Word: gauguins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Back Room. The revival was due to an enterprising New Zealander named Rex de C. Nan Kivell, who runs the Redfern Gallery. In 1938 he had come across a Dumont landscape in the back room of a Paris gallery. It suggested both the influence of Gauguin and a comparable talent. After the war, Nan Kivell set out to find more of Dumont's work; he roamed all over France, picking up paintings from private collections and the homes of Dumont's friends. In ten years, he succeeded in getting together 54 Dumonts for the current show...
Last week the results of this largess were on view in Paris' Pedagogical Museum. Among some 300 childish works done by boys and girls in France's Pacific possessions were nine drawings of special interest: they were done by six of the eight grandchildren of Paul Gauguin and Tehura. The most promising talent among Emile Tai's children was that of eleven-year-old Adolphe, whose dark browns and blues could, by only a slight stretch of imagination, be made to recall his grandfather's mastery of color. But the real tear-squeezer of the show...
...Though there is evidence that some artistic talent was passed on to the children and grandchildren of Gauguin and his Danish wife Mette: son Jean René, 72, is a noted Copenhagen sculptor, and son Pola, 70, an ex-painter, is now an art critic in Oslo. Among the grandchildren: a promising painter and a maker of woodcuts...
...responsible critic in France would get far enough out on a limb to credit any of Gauguin's Tahitian grandchildren with having inherited their grandfather's genius.* But France-Soir, yielding to a temptation to sentimentalize, proclaimed that the children's efforts "revealed striking gifts that only heredity could explain...
This Elysian union in time produced a son, Emile Tai, who grew up like the other native children. He never learned to read or write, took a native wife, settled himself as a vegetable dealer in the village of Punaauia, seven miles from Papeete. All that Gauguin's son knew of his father (who died in 1903) were vague stories told him by his mother. For almost 50 years, the outside world paid little attention to what had happened to Gauguin's native family...