Art Review: Gauguin, The Self-Invented Artist

THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 24, 2011

"Christ in the Garden" (1889)
By Paul Gauguin

WASHINGTON DC -- The latest exhibition on the Post-Impressionist master, Paul Gauguin opens Sunday and will be on view through June 5 at the National Gallery of Art. It is entitled, “Gauguin: Maker of Myth,” and comes to Washington from the Tate Modern in London. By 1887, Gauguin the stockbroker and Sunday painter was gone, and replaced by an artist with a new identity and history. He was a spiritual seeker and self-proclaimed visionary. In deeply Roman Catholic Brittany he went native (his wooden clogs are in the show) and produced pictures like “Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)” that merged biblical scenes with everyday life. After his Martinique sojourn he took to calling himself a savage and declared his interest in primitive subjects. His self-portraits became self-dramatizations, less records of what he looked like — a kind of hippie grandee — than projections of what he felt like. In 1889 he depicted himself as a doleful, abandoned Jesus in Gethsemane; then as gimlet-eyed Satan fondling a snake; and finally, in a ceramic sculpture, as a bleeding severed head. In the ceramic piece, which echoed pre-Columbian pottery, he played the Inca card, but also cast himself as the martyred John the Baptist. Like John he felt, he was a voice crying out in the wilderness, condemning a corrupt modern Europe, embracing the ideal of non-Western cultures that existed in a state of moral innocence. [link]