gauguin the monster.” Purveyor of primitive fantasies, symbol of French colonialism in the Pacific, and pedophilic, syphilitic sex tourist who took in child brides as young as 13, Gauguin looms large in the public consciousness.
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The National Gallery of Australia has grappled explicitly with this legacy in the lead up to its winter blockbuster exhibition, Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao. This is Gauguin’s first major exhibition in Australia, with more than 130 of the artist’s works selected from collections around the world.
The exhibition’s curator, Henri Loyrette, former director of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée du Louvre in Paris, clearly went through a lot of heavy bureaucratic work to acquire the artworks. The exhibition represents an incredible effort and a remarkable result. For almost any other artist, the NGA would be taking an unqualified victory lap. But instead the gallery finds itself in a quandary of mixed messages, oscillating between elation, ambivalence and polemic.
Some of these messages are addressed directly to Pacific artists; a podcast accompanying the exhibition begins with the question, “What immediately comes to mind when I think of Paul Gauguin?” to which the response is: “Argh!” Across four episodes, the podcast positions Gauguin less as a figure of blind cancellation than as a productive—if deeply troubling—challenge in reckoning with historical legacies.
This is confirmed in the space that opens directly onto the Gauguin exhibition, where Gauguin’s singular narrative gives way to a dialogue in the form of artist Rosanna Raymond’s 2024 collaborative work SaVĀge K’lub: Te Paepae Aora’i – Where the Gods Cannot Be Fooled . It is a physically and symbolically impressive installation that extends to the walls of the gallery. Originally conceived in 2010, SaVĀge K’lub takes its name from the 19th-century gentlemen’s clubs in London where, as Raymond explains, “they parodied indigenous cultures.” Featuring a rich variety of Pacific works from both the NGA’s historical collection and the SaVĀge K’lub collective, the installation almost subverts your vision, transforming the space of parody into a space of celebration.
Raymond’s intervention ends where the Gauguin exhibition begins. In typical monographic exhibition style, the French artist’s name is placed heroically at the entrance to the institution and the exhibition. The exhibition’s possessive title could not be clearer: we enter “Gauguin’s world.”
The first room is filled with Gauguin’s self-portraits. In Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ (1890–91), Gauguin is depicted next to a painted portrait of Jesus. In the next work, Self-Portrait (Near Golgotha) from 1896, he is seen dressed in white robes and assuming an existential gaze, continuing his canonization. Yet it is the final painting, Self-Portrait of the Artist from 1903, produced in the year of his death, that has the most dimension and depth, despite its thin layers of paint.
Here, the white canvas and blue underpainting occasionally peek through the work’s surface, threatening to collapse the fragile painted illusion and the artist’s image. But these portraits, however diverse in their assembled configurations, ultimately unite in reproducing a worn art historical trope, presenting Gauguin as the canonical protagonist whose psychology must be contemplated and fetishized by all passersby.
In the next room Gauguin disappears, along with his loaded symbolism and obsessive chromatic experiments. Instead, we find some of his earliest works, rendered in a soft palette and impressionistic style. A few works recall Camille Pissarro: Landscape of 1873 and Apple Trees of 1879 at l’Hermitage. In both, Gauguin feels absent. While the artistic innovation in the rest of the exhibition is much more striking and obvious, it is a smart curatorial move to start with the atypical and the serious.
The following rooms take a “material turn” and foreground art-making techniques: ceramics, printmaking, and woodcarving. Here the exhibition hardly adheres to its own loudly proclaimed signpost. Half the works in the Gauguin and prints section are not prints; ceramics also occupy a relatively modest portion of the Gauguin and ceramics room. In Gauguin, woodcarving, and monotypes, I saw only three monotypes.
The process-oriented titles of the rooms are a kind of curatorial gamble. They represent a deception that keeps the gallery visitor’s mind on a much safer idea of technique and allows them to forget the man who produced the work.
The exhibition’s final two rooms turn most explicitly to Gauguin’s time in French Polynesia, and are treated with a noticeably light touch. The curatorial texts acknowledge the artist’s colonial or predatory legacies but fail to address them in any substantive way, leaving the viewer immersed in the seductiveness of Gauguin’s paintbrush. Make no mistake, his work—his 1899 masterpiece, Three Tahitians, most importantly – they draw you in with their sheer aesthetic brilliance. The problem is that in the same realm of brilliance Gauguin focused on a primitive fantasy, portraying Tahiti as a mythical land caught in a pre-modern Edenic state.
The last work I saw as I was leaving the exhibition was Gauguin’s Tahitian Woman II, from 1898.. It stops me. Not because of the quality of the painting, but because of the pose. Gauguin took the pose from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1814 orientalist painted fantasy, Grande Odalisque, and reversed it. This painting depicts a naked woman in a Middle Eastern harem.
Loaded with sexual connotations and thoughts of possessing the fantasized object otherIngres’s painting is one of the most famous works of art in the Louvre – a work that hung in the curator’s former workplace and with which he was undoubtedly intimately familiar. Yet Gauguin’s striking reference to this fantasy and its sexual politics is not noted on the nearby wall plaque, which merely provides the painting’s title and date. Here, omission takes the place of critical comment.