Copenhagen's Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is planning an exhibition on Gauguin that aims to show how the French artist's search for the primitive and his career as a professional painter and sculptor were far from straightforward. "If you took a map of his journeys and put it beside a map of his art you will see they are not identical," says Line Clausen Pedersen, the Danish gallery's French art curator who since April has also been its head of curatorial strategy and exhibitions.
The show, which is due to open in Milan's new Museo delle Culture in October with the title Gauguin: Tales from Paradise, comes to Copenhagen in spring 2016. It draws on the Glyptotek's collection of Gauguin's paintings and sculptures and its curators wish to discover overlooked aspects of his work. For example, he painted a rather conventional still-life of flowers while he was living in Tahiti, which hangs in the Glyptotek next to Arearea no varua ino (1894), featuring reclining Tahitian women. He completed the exotic canvas when back in Paris. He sent both to Mette-Sophie Gad, his Danish-born wife that he left behind in Copenhagen. "She stayed loyal to his project," Pedersen says. "She was a very modern woman," who cared for the works her errant husband found hard to sell and continued to help him manage his career.
The collaboration with the Milan museum came about after a 2013 exhibition, which Pedersen organised, that took a fresh look at Degas's art. Called Degas' Method, it also drew on the Danish gallery's collection, which includes a complete set of bronzes cast posthumously from his wax models of horses, bathing women and ballet dancers. In April, the Glyptotek unveiled a newly acquired painting by Degas: Jockeys avant course (1886-1890) joins the 73 bronzes including La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (1880–81).
Such revisionist shows, which the gallery organises alongside rehangs of the permanent collection and single-picture experimental displays, are part of a strategy to find an alternative to the "circus" of blockbusters, Pedersen says, adding that the gallery does not in general put its collection on the road. The Milan show is more about putting its curators and ideas on tour, she says.
While Gauguin and Degas clearly fit in any collection of 19th sculpture and paintings, a Man Ray show co-organised by the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, seems on paper a bit of an odd man out at the Glyptotek. Man Ray: Human Equations (until 20 September) does more than fill a gap in the programme, however. The detour via Denmark came about when Pedersen heard of the show on a visit to the Phillips Collection and spotted its potential for an unlikely third venue in Copenhagen. "Man Ray loved to play with ideas and push our perceptions—curiosity became the story," she says.
Like its setting in a gallery of 19th-century art, the temporary exhibition is full of unexpected juxtapositions, not least Man Ray taking up his paint brush while sitting out the Second World War in Hollywood. His paintings and photographs are shown alongside the early 20th-century mathematical models of equations he first discovered in the 1920s after fellow Surrealist Max Ernst introduced the American in Paris to the Institute Henri Poincaré.
The photographs Man Ray took of the models that at first glance could be by Jean Arp or Barbara Hepworth, provided the inspiration for the photographer-painter's curious canvases, which he named after Shakespeare's plays. The exhibition's subtitle is "a journey from mathematics to Shakespeare", and it presents an intriguing mix of playful Surrealism, hard science and oblique references to the English language's greatest playwright. (Man Ray partly chose to name-check the Bard as the 1944 film version of Henry V, starring Laurence Olivier, was fresh in people's minds in Hollywood.) Pride of place in the Copenhagen iteration of the show is given to Man Ray's riff on the prince of Denmark and higher mathematics: Shakespearean Equation: Hamlet (1949).