Feature: Art - Paul Gauguin

Published: 30 September, 2010
by JOHN EVANS 

Tate Modern’s Gauguin is the first big London show devoted to him for 50 years

THE eyes of a monster? For the image here is a Paul Gauguin self-portrait, one of a number in Tate Modern’s new blockbuster, which opens amid much comment about the artist’s moral failings.

The curator, Edinburgh University fellow Belinda Thomson, believes he would well have understood those who would wish to judge him but do not know whether to choose his art or his life in the attempt.

On Gauguin’s death in 1903 he was described as “a monster indeed, completely, imperiously so… primitive and unsophisticated”. Now he is one of the most influential and celebrated artists of the late 19th century! For Thomson a central theme is the “self-presentation” and “legend-building” of one who struggled for years to be both a dutiful family man (as a stockbroker and breadwinner) yet aspired to be a bohemian and “notorious savage” and abandoned that family.

He admittedly enjoyed an extraordinary and unashamed sense of his own importance. 

There are different Gauguins in the self-portraits. We see not only an artist adventurer but also his own image as a severed head, as Christ-like, and even as a reworked Jean Valjean, Victor Hugo’s sinner. Only in a final, 1903 portrait does Gauguin apparently recognise his mortality.

The subtitle of the show is Maker of Myth. With more than 150 works it sets out to examine the artist’s narrative storytelling, distinctive use of outline and colour, and the myths and fables that were at the heart of his creativity. It reveals his efforts to blend the real with the imaginary (a ghost or demon here, a fox there, or puppies in a still-life) and uses a thematic approach to illustrate different stages in his career, whether in Brittany, Martinique, the South Seas or briefly with Van Gogh in Arles.

Born in the year of revolution, 1848, in Paris, his parents fled and he spent childhood years in Peru. His father died and by the end of 1854 the family were back in France. Gauguin later drew on his “Inca” heritage to explain unconventional habits.

He began to paint in about 1873, came under the influence of Pissarro and others, and exhibited at the Salon and with the Impressionists. But he broke both with finance, to become a full-time painter, and later with Impressionism to go his own way. 

As a young man Gauguin had seen six years’ naval service. “The fragmented nature of his upbringing and the extent of his travels sound almost modern,” says Thomson.

Gauguin visited Martinique in 1887 where he produced paintings seen as first steps to a “primitivism”. Then in Tahiti in self-imposed exile, first between 1891 and 1893, he noted the “melancholy” of its people. But he wrote to his wife Mette in clear terms about his art: “I can assert that what I am doing here has not been done by anyone else and nothing like it is known in France.”

His South Seas paint­ings are well represented; but there is much more, the still-lifes, land­scapes, and the “religious”. The Breton Calvary (The Green Christ) hangs alongside The Yellow Christ, both 1889 and lent from Brussels and Buffalo, respectively, an indication of the “global catchment” for the show. 

Watercolours, wood­cuts, ceramics and carv­ings are included as well as sketchbooks and writings. The drawings are simplified and empha­sise contour, dispensing with what he considered redundant detail.

The powerful stone­ware Oviri (Savage) of 1894, which Gauguin thought his best ceramic, influenced Picasso. It is central to a room devoted to “the Eternal Femin­ine”. Gauguin wanted it for his grave but this was not to be and it is normally to be found in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

• Gauguin: Maker of Myth at Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1, until January 16. £13.50, concessions available. www.tate.org.uk/modern, 020 7887 8888.