Word: gauguins
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...PAUL GAUGUIN, Art Institute of Chicago. Two major attractions in one: a revelatory retrospective that shows Gauguin whole for the first time, housed in the top floor of the institute's new Rice Building. Through...
Whatever else may be wrong with the late American art industry, we are living in the golden age of the retrospective exhibition. One by one, the great artists of the 19th century have been done over the past decade: Cezanne, Manet, Courbet, Van Gogh, Gauguin -- and now Edgar Degas. We may deplore the crowds at these shows, the souvenir selling, the social circus and the TeleTron tickets at up to $7.75 apiece, an outrageous tax on knowledge. Earplugs -- preferably not attached to Acoustiguide gadgets -- and yogic detachment are needed. There are, as crusty old Degas said, some kinds of success...
...early work is just as surprising as anything in his Tahitian years. By 1880 the Sunday painter in his 30s had become a tardy impressionist, imitating Pissarro's landscapes and Mary Cassatt's moppets. After ten years of work in Paris, Brittany and with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin was making his first real masterpieces, like The Ham, 1889, a still life that pays homage to Cezanne and Manet while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness, and Yellow Christ, 1889, with its startling extremes of yellow and orange. This painting of peasants adoring a wayside crucifix was also, perhaps...
Always in the art world, as in a madhouse, there are bad painters who obstreperously claim to be prophets. Gauguin was that discomfiting figure, a great artist with little modesty who made good on strident prophetic claims. He saw himself as both Christ and savage, sacrificial lamb and initiator of cultural mayhem. The whole tangle of the "primitive," so basic to early modernism, begins with Gauguin -- not in Tahiti but in Brittany, "savage and primitive," he wrote, where "the flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting...
...ambitions were Wagnerian. Gauguin thought in terms of large didactic and decorative cycles. He dreamed of making a "total" work of art subsuming architecture, painting and sculpture -- hence the "Studio of the South Seas" that he set up in rue Vercingetorix in Paris after he got back from his first Pacific sojourn in 1893, and the "House of Pleasure," with its lewd carvings and mottoes, that he built in the Marquesas. Tahitian myth was as literal a gift from the gods to him as Valhalla had been to Wagner. Gauguin was no anthropologist but a romantic looking for pity...