Great British Gauguin: His Reception in London in 1910-11 (Paul Gaugin‪)‬

The private view for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition took place on 5 November 1910, Guy Fawkes's day, at the Grafton Galleries in London. For the first time the British public saw the work of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin and other painters drawn mainly from the late nineteenth-century French avant-garde. It was a succe's de scandale which became at once the most widely publicised and also the most notorious exhibition in the history of art. Both its timing and the choice of works, however, were entirely adventitious. The gallery had a gap in its programme and in the summer of that year asked Roger Fry to assemble an exhibition for the autumn in a hurry. Fry, a trusted and established connoisseur, critic, writer, and editor of the Burlington Magazine, went with Desmond MacCarthy to Paris and begged what the could from the dealers. Fry created a rationale for the selection by inventing a title--'Post Impressionists'--and overnight, a new school came into being. The public was astounded, and many journalists suspected a plot to undermine British art and British civilization from an 'organized headquarters in Paris' reflecting 'the debasement of the painters living in the Gay City' (1). The phobic response of the middle classes to this exhibition drew its energies from events that lay well beyond the ambience of Bond Street. At home, the striking Welsh miners and the demonstrating suffragettes both contributed to sense that stable values and cultural certainties were under threat. On the continent, Paris appeared to be a hotbed of anarchism. The knowledge that Les Entretiens Politiques et Litteraires had published the writings of Max Stirner and Michael Bakunin, and La Revue Blanche had defended the causes of Symbolism, free verse, and anarchy, led to the British suggestion that the Post-Impressionists were 'the analogue of the anarchical movements in the political world'(2). The first Post Impressionist exhibition was a blow aimed at British propriety, decency, and moral superiority from the ground of high art. Worse still, Fry" had persuaded various members of the British establishment to collude, with the result that the Director of the National Gallery and the Keeper of the Wallace Collection had both put their names to the conspiracy. The level of journalistic vituperation was startling. The works on display were 'hysterical daubs', 'crude intolerable outrages' and 'childish rubbish'; they were 'sterile', 'unmanly', "sickening aberrations'; they were the product of 'morbid' and 'diseased minds'; they were, in short, examples of 'the last degradation of art' (3) Of the central triumvirate of painters, hostility to Cezanne was fomented by Roger Fry's outspoken reverence for the artist; Van gogh's mental condition gave rise to predictable comments about the 'visualised ravings of an adult maniac' (4) but the case of Gauguin was more complex. He dominated the show, from the advertising poster (Fig. 1) that used his Poemes Barbares (1896) (5) to the thirty-seven more examples on the walls. Since these were the most 'decorative' offer ings, they were also the most approachable. 'You might imagine that you are entering an exhibition of the New Tahitian Art Club instead of the Graffon Gallery', wrote Martin Hardie. (6) Furthermore, these paintings had an anthropological appeal. Though the epithets used to describe them--'barbaric'and 'savage'--were often derisive or dismissive, there was also a certain curiosity and even admiration for Gaugin's 'primitive grandeur' (7). In other words, the responses to Gauguin in 1910 were coloured by a number of contradictory prejudices, preconceptions, and received ideas, many of which were socially, culrurally, aesthetically and even scientifically determined. Foremost among these preconceptions were those that conditioned understanding of primitive culture and primitive art. Lovejoy and Boas, in pointing out that primitivism is an extremely ancient concept, distinguish between what