Travel news from around the world

1. Britain

In the Tate Modern, London’s riverside art gallery, a new blockbuster exhibit of Paul Gauguin’s artworks has been drawing crowds. “Gauguin: Maker of Myth,” which runs through Jan. 16, surveys the life and art of the controversial French genius, whose career began amid the Impressionist artistic revolution of Paris and ended in French Polynesia.

The show features documents, letters, articles, photographs, posters and 150 paintings, prints and drawings. Many paintings are filled with Gauguin’s luminous colors — ultramarine, vermilions, deep greens, yellows and browns. Iconic figures of women are at one with their natural surroundings. In one painting, “The Loss of Virginity,” a nude girl with a fox, a frequent motif of the artist, lies in a rich brown and green landscape in what Observer critic Laura Cumming described as “exaggeration in the service of truth.”

Gauguin was born in Paris, but he and his family soon fled to Lima, Peru, after Napoleon III’s coup d’état, before returning to Paris. As a young man, Gauguin started work as a stockbroker and a weekend painter while married to Mette Sophie Gad, with whom he fathered five children. He eventually abandoned this bourgeois lifestyle for a penniless artistic life.

His early still lifes and portraits show he followed Impressionism but was attracted to a world beyond simple flower and fruit arrangements or pleasing likenesses — “something psychically deeper than impressionism’s flickering sensations,” Financial Times’ critic Jackie Wullschlager said.

The Tate exhibit is thematic. It opens with Gauguin’s self-portraits, disturbing images of a complex character, showing him from a sullen young searching artist to the disease-ridden syphilitic invalid who died in poverty on a remote Pacific island in 1903.

It progresses through Gauguin’s trips to Brittany in northern France, showing his absorption with the primitive cultures and myths of Breton rural life, and then to South America and the French colonies in the Pacific, where he sought to depict pre-Christian Polynesian life with its cults and deities. He finally decided to live in French Polynesia ‘“to immerse [himself] in nature, see no one but savages, and live their life,” he told a journalist.

Visitors to the London show must book in advance or buy tickets for specific times. Info: https://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gauguin.

—Janet Stobart

2. Spain

More tourists are returning to Spain after a fierce recession, but they’re spending cautiously, and prices are still slipping, industry experts said. Hotel rates have fallen for nearly two years.

—Reuters

3. Germany

For visitors tired of traditional sightseeing, Berlin tour guide Anna Haase is offering something different: a spin through Berlin’s toilets. Highlights include a toilet block dating from the late 19th century and the Kaiser’s fully restored bathroom at Potsdamer Platz square. “At first people tend to turn their nose up, but then they are generally surprised at the interesting facts that they learn about on the tour,” Haase said.

—Reuters

4. Jordan

Three years of restoration have revealed intricate, brightly colored artwork in Beidha near the ancient city of Petra. Experts say they are rare surviving examples of 2,000-year-old Hellenistic wall painting. “I think it is going to be a new tourist attraction,” said Stephen Rickerby¸ a conservation expert who restored the paintings alongside colleague Lisa Shekede from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art.

—Reuters

5. Australia

Overseas tourists entering Australia are to be given surf safety instructions after a sharp rise in drownings involving foreigners, officials said. Twenty-six of the 82 people who drowned on Australia’s beaches last year were from overseas, compared with nine in 2006. Six international airlines have agreed to screen a coastal safety video on inbound flights.

—Reuters

Caution spots

The State Department recently issued warnings or alerts for these areas:

India, because of safety and security issues related to the 2010 Commonwealth Games that continue through Oct. 14 in New Delhi.

Eritrea, because of restrictions on travel outside the capital city of Asmara, an increased number of U.S. citizens arrested without clear justification and heightened border tensions.

travel@latimes.com