Gauguin exhibition to open at National Gallery of Australia

A major exhibition will explore the brilliant art and complicated legacy of Paul Gauguin in the South Pacific.

National Gallery of Australia director Nick Mitzevich at the launch of the Gauguin exhibition in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

French artist Paul Gauguin left a legacy in the South Pacific that included his colour-drenched paintings of Polynesian life, a somewhat romanticised legend of the artist as an adventurer and a history of sexual relationships with local teenage girls.

The celebrated artist – who also made two stops in Australia en route to Tahiti – is to be the subject of a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra next year.

Gauguin’s World: Tona Iho, Tona Ao will show paintings borrowed from major collections including the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, and also a selection of traditional Polynesian arts from the Musee de Tahiti et des Iles.

NGA director Nick Mitzevich said the exhibition would focus on Gauguin’s years in Tahiti and his startlingly original use of colour. “The real highlight of this survey exhibition are the late Gauguins in Tahiti and the way that Gauguin really captured Tahitian culture,” he said.

The exhibition is curated by French art expert Henri Loyrette, a former director of the Louvre and of the Musee d’Orsay, which has agreed to lend 17 works for the show.

Mr Loyrette said he had organised the exhibition from the perspective of Gauguin’s final period in the Marquesas Islands, where he died in 1903.

“When Gauguin landed in the Marquesas in September 1901, he knew that he had reached his journey’s end; he had at last found his true homeland, the place to which he had always aspired,” he said.

“In the 20 months before his death, he continued to develop his art while in his writings he set out to review his career as a whole.”

Gauguin was a stockbroker before he devoted himself to painting and had productive periods in Brittany and in the south of France with Vincent van Gogh before he made his first visit to the South Pacific in 1891.

The 140 works by Gauguin in the exhibition, opening in Canberra on June 29, are from across his career and include ceramics, wood relief and woodcuts as well as paintings.

Mr Mitzevich said the exhibition and public programs would explain the context of Gauguin’s life and career in the South Pacific, including its unpleasant aspects. “In today’s context, Gauguin’s interactions in Polynesia in the later part of the 19th century would not be accepted and are recognised as such.”