Illuminating Gauguin’s ‘Decisive Experience’ in Martinique

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/arts/gauguin-martinique-van-gogh-museum.html

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AMSTERDAM — In the spring of 1887, the painter Paul Gauguin wrote a letter to his wife, Mette-Sophie, who was living in Denmark with four of their children, to ask her to come pick up their fifth child, Clovis, from Paris, because Gauguin wanted to leave the stifling city and find a “free and fertile” island.

“I will take my paint and my brushes,” he wrote, and “live like a native.”

In April of that year, he and his friend and fellow painter Charles Laval left Paris to go to Panama, but found it inhospitable, then detoured to the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony at the time. They spent the next four months together living in a hut on a sugar plantation there, near the Bay of St.-Pierre, painting images of the tropical landscape; mango, papaya and palm trees; and the local women.

That brief period of Gauguin’s career has mostly been forgotten, in part because that first tropical sojourn has been overshadowed by the decade that Gauguin spent on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, where he created some of his most famous paintings.

But a new exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, “Gauguin & Laval in Martinique,” which opened on Friday and runs through Jan. 13, seeks to illuminate that short but transformative moment by bringing together most of the works the two painters created during that time.

“For whatever reason, the Martinique period does seem to be a period that seems to have been neglected in Gauguin studies,” Belinda Thomson, an art historian and curator of a Gauguin exhibition in 2010 at Tate Modern, said in a telephone interview.

“It’s very important to open up this earlier aspect of his work and also to see him in relation to Laval, because for a long time their works were confused,” she continued. “Laval himself was a very talented artist who we know very little about, and so that will be a revelation.”

The Van Gogh Museum already had three paintings from the Martinique period — two by Gauguin and one by Laval — and two Gauguin drawings in its collection. That, in part, is why Maite van Dijk, senior curator of paintings at the museum, and the junior curator Joost van der Hoeven decided to try to mount an exhibition focused on the period. In addition, it seems to have been a pivotal moment in Gauguin’s career.

“These were the paintings that got him his first real recognition,” Ms. van Dijk said in an interview at the museum. “So it was a pretty important moment.”

Gauguin told the French art critic Charles Morice in 1890: “I had a decisive experience in Martinique. It was only there that I felt like my real self, and one must look for me in the works I brought back from there, rather than those from Brittany, if one wants to know who I am.”

When Gauguin returned to Paris, the art dealer Theo van Gogh and his brother, Vincent van Gogh, acquired one of Gauguin’s paintings, “The Mango Trees, Martinique” for their personal collection. It hung above the sofa in Theo’s home until he died, Ms. van Djik said. Theo began dealing in Gauguin’s art. These paintings also caught the attention of a prominent French art critic, Félix Fénéon, who started to write about his work, and “that really started things going for Gauguin,” Ms. van Dijk said.

Gauguin had grown up in Peru and traveled extensively as a sailor, but he came of age as a painter in Paris, during the era of the Impressionists and under the tutelage of Camille Pissarro. Like other painters of his era, he believed that he could find a more idyllic, “primitive” environment in an island setting, and he searched for the perfect locale. In 1891, he traveled to Tahiti, and stayed there for two years. He returned in 1895 and remained until his death in 1903. During the final eight years of his life, he painted many works that evoked a colorful, tropical paradise, featuring nearly nude images of local women at work, on beaches and in palm groves.

The Martinique period was never extensively studied before, said Ms. van Dijk, except in an unpublished 1981 dissertation by Karen Rechnitzer Pope, who became a professor of 19th-century European art at Baylor University in Texas.

“The significance of the Martinique period comes with hindsight,” Professor Pope said in a telephone interview. “The ‘Mango Trees’ picture is a kind of breakthrough. It’s not just lyrical and delicate and hazy and scenic; it’s a powerful large figure composition and that became the direction of his work from then on.”

The five Martinique works the Van Gogh Museum already owned formed the basis of the exhibition, and the museum subsequently purchased two more Martinique drawings by Laval. It also secured loans from museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the National Galleries of Scotland and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, as well as private collections.

Ultimately, the museum was able to secure nine out of 17 paintings that Gauguin completed in the four months and all of Laval’s known paintings from the period, as well as painted fans, ceramics, sculptures and letters that Gauguin wrote about his time there.

“We really wanted to focus on the relationship between the two painters,” Ms. van Dijk said. “It’s really about this artistic collaboration. Laval was often considered a follower of Gauguin, but when you look at these works together, it’s not possible to say that Gauguin was necessarily the greater painter of the two.”

Gauguin and Laval’s friendship dissolved when Laval married Madeleine Bernard, the sister of a mutual friend, the painter Émile Bernard. Gauguin was also in love with Madeleine, and he not only broke with Laval but also disparaged him publicly, as did Bernard, Ms. van Dijk said.

Laval died a few years later of complications from tuberculosis, just after turning 33, and his body of work was very small.

“What he learned on Martinique was also something about himself,” Ms. van Dijk said. “He was really looking for his own identity, and who he wanted to be as an artist, what he wanted to paint or present. I think that being in France, because he had grown up abroad and traveled a lot, he always felt like an outsider. In Martinique, he realized that he had to go somewhere else to find his subject.”