好英语网我们该彻底停止欣赏高更了吗？
LONDON — “Is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether?”
伦敦——“是不是该彻底停止欣赏高更了呢？”
That’s the startling question visitors hear on the audio guide as they walk through the “Gauguin Portraits” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The show, which runs through Jan. 26, focuses on Paul Gauguin’s depictions of himself, his friends and fellow artists, and of the children he fathered and the young girls he lived with in Tahiti.
伦敦国家美术馆举办的“高更肖像”(Gauguin Portraits)展览上，参观者在语音导览里听到了这样一个令人惊诧的问题。该展览将持续到1月26日，主要展出保罗·高更(Paul Gauguin)的肖像画，描绘的对象包括他本人、他的朋友和其他艺术家、他的孩子们，以及在大溪地和他一起生活的女孩。
The standout portrait in the exhibition is “Tehamana Has Many Parents” (1893). It pictures Gauguin’s teenage lover, holding a fan.
展览中格外引人注目的是作于1893年的《塔哈马纳的祖辈》(Tehamana Has Many Parents)。画中描绘了高更的少女情人手持扇子的形象。
高更的《塔哈马纳的祖辈》(1893)是伦敦国家美术馆“高更肖像”展中的一件杰作。
The artist “repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls, ‘marrying’ two of them and fathering children,” reads the wall text. “Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him.”
画家“反复与年轻女孩发生性关系，‘娶’了其中两个，并生了孩子，”墙上的解说写道。“高更无疑利用了他的西方人特权，从而充分享受他所得到的性自由。”
Born in Paris, the son of a radical journalist, Gauguin spent his early years in Peru before returning to France. He took up painting in his 20s, while working as a stockbroker, a profession he would soon give up — along with his wife and children — to make art full time. He set sail for Tahiti in 1891, searching for the exotic surroundings he had known as a boy in Peru. Gauguin spent most of the 12 remaining years of his life in Tahiti and on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa, cohabiting with adolescent girls, fathering more children, and producing his best-known paintings.
高更出生于巴黎，是一个激进派记者的儿子，他早年在秘鲁度过，然后回到法国。他在20多岁的时候开始画画，当时还是个股票经纪人，但没过多久他就放弃了这个职业，也放弃了妻子和孩子，全职从事艺术创作。他于1891年启程前往大溪地，追寻他在秘鲁的童年记忆里那种异国情调。余生的12年里，高更的大部分时间在大溪地和法属波利尼西亚的希瓦瓦岛上度过，与青春期女孩同居，生了更多的孩子，创作了他最著名的作品。
In the international museum world, Gauguin is a box-office hit. There have been a half-dozen exhibitions of his work in the last few years alone, including important shows in Paris, Chicago and San Francisco. Yet in an age of heightened public sensitivity to issues of gender, race and colonialism, museums are having to reassess his legacy.
高更是国际博物馆的票房热门。仅在过去的几年中，他的作品就进行了六次展览，包括在巴黎、芝加哥和旧金山的重要展览。然而，在公众对性别、种族和殖民主义问题日益敏感的时代，博物馆不得不重新评估他的艺术遗产。
A couple of decades ago, an exhibition on the same theme “would have been a great deal more about formal innovation,” said Christopher Riopelle, a co-curator of the National Gallery show. Now, everything must be viewed “in a much more nuanced context,” he added.
此次国家美术馆展的联合策展人克里斯托弗·里奥佩尔(Christopher Riopelle)说，放在几十年前，同一主题的展览“会更注重形式创新”。而现在，他说，所有内容都必须“放到一种更微妙的语境中”去看。
“I don’t think, any longer, that it’s enough to say, ‘Oh well, that’s the way they did it back then,’ ” he said.
他说：“我不再觉得，只是说一句‘哦，那时候的人就是那样的’就足够了。”
Mr. Riopelle described Gauguin as “a very complicated person, a very driven person, a very callous person,” and said he was “disappointed” that his overwhelming urge to make art “led him to hurt or use so many people badly.”
里奥佩尔将高更描述为“一个非常复杂的人，一个非常有紧迫感的人，一个非常冷酷的人”，并说他被艺术创作的冲动淹没，“导致他严重伤害或利用了许多人，”这让里奥佩尔感到“失望”。
The show was co-produced with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and opened in Ottawa in late May. A few days before the opening, the museum’s newly appointed director, Sasha Suda, and the exhibition’s curators decided to edit some of the wall texts after touring the show. Nine labels were changed to avoid culturally insensitive language, according to the museum’s press office.
该展览与位于渥太华的加拿大国立美术馆联合举办，并于5月下旬在渥太华开幕。开幕前几天，博物馆新任命的馆长萨沙·苏达(Sasha Suda)和展览的策展人在参观了展览后，决定修改一些墙面上的解说文字。馆方媒体部门说，为了避免缺乏文化敏感的文字，更改了九个作品标签。
In Ottawa, the title “Head of a Savage, Mask” was shown with an extended label explaining that the words ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian,’ “considered offensive today, reflect attitudes common to Gauguin’s time and place.” Elsewhere, his “relationship with a young Tahitian woman” was changed to “his relationship with a 13- or 14-year-old Tahitian girl.”
在渥太华，《野蛮人头像（面具）》(Head of a Savage, Mask)附有一个详尽的标签，解释“savage”（野人）和“barbarian”（蛮人）这样的词语“在今天被认为具有侵犯性，但反映了高更所处时代与地域普遍存在的态度”。还有一些地方把他“与一名大溪地年轻女性的关系”改为“他与一名13或14岁的大溪地女孩的关系”。
Ms. Suda said that out of 2,313 feedback cards submitted by visitors at the Canadian exhibition, about 50 were complaints about Gauguin and about the museum programming.
苏达说，在加拿大展览的参观者提交的2313张反馈卡中，大约有50张是关于高更和关于博物馆项目的投诉。
The show should “have addressed these issues in a more open and transparent way that connected with contemporary audiences,” Ms. Suda said in an interview. Addressing “blind spots” in the work of historical artists “could make those artists more relevant,” she added.
该展览“本应以一种更加开放和透明的、与当代观众相通的方式处理这些问题，”苏打在接受采访时说。去面对历史上的艺术家在作品中存在的“盲点”，这样“可以使这些艺术家更具相关性，”她还说。
《高贵死亡》(1892)。
To other museum professionals, re-examining the lives of past artists from a 21st-century perspective is risky, because it could lead to the boycott of great art.
对于其他博物馆专业人士而言，从21世纪的角度重新审视过去艺术家的生活是一件冒险的事，因为这可能导致伟大的艺术遭到抵制。
“The person, I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work,” said Vicente Todolí, who was Tate Modern’s director when it staged a major Gauguin exhibition in 2010, and is now the artistic director of the Pirelli HangarBicocca art foundation in Milan.
位于米兰的倍耐力比可卡机库(Pirelli HangarBicocca)艺术基金会总监维森特·托多利(Vicente Todolí)说：“对于这个人，我可以完全憎恶和讨厌，但作品就是作品。”托多利曾任泰特现代艺术馆馆长，任内该馆于2010年举办了高更的大型作品展。
“Once an artist creates something, it doesn’t belong to the artist anymore: It belongs to the world,” he said. Otherwise, he cautioned, we would stop reading the anti-Semitic author Louis-Ferdinand Céline, or shun Cervantes and Shakespeare if we found something unsavory about them.
他说：“一旦艺术家创造了某种东西，它便不再属于这个艺术家：它属于世界。”否则，他告诫说，我们就要停止阅读反犹作家路易-费迪南·塞利纳(Louis-Ferdinand Céline)或回避塞万提斯和莎士比亚，因为我们发现了他们不光彩的事。
Yet Ashley Remer, a New Zealand-based American curator who in 2009 founded girlmuseum.org, an online museum focused on the representation of young girls in history and culture, insisted that in Gauguin’s case the man’s actions were so egregious that they overshadowed the work.
然而，常驻新西兰的美国策展人阿什莉·雷默(Ashley Remer)坚持认为，在高更这件事上，这个男人的行为是如此恶劣，以至于盖过了作品本身。她在2009年创立了girlmuseum.org，一家专注于年轻女孩在历史和文化中的呈现的在线博物馆。
“He was an arrogant, overrated, patronizing pedophile, to be very blunt,” she said. If his paintings were photographs, they would be “way more scandalous,” and “we wouldn’t have been accepting of the images,” she added.
“直白地说，他是一个傲慢、过誉、居高临下的恋童癖，”她说。假如他的画作是照片，引起的愤慨会“严重的多”，并且“我们一开始就不会接受这些图像”，她补充说。
Ms. Remer questioned the constant exhibitions of Gauguin and the Austrian artist Egon Schiele, who also depicted nude underage models, and the ways those shows were put together. “I’m not saying take down the works: I’m saying lay it all bare about the whole person,” she said.
雷默还质疑了层出不穷的高更和奥地利艺术家埃贡·席勒(Egon Schiele)展（后者还描绘了裸体未成年模特），以及这些展览的制作方式。“我不是说要撤下这些作品：我是说要把艺术家整个人都公之于众，”她说。
Gauguin remains a tourist draw in Polynesia and the South Pacific. There is even a luxury cruise line that tours the region that is named after him. But to many locals, the painter’s clichéd representations of lush, exotic islands full of dusky maidens with no voice or identity are tiresome.
高更仍是波利尼西亚和南太平洋旅游的一个卖点。甚至还有一条游览该地区的豪华游轮专线是以他命名的。但是对许多当地人来说，他们对这个画家笔下的俗套描绘感到厌倦——郁郁葱葱、异国情调的岛屿，满是无声又无名的朦胧少女。
“Gauguin, you piss me off,” begins “Two Nudes On a Tahitian Beach, 1894,” a poem by the New Zealand poet and academic Selina Tusitala Marsh.
“高更，你把我惹火了，”这是新西兰诗人和学者赛琳娜·杜西塔拉·马什(Selina Tusitala Marsh)的诗作《1894年，大溪地海滩上的两个裸体》(Two Nudes On a Tahitian Beach, 1894)的开头。
The anonymity of his Tahitian portraits is another cause of frustration. In the 2009 photographic series “Dee and Dallas Do Gauguin,” the New Zealand-born Samoan artist Tyla Vaeau has cut out the faces in Gauguin reproductions and inserted photos of her own sister and friend.
他的大溪地肖像的匿名性是另一个引发不满的地方。在2009年的摄影系列“迪和达拉斯仿高更”(Dee and Dallas Do Gauguin)中，新西兰出生的萨摩亚族艺术家泰拉·瓦伊奥(Tyla Vaeau)剪下了高更作品复制品上的面孔，换成了她姐妹和朋友的照片。
Gauguin’s art is a problem “if it continues to be used to frame the Pacific in this timeless, semi-damaged past, when actually there’s so much going on,” said Caroline Vercoe, a senior lecturer in art history at the University of Auckland who is part Samoan and is participating in the National Gallery in London’s talk and film program. “It’s such a lively and dynamic culture within the indigenous context as well.”
如果高更的艺术“继续被用来将太平洋地区置于一个永恒的、半损毁的过去中，尽管那里有那么多事在发生”，那它就成了一个问题，奥克兰大学艺术史高级讲师卡洛琳·韦尔科(Caroline Vercoe)说。有萨摩亚族血统的韦尔科正在参与国家美术馆在伦敦的谈话和电影项目。“而在原住民语境下，这是如此生动活泼的一种文化。”
Even to his admirers, Gauguin invites questioning. The African-American painter Kehinde Wiley — who described Gauguin as one of his idols in a 2017 interview, but also as “creepy” — recently painted a series in Tahiti inspired by Gauguin that depicts the mahu, a nonbinary community considered a “third gender” in Polynesia.
甚至高更的仰慕者也不禁提出质疑。非裔美国画家凯因德·威利(Kehinde Wiley)在2017年的一次采访中称高更是他的偶像之一，但同时也认为他“让人发毛”——最近，他在大溪地创作了一系列由高更启发的画作，描绘了波利尼西亚的mahu，一个被认为是“第三性别”的非二元群体。
“I love his paintings, but I find him a little bit strange,” Mr. Wiley says in a National Gallery film. “The ways we see black and brown bodies from the Pacific are shot through his sense of desire. But how do you change the narrative? How do you change the way of looking?”
“我喜欢他的画，但我觉得他有点奇怪，”威利在国家美术馆的影片中说。“我们是通过他的欲望感官，看到太平洋岛屿上那些黑色和棕色的身体的。但你如何改变叙事？你如何变换观看的方式？”
To ensure that Gauguin’s artistic legacy is not besmirched by his “marriages” to underage girls, these relationships should be covered in exhibitions, said Line Clausen Pedersen, a Danish curator who has put on several Gauguin shows. With each exhibition, “another layer is peeled off the protection of history that he has somehow enjoyed,” she said. “Maybe the time is ripe to take off more layers than before.”
制作过多场高更展的丹麦策展人里恩·克劳森·佩德森(Line Clausen Pedersen)说，为了确保高更的艺术遗产不会被他与未成年女孩的“婚姻”关系所污染，展览中应包含这些关系。每举办一次展览，“他曾经享受过的历史保护就被揭掉一层，”她说。“也许现在可以揭掉更多的保护层了。”
“What’s left to say about Gauguin,” she added, “is for us to bring out all the dirty stuff.”
“如今关于高更还需要去说的是，”她还说，“我们要呈现出所有那些肮脏的东西。”