Review: 'Gauguin - Maker Of Myth' at Tate Modern

Tate Modern 30 September 2010  –  16 January 2011

This is what big institutional galleries like the Tate are for: only they have the resources and the clout to bring together a major artist’s work into a single huge show like this. Of course when a curator is given that much economic and cultural capital to play with, they feel that they need to make a statement, whether they have anything to say or not.

As far as I can tell the subtitle ‘Maker Of Myth’ is pretty much spurious: sure, Gauguin was obsessed with mythology, and was a conscious cultivator of his own myth as an artist, but he was as much a victim of myth as a manipulator of it. This more complex picture is not elided in the exhibition, but neither is there any coherent attempt to argue for the view of the artist expressed by ‘maker of myth’. I can buy that term applied to Picasso, say, but not poor old syphilitic, frustrated, misunderstood and finally penniless Paul Gauguin.

This is all by the by: whatever curatorial agenda there may be does not interfere with the work, which speaks for itself, and is hung in nine galleries, grouped according to themes such as self-portraiture, landscape, still-life, female subjects and so on. The themes are pretty sensible, although of course self-portraits are headed ‘Identity and Self-Mythology’, women ‘The Eternal Feminine’ etc. (yawn). There are also two rooms of ephemera which I didn’t linger in, as time was pressing: I saw enough to get an interesting inkling of the extent to which Gauguin was influenced by commercial art, however, and I’d be interested in how much influence he’s felt to have had on the commercial world in his turn

I know Gauguin from books, by and large: his paintings in the flesh are imposing physical objects, mainly by dint of their chromatic intensity. They are mostly smaller than I’d imagined them. There is also, oddly, a lot less paint on the canvases than I thought there would be: there is a good deal of dark underpainting, which gives the often gaudy colours a depth I had supposed came from a physical depth of paint. In fact, the weave of the canvas is visible over much of the painted surfaces, suggestive of a frugality at odds with the works’ visual opulence.

Seeing such an extensive sampling of an artist’s work has its pros and cons. On the one hand it’s a rich meal: there’s really only so much you can take in at one sitting, and at £15 a visit I’m not too likely to go back repeatedly. I stayed for an hour: on my own I might have stayed for two, but I’d have been boss-eyed by then, and really this show would take about ten or twelve hours to see properly.

On the other hand, seeing so many self-portraits together (for instance) gives you an opportunity to see the development of Gauguin’s practice, to see him probing, abandoning blind alleys, gradually gathering the threads of his mature work. His relationship with Van Gogh (which continues in his work long after the termination of their personal association) is a fascinating thread to follow: I’d love to see a show that puts the two together, like the Picasso/ Matisse show here a few years back.

On a technical level some dubious decisions were taken in hanging this show: the contemporary obsession with shoving the labels to the end of the wall often makes it confusing to find the details of the piece you’re looking at, and really, what harm does it do to have a little piece of text next to each work? And while I appreciate the aesthetic drawbacks of either board labels or clear stickers, the direct transfers they like at the Tate tend to have rubbed off a few weeks into the show. It was very hard to make sense of a few labels.

Clearly it’s hard to review a show like this. Gauguin is Gauguin: an opportunity to view his work en masse should be taken if you can. The way he sets blocks of colour singing against each other so that they seem to fizzle and vibrate on the canvas is for me very rarely matched, perhaps only by Rothko. The curator, despite some minor pretensions, has done the sensible thing and gotten out of the way, while these magnificent paintings blare out across the galleries like foghorns.