From Paris to Polynesia

An exhibition provides an illuminating view of Gauguin's long, restless career

- KAREN WILKIN

'GAUGUIN IN THE WORLD," at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, can change our understanding of the work of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Organized by the National Gallery of Australia, the MFA Houston and Art Exhibitions Australia, with Henri Loyrette as curator and Ann Dumas as the MFA's consulting curator, the show illuminates what Mr. Loyrette calls Gauguin's "inner quest for elsewhere" through a generous selection of works spanning his entire life as an artist, reflecting his restless search for alternatives in Paris, the Caribbean, Normandy, Brittany, Provence, and finally Polynesia.

One caveat. Many of Gauguin's most celebrated canvases are too fragile to travel. The show includes enough compelling, well-known paintings, but its strength is in less familiar works, in different media, from far-flung collections. Gauguin's appetite for experimentation dominates. In addition to the inventive painter and brilliant colorist whom we know, we meet the sculptor/woodcarver, the creator of eccentric pottery and the daring printmaker, and catch glimpses of the writer and friend of Symbolist poets. We may miss some of the absent works, but we gain an enriched context in which to consider them-one so provocative that it might even overshadow the biography, here documented by a revealing selection of self-portraits painted between 1885 and 1903, punctuating the exhibition.