Art: Seeing Gauguin Whole at Last

No great museum retrospective is just a matter of a "definitive" array of works, or of critical intelligence applied to them, or of a deep curiosity about the artist's life. It is a combination of all three, a vision of how they weave together -- the museum's equivalent of George Painter on Marcel Proust, or Leon Edel on Henry James. Once you have digested it, neither you nor the artist will be quite the same. You have seen the record set straight. Such events cannot be replaced by 50 Helgas.

The Paul Gauguin retrospective, which opened this week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and which, after closing there July 31, will be seen through the fall at the Art Institute of Chicago and in early 1989 at the Grand Palais in Paris, is of this kind. When the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris found they were all planning separate shows on different aspects of Gauguin -- his prints, his Brittany paintings and his Tahitian work -- it seemed obvious to merge the three. The result, thanks to its curators (Francoise Cachin and Claire Freches-Thory in France, Richard Brettell and Charles F. Stuckey in the U.S.), is both a curatorial masterpiece and the most complete view of its subject ever offered in a museum show.

Gauguin's achievement has always been hard to assess because so much of his late work, done between his final departure from France in 1895 and his death on the tiny, remote island of Hivaoa in 1903, was bought en bloc by Russian collectors, ended up in the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum, and has not been seen in the West since 1906. The show contains eleven of these "Russian" Gauguins.

So now at last one sees the work whole -- more than 240 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and ceramics, the outpouring of a protean talent who influenced the course of modern painting more than anyone except Cezanne. One may be half prepared for Gauguin's impact on younger artists after 1900, but to see it in the paint (and the wood) is another matter. Where does that peculiar, dense, purply brown shading of Picasso's early work come from but the bodies of Gauguin's Tahitians? Most of early Matisse seems present in the twining lines and harsh dissonances of red, yellow and green with which Gauguin pictured himself 15 years before in the sardonic Self-Portrait with Halo, 1889. Gauguin's sculpture and painting were basic to German expressionism, and even Henri Rousseau seems to have based his Sleeping Gypsy on Gauguin's goose-pimply image of erotic shame, The Loss of Virginity, 1890-91.

Gauguin is a legendary figure, with all the accretions that entails. His legend was helped by other people's fictions, though Gauguin's own existential posturings as hero, Christ-martyr, magus, savage and artist-criminal lay at its root. For many, the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is still the "real" Gauguin -- a stockbroker and Sunday painter who cracks out of the bourgeois egg, dumps his wife, family and career and hightails it to Tahiti to "find himself" among the breasts and breadfruit. He is part brute and part escape artist, the Houdini of the avant-garde.