“Everyone has a secret desire to rape: because through this act of male authority the female will retains its complete irresponsibility.”
This quote comes from “Noa Noa,” a text by the French artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). It was created in Paris in 1893, as a kind of accompanying and advertising text for the works he created in French Polynesia.
However, this quote cannot be read in the exhibition “Gauguin – unexpected” in the Vienna Art Forum. The biography of “the superstar of modern painting” is displayed in the penultimate room. However, it was noted on the boards there that Gauguin had disembarked in Marseille “in August 1893 with 66 paintings and four francs” after his first stay in Tahiti (1891–1983), a colonial territory in the South Pacific.
At least two children
This observation represents the general dilemma that plagues the show (curator: Evelyn Benesch) – a collaboration with the Vienna Albertina -: meticulousness, effort and care characterized the organization, the collection of the works obviously and also shape the presentation of Gauguin’s work.
The radicalism that our time demands in dealing with (male) “geniuses” who have never been sufficient for today’s conventions can only be found with a magnifying glass. What catches your eye are the colors, shapes and lines that made Gauguin an innovator, a pioneer of abstraction (post-impressionism), the rejection of the illusion of life-likeness and painting based on feelings, dreams and instincts.
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Image: C. Jobst/Kunstforum Wien/bpk | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975
Source: Nachrichten
