"The person, I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work... Once an artist creates something, it doesn’t belong to the artist anymore: It belongs to the world."

Said Vicente Todolí, who was the director of the Tate Modern when it put on a big Gauguin exhibition in 2010, quoted in "Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?/Museums are reassessing the legacy of an artist who had sex with teenage girls and called the Polynesian people he painted 'savages'" (NYT).

“I love his paintings, but I find him a little bit strange,” [said Kehinde Wiley, a male African-American painter]. “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?”

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.”

“What’s left to say about Gauguin,” she added, “is for us to bring out all the dirty stuff.”

Despite the headline, the article doesn't seem to have anyone arguing for the cancellation of Gauguin. There so much money invested in these artworks, and people love them and have been gazing at them for years. Maybe some day people won't want to look and these shows won't rake in money.

But notice the confusion between the images themselves and what the man did in his life.

If we look only at the painting — if Todolí is right that "the work is the work" — is there still a problem? If so, is it about race or sex? Wiley combines the 2: "lack and brown bodies... shot through his sense of desire." Is the painter of nudes not supposed to have sexual feelings? Is the painter of nudes supposed to stick to models of his own ethnicity? Are artists supposed to report on their own environment and not go off in search of the exotic? This connects to my critique of travel: Is there something wrong with wanting to be with people who are, to you, exotic?

The NYT also quotes 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":

“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. 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.

Notice that even she isn't arguing for cancellation. No one does. But back to Todolí's "the work is the work" — and assuming Gauguin had sex with females who were "underage" in the sense that it would violate the law wherever 13 was not within the age of consent  — is there something wrong with a painting depicting a person that age in the nude? Nudity is a venerable tradition in art. That doesn't mean it can't be critiqued. I just want people who equate nudity with sex to be attentive to the leap they are making and to think about what they want to say.