A rare Gauguin manuscript enters the collections of the Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld Gallery in London recently purchased at a cost of 7.1 million euros a rare manuscript by French artist Paul Gauguin (Paris, 1848 - Atuona, 1903). It is Avant et Après, a book of more than two hundred pages written by the artist two months before his disappearance, when he was in Polynesia.

Composed in fact in the Marquesas Islands in 1903, it has 213 pages and is enriched with about thirty original drawings and anecdotes about the art scene of the time, with opinions on the art of his contemporaries, such as Degas, Signac, and Cézanne, and with accounts of his relationship with Van Gogh. Indeed, the manuscript offers information about Gauguin’s life and his relationships. It also makes known his feelings about his own art, pointing out how Parisian critics failed to grasp the modernity of his painting.

“Although he was one of the most influential artists of the 19th century, Gauguin was also a very controversial figure,” said Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, director of the Courtauld Gallery. “We will now ensure that this important manuscript is thoroughly researched and widely disseminated as part of the reassessment of Gauguin’s controversial legacy.”

It is likely that the manuscript has not been visible to any historian for fifty years, since it has never been exhibited and has not returned to the art market for nearly a century. From critic and writer André Fontainas, to whom Gauguin sent the manuscript to have it published in France, the book then passed to the artist’s ex-wife, German publisher Kurt Wollf, who published it in 1918 in a small edition, to the publisher Erik-Ernst Schwabach and finally to the textile industrialist Erich Goeritz; after the latter’s death the volume was unearthed by a New York art dealer, John Fleming. It was later returned to the artist’s heirs after a lawsuit. It was one of Gauguin’s nephews who granted the manuscript to the Courtauld Gallery.

Pictured are pages from Gauguin’s Avant et Après manuscript. Ph.Credit Courtauld Gallery

A rare Gauguin manuscript enters the collections of the Courtauld Gallery

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