The MFAH is the exclusive U.S. Venue for “Gauguin’s World”

From November 3, 2024, through February 16, 2025, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will host an ambitious exhibition of the work of French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).

Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston · Image: Paul Gauguin, Three Tahitians, 1899, oil on canvas, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

“Gauguin’s World” chronicles what curator Loyrette characterizes as Gauguin’s “inner quest for elsewhere” through an expansive survey of his work, from its Impressionist beginnings in Paris, through a period of exploration to Denmark, Brittany, Provence, and Martinique, to its culmination in his last years in Oceania, where he created some of his most iconic paintings. While Gauguin’s World is a comprehensive survey of Gauguin’s prolific career, Loyrette underscores that the show’s narrative is constructed from the perspective of the artist’s last works: “When Gauguin landed in the Marquesas in September 1901, he knew that he had reached his journey’s end; he had at last found his ‘true homeland,’ the place to which he had always aspired. In the 20 months before his death, he continued to develop his art while, in his writings, he set out to review his career as a whole. This is the starting point for an exhibition that reveals that introspection and the art that preceded it, returning to the questions that haunted him as an artist—the challenges that he set himself and solved in his quest for his own identity.”

The exhibition will be organized across six galleries, presenting the arc of Gauguin’s career from the 1870s through his final years, with half of the exhibition devoted to Gauguin’s work in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands.

Gauguin’s World includes 150 works of art drawn from 65 public and private collections worldwide, including: Musée d’Orsay, Paris; National Galleries of Scotland; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louvre Abu Dhabi; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; and the Musée de Tahiti et des îles, which is lending both their Gauguins and important 19th-century Marquesan sculptural works.