Part of his installation will be the piece“The Invocation”, which is on loan to the IU Art Museum from The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
“The style that he is associated with is called symbolism,” said Jenny McComas, curator of European and American Art at IU Art Museum. “The symbolist movement was an artistic and a literary movement in the late 19th century. Artists are really trying to convey their inner feelings, almost their spiritual connection to art, and they are trying to get that through in their work.”
That is what Gauguin did in his piece “The Invocation” on view now, McComas said.
“The focus of “The Invocation” is a raw female figure who stands before a mountainous landscape, her arms reaching toward the sky,” McComas wrote in an article for Ryder magazine.
“The Invocation” is just one piece in Gauguin’s installation in the IU Art Museum’s Gallery of the Art of the Western World, located on the first floor.
Other pieces include “The Devil Speaks (Mahna No Varua Ino)” and “The Rape of Europa (L’Enlèvement d’Europe).” Both are wood cuts on Japanese paper.
All of these works represent Gauguin’s time in Tahiti, a time when he became skeptical about the Catholic church, McComas said.
When Gauguin lived in Polynesia for about a decade, McComas said, he saw how Catholic missionaries suppressed the traditional culture.
“He was becoming uneasy about that, so I think the cross, the church in the background, is meant more as a commentary on the role the Church is making as a transformer of traditional culture and maybe not necessarily in a good way,” McComas said.
Gauguin was raised Catholic and attended a prestigious boarding school, Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, before joining the French merchant marines, McComas said in the Ryder piece. His background may have led to his rebellion on religious thought.
His later work shows that this alluded to his “increasingly ambivalent and complicated attitude towards colonialism,” McComas wrote.
McComas said “The Invocation” is the first Gauguin work to go on view in the gallery, “at least in recent years.”
There will also be a Noon Talk series in February discussing “The Invocation” as Gauguin’s “frustrated urge to ‘express the inexpressible.’”
The installation will be on display until April 10.
