Can a narcissistic paedophile and rapist still be called a genius?

Your sensitive, arts-loving columnist has just foxtrotted to and through the National Gallery of Australia's just-opened Gauguin's World blockbuster with mixed, confused, unresolved feelings.

You would never know it from anything the NGA tells you at the exhibition about Gauguin the man but Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) the painter, ceramicist and sculptor was famously, while in Polynesia, often a French-colonial beast, a paedophile and rapist.

I've somehow always known this (for I am a girly swot when it comes to the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists and have read all about them) and now, with Gauguin in town and being feted by the NGA, the controversy of his brutishness is getting some new attention. See for example the piece Artist or monster? Mammoth new Gauguin show ... just published in the online The Guardian.

My homework about the Gauguin show has included reading in PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, a diagnosis of Gauguin as a classic exhibitor of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

The newsworthy Donald Trump, too, is thought by some experts to radiate NPD, to exhibit a "malignant narcissism".

NPD drives those possessed by it, PsyArt tell us, to show among other things a "grandiose sense of self-importance", and to be "interpersonally exploitative ... taking advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends".

In addition, the NPD-possessed person "has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations" and "lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognise or identify with the feelings and needs of others".

But having carried on like a pork chop here about the dilemmas raised by attending Gauguin's World, your columnist still doesn't know what to think. Not all of life's dilemmas can be resolved and the monster/genius dilemma may be one of them. Was Gauguin a monster or a genius, or was he, more probably, more bewilderingly, both of those things at the same time?

On my visit to Gauguin's World, morally copping out for 90 minutes, I chose to temporarily forgive the artist his vile trespasses (this forgiveness made easier by the NGA's shameful failure to mention in the exhibition's signage and captions anything about Gauguin's nastiness) and to just be beguiled by the artwork.

And how wonderful it is.

As well as the world-famous paintings of naked and semi-naked Polynesians, he is startlingly, originally good at everything he depicts. His snow, his breaking waves, his sunflowers, his cows (radiating an intrinsic cowness), his pigs (radiating a quintessential pigness), his geraniums, his human flesh, all say something original and convincing about those subjects.

His sunflowers effortlessly eclipse, sometimes in splendour sometimes in strangeness, van Gogh's more famous but relatively weedy sunflowers.

So many of the paintings have an unexplained object in them, an angel or a mystic dog here, a slithering lizard or an indoor companion fox there.

Then there are his depictions of himself as a tormented Jesus Christ. Can this be an expression of his aforementioned narcissism? Yes, surely it is.

Mention of Christ enables a graceful segue into the grotesque life and times of the God-fearing United States.

It's very, very difficult to think like God. What mysterious ways He moves in.

Donald Trump believes (and his disciples, who also believe Trump has been sent by God to save America, share his view) that "God alone" divinely intervened to save Trump from assassination.

But if that's so then there are some serious "please explain" questions a smart-arse rationalist like myself would like to ask God.

"Creator," I imagine myself saying as a probing journalist at a Godly press conference, respectfully taking my turn to ask my question after Michelle Grattan has asked hers, "since you are an intervening God, please explain why instead of just intervening to save Trump you didn't intervene to stop the assassination attempt in the first place?"

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"And if you're going to intervene, then why not," I continue, driven by my journalistic calling's sacred obligation to fearlessly search for the truth, "simply knock the gun out of the gunman's hands?"

"Or why not, with yet another of your critically acclaimed miracles, turn his bullets of lead into soft, rubber ones that can do no harm but only bounce off Trump's fakely suntanned face?"

"Better still," I dare to continue, expecting any moment to be turned by God into a pillar of salt (see Genesis 19) or to suffer a sudden personal infestation of lice and frogs (see Exodus 7-10) or to be withered like an accursed fig tree (see Mark 11:20-25) "why didn't you neurointervene to stop the very idea of assassinating Trump from ever even entering the gunman's mind in the first place?"

"I put it to you that you didn't intervene, and couldn't, because you don't even exist. So there!"

Here in my imagination the fanatically Christian bouncers at God's Holy Press Conference suddenly realise that an atheist (it's me) has managed to infiltrate what's supposed to be strictly believers-only Make God Great Again rally.

Roughly, with Pentecostal zeal, they pounce on me and bustle me off the premises and kick me out onto the street, leaving the probing, investigative theological questions I had asked almightily unanswered.