We do need to talk about Paul Gauguin. But haven't we been talking about him all along?
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The French artist, who died in 1903, is one of the world's most famous painters.
His works are considered seminal to the Impressionist movement, prized by public and private collectors, and are endlessly reproduced.
![Paul Gauguin, Three Tahitians (Trois Tahitiens), 1899. Pictures supplied by the National Gallery of Australia Paul Gauguin, Three Tahitians (Trois Tahitiens), 1899. Pictures supplied by the National Gallery of Australia](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/24cef963-e025-4773-81ab-b82ec3b87e87.jpeg/r0_0_5000_2811_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
And they left a significant imprint on the islands he visited, and on which he spent his final years. Parts of Polynesian culture are inextricably linked with his portrayals of late 19th-century island life.
But the details of his personal life are deeply controversial - he could be well and truly cancelled by today's standards, thanks to his relationships with his Polynesian muses.
The beautiful, brown-skinned girls in his most famous works are young and impressionable - he married and impregnated three of them, while his wife and children languished in Europe.
It's fair to say Gauguin has a significant ick factor, one that's been hanging around for at least the last 50 years, when his reputation was reframed and reassessed. The ick lives on; Gauguin is officially problematic.
This hasn't stopped his luminous Impressionist works taking prized places in the world's great galleries, with prints adorning t-shirts and living room walls, posters advertising tourism in the Pacific region and now, a swish selection of merchandise at the National Gallery of Australia.
The Aussie penchant
It's a year like any other when a big fancy exhibition of European paintings opens at an Australian gallery.
And if the paintings are French, then all the better.
![Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Madeleine Bernard, 1888. Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Madeleine Bernard, 1888.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/1b740bbf-ea2f-408c-8470-6b6bb55711c9.jpeg/r0_0_5000_5882_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Australian audiences, and especially those who frequent the major state galleries, have a well-documented penchant for all things French, and the National Gallery of Australia has been delivering crowd-pleasers of the Francophone variety almost since it opened 40 years ago.
And when it comes to one of the great Impressionists, Paul Gauguin, a major show of his work should be a no-brainer, shouldn't it?
Like all public institutions worth their salt, "Problematic Man, Problematic Artwork" alarm bells function like siren calls to those tasked with bringing together a show like this, and the NGA has certainly risen to the occasion.
Gauguin's world
Billed as a "return" of Gauguin's works to the Moana/Pacific region, Gauguin's World: Tona Iho, Tona Ao is an invitation to place the painter's works into the contemporary cultural landscape.
It's presented alongside an exhibition led by New Zealand artist, poet and cultural commentator Rosanna Raymond, SaVAge K'lub, exploring ideas of hospitality, culture and identity. By elevating voices of the Pacific, the familiar Tahitian figures next door become part of a continual culture.
![Paul Gauguin, Still life with Hope, 1901. Paul Gauguin, Still life with Hope, 1901.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/8d18f3a5-c82b-49db-8f24-9619b785be68.jpeg/r0_45_5000_4232_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Those girls, those richly coloured and highly symbolic scenes that sprang partly from reality, and partly from the artist's wistful imagination, are not powerless, no longer mere tropes.
"We're a big mix," says Raymond.
"It was really important to show that this is a living, breathing culture, and just look at it just from one particular lens. It's great to have a platform to go look, it's wild and colourful, and it's angry, and it's heavy, and it's creative."
The Gauguin exhibition has been five years in the making, and involves loans from 65 different public and private collections; it's been a logistical feat to bring it together, and gallery director Nick Mitzevich says it's the NGA's most ambitious show to date, in terms of the work involved to bring it into a coherent narrative.
Raymond admires the risk involved - not just in terms of dozens of priceless artworks making their way down to Canberra, but also the Problematic Man factor.
"I actually thought it was brave for them to take on Gauguin, especially in light of a lot of the binary thinking - bad guy, good art," she says.
"But it's so much more complex than that ... He's a complex man."
The show she has curated also demonstrates a continuing creative culture that really has nothing to do with Gauguin at all, a reminder of how Pacific culture has endured beyond Eurocentric imagery.
"We're not all interested in him. He's definitely taken up enough space. But it's great that through his sort of space-taking, it's allowed us to have a space - turn it into a positive rather than just that binary."
Bad man, good art?
Of course, you can also simply wander through the exhibition, savour the beauty of Gauguin's works, and enjoy them for art's sake.
Art should be allowed to be uncomplicated, or enjoyed on a surface level. In many ways, Gauguin changed the course of art history; he broke all the rules of colour and perspective, and would go on to influence generations of artists.
![Paul Gauguin, Parau na te varua ino (Words of the devil), 1892. Paul Gauguin, Parau na te varua ino (Words of the devil), 1892.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/96a316a6-08f8-4636-b0cf-030b2d32bd42.jpeg/r0_0_5000_6738_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
But good art can and should make you uncomfortable, make you question what you're seeing, your role as a viewer, the role of history and social mores and artistic impulse in the creation of works that have endured for more than a century.
Back in 2011, Betty Churcher, the late, great former director of the National Gallery of Australia, stood before a classic Gauguin nude in the Courtauld Galleries in London, and felt as conflicted as ever.
Gauguin's Nevermore (not featured in the NGA show) was one that she admitted provoked some complicated feelings - a young Tahitian woman reclining on a bed, dark hair curling onto a yellow pillow.
The work, like all Gauguin's works, is sensuous and rich in colour and symbolism, but if you stand still for a moment and look closer, you might notice her toes curling upwards in discomfort, her eyes sliding sideways, her uncomfortable posture. She's tense and wary, and it has nothing to do with the bird or the people in the background, which we know from his letters to his dealer were added to the canvas later.
"So in reality, she's not distracted by her environment," Churcher wrote. "It's clear that her anxiety can only relate to the unkempt, elderly Frenchman painting at his easel."
This is, then, bad behaviour in plain sight, if you know what to look for. But Churcher was still enamoured enough of the work itself to revisit it in the last years of her art-crammed life.
It's the mixed feelings we should all be permitted to feel when we wander through Gauguin's world.
The problematic man
Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin had a privileged upbringing in Peru and France, and worked for a time as a stockbroker. He painted in his spare time, and when the financial crisis of 1882 hit, he decided on a full career change, turning to art full time.
![Paul Gauguin, Portrait of the artist with The yellow Christ (Portrait de lartiste au Christ jaune), 1890-91. Paul Gauguin, Portrait of the artist with The yellow Christ (Portrait de lartiste au Christ jaune), 1890-91.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/bbccc379-5b37-4e05-922c-870b9ee522ae.jpeg/r0_0_5000_4154_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
He travelled extensively - to Denmark, Panama, the French colony of Martinique - and had mentors, including Camille Pissaro. He moved in artistic circles, but he was largely self-taught. This is one factor to consider when you take in his delicate landscapes, his unusual still lifes and unconventional self-portraits. You can trace his trajectory as an artist, and see the patterns emerging, as the show takes in his entire career.
Curator Henri Loyrette, former director of both the Louvre and the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, says the exhibition is designed to show Gauguin's artistic trajectory in a different light - with his final self-portrait a reminder of how far he journeyed into his own soul.
"Presenting such an exhibition here in the Pacific, where Gauguin's life was finally quenched after his long Odyssean wanderings, inevitably bestows a special resonance," he says.
For Loyrette, Gauguin's personal life is integral to his artistic journey.
It's art, so bring it on
![We can still enjoy just looking at the works. Picture by Sitthixay Ditthavong We can still enjoy just looking at the works. Picture by Sitthixay Ditthavong](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/9feb7520-5457-410a-ab86-ee7f42722976.jpg/r1343_542_4923_2744_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
But, as Mitzevich points out, Gauguin was hardly unique in the time he was working in.
"Artists that have problematic individual histories are actually ubiquitous throughout history," he said.
"Our job today is about widening the discussion about the works rather than narrowing them. And today, we have more information. The fact that information is so easily accessible, and shareable, means that we know lots more about every subject.
"And so that puts the responsibility on a public collection like ours, to have a wider discussion.
"It actually makes the exploration of art history fascinating, because we evolve history all the time, and we add new things.
"And so this exhibition, in partnership with the Pacific project that we're working on, and also the displays of our own permanent collection, just gives people a more rounded view of things."
- Gauguin's World: Tona Iho, Tona Ao is showing at the National Gallery of Australia until October 7. nga.gov.au