The show

I have avoided this exhibit, the "Impressionist Gaugin" at the Kimbell. Like what I had seen of these works, practically none, I found out, had left me cold. But as so often, I am wrong in these superficial estimates.

It was a long apprenticeship, perhaps. Paul Gauguin, born in France, brought up in Peru, merchant marine at 17, married into a Danish business family, became a sunday painter at first, making a killing during the week as a stock broker. He collected the art that inspired him, getting a sizable collection that paid off later, supporting his own art career from re-sales. Left Denmark, and took up with the artists in Paris. He used dark, rich colors naturally, and began to organize his canvases along the lines of Camille Carot, and the Barbezon school, painting out doors, most likely in the company of other artists. His mentor for the first 12 or so years of his painting career became old Camille Pissarro, who was daddy to other artists, and stood in high esteem among a group that included Degas, Cezanne, Monet. He participated, we learn, in five of the eight Salon des Refuses exhibition, that gave Paris and the art world surveys of what the impressionists were up to, in a stiff art world officially dominated by the Acadamy of Fine Arts, who considered those Bohemians undisciplined upstarts. The Salon shows created much controversy and ridicule among the Bourgeoisie, and Gauguin attracted much attention when he showed, in 1881, a very ordinary, rather lumpy nude woman sowing, close-up and personal, but a far cry from the slick, silken goddesses of the Academic manner dating back to Bouchee and Ingres! And an advancement, it turns out, that Degas learned a lesson or two from, receiving the enthusiastic endorsement of one independent critic, Huysman, who practically wrote a doctoral dissertation on the piece... He first showed his sculpture talent in two beautiful marble busts, of his wife and one of his young sons. He did these, they say, while living in a rented apartment owned by a sculptor whose studio was near by. In fact, his original and remarkable sculpture surfaced several times during his long and busy career. The show is revealing, giving such a big display of this artist's under-appreciated beginnings, the blaze of his later work seems to have blinded us to the richness and variety of the many works done in this early period. But after initial critical , but not financial success, he went back to a more lack-luster business career in Copenhagen for a few years, but could not escape his passion for making art. Back in Paris, his marriage in shambles, he could not seem to pick up where he left off, and this prompted a move first to Brittany where a group of painters were transforming art in a new way, emerging was the movement that was later anointed the name Nabis, the "symbolists"! Somewhere in here was a disastrous collision with Vincent Van Gogh, the other great figure, brought about an emotional, intense elevation of the impressionist break-throughs.

Then on to the Caribbean isle of Martinique and finally to Tahiti, where the techniques he acquired transformed into the tropical, mystic paintings his reputation rests on today. The rest is history, you might say, painting away glorious elevated canvases of tropical brilliance while dying of syphilis among the natives, much to the horror of the Christian missionaries who tried to impose Western morality on these sinful naturals.

His philosophic method: "Dream freely and seek the simplest form." and finally he could say: "I have escaped everything that is artificial and conventional. Here I enter into Truth, become one with nature. After the disease of civilization, life in this new world is a return to health."

This was the last day of the show, and I am glad I made it in time, because I do not believe that this large body of unknown work will be put together again in my lifetime.