Gauguin the Primitive

(The New-York Historical Society)

"Gauguin: Metamorphosis," presenting nearly 160 works reassessing the unusual career of Paul Gauguin, is, surprisingly, the Museum of Modern Art's first major exhibition to focus solely on the self-taught and influential 19th-century painter.

Gauguin's alchemical use of color and simplified forms would go on to greatly impact the Symbolist and Modern art movements. Viewing the exhibit one wonders what to make of the man, heralded by many as a great painter and disparaged by as many others as a retrograde.

(Read the entire review at The New York Sun.)

^ Paul Gauguin, "Mata Mua (In Olden Times)," 1892. (Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid)

^ Paul Gauguin, "Tahitian Woman with Evil Spirit (recto)," c. 1900. (Private collection.)

                       ^ Paul Gauguin, "Ovri (Savage)," 1894. (Private collection.)

Flesh and Shadow

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 602: European Paintings)

Flesh and Shadow

by Robert Edward Bullock, Special to the Sun

Two paintings currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide a glimpse of the achievements and the variety of subjects in seventeenth-century Italian painting. A fertile and creative artistic environment gave birth to some of the greatest talents in Western art that, like constellations of bright stars, cause us to stop and stare nearly four hundred years later.

Alongside scenes from the Bible and saints lives were those from ancient mythology, such as Danaë. Confined to a tower as a virgin by her father, the king, because of a prophecy that he would be killed by the son she would bear, Danaë is visited by the god Jupiter, who appears as a shower of gold and lays with her for the night. Their son, Perseus, grows to one day behead Medusa and to accidentally kill his grandfather. 

Orazio Gentileschi (b.1563) dramatizes the story's key event with mannerist effect. His "Danaë" (ca.1621) shows the princess full and fertile, the classical ideal, reclining on a royal bed against the enveloping shadows as a putto clumsily raises the heavy drapery, bathed in the light of the divine. The veil separating the worlds of gods and men is, in effect, momentarily .....

(read the full review at The New York Sun)

"Danaë" by Orazio Gentileschi. Oil on canvas, ca.1621. Private collection on temporary loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

"St Dominic in Penitence" by Filippo Tarchiani. Oil on canvas, no date given (first quarter of 17th-century). Private collection on temporary loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.