"Gauguin had a daredevil attitude towards creation and art"

Flemming Friborg is the organizing curator of Gauguin & Polynesia, an elusive paradise, a show with more than 50 of Gauguin's famous motifs from Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands -many of them being exhibited in Denmark for the first time. Friborg takes us through some of the highlights of the exhibition, which can be seen at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, (Copenhagen, Denmark).

Gauguin & Polynesia pursues the artist's idea of the primitive. How would you describe this idea? What are the main highlights of Gauguin's form of primitive art?

'The primitive' in Gauguin is not just Polynesians and far-away tropical islands, but an attitude towards the world and art; Gauguin seeks out old and allegedly primitive cultures and sentiments early on, already in the 1880'ies, and both in Brittany, in Denmark (where he lived for 7 months in 1884-5), and in Arles with Van Gogh (1888).

He is -together with many at the time- fascinated by old folk tales, myths and the art of the Middle Ages (Romanesque, Gothic), and gradually forms the opinion that art should deal with finding and showing the deep roots of mankind all over the world -regardless of period, geographical place or religious creed. With Gauguin, this idea becomes a quest for something raw, primeval or original, as opposed to both the general moral corruption of Paris and Europe as such and as a counter-strategy to Impressionism, which he grew from as an artist, but quickly came to despise for its superficiality (the fact that Impressionism deals only with showing the visible in a sort of naturalistic way, not caring much about deeper sentiments and the human element beyond simple rendering of light and shadow).

Main highlights are many -but the Oviri ceramic sculpture (1894, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), the wooden relief Pape moe (1894, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek), the painting La Luxure (1889, private coll.) and the wood sculpture Père Paillard (c.1902, National Gallery Washington).   

If you had to single out one aspect of Gauguin’s art, what would it be? 

His daredevil attitude towards creation and art as such.

How long was this show in the making? 

5 years...

To what extent did Gauguin’s personality influence in his artistic creation? 

Enormously; he is the kind who never gives up, and he uses adversity as an energizer, working on rage or in extreme awareness of showing the world that he is the Master. Also, his Peruvian ancestry is something he flaunts often, claiming to be descended from the famous Flora Tristan and through her, to have Inca blood in his veins.

"With Gauguin art becomes seriously modern". Could you explain this statement?

He is one of the pioneers of modern art inasmuch as he is extremely conscious of his artistic media, audacious in mixing them, and an artist who experiments wildly in all sorts of materials and artistic expression. He is one of the first to use the objet trouvé: picking a banal everyday object like a part of a staircase decoration and then transforming it by painting on it, or using old door-panels from Brittany to piece together a wooden relief (Pape moe, 1894). His 'primitive' decorative style also influenced artists like Picasso.