Monday, Apr. 12, 1954
GAUGUIN IN TEXAS
IN his rambling Intimate Journals, Peter Paul Gauguin jotted down a bit of dialogue with himself:
How much does society owe me? A great deal too much. Will it ever pay? Never!
Never in his own lifetime did society pay Gauguin the honor, fame or fortune due a great artist; but in the years since he died in poverty on a South Pacific island, the world has paid his memory handsomely in the hard coin of lasting esteem. Last week society made another payment on its debt to Gauguin: in bustling Houston, Texas, an impressive show of Gauguin's work was drawing record crowds.
Assembled in Houston's Museum of Fine Arts were 34 oils and 9 watercolors, drawings and prints, gathered from U.S. collections and the Louvre by Director Lee H. B. Malone. Starting with the premise that Gauguin "builds a bridge . . . between the past and the future," Malone arranged his paintings to demonstrate the influences that worked on Gauguin--Japanese prints, Persian miniatures, Cambodian sculpture--and the influence that Gauguin had on his contemporaries and succeeding generations of painters. Gauguin's Caribbean Woman with Sunflowers was hung next to a 14th century B.C. Egyptian painting of the style from which Gauguin's picture was clearly derived; a Gauguin drawing was placed next to a statuette by Maillol, who got his inspiration from the Gauguin sketch.
Two of the best paintings in Houston's show are those reproduced in color on the next two pages. They were both painted in the last years of Gauguin's life, after he had returned to his Pacific islands for the last time. The White Horse, full of the liquid dreaminess of Tahiti, shows none of the personal torment which plagued Gauguin at the time he painted it; no one would suspect that the artist had just failed in an attempt at suicide by drinking arsenic, afterwards scribbling in a bitter letter to a friend: "I am condemned to live, although I have lost all my moral reasons for living." The Call was done after Gauguin abandoned Tahiti for Hivaoa in the Marquesas Islands where, although racked with disease, he found "everything which a simple artist could wish." The picture has all the vitality and lushness for which Gauguin is famous, and is imbued with his admiration of the island women, of whom he wrote: "These nymphs--I want to perpetuate them, with their golden skins, their searching animal odor, their tropical savors."
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