Word: gauguins
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...Gauguin's achievement has always been hard to assess because so much of his late work, done between his final departure from France in 1895 and his death on the tiny, remote island of Hivaoa in 1903, was bought en bloc by Russian collectors, ended up in the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum, and has not been seen in the West since 1906. The show contains eleven of these "Russian" Gauguins...
...last one sees the work whole -- more than 240 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and ceramics, the outpouring of a protean talent who influenced the course of modern painting more than anyone except Cezanne. One may be half prepared for Gauguin's impact on younger artists after 1900, but to see it in the paint (and the wood) is another matter. Where does that peculiar, dense, purply brown shading of Picasso's early work come from but the bodies of Gauguin's Tahitians? Most of early Matisse seems present in the twining lines and harsh dissonances of red, yellow and green...
...Gauguin is a legendary figure, with all the accretions that entails. His legend was helped by other people's fictions, though Gauguin's own existential posturings as hero, Christ-martyr, magus, savage and artist-criminal lay at its root. For many, the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is still the "real" Gauguin -- a stockbroker and Sunday painter who cracks out of the bourgeois egg, dumps his wife, family and career and hightails it to Tahiti to "find himself" among the breasts and breadfruit. He is part brute and part escape artist, the Houdini of the avant...
Such an image of Gauguin, as Stuckey and Brettell show by exhaustive research, is mostly moonshine. The brute of fiction was not only a superbly intelligent painter but also a writer who left, as Brettell points out, the "largest and most important body of texts, illustrated and otherwise, produced by any great artist in France since . . . Delacroix . . . That he has always been treated as a businessman-turned-artist rather than an artist- turned-writer shows the extent to which his literary achievement has been undervalued...
...this show vividly proves, Gauguin was an artist of extraordinary powers long before he sailed to the South Seas from Marseilles in 1891. By then, most of the basic obsessions of his work were in place: he had already "found himself" in Brittany, presiding over a small colony of lesser artists like Maurice Denis and Jacob Meyer de Haan, amid the ritual dolmens and the stolid squinting peasants -- an exotic tribe with its own language and religious customs, an enclave that seemed closer to the earth than the rest of France...