Антон Подковенко
21 ноября 2019 00:57
"Заглянуть в самого себя и понять, имеем ли мы право осуждать людей прошлого, которые нам дали великое наследие?" В Лондоне — уже заглянули. И решили осуждать Поля Гогена. В национальной галерее советуют не восхищаться его картинами. Мол, педофил. А может вообще запретить?
"Откровенно говоря, он был высокомерным, переоценённым, заносчивым педофилом". Слова основательницы американского онлайн-музея женского искусства, которые сегодня оказались растиражированы западными СМИ. На фоне так называемого "переосмысления" творчества Поля Гогена.
Повод для дискуссии — экспозиция работ великого французского модерниста в лондонской Национальной галерее. Где к его картинам подобрали сопроводительный текст. О том, что Гоген — якобы, цитата, "использовал привилегированное положение человека с Запада, чтобы не ограничивать себя в сексуальных свободах".
Речь, как нетрудно догадаться, о чрезвычайно продуктивном — в плане творчества — пребывании художника на Таити. Провёл там последние двенадцать лет своей жизни, написал множество общепризнанных шедевров — из тех, что постоянно выставляются по всему миру... Зато теперь — вдруг оказался записан в растлители малолетних.
И заодно, не менее внезапно, в расисты — хотя сам-то он, по понятным причинам, возразить не сможет и адвокатов себе не наймёт. А что по этому поводу говорят современные искусствоведы и живописцы?
"Не пора ли вообще перестать смотреть Гогена?" — это "Нью-Йорк Таймс" таким вопросом задаётся после выставки в Лондонской национальной галерее. Музеи, мол, пересматривают наследие художника. Потому что он занимался сексом с девочками-подростками — те самые таитянки с его знаменитых полотен. А ещё Поль Гоген называл полинезийцев, которых писал, "дикарями". И не важно, мол, что французского пост-импрессиониста в мире искусства считают гением.
"У меня есть картина, это реплика на Брейгеля – "Слепцы", где один слепой падает, второй за ним, третий ещё не догадывается, четвертый не чувствует, но всё равно скоро упадёт. Сзади – Европа, подсвеченный Лувр, Рим, если мы посмотрим на сегодняшнюю Европу, находясь во Франции, Париже, мы видим, какой бардак – валяются нищие, мусор. Нужно заглянуть в самого себя и понять, имеем ли мы право осуждать людей прошлого, которые нам дали великое наследие. Я считаю, это — маразм, к которому пришли современные, назовём их "искусствоведы", — считает Никас Сафронов, заслуженный художник России.
Вот ролик о фильме, который показывают от имени Национальной галереи Лондона в разных странах, в России в том числе. Текст такой: "Гоген, переосмысленный в 21-м веке: гениальный, но опасный. Он писал рай, но чего это стоило людям?" На британской выставке аудио-гид прямым тестом объясняет, чего это таитянкам якобы стоило, и советует живописцем больше не восхищаться.
"Каждое произведение искусства рождается в определённую эпоху – и если в ту эпоху считалось нормальным уехать куда-то на Таити, и иметь там какие-то отношения с молодыми таитянками, и высказываться вот так, что там кто-то "дикари" – ну тогда, значит, так было можно. Раз не было никакого привлечения Гогена к суду, значит, и сейчас – спустя сто пятьдесят лет — мы не имеем права", — полагает Сергей Заграевский, Академик Российской академии художеств, искусствовед.
Творчество Гогена в кривом зеркале пресловутой европейской толерантности выглядит настолько странно, что в сети даже начались разговоры, а не потеряют ли теперь картины Гогена в стоимости на арт-рынке?
"Предположения о том, что популярность Гогена как выдающегося художника упадёт – и, что это может отразиться каким-то образом, прямо или косвенно, на востребованности этого художественном рынке – это, конечно же, с моей точки зрения – полная чушь. В его искусстве никакой пропаганды педофилии найти невозможно. Обращаться в предшествующую эпоху с этическими претензиями сегодняшнего дня – это, на мой взгляд, абсолютно необоснованно", — уверен Михаил Каменский, искусствовед.
Иначе далеко можно зайти в критике искусства. Публика-то разная. Картины британского классика 18-го века Уильяма Блейка уже пометили как "шок-контент". Дега западная пресса заклеймила ещё год назад, как женоненавистника.
Теперь пишут: давайте Ван Гога запретим, он ходил к проституткам. А как же тогда мизантроп и антисемит Селин? Или Киплинг, "Бремя белого человека"? Так Великобритания, да и вообще Европа, может, и "Маугли" в мусорную корзину отправит? Обкрадывая саму себя и мировую культуру?
"
---
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/arts/design/gauguin-national-gallery-london.html"
Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?
Museums are reassessing the legacy of an artist who had sex with teenage girls and called the Polynesian people he painted “savages.”
“Tehamana Has Many Parents” (1893) by Paul Gauguin, a standout work in the exhibition “Gauguin’s Portraits” at the National Gallery in London.
“Tehamana Has Many Parents” (1893) by Paul Gauguin, a standout work in the exhibition “Gauguin’s Portraits” at the National Gallery in London.Credit...The Art Institute of Chicago
By Farah Nayeri
Nov. 18, 2019
LONDON — “Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?”
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.”
Image“Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin” (1889)
“Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin” (1889)Credit...Hammer Museum
Born in Paris, the son of a radical journalist, Gauguin spent his early years in Peru before returning to France. He took up painting in his 20s, while working as a stockbroker, a profession he would soon give up — along with his wife and children — to make art full time. He set sail for Tahiti in 1891, searching for the exotic surroundings he had known as a boy in Peru. Gauguin spent most of the 12 remaining years of his life in Tahiti and on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa, cohabiting with adolescent girls, fathering more children, and producing his best-known paintings.
In the international museum world, Gauguin is a box-office hit. There have been a half-dozen exhibitions of his work in the last few years alone, including important shows in Paris, Chicago and San Francisco. Yet in an age of heightened public sensitivity to issues of gender, race and colonialism, museums are having to reassess his legacy.
A couple of decades ago, an exhibition on the same theme “would have been a great deal more about formal innovation,” said Christopher Riopelle, a co-curator of the National Gallery show. Now, everything must be viewed “in a much more nuanced context,” he added.
“I don’t think, any longer, that it’s enough to say, ‘Oh well, that’s the way they did it back then,’ ” he said.
Image
“Contes Barbares” (1902). The French title translates as “Barbarian Tales.”
“Contes Barbares” (1902). The French title translates as “Barbarian Tales.”Credit...Museum Folkwang
Mr. Riopelle described Gauguin as “a very complicated person, a very driven person, a very callous person,” and said he was “disappointed” that his overwhelming urge to make art “led him to hurt or use so many people badly.”
The show was co-produced with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and opened in Ottawa in late May. A few days before the opening, the museum’s newly appointed director, Sasha Suda, and the exhibition’s curators decided to edit some of the wall texts after touring the show. Nine labels were changed to avoid culturally insensitive language, according to the museum’s press office.
In Ottawa, the title “Head of a Savage, Mask” was shown with an extended label explaining that the words ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian,’ “considered offensive today, reflect attitudes common to Gauguin’s time and place.” Elsewhere, his “relationship with a young Tahitian woman” was changed to “his relationship with a 13- or 14-year-old Tahitian girl.”
Ms. Suda said that out of 2,313 feedback cards submitted by visitors at the Canadian exhibition, about 50 were complaints about Gauguin and about the museum programming.
The show should “have addressed these issues in a more open and transparent way that connected with contemporary audiences,” Ms. Suda said in an interview. Addressing “blind spots” in the work of historical artists “could make those artists more relevant,” she added.
Image
“The Royal End” (1892)
“The Royal End” (1892)Credit...The J. Paul Getty Museum
To other museum professionals, re-examining the lives of past artists from a 21st-century perspective is risky, because it could lead to the boycott of great art.
“The person, I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work,” said Vicente Todoli, who was Tate Modern’s director when it staged a major Gauguin exhibition in 2010, and is now the artistic director of the Pirelli HangarBicocca art foundation in Milan.
“Once an artist creates something, it doesn’t belong to the artist anymore: It belongs to the world,” he said. Otherwise, he cautioned, we would stop reading the anti-Semitic author Louis-Ferdinand Celine, or shun Cervantes and Shakespeare if we found something unsavory about them.
Yet Ashley Remer, a New Zealand-based American curator who in 2009 founded girlmuseum.org, an online museum focused on the representation of young girls in history and culture, insisted that in Gauguin’s case the man’s actions were so egregious that they overshadowed the work.
Image
“Exotic Eve” (1890)
“Exotic Eve” (1890)Credit...Pola Museum of Art
“He was an arrogant, overrated, patronizing pedophile, to be very blunt,” she said. If his paintings were photographs, they would be “way more scandalous,” and “we wouldn’t have been accepting of the images,” she added.
Ms. Remer questioned the constant exhibitions of Gauguin and the Austrian artist Egon Schiele, who also depicted nude underage models, and the ways those shows were put together. “I’m not saying take down the works: I’m saying lay it all bare about the whole person,” she said.
Gauguin remains a tourist draw in Polynesia and the South Pacific. There is even a luxury cruise line that tours the region that is named after him. But to many locals, the painter’s cliched representations of lush, exotic islands full of dusky maidens with no voice or identity are tiresome.
“Gauguin, you piss me off,” begins “Two Nudes On a Tahitian Beach, 1894,” a poem by the New Zealand poet and academic Selina Tusitala Marsh.
You strip me bare
assed, turn me on my side
shove a fan in my hand
smearing fingers on thigh
pout my lips below an
almond eye and silhouette me
in smouldering ochre.
The anonymity of his Tahitian portraits is another cause of frustration. In the 2009 photographic series “Dee and Dallas Do Gauguin,” the New Zealand-born Samoan artist Tyla Vaeau has cut out the faces in Gauguin reproductions and inserted photos of her own sister and friend.
Gauguin’s art is a problem “if it continues to be used to frame the Pacific in this timeless, semi-damaged past, when actually there’s so much going on,” said Caroline Vercoe, a senior lecturer in art history at the University of Auckland who is part Samoan and is participating in the National Gallery in London’s talk and film program. “It’s such a lively and dynamic culture within the indigenous context as well.”
Image
“The Siesta” (2019) by the African-American artist Kehinde Wiley, part of a series painted in Tahiti that was inspired by Gauguin.
“The Siesta” (2019) by the African-American artist Kehinde Wiley, part of a series painted in Tahiti that was inspired by Gauguin.Credit...Kehinde Wiley; ADAGP, Paris; via Galerie Templon
Even to his admirers, Gauguin invites questioning. The African-American painter Kehinde Wiley — who described Gauguin as one of his idols in a 2017 interview, but also as “creepy” — recently painted a series in Tahiti inspired by Gauguin that depicts the mahu, a nonbinary community considered a “third gender” in Polynesia.
“I love his paintings, but I find him a little bit strange,” Mr. Wiley says in a National Gallery film. “The ways we see black and brown bodies from the Pacific are shot through his sense of desire. But how do you change the narrative? How do you change the way of looking?”
To ensure that Gauguin’s artistic legacy is not besmirched by his “marriages” to underage girls, these relationships should be covered in exhibitions, said Line Clausen Pedersen, a Danish curator who has put on several Gauguin shows. With each exhibition, “another layer is peeled off the protection of history that he has somehow enjoyed,” she said. “Maybe the time is ripe to take off more layers than before.”
“What’s left to say about Gauguin,” she added, “is for us to bring out all the dirty stuff.”
Gauguin Portraits
Through Jan. 26, 2020, at the National Gallery in London; nationalgallery.org.uk.
"