BONJOUR MONSIEUR GAUGUIN / VENDEL

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 https://hammer.ucla.edu/blog/2018/01/where-are-they-now-bonjour-monsieur-gauguin 

Where are They Now? Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin

January 31, 2018

 – By Lisa Aubry, curatorial intern

It is rather fitting that Paul Gauguin's works circulate around the world, their movements bringing a degree of continuity to the artist’s own restless movement and globe-trotting tendencies.

From the age of eighteen months until his death in 1903, Gauguin moved or traveled between Peru, Martinique, Le Havre, Rio de Janeiro, Denmark, various regions within France, and the islands of Tahiti and Hiva Oa. It was during his stay at the remote fishing village of Pont-Aven in Brittany on the northwestern French coast, that the artist painted Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1889), which is now on view at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City until February 4.  

The painting is joined by another work from the Hammer’s permanent collection, Titian’s Portrait of a Man in Armor (1530), as part of the Mexican Red exhibition. The show focuses on the utilization of a pigment, produced by insects, and cultivated in the Mexican plateau called grana cochinilla, which was in demand for its rich hue from the 16th century until the late 19th century. Masters like Tintoretto, Tiziano, Velázquez, Turner, Renoir and Van Gogh used grana cochinilla in their works. Curated by color theory specialist Georges Roque, the exhibition demonstrates the importance of this product for over four centuries, examining the cochineal grana’s symbolic and market value in a time of early globalization and commodity culture. United in their employment of this popular deep red pigment, the Hammer’s works hang alongside other masterpieces like The Bedroom of Van Gogh in Arles by Van Gogh (1888) and The Deposition of Christ by Tintoretto (c. 1550).

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He painted Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin after his visit to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier with Van Gogh in December of 1888, where he saw Gustav Courbet’s Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet. Although sharing few formal similarities, Gauguin’s painting is meant to be a response to Courbet. In both works, the artists are central and capture the viewer’s attention. Courbet represents himself as a free roaming figure who dwells outside the constraints of society. Similarly, Gauguin’s choice of a rural setting expresses his shared desire to escape the proper and civilized Parisian lifestyle and become immersed within the landscape, among "peasants." Gauguin’s personage is cloaked by a mysterious red shroud, which is a tool to emphasize that the artist is a withdrawn, misunderstood creative genius working outside the norms of bourgeois society. It seems rather ironic that the presence of red produced by the popular grana concillia on Gauguin’s cloak, a symbol for the isolated figure of artist, behave as an element of unity amongst other works and painters in the Mexican Red exhibition.