Artist or monster? Mammoth new Gauguin show reckons with colonial legacy – to limited success

Three Tahitians, an 1899 painting by Paul Gauguin. Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao is at the National Gallery of Australia until 7 October Photograph: NGA

What to do with a problem like Paul Gauguin? The 19th-century French master’s radical experimentations with colour, space and syncretic symbolism have made him a canonical artist. Yet it is “Gauguin the monster” – not “Gauguin the artist” – who takes up the most oxygen in discussions today. It is Gauguin – purveyor of primitivist fantasies, emblem of French colonialism in the Pacific, and paedophilic, syphilitic sex tourist who took child brides as young as 13 – who looms large in the public consciousness.

The National Gallery of Australia has clearly grappled with this legacy in the lead-up to its winter blockbuster, titled Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao. This is the first major exhibition of Gauguin in Australia, with more than 130 works by the artist being pulled from collections from around the world.

The curator of the show, Henri Loyrette – a former director of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée du Louvre in Paris – has obviously done a lot of heavy bureaucratic lifting to acquire the artworks. The show represents an incredible effort and a remarkable result. For almost any other artist, the NGA would be taking an unqualified victory lap. Yet instead the gallery finds itself in a double bind of mixed messaging, which oscillates between jubilation, ambivalence and polemic.

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Some of this messaging directly platforms Pacific artists – a podcast accompanying the exhibition opens with the question “What immediately comes to mind when I say Paul Gauguin?” with the response: “Argh!” Over four episodes, the podcast positions Gauguin as a productive – if deeply fraught – challenge to reckon with historical legacies rather than a figure of blind cancellation.

This is borne out in the space directly leading to the Gauguin exhibition. Here the singular narrative of Gauguin cedes ground to a dialogue in the form of the artist Rosanna Raymond’s 2024 collaborative work SaVĀge K’lub: Te Paepae Aora’i – Where the Gods Cannot Be Fooled, a physically and symbolically imposing installation reaching high up the walls of the gallery. First conceived of in 2010, the SaVĀge K’lub takes its name from 19th-century gentlemen’s clubs in London, where, Raymond explains, “they parodied Indigenous cultures”. Presenting a rich diversity of Pacific work from both the NGA’s historical collection and the SaVĀge K’lub collective, the installation almost overwhelms your vision, inverting a space of parody into a space of celebration.

Raymond’s intervention ends where the Gauguin exhibition begins. In the typical fashion of a monographic exhibition, the French artist’s name is heroically emblazoned across the entrance to the institution and the exhibition. The show’s possessive title could not be clearer: we are entering into “Gauguin’s world”.

The first room is filled with Gauguin self-portraits. In Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ (dated 1890-91), Gauguin is depicted beside a painted image of Jesus. In the next work, the 1896 painting Self-Portrait (near Golgotha), he is seen garbed in white robes and wears an existential stare, continuing his canonisation. Yet it is the last painting, 1903’s Portrait of the Artist by Himself – produced in the year of his death – which holds the most dimension and depth, despite its thin painted layers.

Here white canvas and blue underpainting intermittently peek through to the work’s surface, threatening to collapse the fragile painted illusion and the image of the artist. But while there is diversity in these portraits, in their assembled configuration, they are ultimately unified in reproducing a well-worn art historical trope, proffering Gauguin as the canonical protagonist whose psychology must be deliberated over and fetishised by all passersby.

In the next room, Gauguin disappears, as does his loaded symbolism and obsessive chromatic experimentation. Instead we find ourselves looking at some of his earliest work, rendered in a muted palette, and with an impressionist style. Several works recall Camille Pissarro: 1873’s Landscape and 1879’s Apple Trees At l’Hermitage . In both Gauguin feels absent. It’s a smart curatorial move to lead with the atypical and the staid, as the artistic innovation in the rest of the show feels all the more punchy and pronounced.

The following rooms take a “material turn” and foreground art-making techniques: ceramics, printmaking, and wood carving. Here the exhibition doesn’t quite stick to its own, loudly professed, signposting. Half of the works in the Gauguin and printmaking section are not prints; the ceramics, too, occupy a relatively modest part of the Gauguin and ceramics room. I spied barely three monotypes in Gauguin, wood carving and monotypes.

The process-driven titles of the rooms are something of a curatorial gambit. They represent a deception which keeps the gallery-goer’s mind on the far safer idea of technique and allows them to forget the man producing the work.

The exhibition’s final two rooms turn most explicitly to Gauguin’s time in French Polynesia and are handled with a conspicuously light touch. The curatorial texts acknowledge but do not substantively address the colonial or predatory legacies of the artist, leaving a viewer caught in the seductions of Gauguin’s paintbrush. Make no mistake, his works – the 1899 masterpiece Three Tahitians, foremost – pull at you with their utter aesthetic brilliance. The problem is that, in the space of this same brilliance, Gauguin fixates on a primitivist fantasy, which paints Tahiti as a mythical land, caught in a pre-modern Edenic state.

The last work I see as I’m leaving the exhibition is Gauguin’s 1898 painting Tahitian Woman II. It makes me stop in my tracks. Not because of the quality of the painting but because of the pose. Gauguin has taken and reversed the pose from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ orientalist painted fantasy from 1814, Grande Odalisque, which depicts a nude woman in a Middle Eastern harem.

Charged with sexual connotations and ideas of possessing the imagined other, Ingres’ painting is one of the most famous artworks housed at the Louvre – a work that hangs in the curator’s old workplace and which he would undoubtedly be intimately familiar with. Yet Gauguin’s conspicuous reference to this fantasy and its sexual politics is given no mention on the nearby wall plaque, which simply proffers the painting’s title and date. Here omission takes the place of critical commentary.