Gauguin’s Tate show is a record-breaker before it even opens

5 April 2012

The new blockbuster show on the flamboyant artist Paul Gauguin has broken records for advance box office sales at Tate Modern.

The exhibition, the first featuring the artist in London for more than half a century, is already proving the most popular in its history, beating recent hits such as Rothko and past successes like Matisse-Picasso.

Some timed slots have already sold out and a spokeswoman warned that people turning up at busy times should expect to wait.

But when they get in they will be able to see more than 100 works from an artist hailed as one of the most influential and celebrated of the late 19th century.

The show includes some works from Russia, such as The Ford (The Flight), 1901, from the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Art in Moscow, which have never been shown before in Britain.

All four of his great religious paintings — Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), The Yellow Christ, Breton Calvary (The Green Christ) and Christ in the Garden of Olives — from 1888 to 1889 have been hung together for the first time.

There are also writings including a letter from Gauguin to his wife Mette which shows that even late in his career he remained in touch, despite his new life in Tahiti.

Co-curator Belinda Thomson said the image of the romantic bohemian who fled European civilisation for self-imposed exile in Tahiti was what had captured the public imagination. But she hoped people would look beyond that to the works.

"There is nothing slapdash or unnecessary in his paintings. Everything counts. That is what I find really fascinating."

Gauguin: Maker of Myth, sponsored by Bank of America Merrill Lynch with others, opens on Thursday and runs until January 16, 2011.

A pity curators talk to each other rather than the public
By Brian Sewell

"Beyond the mythical Gauguin was a man who not only took to painting because, like Van Gogh, he had to', who in the absence of conventional training struggled for years to make himself proficient, but who believed that an artist must be intelligent, a man whose brain is superior to his eye — and it was indeed his fierce intelligence that compelled him to reject the whimsical responses of the Impressionists to the thing seen, be it landscape portrait or still life, and instead subject them to analysis and impose his maturing style.

All this is evident to those who already know something of Gauguin, but to those who do not, this exhibition may be disappointing. Gauguin's paintings cry out for daylight but in Tate Modern this is not allowed and we must see them in ill-judged artificial light. The exhibition rooms contribute to a measure of disorder and confusion. I doubt if many visitors unaware of the clear stages of Gauguin's development will leave comprehensively informed — this is yet another example of curators talking to curators instead of to a public willing and anxious to learn."

Brian Sewell's full review appears in Thursday's Evening Standard.

What the rest of the press is saying

Michael Glover, The Independent
"By turning the mysteries of Gauguin into an extended exercise in storytelling, Tate Modern has distastefully pandered to an appetite for prurience, and done the reputation of Gauguin the painter a disservice. By talking him through so thoroughly, they have partially succeeded in talking him out

"Once, when Gauguin first made an impact upon the British public soon after the turn of the 20th century, he was hailed for his experimentations as a painter; for his luxurious, non-naturalistic way with colour; for his decorative patterning in the Japanese manner; for flattening the picture plane in such a way as to suggest a kind of dreamy, timeless simultaneity. This exhibition manages almost to sideline those genuine reasons for admiring him."

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times
"It's the show of the season — in fact of the whole year The exhibition looks at Gauguin from the wider perspective that pretty greetings cards reproductions can never accommodate. It includes watercolours, ceramics, carvings, letters and sketchbooks and his decorated portfolio. These reveal rare insights into the working processes of the artist and the development of a unique iconography."

Adrian Searle, The Guardian
"Gauguin: Maker of Myth rescues the artist from his reputation as the amoral, dissolute monster of trashy biopics, and gives us instead a Gauguin for our time

"He personifies the idea that the artist is as much an invention as the art itself. Beginning with portraits, this exhibition shows us that his self-invention was of a piece with his painting and sculpture

"Gauguin has been both championed and reviled by art history, by feminism and critiques of colonialism. He's guilty as charged As Belinda Thomson makes clear in her excellent Tate catalogue essay, in looking at his work, what we have to overcome, first of all, is the embarrassment of Gauguin's life and personality. Self-promotion and self-invention are inextricable from the art itself. Thomson shows us an artist, both outsider and careerist, who is a bit dodgy in a way that anyone acquainted
with today's art world would recognise."

Richard Dorment, The Telegraph
"It is the huge achievement of Tate Modern's Gauguin: Maker of Myth that it tells us something new about this colossus, something both biography and modernist formal analysis of his paintings tend to ignore: that in addition to being a stylistic innovator, he was a story-teller of genius, a weaver of intimate psychological dramas that get under the skin and delve into the minds of his subjects. He used expressive distortion and non-naturalistic colour not for their own sake but because these devices enabled him to give visual form to intangible feelings such as desire, jealousy, alienation, and the fear of death I loved the show but be warned that it is huge."

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