I live with a Gauguin. It’s on the cover of my 1984 paperback copy of the novel Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje. It’s propped up on a bookcase and I look at it almost every day. The painting is called Paysage. I like the colours and the free sketchiness of this watercolour, which shows a view of trees and includes a person standing under one in the middle distance. As a picture of a place and a sensation, it is not so different from the view through my windows into my rewilding garden.
The painting appears in the new Paul Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in the video footage of the turning pages of the manuscript of his book Noa Noa. It’s alive in the way that Gauguin’s best works are alive. Cadmium red, orange, yellow and green were his most loved colours. Particularly the red that leans towards a pink. Or the red you see when your eyes are closed and you face the sun. This colour comes to the work as an emotion, a dissolving of words and description into feeling.
The hero image for the 2024 National Photographic Portrait Prize, which is showing at the National Portrait Gallery at the same time as the NGA’s Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, is a calm and funny photograph titled Fragility, by Southern Kaantju/Umpila artist Naomi Hobson. It’s of her cousin Micky, a handsome Aboriginal man, grimacing because he has a huge bug on his face. He is not afraid or angry: he is about to carefully lift it off. As it pops up all over Canberra, this photo can be seen as somehow inadvertently talking back to Gauguin, a pest with whom we must co-exist.
Do we need to talk about colonisation, about French hegemony in the Pacific? Hegemony – that sounds so Greek. What about the Latinate word – domination? What is happening in New Caledonia right now? How dare the French treat the Kanak people the way they do? Decolonisation and the aftermaths of colonisation still swirl around the world – from pending reparations in Barbados and in Australia, to independence movements in Polynesia and Bougainville, to the repatriation of objects, to lost cultures that were not lost and languages that are being reclaimed.
Writing back to the empire, talking back, taking back and simply demonstrating lack of submission are strong and impressive parts of the installation and framing of the Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao exhibition.
The SaVĀge K’lub, orchestrated by artist and curator Rosanna Raymond, is a Pasifika peoples’ prelude to the exhibition. Raymond’s installation, a rethinking of the Savage Club – a historic gentlemen’s club named after the poet Richard Savage – is an evolving work that first appeared in 2010 in Canada and notably at the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane in 2015.
SaVĀge K’lub: Te Paepae Aora’i – Where the Gods Cannot Be Fooled includes historic pieces of Pasifika art from the NGA collection and work by 36 contemporary Pasifika artists. It emphasises the importance of hospitality, sitting down together, listening, conversation, relationship, humour, community, traditions – old and new, resistance and resilience. It brings together pieces of the culture in the form of fabric, photographs and paintings, energy and stories, customs and clothing, and casts off the stories of victimhood that look back to Lost Paradises.
Even before the visitor gets to the K’lub they will see hanging on the wall to their left an exuberant photograph by Samoan New Zealander Greg Semu – Auto portrait with 12 disciples (2010) – an evocation of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Last Supper made with Kanak people. Opposite the SaVĀge K’lub, as you continue towards the Gauguin show, is Yuki Kihara’s large photograph Fonofono o le Nuanua: Patches of the Rainbow (after Gauguin) (2020), which powerfully re-creates Gauguin’s famous valedictory painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? with third-gender fa‘afafine playing all the roles. Kihara’s work is, in her words, “repurposing and upcycling” Gauguin and drawing attention to ongoing inequalities and environmental damage in the Pacific.
Further thoughtful framing of Gauguin is present in the variety of Pasifika reactions to him recorded in the podcast interviews on the NGA website. They range from analysis, to lack of interest, to a huge distaste.
On finally reaching Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao – an exhibition of more than 140 works from 65 lenders across the globe that includes ceramics and woodcarvings as well as paintings and many prints – my first sensation was of entering a piece of Europe. This is because most of the paintings are framed in gold, with all the associations of complacent authority and pedigrees that they bring with them across the sea.
Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, translated as “his world, himself”, draws attention to Gauguin’s frequent use of the Polynesian language. Gauguin titled many artworks with Polynesian words and included them on his canvases and woodcuts. The openness of that language in its use of vowels – As and Os – suggests an oceanic spaciousness of being and thinking.
Three notable self-portraits are shown in the first of seven galleries of Gauguin’s work. The first is a proud and piercing self-portrait (1890-91) with a strong hooked nose in which his eyes engage challengingly with the viewer in front of his work The Yellow Christ. In Self-Portrait (Near Golgotha) (1896), he looks dissolute, desperate and unwell. The third self-portrait (1903) shows him looking mild, with quite an ordinary nose and glasses – and frankly a lot like the musician and songwriter Paul Simon. This final portrait has a valedictory air. I saw it for the first time in Basel where it usually lives. And I remember thinking at the time – Ah, so he had doubts too.
The curator of this rich and thoughtful exhibition, the French art historian and former director of the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Henri Loyrette, has a somewhat disarming romantic passion for Gauguin and his complexity. He asserts that the artist was making his work for a Paris audience and market. Yet Gauguin clearly wanted to leave that narrow world to find more powerful things. Gauguin’s best works, whether paintings or prints, remind me of Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz, Emil Nolde and Paula Modersohn-Becker and their emotional, expressionist engagement with the divine comedy and tragedy of human existence.
Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao includes three striking portraits of Parisian friends of Gauguin. Two are paintings – one of Fritz Schneklud playing the cello, one of a flirty Madeleine Bernard – and the third is a terrific etching of poet Stéphane Mallarmé with a bird on his shoulder. It is easy to imagine Gauguin having a substantial career in Paris with this sort of work. It shows a great gift for portraiture.
He carried this insight and empathy to his images of Polynesian women, which are portraits of individuals, not generic types. Gauguin’s paintings of Polynesian women aren’t lascivious: rather they convey immense dignity, self-possession, power and autonomy. To my eyes, the sense of an inviolate inner life within the women is strongly present.
The harsh necessity of self-promotion for the artist, then and now, comes across very strongly in Gauguin’s life. It wasn’t until near the end that a small stipend from his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, enabled him to experience a stable income. The year before he died Gauguin wanted to go back to France but was told in 1902 by his friend and supporter George-Daniel de Monfreid: “You should not return … You are already as unassailable as all the great dead; you already belong to the history of art.”
This exhibition reveals the ongoing power of being collected and shown but also the possibility of sharing that power to circulate other stories and other ways. It was excellent to hear music from the SaVĀge K’lub infiltrating the end of the Gauguin show and creeping through the gift shop. If Gauguin were present, I think he might have been sitting out there in the K’lub, observing and communing with the Pasifika spirits. Though he might want to be in disguise.
Stephanie Radok travelled to Canberra with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia.
Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao and SaVĀge K’lub: Te Paepae Aora’i – Where the Gods Cannot Be Fooled are showing at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until October 7.
ARTS DIARY
CINEMA The 7th Taiwan Film Festival
Event Cinemas, Gadigal Country/Sydney, July 25–September 14
INSTALLATION Lightscape
Royal Botanic Gardens, Naarm/Melbourne, until August 4
LITERATURE Perth Comic Arts Festival
State Library of Western Australia, Whadjuk Noongar Country/Perth, July 27-28
EXHIIBTION Reimagining the Renaissance
Art Gallery of South Australia, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, until April 13
CULTURE Riding the Olympic Wave: Breakthrough Sports
National Museum of Australia, Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country/Canberra, until September 30
LAST CHANCE
THEATRE Counting and Cracking
Carriageworks, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until July 21
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
July 17, 2024 as “Framing Gauguin”.
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