'Gauguin and Polynesia': dazzling mix-and-match
18.05.12
Be seen as two exhibitions running in artful but separate parallel.
But the better way to see SAM's mix of nearly 60 Gauguin works and an equal number of indigenous Polynesian items is as a single harmonic vision.
The Gauguin portion of the exhibit covers the last 17 years in his career, starting in the late 1880s when his visits to Brittany and Martinique signaled his desire to lose himself in surroundings far from Paris' art epicenter.
Already, there were signs of things to come. In "Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin" (1889), you can spy proverbial "Gauguin colors" seeping into the Breton landscape, while in "Self-Portrait Dedicated to Carrière" (1886), the warm colors positively buzz and the confidence in the artist's eyes is electric.
It wasn't the colors of Polynesia, initially, but its artifacts (seen by Gauguin at the 1889 Paris World's Fair) that put Oceania on his radar as a potential "elsewhere" to go. The samples in "Gauguin and Polynesia" make clear what their appeal to him was, starting with a skeletal yet smiling male figure from Easter Island, both mordant in its wit and spooky in its power.
Source: The Seattle Times