Gauguin and the Voyage to the Exotic

Gauguin and the Voyage to the Exotic
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
9 October 2012 to 13 January 2013

To coincide with the celebration of the Museum’s 20th Anniversary, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will be presenting Gauguin and the Voyage to the Exotic, opening on 9 October. Primarily focusing on Gauguin and his flight to Tahiti, the exhibition will analyse how this journey to supposedly more authentic worlds resulted in an updating and rethinking of his creative idiom and to what extent this experience affected the transition towards modern art. The exhibition will survey the period that opens with Gauguin’s visual experiments in the South Seas and continues with the artistic investigations of subsequent artists such as Emil Nolde, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and August Macke, with the aim of revealing Gauguin’s influence on the early 20th-century avant-garde movements.

Curated by Paloma Alarcó, Chief Curator of Modern Painting at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibition will include 111 works loaned by museums and private collections around the world including the Beyeler Foundation, Basel, the Albertina, Vienna, The Fine Arts Museum, Budapest, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Particularly important loans include Gauguin’s painting Matamoe (Death. Landscape with Peacocks, 1892) from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Two Tahitian Women (1899) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Girl with a Fan (1902) from the Museum Folkwang, Essen. Also important are the loans of works from the Nolde Foundation, which is sending six watercolours by the artist from the series “Natives of the South Seas” (1913-1914), and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, which has lent a significant group of works from the Kandinsky Bequest.