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THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 265, February 2015
EXHIBITIONS Continental Europe
Gauguin’s ‘will and testament’
Leading loans:
Gauguin’s Where
Do We Come
From? What
Are We? Where
Are We Going?,
1897-98, and
the recently
rediscovered
sculpture Thérèse,
1902
POST-IMPRESSIONISM
Riehen/Basel. The Fondation Beyeler’s
Paul Gauguin retrospective will be the
most ambitious exhibition mounted
at the museum since its establishment
in 1997. After six years of work, the
museum has secured the loan of 50
paintings and sculptures from 13 countries. It is being billed as the greatest
exhibition of Gauguin’s work since
“Gauguin: Tahiti” was held at the Grand
Palais in Paris and the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston (MFA) in 2003-04.
Raphaël Bouvier, the Beyeler show’s
co-curator, wants to present Gauguin as
“one of the forerunners of Modern art”.
The exhibition will also fill a gap, since
Gauguin is the most important Post-Impressionist artist still missing from
the Beyeler’s permanent collection.
Although the Basel show is covering the
artist’s full career, it will concentrate on
his period in Tahiti and the Marquesas
Islands, from 1891 until his death in
1903. It was there that he did his greatest
work. In Polynesia he sought an exotic
world, combining nature and culture,
mysticism and eroticism, and dream
and reality.
The most important loan will be the
monumental (nearly four metres wide)
Where Do We Come From? What Are We?
Where Are We Going?, 1897-98, which is
being lent by the MFA and which very
rarely travels. Martin Schwander, the
show’s co-curator, describes the work
as Gauguin’s “artistic last will and testament”. In return, the Beyeler is offering a group of important Picasso loans
to the MFA, although this has not yet
been announced.
Russia’s two major museums, the
Hermitage Museum and the Pushkin
Museum, are each lending three
important paintings. These include
the Pushkin’s Rupe Rupe, 1899, which
has only rarely been lent since its
arrival in Moscow more than a century
ago. To help secure the Russian loans,
the Beyeler is sponsoring the current
Pushkin exhibition “Paul Klee: Not a
Day Without a Line” (until 1 March),
which includes loans from the Basel
museum and the Zentrum Paul Klee in
Bern. Important private loans include
three paintings from 1902, the year
before Gauguin’s death: Riders on the
Beach II, (owner unidentified, but once in
the Niarchos collection), The Incantation
(courtesy of Ordovas gallery, London)
and Bathers from an unnamed collection.
Gauguin’s sculptures are often
overlooked. However, his ceramics
and carved wood scupltures are highly
inventive, revealing a different side to
his work. They had a powerful
influence on such 20th-century
artists as Pablo Picasso. Bouvier
says: “It was Gauguin’s sculptures, their expressive power
and their archaic air, that left
their mark on Picasso’s first
essays in the medium.” Among
the exciting rediscoveries in
the Beyeler show will be Gauguin’s Thérèse, 1902, a carved
figure of a stylised Polynesian
woman.
Sam Keller, the Beyeler’s
director, had always wanted
to include Thérèse, but it had
disappeared around 1980, and
was since hidden away in a
private London collection.
Keller spotted it at Frieze
Masters last October, on the stand of the
London gallery Lefevre Fine Art, which
is lending the sculpture for the show.
The haunting figure of the woman is
said to depict a servant of the Marquesan Catholic bishop, Joseph Martin, who
Gauguin believed had sexual relations
with his employees. Sadly, the pendant
sculpture of the bishop, Père Paillard
(Father Lechery), 1902, now at the
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, is not being borrowed, so
the bishop and the servant will not
be reunited.
The Fondation Beyeler is the
only venue for the show, since
securing the major loans for a
second institution would have
proved too difficult. The museum
is expecting around 300,000 visitors,
which is likely to make it Switzerland’s most popular exhibition of
the year.
“Paul Gauguin” is supported by
the Swiss pharmaceutical company
Novartis.
Martin Bailey
• Paul Gauguin, Fondation Beyeler,
Basel, 8 February-28 June
Compare and contrast
How the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl diverge
Art lures skiers
off the slopes
FOLKLORE
St Moritz. Like the ancient Greeks, the
Swiss have their own myth of a seductive nymph, luring hapless youths to
their deaths with her enchanting looks.
La Diavolezza was a mountain-dwelling
fairy whose beauty mesmerised young
huntsmen into following her into the
snowy unknown, never to be seen again.
She achieved such renown that a mountain in the Engadin area of the Swiss Alps
was named after her, and a nearby glacier
after her most famous victim, Aratsch.
The artist Pierre Huyghe and the
architects François Roche and Camille
Lacadee of the architect collective
New-Territories are venturing out into
this icy landscape to create What Could
Happen, a large-scale installation on the
banks of Lej Nair, a frozen lake, which,
according to legend, emits a mysterious
humming sound. Visitors will be transported from St Moritz to this remote site
by an Alpine train dating from 1910.
A film of the three-day event, which
has been organised by Giorgio Pace Projects, will be shown at the Luma Foundation, Arles, in late spring.
Culture seekers
The Engadin valley, and St Mortiz in
particular, is drawing a growing number
of culture seekers on top of its steady
stream of nature lovers and skiers. The
contemporary art festival St Moritz Art
Masters, which takes place from 21 to 30
August, is now in its eighth edition, and
established dealers including Robilant +
Voena, Gmurzynska and Karsten Greve
have all opened spaces in the luxurious
ski resort. It has also been reported that
the dealer Vito Schnabel, son of the
artist Julian, is taking over Bruno Bischofberger’s space in the town; its final
show is of works by the Czech artist Jiri
Georg Dokoupil (until 7 April).
Other highlights nearby this month
include shows by Rolf Sachs and Olivier
Mosset at Andrea Caratsch, St Moritz
(until 7 April), and Kimsooja at Galerie
Tschudi, Zuoz (until 14 March).
Julia Michalska
• What Could Happen, Lej Nair, St Moritz,
26-28 February
ROMANTICISM
Dresden. The works of the Romantic
landscape artists Caspar David Friedrich
(1774-1840) and his younger contemporary Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857)
easily lend themselves to a study in similarities and differences. While Friedrich
was born in Greifswald, on the Baltic
coast (then in Swedish Pomerania) and
Dahl in the Norwegian town of Bergen,
then in the Kingdom of Denmark, both
spent their adult lives and careers in
Dresden, the German capital of the
Duchy of Saxony. Both had attended
the Academy of Art in Copenhagen
and even shared a house and studio for
almost 20 years. Yet each was distinct in
significant ways.
Friedrich’s trajectory was already
falling by the time the 30-year-old Dahl,
on the threshold of his career, moved
to Dresden in 1818. Friedrich had considerable support and patronage from
the Prussian royal family and the stamp
of approval of none other than Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, but because of
his support for bourgeois, liberal and
democratic ideas, the artist fell out of
favour during the repressive years following the Congress of Vienna in 181415. He was a member of the Academy of
Art from 1816, but when the incumbent
Glacial installation: François Roche,
What Could Happen (rendering), 2015
In brief
War stories
professor of landscape died in 1824,
Friedrich was passed over for the post
(which was given, ironically, to Dahl).
The greatest difference between the
two lay, however, in their approach to
landscape painting. Friedrich’s might
be termed the landscape of meaning—
that is, pictures of nature that stimulate
the imagination or, through quasi-symbolic forms (famously, his Rückenfiguren,
figures seen from behind), subjectively
create a mood or mystery, or suggested
political tendencies (figures dressed in
Altdeutsch costume signalled his liberal
and nationalistic leanings).
Dahl’s style and sympathies lay in
the landscape of observation. His chief
Nationalistic and symbolic: Dahl’s Nordic
River Landscape, 1819, and Friedrich’s
Megalithic Grave in the Snow, 1807
attempt was to use light and colour to
transcribe nature as precisely and objectively as possible. To ensure topographical exactness, Dahl returned to Norway
four times to make detailed and increasingly highly finished sketches that he
worked into paintings on his return to
Dresden. Dahl’s landscapes were also
intended, and perhaps seen, as expressions of nationalistic feeling (although
not as explicitly as Friedrich’s) and Dahl
actively promoted Norwegian concerns,
notably the conservation of ancient
monuments and the foundation of the
National Gallery of Norwegian art.
The artists exhibited together until
Friedrich’s work slowed and then
stopped in 1835. They are paired once
again in “Dahl and Friedrich: Romantic Landscapes” at the Dresden Albertinum, an exhibition of paintings and
drawings that is the fruit of a collaboration between the Dresden Galerie Neue
Meister, the Kupferstich-Kabinett and
the Oslo National Museum of Art, under
the patronage of H.M. Queen Sonja of
Norway and Daniela Schadt.
Donald Lee
• Dahl and Friedrich: Romantic Landscapes,
Dresden Albertinum, 6 February-3 May
Artists, in their pursuit of truth, have often
turned to the subject of war. In “Fight
History”, the second show in the three-part
series “Crisis of History” at the Tolhuistuin,
Amsterdam (6 February-9 March), ten artists confront the violence that has erupted
across the Middle East. The Iraq-born artist
Wafaa Bilal, for example, critiques Western
action in Iraq through the adaptation of
an American video game, and Cairo-based
Nermine Hammam’s photography captures
the disillusionment and isolation of individuals in post-revolution Egypt (below, Codes
of My Kin, 2012). The show is supported
by the Mondriaan Fund and Amsterdams
Fonds voor de Kunst, among others. L.H.
GAUGUIN: MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON. DAHL: NASJONALMUSEET FOR KUNST, ARKITEKTUR OG DESIGN, OSLO. FRIEDRICH © STAATLICHE KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN DRESDEN, PHOTO JURGEN KARPINSKI
The French painter is the subject of a retrospective that includes important rediscovered sculpture