HOUSTON, TX.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is the only U.S. venue for an ambitious exhibition of the work of French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Organized by independent curator Henri Loyrette, former director of the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and leading scholar of 19th-century French painting, the exhibition offers new perspectives on Gauguin’s life and work, his artistic networks and influences and his contemporary legacies, both artistic and historical.
Gauguin in the World is on view at the MFAH from November 3, 2024 through February 16, 2025. The Houston presentation follows the exhibition’s debut in Australia in June, at the National Gallery of Art, Canberra, in partnership with Art Exhibitions Australia.
“20th-century European and American art would never have developed in the ways that it did were it not for Gauguin,” commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “He was the key predecessor to the different strands of modernism that developed through Picasso and Matisse, challenging what he perceived as a culture that had reached a dead end and renewing it by exploring and embracing non-Western art. Gauguin was controversial in his own time and remains so today. The scope of this exhibition, and the thoughtful, wide- ranging perspectives on Gauguin’s work offered by the catalogue’s authors, promise to illuminate the artist in all of his artistic complexity.”
“Gauguin in the World will offer an exceptional opportunity to understand the astonishing range of the artist’s achievement,” noted Ann Dumas, MFAH consulting curator for the exhibition. “Fusing influences as diverse as European Old Masters, Peruvian potters and Egyptian tomb painters, Gauguin created not only sumptuous and richly colored paintings, but also developed entirely original methods of print making, and sculptures in wood and ceramic, dissolving conventional boundaries between art forms. His influence on avant-garde has been profound and continues in our own time.”
Gauguin in the World chronicles what curator Loyrette characterizes as Gauguin’s “inner quest for elsewhere” through an expansive survey of his work, from its Impressionist beginnings in Paris, through a period of exploration to Denmark, Brittany, Provence and Martinique, to its culmination in his last years in Oceania, where he created some of his most iconic paintings. While Gauguin in the World is a comprehensive survey of Gauguin’s prolific career, Loyrette underscores that the show’s narrative is constructed from the perspective of the artist’s last works: “When Gauguin landed in the Marquesas in September 1901, he knew that he had reached his journey’s end; he had at last found his ‘true homeland,’ the place to which he had always aspired. In the twenty months before his death, he continued to develop his art while, in his writings, he set out to review his career as a whole. This is the starting point for an exhibition that reveals that introspection and the art that preceded it, returning to the questions that haunted him as an artist – the challenges that he set himself and solved in his quest for his own identity.”
The exhibition has been 1870s through his final years, with half of the exhibition devoted to Gauguin’s work in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands.
Gauguin in the World includes 150 works of art drawn from 65 public and private collections worldwide, including: Musée d'Orsay, Paris; National Galleries of Scotland; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louvre Abu Dhabi; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; and the Musée de Tahiti et des îles, which is lending both their Gauguins and important 19th-century Marquesan sculptural works.
Gauguin was born June 7, 1848, to a French father, a radical journalist, and French mother of Peruvian heritage. In 1851, the family left Paris following the 1848 revolutions, destined for Peru and his mother’s family there. Gauguin’s father died on the voyage. Gauguin and his sister were raised by their widowed mother in Lima, initially, then France, in Orleans and Paris. Educated at boarding schools in Orleans, Gauguin enlisted at 17 as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine to satisfy his military service; he then joined the French navy.
After a half-dozen years at sea, he returned to Paris. At 23, he secured a stock broker job at the French Bourse, later marrying a Danish woman and fathering five children.
Financially secure and interested in art, he entered the art world as a collector and patron. After meeting Camille Pissarro in 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, the two struck up a mentor/tutor relationship, and Gauguin began to paint in his spare time. He would submit to the Impressionist exhibitions over the next eight years but achieved little success as an artist. After the collapse of the French stock market in 1882, with his income now lost, Gauguin moved his family from Paris, first to Rouen and then to Copenhagen, where his wife was able to find work. There, Gauguin had a brief, unsuccessful stint as a carpet salesman. Frustrated by his lack of artistic success, Gauguin decided to escape Europe and make a voyage to French Polynesia, where he lived and resumed painting. He returned to Paris in 1893. Two years later, disillusioned by his failed attempts to succeed as an artist, he left France, and his family, for good, and settled in French Polynesia, ultimately at Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. Following years of deteriorating health, Gauguin died on May 8, 1903, at 54.
