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I read the following headline today in The New York Times: “Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?” I quote:
That’s the startling question visitors hear on the audio guide as they walk through the “Gauguin Portraits” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The show, which runs through Jan. 26, focuses on Paul Gauguin’s depictions of himself, his friends and fellow artists, and of the children he fathered and the young girls he lived with in Tahiti.
The standout portrait in the exhibition is “Tehamana Has Many Parents” (1893). It pictures Gauguin’s teenage lover, holding a fan.
The artist “repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls, ‘marrying’ two of them and fathering children,” reads the wall text. “Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him.
The article — written in a dispassionate, objective tone — goes on to take all this very seriously, citing scholar after scholar, expert after expert, who all, in one or another, confirm the premise of the National Gallery’s show, which highlights Gaugin’s moral failings. Even the one mild counter-point provided, is not so much a counter-point, as a straw-man:
“The person, I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work,” said Vicente Todolí, who was Tate Modern’s director when it staged a major Gauguin exhibition in 2010, and is now the artistic director of the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca art foundation in Milan.
