Everyone knows the story of Paul Gauguin’s life. How the bourgeois stockbroker, family man, and amateur painter abandoned his wife and children to live on an island paradise in the South Seas, where he developed a visual language so revolutionary that whole swaths of 20th century art, including Symbolism, Primitivism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Abstraction would be unthinkable without him.
That, anyway, is the legend – and most of it is even true, except that Polynesia was no paradise and his breakthrough happened long before his first voyage to Tahiti. In Vision of the Sermon, painted during the summer of 1888 in Pont-Aven, he abandoned pictorial illusion, depth, atmosphere and shadow to create a flat field on which to place boldly drawn, simplified forms painted in a palette of un-modulated primary colours.
It is the huge achievement of Tate Modern’s Gauguin Maker of Myth that it tells us something new about this colossus, something both biography and modernist formal analysis of his paintings tend to ignore: that in addition to being a stylistic innovator, he was a story-teller of genius, a weaver of intimate psychological dramas that get under the skin and delve into the minds of his subjects. He used expressive distortion and non-naturalistic colour not for their own sake but because these devices enabled him to give visual form to intangible feelings such as desire, jealousy, alienation, and the fear of death.
It’s all there, right from the beginning. In The Little One Dreaming of 1881 Gauguin shows his daughter asleep in her cot, her face turned towards the wall, the blankets kicked off to expose her bare legs and night dress riding up to her thighs. Though we can’t see her face, we know that her sleep has been made restless by dreams and nightmares – because the artist has made them visible in the birds flitting over sea green wallpaper above her head, and by a sinister doll (with a beard like her father’s) by her bedside. To me it is extraordinary that a picture which so delicately evokes a child’s unconscious fears, conflicts and consolations should have been painted 18 years before Freud published the Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. A lesser artist, like Edvard Munch, would manipulate our response by giving us too much information about the girl’s emotional state. One of the most modern things about Gauguin is the way he leaves his narratives unresolved, allowing the viewer to bring his or her own experiences to understand, enrich, or deepen the meaning of the work.
Fast-forward to 1892 and one of the masterpieces of the Tahitian period The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch. Once again the picture shows a girl lying on a bed, this one an adolescent who lies naked on her stomach with her eyes open. Here the soft, naturalistic colours of the earlier picture have been replaced by lurid washes of mauve and violet intensified by accents of hot pink, deep indigo, and yellow. But as in the earlier work, Gauguin’s theme is fear, this time embodied by the terrifying figure of Death sitting just behind her, where she can sense its presence but not see it. Both pictures explore the unconscious, but in the later image the denial of visual reality leaves him free to examine psychological truth.
If Gauguin sought to uncover the deepest fears and desires of other people, the opposite is true when it came to self examination. In this show the curator, Belinda Thomson, sees his many self portraits as consciously constructed images of himself, not necessarily as he was, but as he wished the world to see him. With his hooded eyes, hooked nose, flat cheekbones and pointed beard his face is always instantly recognisable. What changes are the clothes, accessories and props he uses to identify himself as a banker, a bohemian artist at work in his garret, a decapitated criminal, disillusioned intellectual, the devil incarnate, or Jesus Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane.
Once you start to think of Gauguin’s portraits in terms of narration, you see it everywhere. His friend, the harmless Dutch painter Jacob Meijer de Haan, is invariably caricatured as a satanic figure in red, stroking his beard as though plotting some act of unspeakable evil, whereas he makes his young model Tehamana the embodiment of a complex cultural history by posing her in front of a frieze depicting the primitive idols of her ancestors, but wearing modest Western dress that identifies her as a Christian.
Even Gauguin’s still lifes tell stories, as in one astonishing painting showing nothing more exciting than a slab of ham on a platter. Look at it for a few minutes, and it mysteriously begins to resemble a severed head such as Francis Bacon might have painted, perhaps because the picture is shown near Gauguin’s macabre ceramic self portrait in the form of a severed head, glazed with trickles of red paint dribbling from nose and mouth to pool around the base.
By the last gallery in the show, we’ve become so used to looking into each picture for dramatic encounters and incomplete narratives that when they aren’t there – as in the beautiful Two Tahitian Women of 1899 – the lack of tension disappoints us.
The exhibition is hung thematically – a huge risk in a show about the work of a single artist because it makes it difficult for anyone coming to the artist’s work for the first time to follow his stylistic development. The curator mitigates this potential difficulty by including two archival galleries in which visitors can become familiar with Gauguin’s life and art through photographs, documents, posters, and objects.
These archival galleries serve another purpose. By relegating social history, biography and critical interpretation to the sidelines, they help to counteract a tendency among the trendier art historians to interpret Gauguin’s paintings using criteria – colonialism, sexism, and even sexual tourism – that were scarcely thought of at the time he painted them. I loved the show, but be warned that it is huge. I haven’t mentioned the sculpture or the prints because you can’t see them properly in one visit and to do them justice in a newspaper would require another review.
Until January 16