Acquisitions round-up: Gauguin’s Le Toit Bleu is among this month’s picks

Paul Gauguin’s Le toit bleu, ou Ferme au Pouldu (1890)

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Paul Gauguin’s scene of rural life in the fishing village of Le Pouldu on the Brittany coast has become the first painting by the artist to enter an Australian museum collection. The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra is showing the work, which it purchased through Ordovas in London, in the exhibition Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao (until 7 October). In search of ever-more remote places to inspire his radical art, Gauguin travelled to Le Pouldu in 1889. “Here in Brittany the peasants have a medieval air about them and don’t appear to think for a moment that Paris exists,” he wrote to his friend Vincent van Gogh.

Drawings by Mary Sully (1920s-40s)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Yankton, South Dakota artist Mary Sully (née Susan Mabel Deloria) was reclusive during her lifetime and in danger of being forgotten at the time of her death in 1963, when her distinctive coloured pencil drawings were stashed in a cardboard box kept by her sister, the ethnographer Ella Deloria. The paper triptychs fuse kaleidoscopic patterns with Native aesthetics and themes, inspired by celebrities such as Babe Ruth and Gertrude Stein. Sully’s rediscovered works are now the focus of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Mary Sully: Native Modern, until 12 January 2025). Among the 25 works on show are 19 triptychs acquired by the Met last year from the Mary Sully Foundation.

Remedios Varo’s Naturaleza muerta resucitando (1963)

Art Institute of Chicago

This cosmic still-life was the final painting made by the Spanish Mexican Surrealist Remedios Varo and also her largest work on canvas. The scene of a table orbited by levitating plates and fruits has been interpreted as a twist on the moralising message of the 17th-century memento mori, which reminded viewers of the inevitability of decay and death. The Art Institute of Chicago acquired the painting in June from Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, a year after a major retrospective of the artist.