Cleveland museum showcases role of Paris exhibit in Gauguin’s development

Cleveland museum showcases Gauguin in Paris

CLEVELAND — Before his Tahiti paintings established him, Paul Gauguin was snubbed by the 1889 Paris world’s fair. Undaunted, he and colleagues staged a rival show in a cafe, a formative time featured in an international exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The “exhibition about an exhibition” runs from Oct. 4 through Jan. 18 and then goes to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It includes works on view by Louis Anquetin, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval and Emile Schuffenecker.

“Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889″ includes more than 75 paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Gauguin and his contemporaries and the first reinstallation of works from the Volpini Cafe des Arts exhibition in Paris near the new Eiffel Tower.

Many of the works haven’t hung side-by-side since 1889, when Gauguin displayed his emerging postimpressionist style and began focusing on colors and themes that blossomed in his Tahiti works.

“I think when people hear the name Gauguin, they usually think Tahiti, South Seas, Polynesia, palm trees, beaches,” said Heather Lemonedes, the Cleveland museum’s associate curator or drawings. “But I’ve felt in studying Gauguin, a lot of what he was all about was kind of coming to fruition in 1889.”

The show includes a rare, pristine complete set of Gauguin’s zincograph prints on canary yellow paper in which Gauguin hinted at his future interest in painting bathers and exotic landscapes.

“It’s a visual resume, almost a sort of summary of Gauguin’s major themes,” Lemonedes said in a preview walk through the exhibit. “It summarizes the exotic places. You have subjects from Arles, subjects from Martinique and from Brittany. He’s telling you the places that he’s been, he’s telling you what his major subjects are and also his bold new style.”

The Volpini show was staged when Gauguin was excluded from an exhibition of well-known artists as France flexed its cultural muscle at the 1889 world’s fair in Paris. The rival exhibit of Gauguin’s early works was located in a cafe on the grounds of the world’s fair, giving him a chance to tap into the crowds to promote his art.

The works in the Cleveland show were collected from 42 museums and private collections around the world, including the only hand-colored set of the Volpini Suite prints colored by Gauguin.

Visitors will recognize the development of Gauguin’s renowned paintings of Tahiti bathers in earlier Brittany works displayed in 1889.

“They are kind of predictors of what we now think of as the signature Tahitian style — already there are all of these major themes that are already in place,” Lemonedes said.

The cafe exhibit marked a major point in Gauguin’s development.

“It’s kind of a world stage and he imagines himself taking his work to a broader, more sophisticated clientele,” said Elizabeth Childs, chair of the art history and archaeology department at Washington University of St. Louis.

On the Net: cma.org