In August, the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation announced that it was dispersing all 63 artworks in its possession to three art museums: the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Among the 29 artworks gifted to the Brooklyn Museum—many of them paintings and sculptures by Chaïm Soutine, Edgar Degas, and Amedeo Modigliani—is Paul Gauguin’s painted relief panel Te Fare Amu, dated to the late 1800s or early 1900s, depending on the source. The panel was initially intended to adorn the entrance to Gauguin’s home in Polynesia.
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The Art Newspaper published an interesting deep dive on the history of the suggestive panel, which Henry Pearlman purchased in Paris in 1954 from a French private collector. There is a crouching nude female figure on the left, who is depicted with red dots down her spine and exaggerated red lips. In the original version, Gauguin painted her genitals red as well; Pearlman painted over them with green pigment in order to avoid having the work seized by U.S. Customs on account of its “indecency.” It has remained in this censored state ever since.
The Pearlman Foundation website includes an x-ray image showing the figure’s genitals before Pearlman painted over them.
In 2017, a conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the panel was on view in the exhibition “Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist,” determined that the green paint had adhered to the original vermillion in such a way that made attempting to remove it ill-advised.
Almost a decade later, Te Fare Amu is on view at LACMA (through July 19) as part of the exhibition “Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection,” which showcases 50 artworks donated to the trio of American museums. The show, retitled “Cézanne to Modigliani: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection,” travels to the Brooklyn Museum this fall. At that point, conservators will once again examine the unfortunate overpainting. A museum spokesperson told the Art Newspaper that they “will be looking into this with our conservation team.”
