The Glyptotek Museum Showcases "Guaguin & Polynesia ~ An Elusive Paradise"

Written by Nicklas Rommedahl Friday, 21 October 2011 02:20

Copehagen.- The Glyptotek Museum is proud to present "Guaguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise", on view at the museum through December 31st. Tahiti’s exotic women, the light and the vibrant colours, carved human bones, tattoos – the Glyptotek’s exhibition of the French painter Paul Gauguin delves deep into the artist’s life and the myths about Polynesia as Paradise on Earth. ”Gauguin & Polynesia – An Elusive Paradise” comprises 120 works – including more than 50 of the artist’s famous motifs from Tahiti and the Marquesa Islands. Many of them are being exhibited in Denmark for the first time. With its 60 Polynesian artefacts from the period between 1750 and 1900 this is the most comprehensive presentation hitherto of the rich, exotic culture Gauguin encountered in the South Seas and subsequently soaked up: cult figures, weapons, jewellery made of hair and bones, beautiful women and tattooed bodies. However the meeting between Gauguin and Oceania inadvertently also tells a story of Tahiti’s rapid cultural and human decline. Gauguin noticed the decline immediately on his arrival in 1891, but still managed to contrive an image of a Paradise which has remained intact almost until the present day.

Gauguin spent the winter of 1884-85 in Copenhagen with his Danish wife Mette (née. Gad) and their family. Much suggests that visits to the Danish National Museum’s ethnographic collection awoke his yearning for remote tribal cultures. This inspiration was further nurtured by his encounter with the art of the so-called ’primitive’ peoples at the World Exposition in Paris in 1889, and it flowers during his subsequent journeys to Polynesia and New Zealand. Gauguin often called himself  ‘Oviri’ – the wild man. He invented and refined his own form of “primitive” art, equal parts abstraction and observation of the natural world. In Copenhagen, Brittany and in Tahiti the ‘primitive’ aided Gauguin in his intense quest for a new art capable of making powerful statements about the human being, the erotic, and the mythical and mystical depths of life.


Posterity has shown an enormous interest in Gauguin’s art, but also in his character and personal life. His pictures of Tahiti are today icons of the encounter of European art with alien cultures and he inspired painters such as Picasso and Matisse. With Gauguin, art becomes seriously modern. ”Gauguin & Polynesia” combines a presentation of Gauguin the pioneer’s dream and life’s work with an insight into a fairytale but ultimately also tragic part of a world on the threshold of the 20th century. Gauguin’s artistic and human odyssey can be seen as one of old Europe’s last, romantic infatuations with the alien, the remote and the yearning for Paradise on Earth. Before Tahiti Gauguin had believed he could realize utopia in such places as Brittany, Provence, Panama, Madagascar, Cambodia and Martinique. Many of these places he never even visited, however he saw them as alternating destinations in dreams. It is possible that he realised quite early on that it was not the goal but the journey that mattered. In 1892, the year after his arrival in Papeete, he wrote: ”My artistic centre is in my head and nowhere else”. Gauguin always seems to be arriving either to late or too early for his own life, but his massive restlessness is, at the same time the driving force in his art and thought. It was he himself who started many of the myths which still thrive about him today – and it is in the variety and rôles of these that new questions are now (being) asked. For the first time in a Gauguin exhibition Polynesian art, cults and history are being independently and extensively presented – and that exclusively with artefacts from before 1900, so one gains an impression of these islands in Gauguin’s time. Visitors will be able to see objects he used directly in his painting, but especially to gain insight into mores and customs in the French colony towards the end of its flourishing.

The Glyptotek has a special relationship with Gauguin. Their collection with 46 of the artist’s works is one of the largest in the world. Helge Jacobsen (1882-1946), son of the museum’s founder Carl Jacobsen, undertook massive purchases of his paintings, several of them from his widow, Mette Gad, who was Danish and lived in Copenhagen until her death in 1926. The Ny Carlsberg Foundation has since donated a great number of the master’s works. Some of collection’s most important pieces can be seen in a special arrangement with other major French works at the museum during the course of the exhibition.


The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek mseum was founded by the brewer Carl Jacobsen (1842-1914) who created one of the largest private art collections of his time. It was named after his brewery, Ny Carlsberg, with the addition of "Glyptotek", meaning collection of sculpture. Jacobsen was interested in contemporary French and Danish art, as well as ancient art from the cultures surrounding the Mediterranean. To secure the future of the collection, Carl Jacobsen and his wife Ottilia donated it to the public in two deeds of gift from 1888 and 1899. The Museum's buildings were created to house these works of art. "With a beauty all its own", Carl Jacobsen wrote about his museum on Dantes Plads. This quote still carries weight at the Glyptotek, where the staff see it as their most cherished duty to maintain, develop and strengthen the museum's particular profile as an art collection, an architectural monument and a cultural institute. Today, the museum houses the largest collection of ancient art in Northern Europe, primarily sculpture, from Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Italy. The main focus of the French Collection is 19th century French painting and sculpture. The painting collection contains works by such painters as Jacques-Louis David and Édouard Manet, as well as a large collection of Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard.

The single painter represented with most paintings is Paul Gauguin with more than 40 works. The museum also holds a large collection of French 19th century sculpture by artists such as Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Rodin, the Rodin collection being one of the largest in the world, as well as a complete collection of Degas' bronze sculptures. The Danish Collection contains a large collection of Danish Golden Age paintings by painters such as Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Christen Købke and Johan Lundbye. It also contains the largest representation of Danish Golden Age Sculpture in the country. The European Collection comprises works from the 18th to the 20th century. Represented sculptors include Neoclassicists such as Antonio Canova, Johan Tobias Sergel, Asmus Jacob Carstens, John Flaxman, Christian Daniel Rauch and Edward Hodges Baily, as well as Modernists like Constantin Meunier, Julius Klinger, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti. The collection also comprises a small collection of Modern paintings of artists such as Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Serge Poliakoff and Gilioli. The unique surroundings with the Winter Garden, the Larsen Building for the Collection of French painting (inaugurated in 1996) and the Café each create a beautiful frame for the enjoyment of art and culture of a high standard. Since 1996 the Glyptotek has received approximately 350,000 visitors per year, making it one of the most popular art museums in Denmark. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.glyptoteket.dk

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