Gauguin: Metamorphoses (Museum of Modern Art, New York Exhibition Catalogues)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Gauguin: Metamorphoses (Museum of Modern Art, New York Exhibition Catalogues) Details
Review If you can have only one Gauguin book, the Museum of Modern Art's catalog for its "Gauguin: Metamorphoses" exhibition last spring is a very strong candidate. It is distinguished by excellent essays by Starr Figura, who organized the show, as well as by Elizabeth Childs, Hal foster and Erika Mosier. Moreover, its multimedia approach places new emphasis on the way motifs migrated among the artist's woodcuts, transfer drawings, carved wood sculpture, paintings and ceramics. The result is a much expanded sense of Gauguin's inventiveness, his working methods and how much he accomplished during his relatively brief maturity. (Holland Cotter The New York Times)As important as painting obviously was to Gauguin, this exhibit argues that his efforts in printmaking and drawing were just as significant. (Halle Howard Time Out New York) Read more About the Author Starr Figura is a curator with the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Elizabeth Childs is Department Chair of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis.Hal Foster is an American art critic, historian and Guggenheim Fellow; he has taught at contemporary art and theory at Cornell University and Princeton University.Erika Mosier is an associate conservator at The Museum of Modern Art.Lotte Johnson is a curatorial assistant with the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art. Read more
Reviews
This is the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name at New York's Museum of Modern Art from March to June 2014. The MoMA is the show's only venue, which means that not many people who love Gauguin's work will be able to see it. Fortunately, the catalogue does it full justice in every respect. When we think of Gauguin, we think first, of course, of oil on canvas (or burlap or sailcloth or whatever other fabric support was available and affordable), and then of the wonderful wood carvings that he always did alongside the paintings and that are also frequently represented in exhibitions of his work. But now we learn that all along we should have been thinking of Gauguin also in terms of graphic art, for it turns out that he was one of the most inventive and original graphic artists working in France in the last decade or so of the 19th century--a time when work on paper experienced an extraordinary revival. Gauguin concentrated his attention on this kind of work only in several spurts from 1889 until his death in 1903, but his contribution to the various mediums of graphic art was so significant and extensive in just those fourteen years that a contributor to the volume calls it one of "the most innovative bodies of work . . . in the history of printed art" (70). These are the works at the heart of the exhibition; more than three-quarters of them are on paper, and the rest are either paintings or sculptures.Four scholarly essays illuminate this relatively unfamiliar aspect of his oeuvre. Starr Figura, the museum's major curator of the exhibition and the volume's editor, introduces the subject and explains that "Metamorphoses" was the chosen title because the artist's "creative process involved repeating and recombining motifs from one work to another, and allowing them to metamorphose over time and across mediums" (15). The catalogue illustrates this procedure through many examples; to take just one, it is fascinating to follow how Gauguin treats the motif of a figure drinking water from a spring first as an oil on canvas from 1893 ("Pape moe"--"Mysterious Water"), and then, in the following year, as a watercolor monotype, an oak wood carving, and a woodcut printed in various stages. Other examples show him using the same subject to make zincographs, ceramics, drawings, transfer drawings and "oil transfer drawings," a medium that seems to have been his own invention. The other scholarly essays are descriptive and informative in this way, rather than intent on presenting new insights or the results of recent research, although they are no less authoritative for that. Elizabeth C. Childs, Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis, has written extensively on Gauguin, exotic art, and the experience of culture in colonial Tahiti, and here contributes an essay on Gauguin's sculptures. Hal Foster, the Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton and a frequent writer on primitivism, considers Gauguin's situation to be that of "The Primitivist's Dilemma." And Erika Mosier, the MoMA's Paper Conservator, writes about his technical experiments in woodcut and oil transfer as forging, in her very nice formulation, "an aesthetic of ambiguity and evocation" (70) that helped set the stage for the stylistic innovations of the coming century.The catalogue itself consists of 185 plates reproduced mostly full- or half-page in excellent color and supported by an extensive number of illustrations in the body of the texts. This is an amazing collection of images, quite stunning in its scope and variety, and my only lament is that the sculpture in the round is photographed usually from only one angle, which sometimes results in "lost profile" reproduction of the flanking figures. There are three major sections, according to where the peripatetic Gauguin was located, and each section is subdivided into thematic units; e.g., the second section is "1889--1895: Paris-Brittany-Tahiti," and two of its thematic units are "Self-Portraits" and "Tahitian Eve." Each of the units is preceded by a page of introductory text and contains images identified by title, date, medium and location but not otherwise commented. The volume as a whole is delightfully designed and produced, with generously sized type, uncluttered layout and beautiful chapter frontispieces throughout. The scholarly apparatus consists of a map of Gauguin's travels and itinerary, a list of illustrated works, chronology, selected bibliography, a very good bibliography of Gauguin's own writings, and an index of plates, but no comprehensive index. In general, I would say that this is a volume one wants to have less for its scholarly usefulness than for the stunning quality of its visuals and for illuminating an area of Gauguin's oeuvre that has hitherto escaped much attention but which emerges here as even more radical and inventive than his paintings. This is an important exhibition that has gathered work from over fifty lenders internationally, and it is a great pity that it will be mounted only in New York, for it refines--if not to say redefines--our perception of one of the nineteenth century's major artists. Fortunately, the exhibition is superbly documented in this beautiful catalogue.
