The Wanderer: Gauguin at the MFAH

“He’s a wanderer by nature and upbringing,” describes Ann Dumas, consulting curator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s fall blockbuster exhibition, Gauguin in the World, on view Nov. 3, 2024-Feb. 16, 2025.

One of the most remarkable of the Post-Impressionist, Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin is also one of those artists whose dramatic life can influence our perception of the artwork. But the title of this exhibition offers us another way to assess and reassess Gauguin’s art and vision. The exhibition follows that wandering path Gauguin took across the globe as he filtered the people and places he saw through his own interior world and philosophies to create artwork that still beguiles even as we debate Gauguin the man.

Originally organized by independent curator Henri Loyrette, former director of the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the exhibition debuted at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra with a slightly different name: Gauguin’s World. Thanks in part to the MFAH and director Gary Tinterow’s previous collaborations with Loyrette and the NGA, Houston is the only U.S museum to present this expansive exhibition showcasing 150 Gauguin’s works, including paintings, sculptures, prints and writings.

Born in Paris to a French father and French mother of Peruvian heritage, at points in his life Gauguin could call Paris, Lima, the merchant marines, the French Navy, Copenhagen, French Brittany, Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands home. He spent his most conventional years as a successful Parisian stockbroker, marrying a reputable Danish woman and fathering five children all the while teaching himself to paint. After losing most of his wealth in a stock market crash and then a failed stint as a businessman in Copenhagen, he essentially abandoned all convention–including his wife and children–to devote his life to becoming an artist. Later when his wandering nature took him to Tahiti he had relationships with young native women in their teens while making them models for his paintings.

“There have been many great Gauguin exhibitions in the past, particularly in the last 15 years or so, but for those exhibitions all these kinds of controversial, polemical sides to Gauguin weren’t really discussed,” says Dumas. “Since then we’ve had the MeToo movements and there’s a great deal of anti-colonialism feeling around. Gauguin is right in the storm of all these debates. You can’t really do anything on Gauguin now without at least acknowledging that side of him.”

Dumas finds it somewhat “daunting” to mount a Gauguin exhibition amidst the “storm,” but as controversial as we might find Gauguin now, not many will debate the richness of his work and his lasting influence on the art world.

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Paul Gauguin, Femmes de Tahiti (Tahitian Women), 1891, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © TMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

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Paul Gauguin, Vase Decorated with a Fishing Scene, 1886, coffee-colored unglazed stoneware, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource. NY

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Paul Gauguin, Portrait de Madeleine Bernard (Portrait of Madeleine Bernard), 1888, oil on canvas, Musée de Peinture et de Scupture, Grenoble, France. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

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Paul Gauguin, Nature morte au profil de Laval (Still Life with Profile of Laval), 1886, oil on canvas, Indianapolis Museum of Art.

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Paul Gauguin, U‘u (Club), 19th century, wood and vegetable fiber, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2008.

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Paul Gauguin, Trois tahitiens (Three Tahitians), 1899, oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, presented by Sir Alexander Maitland in memory of his wife Rosalind 1960.

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“We’re certainly not trying to whitewash Gauguin,” asserts Dumas. “We’re trying to present all the facts. Our job as an institution is to present great art, and we will acknowledge the problematic facts about his life. But we don’t think he should be canceled.”

Dumas is organizing the galleries mostly chronologically, but speaking with her it becomes apparent arranging the art by years also necessitates arranging the art by place.

The exhibition begins with an early self-portrait, one of about half a dozen that collectively give us Gauguin’s changing views on Gauguin. Along the way, we wander with him from the beginning of his career in Paris heavily influenced by Impressionism. We follow him to Brittany, and see his breaking with Impressionism’s ideals and its focus on direct observation and capturing the fleeting moment. His colors brighten and he becomes much more interested in imagination and trying to catch the spirit of a place.

“He’s not a storyteller. He’s interested in creating a mood and a mystery,” describes Dumas of his work in Brittany and later in Tahiti, as he becomes influenced by the  literary Symbolism movement.

The exhibition also includes two works he painted while living with Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, France. Dumas notes that while Van Gogh admired Gauguin, in the end, neither their painting philosophies nor personalities meshed very well.

A significant portion of the exhibition is devoted to Gauguin’s creative period in Tahiti and his final few years in the Marquesas Islands, where he died. He went to French Polynesia to find new worlds to explore far from French culture.

“I think he’s completely bowled over by the beauty of the place, the landscape, these great mountains, the beautiful light and tropical vegetation,” explains Dumas, but notes he was also disappointed at how many French people had arrived before him.

These paintings and prints allow us to see what Gauguin saw, though filtered through his own obsessions and ideas. He became fascinated by Tahitian culture, particularly its religion and rituals, which he tried to depict in some of his paintings, like Mata mua (In Olden Times), and its scene of Tahitian women worshiping near a statue of a moon goddess.

“A lot of that kind of culture was stamped out by the Christian missionaries, and Gauguin very much resented it. He hated the way western missionaries had destroyed this incredibly vivid Polynesian culture. He tries to recapture that in his art and especially in the very vigorous wood cuts,” remarks Dumas, while referencing some of the prints and woodcuts included in the show.

In the Tahiti galleries, we can see superb examples of Gauguin’s interest in creating mood and mystery, as opposed to naturalistic renderings. One of Dumas’s favorite works from this period is, Te raau rahi (The Large Tree). The painting portrays a deep stillness as a scattering of Tahitian women rest in the shade of trees and in the entrance of a bamboo hut.

“A work like this, he’s painting a totally recognizable scene but it’s filtered through his inner subjective reaction and imagination,” Dumas describes. “He sort of removes it from reality, but alongside that he’s pretty detailed. He’s interested in all the plants and trees. He’s done a detailed description of the actual foliage whilst making the whole thing mysterious and dream-like.”

Dumas says he found a different reality in Tahiti and the Marquesas, but there was already a “different reality in his head.”

“His works are so rich because he folds all these traditions into them in such an interesting way. Also his incredible technical diversity and skill, his experimental approach to all sorts of material is amazing really.”

In the last galleries of Gauguin in the World we’ll find a final series of prints, a late, stripped-down self-portrait and a painting of a snowy landscape of Brittany, which he apparently painted in the heat of the Marquesas. Even at his own personal world’s end, Gauguin seemed to wander on.

—TARRA GAINES