Unexpected beauty and the shock of recognition

You may think you know Gauguin well. You may think Gauguin is not worth knowing. But Gauguin at the Tate Modern makes the kind of impression that is not common. The reassembly in one place of works scattered in museums around the world, and the choice not to tell a predictable biographical story, made this a source of constant surprises.

One of these was the shock of recognition. In a room halfway through the gallery space, dedicated to exploring the sacred in Gauguin's work, "The Yellow Christ" met me with a shock of recognition. I grew up with this painting, even if my memory of it was half submerged, as it comes from the Albright Knox Art Museum. But the painting next to it, "The Green Christ", from the Belgian national museum, I had never seen. Its alternate title, "Breton Calvary", throws new light on its close companion. In the "Breton Calvary", what looks at first like the moment following the crucifixion, is revealed as a weathered sculpture, a pieta. Yet the "Yellow Christ" seems to show the Breton woman praying, not around a statue, but around a crucified man.

Then I turn, and see "Vision of the Sermon", this one from the National Galleries of Scotland. Breton women praying in the foreground frame a semicircular area delineated in solid red, where on one side of a tree a cow stands. On the other Jacob wrestles with the angel. The curatorial suggestion that what we see is the externalization of the women's perception of the sermon transforms how I can see any other work by Gauguin: as a kind of visual magical realism, so far from the false primitivism that he seemed to exemplify before.