From November 3, 2024, by February 16, 2025, the Museum of Fantastic Arts, Houston, will host an bold exhibition of the work of French Publish-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).
Supply: Museum of Fantastic Arts, Houston · Picture: Paul Gauguin, Three Tahitians, 1899, oil on canvas, Nationwide Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.
“Gauguin’s World” chronicles what curator Loyrette characterizes as Gauguin’s “inner quest for elsewhere” by an expansive survey of his work, from its Impressionist beginnings in Paris, by a interval of exploration to Denmark, Brittany, Provence, and Martinique, to its fruits in his final years in Oceania, the place he created a few of his most iconic work. Whereas Gauguin’s World is a complete survey of Gauguin’s prolific profession, Loyrette underscores that the present’s narrative is constructed from the attitude of the artist’s final works: “When Gauguin landed in the Marquesas in September 1901, he knew that he had reached his journey’s end; he had at last found his ‘true homeland,’ the place to which he had always aspired. In the 20 months before his death, he continued to develop his art while, in his writings, he set out to review his career as a whole. This is the starting point for an exhibition that reveals that introspection and the art that preceded it, returning to the questions that haunted him as an artist—the challenges that he set himself and solved in his quest for his own identity.”
The exhibition might be organized throughout six galleries, presenting the arc of Gauguin’s profession from the 1870s by his remaining years, with half of the exhibition dedicated to Gauguin’s work in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands.
Gauguin’s World consists of 150 artworks drawn from 65 private and non-private collections worldwide, together with: Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Nationwide Galleries of Scotland; Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Artwork; Cleveland Museum of Artwork; the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, New York; Louvre Abu Dhabi; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork; Nationwide Museum of Western Artwork, Tokyo; and the Musée de Tahiti et des îles, which is lending each their Gauguins and vital Nineteenth-century Marquesan sculptural works.
