Yes, this is the question that one can hear in the National Gallery in London audio guide when approaching the paintings of the great French painter. Why has Paul Gauguin became so displeased that even highly respected media in the world (including The New York Times dated 11/18/2019) have decided to publish reports about “Gauguin Portraits” exhibition?
“Tehamana Has Many Parents” (1893) by Paul Gauguin, an outstanding work in the exhibition “Gauguin’s Portraits” at the National Gallery in London. It pictures Tehura, Gauguin’s teenage wife. The wall annotation, accompanying the portrait, mentions that the artist “repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls, ‘marrying’ two of them and fathering children… Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him.”
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) spent his early years in Peru before the family returned to France. He began painting in his 20s, but later he started to make art full time. He set sail for Tahiti in 1891, searching for the exotic surroundings he had known in Peru during his childhood. Gauguin spent most of the 12 remaining years of his life in Polinesia producing most of his best-known paintings there.
There Gauguin married Tehura. Amazingly, this young girl became the muse of a 43-year-old painter and the model for his best works. In addition, Tehura knew local traditions very well and told them to Gauguin, thereby providing the artist with a huge material for imagination and creativity. In 1893, Gauguin in Paris painted this picture, yearning for his young pregnant wife. When, two years later, he returned to Tahiti, Tehura had already married a local resident, and his son grew up in the family of islanders. By the way, other Polymesian “passions” of Gauguin did not provide such inspiration for the artist’s work.
One may claim that Gauguin’s personal life was, to put it mildly, immoral, however, in those days there was nothing criminal in his behavior. Indeed, he married teenage girls and they gave birth to his children. But how does his personal life relate his brilliant paintings?
Yes, it does… And the museum professionals and art critics have immediately taken two opposite sides. Ashley Remer, a New Zealand-based American curator who in 2009 founded girlmuseum.org, an online museum focused on the representation of young girls in history and culture, said: “He (Gauguin) was an arrogant, overrated, patronizing pedophile”. Moreover, she insists that in Gauguin’s case the man’s actions were so egregious that they overshadowed the work. The American painter Kehinde Wiley, who described Gauguin as his “creepy” idol, points out “black and brown bodies from the Pacific” are shot through Gauiguin’s sense of desire. “To ensure that Gauguin’s artistic legacy is not besmirched by his marriages to underage girls, these relationships should be covered in exhibitions,” said Line Clausen Pedersen, a Danish curator of several Gauguin’s exhibitions. “What’s left to say about Gauguin is for us to bring out all the dirty stuff.”
However, there are other opinions. ““The person, I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work,” said Vicente Todolí, the artistic director of the Pirelli HangarBicocca art foundation in Milan. “Once an artist creates something, it doesn’t belong to the artist anymore: It belongs to the world…”
Now I want to remind our visitors of several recent stories.
In January 2018, Leo Muscato presented in Florence an unusual version of the famous opera by Georges Bizet “Carmen” with a completely changed ending: the story is not finished with the death of the gypsy. ‘At a time when our society has to confront the murder of women, how can we dare to applaud the killing of a woman?’ says Cristiano Chiarot, head of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale. In the same article, Le Figaro proudly stated that the director Muscato took revenge on a 143-year-old story.
At the same time (January 2018), the National Gallery of Art in Washington abolished the retrospective of portrait artist Chuck Close due to allegations of sexual harassment. Then there was a widespread petition calling for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to remove or at least contextualize the paintings of the mid-20th century Polish artist Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola). All these done in view of the public attacks on Pablo Picasso’s art – of course, not because of his genius works, but because of the scandalous (as the protesters consider) statements made by him many years ago. What does artistic value have to do with it? Unclear.
I think that it is not possible to evaluate if a particular behavior is accepted or not without the temporal and cultural contexts. Even if we dislike the author’s behavior, it is impossible to transfer the attitude to his work. However, the moral warriors in modern society completely ignore this obvious fact. And the silent majority, who calmly accept the censorship of Gauguin’s works because of his immoral behavior, should consider the possible consequences. Taking this path, our society condemns itself to the rejection of the works of Vrubel, Chagall, and, of course, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Nabokov, Hemingway and many others. We will become narrow-minded and will cease to perceive the new, becoming less thinking and more aggressive. The next stage would be burning books and heretics in the city squares. Are you sure that we want any of this?
On this topic, we have two questions for discussion:
- When, for the sake of strange trends, will we stop destroying the golden fund of world culture?
- Who is next? The first question is totally hypothetical, but the second one is real enough.
In order not to end the post with such a sad issue, I would like to share few ideas for our future discussions. If we try to analyze the above stories in more depth, we will come to almost philosophical questions about the roles of women and men, as well as the gender relationships in our complicate world. Since our site has a popular science orientation, we will try to discuss these issues from scientific point of view. For a moment, let’s put aside the important questions that the Feminism movement raises. I propose to discuss the question of the biological significance of male and female.
May our civilization develop in one-sex mode (especially, considering cloning and other achievements of genetics)?
How our world will look like if men and women will live their lives in total separation (as, for example, mythological Amazons did)?
Do matriarchy and patriarchy have a biological basis, and are there any examples of such societies in the animal kingdom?
In my opinion, these questions are quite interesting. Do you agree?
Featured image: Tehamana Has Many Parents, Paul Gauguin.