Gauguin continues to court controversy

With pleasing symmetry, the London exhibition year is bookended by shows from both halves of one of art history’s most potent double acts. Where 2010 began with The Real van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters at the Royal Academy, it draws to a close with the newly-opened Gauguin: Maker of Myth at Tate Modern.  Alastair Smart, Arts Editor for The Sunday Telegraph, makes the case for Gauguin as the more important of the two artists.

I previewed the show Gauguin: Maker of Myth in the Telegraph pages a couple of weeks ago and promptly received three readers’ complaint letters for my trouble. The offence? Well, apparently, I was both ‘excessive’ in my admiration of the Frenchman’s work and ‘way off beam’ in my criticism of Van Gogh’s. The gist of all three letters was that I was ‘plainly wrong to rate Gauguin as the superior artist’. 

By way of reply, I’m keen to clarify that not once did I say the Frenchman was a better artist than the Dutchman. Rather that I prefer looking at Gauguin’s canvases to Van Gogh’s, for reasons wholly unconnected to their intrinsic quality; and that the former was the more important artist, in terms of legacy and the progression of art into the 20th-century.

To take each point at a time: Van Gogh has become such an international treasure, so over-hyped and over-exposed, that his art does far less for me these days than it once did. Gauguin, by contrast, because of a comparative lack of exposure in the UK (it has been 50 years since his last major exhibition here), remains – to these eyes - fresh and exciting.

The complaint letters rather bear out my point that Van Gogh has morphed into Saint Vincent in the public mind. We seem to feel such collective guilt for the way our late 19th-century forebears disregarded him that we now go to the opposite extreme and venerate him. When was the last time you read a bad word about Van Gogh?

Gauguin, for his part, is increasingly remembered as a sinner, not just for the maltreatment of his wife, children and countless Polynesian maidens, but also for his cameo as a baddie in the Life of Saint Vincent. The two artists spent nine infamous weeks together, of course, in Arles in 1888 - culminating in that now-legendary 24 hours when a row raged, Van Gogh was hospitalised after cutting off his ear, and Gauguin upped sticks to Paris without saying goodbye, never to see his so-called friend again. 

His matter-of-fact response to Van Gogh’s death two years later hardly endears Gauguin to us either: ‘I’m not very grieved, for I knew it was coming. I knew how much the poor chap suffered in his struggles with madness.’ Well, why did you do so much to provoke that madness, and so little to curb it, we ask? You were five years his senior, someone poor Vincent looked up to immensely – heck, Paul, if you had shown even an ounce of compassion, might you perhaps have been the one person who could have saved him..?

The new Tate exhibition focuses on Gauguin’s conscious self-mythologising, the way he cast himself as an artiste apart, a ‘savage’ who had grown up in Peru and would grow old in Polynesia – lands where life was infinitely nobler than in post-Lapsarian Paris. It’s ironic, then, that while many today scoff at the tales Gauguin told about himself, they unquestioningly believe the tales of his part in the Flagellation of Saint Vincent. In the popular imagination, one myth has replaced another.

As for considering Gauguin a more important artist, well, isn’t part of Van Gogh’s supposed tragedy that he went through life unloved – not just by the art world but by the girl he adored (cousin Kee who brusquely rebuffed him) and also his father Theodorus (who kicked him out of the family home in Etten)? He then languished in posthumous obscurity a good while, too - it was a couple of decades or so before Van Gogh’s works started causing a stir and the German Expressionists took up his baton. 

Gauguin, by contrast, directly heralded Matisse and the Fauves with his fields of strong, unmodulated colours; and Picasso, too, with his development of primitivism. It seems fair enough, then, doesn't it, to say he’s more deserving than Van Gogh of the title ‘father of modern art’? 

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