Displaying items by tag: Gauguin

It is the finest collection of modern art anywhere outside Europe and the US, boasting works by Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Edvard Munch, René Magritte and Mark Rothko.

But the pieces have been stacked in the basement of Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art for more than 30 years, gathering dust in storage. Censors in Iran classed some as un-Islamic, pornographic or too gay, and they have never been shown in public. Others have been displayed only once or twice.

But now a number of the collection's paintings are on show for the first time in Tehran as part of the museum's Pop Art & Op Art exhibition, featuring works by Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Victor Vasarely, Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns.

"Many of the works in the exhibition are shown for the first time," Hasan Noferesti, the museum's director for art programmes, told the Mehr news agency. "The exhibition aims to show the evolution of these artistic movements."

More than 100 pieces from the museum's remarkable collection are on display, according to Mehr, along with a series of works from Mexico that have been dedicated to the museum in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution and the 200th anniversary of the country's independence.

James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Larry Rivers and RB Kitaj are among other artists whose works are in the exhibition, which runs until mid-August.

Iran's unique hidden treasure was bought before the Islamic revolution, under the supervision of Farah Pahlavi, the former queen of Iran, who fled the country with the late shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

The 38-year reign of the shah, self-proclaimed kings of kings, came to an end after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran receiving a hero's welcome and founded the Islamic republic.

The collection includes Pollock's Mural on Indian Red Ground, considered to be one of his most important works and estimated to be worth more than $250m, as well as important pieces by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler and Marcel Duchamp.

There are even pieces by artists whom the former empress met in person, including the Russian-French painter Marc Chagall and the English sculptor Henry Moore. The collection is thought to be worth more than $2.5bn.

A painting by Paul Gauguin on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. was attacked by a gallery-visiting woman who repeatedly struck the work of art while screaming ‘this is evil.’

According to other gallery-goers and security personnel the woman, who has been identified as 53-year-old Susan Burns, attempted to tear the painting down from the wall and thrashed the painting with her fists.

According to misdemeanor complaint charges Burns 'struck the middle of the painting with her right fist.'

Luckily, a transparent acrylic shield surrounding the work of art, protecting it from the assault.

'She was really pounding it with her fists. It was like this weird surreal scene that one doesn't expect at the National Gallery,’ Pamela Degotardi, a witness to the incident, told The Washington Post.

The 1899 painting, Gauguin’s ‘Two Tahitian Women,’ depicts two native women carrying fruit and flowers, one with both breasts exposed, the other with one exposed.

According to a criminal complaint filed in Washington, D.C. Superior Court, Burns said that the painting is 'very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned ... I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you.'

An intricate wooden bust carved by Paul Gauguin is expected to sell for as much as $15 million when it is auctioned on May 3, according to Sotheby's.

"Jeune tahitienne," which was carved by Gauguin during his first trip to Tahiti between 1891 and 1893, depicts a young, unidentified Tahitian woman and includes jewelry which Gauguin made himself using seashells and pieces of red coral.

A piercing left on the ear is believed by experts to have once held a flower, and two foxes carved in the back of the neck represent a sort of signature Gauguin often used, with the foxes being representative of sexuality.

"It's rare to see a piece of art of such great quality and with such a great story," said Simon Shaw, Sotheby's head of Impressionist and Modern Art. "It's truly unique."

The 9.5 inch-high carving, which has not been seen in public since 1961, was given as a gift to then 10-year old Jeanne Fournier, the daughter of French art critic and collector Jean Dolent.

"Paul Gauguin: Maker of Myth" focuses on narrative, self-mythologizing and other literary and psychological aspects of the post-impressionist master. The curators of the National Gallery exhibition have focused on recurring themes and visual elements that give Gauguin's art an underlying sense of narrative, even if his paintings and sculptures don't tell explicit stories. These are some of the basic visual icons that visitors to the exhibition will encounter.

Horse and rider

In two of the exhibition's most powerful, and enigmatic, paintings, figures of a horse and rider are seen through an open window. In one case, he is arriving; in the other, departing. Does he have a relation - benign or predatory - to the women depicted in these canvasses? Or does he depict a general sense of a journey, or a movement through time, connecting the stationary figures to a larger sense of time and destiny?

The life of Paul Gauguin, dimly remembered from a bad art-appreciation class, used to go this way: Well-off stockbroker abandons wife and children to devote himself to art; decries the increasing vacuity of his impressionist forefathers; rebels against bourgeois society; leaves Paris for places warm and exotic; and eventually makes his way to Tahiti, where he discovers the primitive, reinvents himself and produces paintings of lush sensuality filled with the enticing forms of native women.

When the National Gallery teamed up with museums in Chicago and Paris more than 20 years ago to mount a monumental exhibition of works by Gauguin, it was precisely that understanding of the pioneering post-impressionist that they sought to undermine. The blockbuster 1988 exhibition, according to its organizers, aimed to stress "his production as an artist rather than the exotic, troubled and fascinating life that has attained almost mythological proportions and is better left to biography and film."

Today, with a new Gauguin exhibition opening at the National Gallery on Sunday, taste and scholarship have changed. Subtitled "Maker of Myth," the current Gauguin show is not so large or comprehensive as the one seen in 1988. Rather, it is focused on many of the things that would have been held in bad odor two decades ago: biographical tales, narrative elements and the relation between the artist and the places and people he painted.

Perhaps the old Gauguin myth did deserve a wooden stake through the heart if anyone still believed it two decades ago. Most of it was piffle and what was true - he abandoned his wife and family and slept with underage native girls - was not very flattering to Gauguin. Close attention to Gauguin's writing, including letters not published until long after his death in 1903, revealed many of the swashbuckling elements of his life story were part of a carefully calculated PR campaign, a reinvention of himself as part "savage" in an effort to create a brand for his work, which wasn't selling as well as he had hoped and had diverged from impressionism long before he made his way to places where the weather was warm and the sex plentiful.