Gauguin Portraits review – a buttoned-up, nervous and nude-light cop-out of a show

National Gallery, London
In a gallery that is elsewhere stuffed with naked white women, this exhibition’s avoidance of Gauguin’s unclothed Tahitians feels like an act of prudery – and even censorship

Paul Gauguin was the first European artist to find brown skin more beautiful than white. He makes that plain in his 1902 painting Barbarian Tales, a highlight of the National Gallery’s ultimately frustrating exhibition. Who is the “barbarian” of the title? The gnome-like European who squats like Rumpelstiltskin, or the two serene Pacific women he is next to? It’s not quite right, however, to call the male colonial interloper who gloats over the pair’s unabashed bodies “white”. His flesh is a horrible bright pink.

Gauguin painted this self-excoriating work just a year before his death in the Marquesas Islands in 1903. The grotesque European voyeur is surely a guilty expression of his own appetite for “exotic” female flesh. In 1891, aged 43, he set sail for Tahiti with funding from the French government. He lived in and painted the Pacific world for the rest of his life, apart from a short return to France. More particularly, he portrayed Oceanian women, naked as often as not.

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