National Gallery of Australia acquires $9.8m Paul Gauguin painting

The major acquisition will help deepen conversations over French artist Paul Gauguin’s troublesome legacy, the National Gallery of Australia says.

Paul Gauguin’s Le toit bleu or Ferme au Pouldu (1890). Picture: National Gallery of Australia

A $US6.5m ($9.8m) artwork by artist Paul Gauguin has been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, making it the first painting by the French post-­impressionist and symbolist to enter an Australian public ­collection.

His Le toit bleu or Ferme au Pouldu (The Blue Roof or Farm at Le Pouldu, 1890) was purchased from an international private collector and acquired by the NGA Foundation through a blend of public and private funds, the NGA has confirmed.

The 70cm x 90cm landscape, on show in Canberra at the NGA’s major exhibition Gauguin’s World: Tona Iho, Tona Ao, was painted by the artist in Brittany, shortly before he travelled into the Pacific, where he would make some of his most famous paintings and develop a historic reputation as a sex tourist and cultural thief.

NGA director Nick Mitzevich told The Australian a Gauguin painting was a missing piece of the art history puzzle for the Canberra institution.

“I was always conscious there was no major Gauguin painting in Australia,” Dr Mitzevich said of the work, which last sold at auction in May 2000 for $US5.2m.

“Paul Gauguin is a divisive and important figure, and I’ve been on the hunt for (one of his paintings) for a long time. We found one that’s perfect.”

The Blue Roof or Farm at Le Pouldu features at its centre a woman drawing water from a well at a rural homestead. The titular blue roof – a bar of deep cerulean that dissects the work’s top third – is a salient portent of the colour to come just a year later when the artist would leave Paris for a new life, and a new style, in the Pacific Islands.

National Gallery of Australia director Nick Mitzevich labelled Gauguin a “divisive and important figure”. Picture: Martin Ollman

Paul Gauguin, Portrait of the artist by himself, 1903. Artwork credit: Kunstmuseum Basel, bequest of Dr Karl Hoffmann 1945

Oceania was where Gauguin’s painterly legacy ultimately would be cemented – his colour-filled representations of young islander women have fetched prices in the hundreds of millions – but it’s also the point from which his personal reputation has come under scrutiny.

Dr Mitzevich said the gallery had embraced “difficult conver­sations” over the artist’s legacy, and said the acquisition of this pre-Pacific work would deepen those discussions.

Gauguin’s World: Tona Iho, Tona Ao is at Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia until October 7. nga.gov.au/exhibitions/gauguins-world

This article first appeared on The Australian and was republished with permission. Read the full article via this link.