The Washington Post - USA (2020-08-02)

I

t’s the nude that bothers Fabrice Fourmanoir.

The way she’s painted is “unsightly” and “vulgar,” quite

unlike the Polynesian women of his mind’s eye. Nor does he

like the way she’s artificially inserted on the canvas, part of

what he calls an “uninventive assemblage” with no coherent

symbolism. Yet there she stands at the National Gallery of Art in

Washington, in a painting titled “The Invocation,” attributed to

Paul Gauguin.

But Fourmanoir’s roving, inquisitorial eye doesn’t stop there.

He’s similarly bothered by another painting, this one at the

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, titled “Women and a White Horse.”

Though it’s labeled as a Gauguin, its signature is “very weak,” he

opines. And the background vegetation looks more like Ta hiti than

the Marquesas Islands, where Gauguin was living when he was

supposed to have painted it.

Fourmanoir isn’t your average weekend art sleuth. The life and

works of G auguin have c onsumed him for m any decades. These t wo

paintings make him suspicious, so much so that questioning their

integrity has become a personal crusade. He thinks they’re impos-

tors, and he won’t rest until there’s a full investigation.

Born in Calais, France, Fourmanoir, 63, might once have been

dismissed as a crackpot, a wannabe who would never be welcomed

into the sophisticated enclave of art scholarship. But since January

BY SEBASTIAN SMEE SEE GAUGUIN ON E10

In a Maine cabin, the simplest acts seem significant. Travel, E17-E20

KLMNO

Arts&Style

SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020. SECTION E EZ EE

INSIDE

Artists consider if

America is at a

reckoning point E8

DANCE: “World of Dance” offers

insights into the art E2

TELEVISION: Actress Michaela

Coel returns with “I May

Destroy You,” an HBO show

loosely based on her life E3

CÉSAR RODRÍGUEZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Raising

doubts on

Gauguin

An amateur detective takes on the

National Gallery, and the art world

NATIONAL GALLERY PRAGUE

TOP: Fabrice Fourmanoir, an art dealer, poses for a

portrait in Sayulita, Mexico, in June. ABOVE:

“Escape,” a 1902 work by post-impressionist Paul

Gauguin. Fourmanoir thinks several of the artist’s

late works may be clever fakes.

BY PHILIP KENNICOTT

With four of the six main

statues on Richmond’s Monu-

ment Avenue now removed, the

boulevard is no longer a proces-

sion of great lies, about the

valor and honor of Confederate

generals and the “sacred virtue”

and “solemn duty” of the Con-

federacy’s leaders and defend-

ers.

R ather, with just two remain-

ing statues — one dedicated to

Robert E. Lee and the other to

African American tennis cham-

pion and humanitarian Arthur

Ashe — the avenue functions

more like a rhetorical question:

Can America move past ab-

stract i deas of greatness — often

attributed to odious men and

obscene ideologies — and learn

to honor smaller, more particu-

lar ideas of goodness? And what

would our cities look like if we

did that?

The statues to Lee and Ashe

don’t exactly face off down the

avenue. The Ashe memorial, a

controversial 1996 addition to

the five Confederate luminar-

ies, looks west to the suburbs,

away from the state Capitol,

designed by Thomas Jefferson,

and the center of a city that was

the capital of the Confederacy.

Lee, whose 1890 statue was the

first erected on the avenue,

looks south, from a height so

Olympian that he doesn’t seem

human at all.

Between these two men, one

a working-class man descended

from an enslaved woman, the

other an enslaver who was a

scion of Virginia’s “first fami-

lies,” lie the empty pedestals

that once held statues of Con-

federate general Stonewall

Jackson, Confederate president

SEE RICHMOND ON E13

BY CHRIS RICHARDS

Do you like your music rare?
That’s fine. Before we knew how
to record it, all music was rare. It
was an invisible wiggle in the air
that materialized and vanished.
Then we learned how to en-
code our songs onto discs and
tapes, and rareness became an
issue of scarcity, with little
s upply-and-demand cults form-
ing around various musical ge-
niuses that time forgot. But to-
day, with so many streaming
services bringing so much for-
gotten music back to the digital
surface, a “rare record” can real-
ly only be a recording that feels
precious and inimitable — some-
thing like the 1984 debut from
Admas, a quartet of Ethiopian
expatriates who emerged from
extraordinary circumstances to
make extraordinary music.
The album was called “Sons of

felt high-tech and low-budget,

worldly and local, futuristic and

nostalgic, funky and delicate.

But ultimately, “Sons of Ethio-

pia” feels like an expression of

exploration and loss. In the liner

notes of the reissue, author and

researcher Francis Gooding pro-

vides social context, describing

the album as “a music of exile

made by players who performed

week in and week out for crowds

of their fellow Ethiopians who

had lost family and friends to the

Derg” — the military junta that

deposed Emperor Haile Selassie

in 197 4 — “and had often fled to

the US in fear for their lives.”

That explains the latent me-

lodic ache in this effortlessly

propulsive music. Listen hard

enough and you can hear the

players pushing into the future

while longing for a past they

were forced to leave behind.

SEE ADMAS ON E4

T he p aradoxes of history

along M onument Avenue

Recovering a t ruly rare record

‘Sons of Ethiopia’ by Admas is a precious document from D.C.’s past

Ethiopia,” it’s recently been reis-

sued on Frederiksberg Records,

and it still sounds like nothing

else. Summoning traditional

Ethiopian melodies from the

newest instruments within

reach (synthesizers, drum ma-

chines, electric guitars), Admas

specialized in paradox, generat-

ing exquisite new grooves that

BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

“ Sons of Ethiopia,” a 1984

record by a quartet of Ethiopian

expatriates, was reissued on

Frederiksberg Records.