Original subtitles

Paul Gauguin has long been a controversial and problematic figure in Post-Impressionism.

He was a painter who was both admired and hated by his contemporaries, and he never

achieved superstardom in his lifetime.

After his death, though, his art became very popular, in part due to the enterprising

efforts of his art dealer and other artists like Picasso, who would cite him as a major

influence.

By the early 20th century, his paintings commanded high prices, and several of his works set sales

records.

The controversies over his life never have entirely disappeared, and in the 21st century in particular,

he has become a hotly discussed and polarizing artist once more.

In this lecture, we need to tackle a thorny and age-old question, how do we talk about

great artists who did horrible things?

Gauguin's beautiful work adorned some of the greatest art galleries, as well as the

coffee mugs and fridge magnets for sale in their gift shops.

How do we reconcile that with the fact that Gauguin would be in prison today for multiple

counts of statutory rape?

How should we discuss works like his that would not be shown in museums for cultural appropriation

and misrepresentation?

Gauguin was an important Post-Impressionist.

We cannot simply ignore him or his talent, but we cannot be blind to the darker side of

his work either, which becomes more obvious as his life goes on.

Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, a year in which popular revolutions were breaking

out across Europe.

His father Clovis was a liberal journalist who was forced to flee France when his newspaper

was suppressed by the French government.

They left for Peru when Paul was just a baby, but his father died of a heart attack en route.

The family and little Paul spent the next four years there.

When the family returned to France, they enrolled Paul in a traditional strict Catholic school,

which would have a huge imprint on his psyche.

Later, Paul would use his formative years in Peru to claim that he was descended from the

Incas.

Unfortunately, that's not how genetics work, but he does get his start early on playing

fast and loose with the truth.

When he's 14, Paul attends a naval preparatory school and, after graduating, becomes a sailor.

Traveling around the world for several years, he visited far away destinations like Brazil,

Brazil, later claiming to have seduced a famous actress there.

Gauguin was fond of exaggerating his masculinity and sexual prowess.

While he was at sea, he learned of his mother's death, leaving him with no parents left alive.

By 1871, he is returned to Paris and eventually gets work as a bookkeeper at the Stock Exchange.

He also begins trading stocks as well, and he's really good at it.

He's one of those people who seem to excel at whatever they try.

It's maddening.

A couple of years later, Paul meets a Danish woman, Meta Sophie Gad, and he falls in love

with her instantly.

They get married and start having children right away—five in total.

Coincidentally, while trading stocks, they also lived on the same street as Delacroix and Pissarro.

By now, he's making good money at the Stock Exchange, and he starts buying and collecting paintings.

He bought from Manet, Pissarro, Degas.

Paul and Meta are going to fancy parties with the upper class.

Meta has nice clothes, and they have a maid.

Everything seems to be going well, and in 1873, when Paul is 25, with no teacher, no classes,

and completely self-taught, he starts painting virtually out of the blue in his off hours after work.

Meta says she doesn't know where this passion came from,

but she's happy because at least it kept him out of the bars.

Oh, Meta, you sweet summer child, if you only knew what was coming.

He starts painting everything around him—landscapes, still life, his children, his home—analyzing

his world with a critical eye and figuring out how to paint it.

He has some canvases of the greats he has purchased hanging around him.

Many of his early paintings, like this simple scene of suburban Paris, are gentle landscapes,

experimenting with color, light, and composition.

His interest in and newfound passion for painting led him to start hanging out with other painters,

especially Pissarro.

Gauguin started visiting Pissarro's studio and picking up some ideas and inspiration,

and Pissarro can see Paul's innate talent.

For example, take a look at this early still life, which is pretty interesting to examine up close.

Yes, it's accurate in its proportion, color, light, and shadow.

But what is most impressive to me is the texture he's painting with.

These very fine feather strokes that are built up rather thickly.

It gives the whole painting an intriguing, implied texture,

almost as if this painting were embroidered from thread.

I don't know where he learned this technique,

or if it just came as a natural byproduct of his intuitive method.

But for a sailor-turned-stockbroker-turned-artist with absolutely no training,

Pissarro surely could not help but be impressed.

But in 1882, the stock market crashed and Paul's income tanked.

They soon had to start cutting way back on their lifestyle.

They had to move to a cheaper part of town.

No more fancy parties.

No more maids.

Mehta wasn't too happy.

She also wasn't too happy with the way Paul was treating her,

and she wants to get away.

She takes the kids and goes to stay with her uncle in Copenhagen for a break.

The stay becomes permanent, so Paul moves up to Copenhagen too.

He hates it in Denmark, he can't speak the language, it's too cold, and it's miserable.

On top of that, he's unsuccessful at his new job selling tarps.

So, to make ends meet, Mehta starts giving French lessons to wealthy upper-class children

while Paul painted in the attic.

Mehta's conservative family were embarrassed by Paul—by his appearance, his politics,

and now the fact that he couldn't provide for his family, so they ask him to leave.

Mehta sides with her family and wants him gone too.

So Paul goes back to Paris, leaving the day-to-day care and economic support of all five children

to Mehta.

Back in Paris, Gauguin turns his hand to pottery.

He ends up making around 100 pieces over the years, many of which he preferred to hand sculpt

rather than using a potter's wheel, giving them a rough, asymmetrical look.

The inspiration for this style came in part from Peruvian pottery, which his mother had collected.

While he was learning and experimenting, one vessel he started replacing ancient Peruvians

with his own self-portrait.

An interesting vignette that reveals he really didn't have any problem with inserting himself

and claiming their culture as his own.

Many of his other pieces very clearly emulate Incan styles.

Paul said, I am a savage, and the civilized foresee it.

The European ideal of the noble savage was meant to be a rebuke to the greed, corruption,

and poverty rampant in modern society. But they idealized, stereotyped, and mythologized the

indigenous people they were colonizing. And Paul Gauguin would also mythologize himself in the same way.

In 1886, Gauguin moved to the art colony at Ponte Venn in Brittany. Ponte Venn was a rural community

of farmers and fishermen and a mecca for tourists looking for the quaint, pre-industrialized life.

The disillusioned Paul seems to think he will find his authentic self here too.

And Gauguin immediately starts inauthentically appropriating local culture, both into his paintings

and in his own style. He's no longer an Incan, now he's a Celtic Breton. And he starts wearing the

traditional beaded vests and clogs of typical Brittany. We can see a bit of a pattern emerging.

He seems to experience a sense of entitlement and ownership with each new culture he encounters.

He's painting scenes like this around Ponte Venn. As we can see here in the field of Derue,

La Lichon, he's very much into Impressionism. Dabs of bright colors recording the coolness of the

shadows and warmth of the light. The Impressionists in Paris were aware of his talent and considered him

a worthy colleague, and he exhibited in the last Impressionists exhibition in 1886.

At this point, he was 38, which was nearly twice the age as most of the other young painters at Ponte Venn.

Ponte Venn was a very popular artist colony, overrun every summer with Europeans and Americans looking

for inspiration. Gauguin hated how popular it was becoming. He went there to get away and be with the

locals, not to be surrounded by people like himself. So, to stay edgy and cool, he leaves for Panama with

friend and painter Charles Laval, so he can live like a savage. Knowing what we do know now, this sounds to

me like he was also looking for places where he could get away with socially unacceptable behavior.

Gauguin had a brother-in-law in Panama and hoped he'd be a wealthy connection, since the Panama Canal was

under construction and money was pouring into the country. But it didn't turn out as he'd hoped. Laval earned

money doing portraits of canal officials, but Gauguin went to work on the canal, a miserable,

back-breaking job. He doesn't last long, and after an arrest for public urination, Gauguin decides it's

time to move on and settles on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1887. Paul stays for a few months,

living off the pity of local neighbors and scavenging for fruit. He starts painting about

fruit as symbols of temptation. He does a series of paintings on the island, capturing life in the

tropics. And he's becoming increasingly preoccupied with the subject of temptation. Specifically, he's

feeling tempted by women, or more accurately, girls, teenage girls. He's still legally married to

Meta with five kids back in Copenhagen, so he feels somewhat conflicted. As we will see,

it's just somewhat, though. Before long, Gauguin returns to Brittany, this time to a smaller town

that wasn't too touristy. But the trip seems to have freed his mind, and from this point on,

he starts a more experimental phase in his work. His colors were getting bolder, his composition's

stranger, certain parts flatter, and he's starting to use outlines. He's one of the early artists who

are beginning to look at Japanese prints, stained glass, and cloisonism for inspiration. Some of his

best-known pieces from this period fused together religious and cultural symbolism with bold palettes

and strong lines. For example, Vision After the Sermon, Jacob Wrestling the Angel, from 1888. This

painting was a huge breakthrough for Gauguin, both stylistically and conceptually. He has completely

flattened the ground and made it bright red. The subject here is a vision these local Breton women

were having after church. It's a purely mental vision, hence their eyes are all closed, but what

he paints in front of them is being seen in the collective minds of the congregation.

Of these women, Gauguin said he was painting their simplicity, rustic, and superstitious. The landscape and

wrestling match in this picture exists only in the minds of the people praying after the sermon.

That's why there's a contrast between the natural people and the wrestling match in a non-natural,

disproportionate landscape. In this period, Gauguin had made several new connections with other artists

which played an important role in his development of this new work. One of the most enduring was with

Emile Bernard, one of the cloisonists, and the two would inspire each other a great deal. Their friendship,

though, might have been sustained in part by Emile's 17-year-old sister, Madeline. She modeled for many

of Emile and Paul's paintings, but Paul fell in love with her despite being over twice her age.

Another important friendship is struck up with Vincent van Gogh after his brother Theo had noticed

and bought some of Gauguin's Martinique paintings. They correspond for a couple years and were equally

excited about each other's work. As we covered in the van Gogh lectures, they would eventually hang out

together for a while in Arliss, and his work from this time was clearly inspired by van Gogh. But it

all ends in tears and detached ears. Gauguin goes back to Pont-au-ven in hopes of seeing Madeline

Bernard again, only to find his painter friend Charles Laval was now dating her. Gauguin is outraged,

devastated, and he feels betrayed. What does Gauguin do with this sense of betrayal? Does he write a

letter to her? Does he lash out at Charles? His response is extremely telling about a key aspect

of his personality. The way Gauguin sees it, he's some kind of martyr. And no one else has been

betrayed like this since Jesus Christ was betrayed and crucified. So, naturally, he starts painting

himself as Christ. His own sense of mythology he has created himself has grown. The local Breton women

are painted as props looking up at poor Paul Christ. Stylistically, this is another big leap for Gauguin.

The gaunt, angular, and highly simplified figure, close-cropped composition, flat red polka dots for

trees. He's also picked up a new yellow habit from van Gogh. Or maybe if he painted himself as Christ in

green, that would better express the way he was treated. This was an odd, egomaniacal turn, and perhaps the

time he spent with Vincent affected not only his colors, but his psyche as well.

This next self-portrait was painted on a cabinet door of the inn he was staying in. He's sporting a

halo, has a serpent between his fingers, and there's that pesky, tempting fruit just behind him. Despite his

bizarre turn into conceiving himself as the savior of mankind, it seems to be working great for his

creativity, experimentation, and boldness. Say what you will about the content—I did—but formally,

his paintings are on fire. He's abandoned observational painting in favor of his imagination.

Bright, bold color palette and conceptual goals. This is the confident, bold, colorful Gauguin that is so

emblematic of his style and much loved on coasters and mouse pads. And as we know, quite a few young

artists of the time were very much taken with Gauguin's work and would incorporate a lot of his ideas into

their own. But despite this influence among the artistic community, outside of that he was still

poor and unknown. In 1889 at the World's Fair in Paris, there's a small exhibition showing his paintings

along with several other post-impressionists, but it's not very successful. But he's inspired by what he

sees at the fair, including architectural recreations from Africa and Asia. The reconstructions of Asian

temples were particularly thorough and elaborate. Gauguin came back to visit them many times, and true to

form, he makes sketches and drawings of their features that he might include in his paintings to

make them seem more exotic. He also learns about Tahiti. In 1769, Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville

comes back from his far-flung Pacific Island and called it a paradise, like the Garden of Eden,

with beautiful people and the happiest society that exists on the globe. Ever since then, Tahiti had

been romanticized and mythologized in France for over a hundred years. Gauguin is mesmerized by this and

decides to leave modernity behind and go live in paradise and make his fortune. He convinces the

colonial officials to give him 30 percent off his fare in exchange for a painting when he comes back.

Gauguin will exaggerate this small deal into a big official government business trip and manages to

raise the rest of the funds necessary through some auctions of his work. He goes to Copenhagen to say a

final goodbye to his long-suffering wife and estranged children and sails for Tahiti in 1891, promising to

return a rich man. Arriving in the colonial capital of Papiti, Gauguin finds that Tahiti has changed

dramatically since the French colonists had arrived. Far from a paradise, life had been transformed by

bureaucrats and missionaries. They had brought smallpox and influenza and alcoholism. Within days,

Gauguin was disillusioned. Our missionaries have already imported much hypocrisy.

Just like Ponte Venn and Panama, others had come and already spoiled what was supposed to be his own

playground paradise. Not finding the Tahiti he expected, he decided to paint the Tahiti of his

dreams. His dreams seemed to focus on the women he thought he'd find there. Romantic European

depictions of the Pacific, like what Gauguin had probably seen at the World Fair, tended to show

women there as voluptuous, in skimpy clothes and bare-breasted. Yet to Gauguin's disappointment,

this was no longer the case in Tahiti. The church had since shamed Tahitian women into wearing long,

baggy smocks. So, Gauguin starts painting the girls in much less clothing, the way he expected and felt

entitled to see them. To be fair, he also painted the baggy nightgown-type dresses as well.

Not long after he arrived, Gauguin took a wife, or a mistress, named Taya Amana, who was 13 years old.

He negotiated this deal in an afternoon. It was not uncommon for local families to effectively

sell their daughters to be wives of French colonists for status or financial advantage.

She moved into his hut with him and lived with him for several years. He claimed to know about

traditional Tahitian mythology and stories from listening to Taya Amana stories. In 1892, he paints

Spirit of the Dead Watching, which is a difficult and problematic painting to sit with, knowing who

Gauguin was. The richness and variety of colors, the shapes, the lines, and the execution are captivating

and very well done. However, we also see 13-year-old Taya Amana in what appears to me more like a rape

scene than a scary ghost painting. He wanted to make her seductive. He attempts to complicate the

narrative with the evil spirit, but to me appears as an afterthought, when the entire goal of the

painting was to use the body of a child to titillate his audience. Whatever the case, Gauguin's portrayals

of Tahitian mythology and custom were not traditional or historical. As he always did, he had no problem

swapping in different gods, religions, or stories. It was all a mashup. He always considered the visual

imagery of other cultures as fair game. In this painting of Taya Amana, for example, the title

translates The Ancestors of Taya Amana. We see his new wife, not overtly sexualized this time,

instead in a modest colonial dress. But the inscriptions on the wall behind her are meaningless,

loosely inspired by a script he saw from Easter Island that has never been translated. And the figure

on the wall behind her is based on Hindu sculptures he's seen in different places.

For the man supposedly obsessed with finding real and authentic experiences, there's almost nothing

authentic about this depiction of Taya Amana's culture or ancestry here.

Here's another example, where a Tahitian woman and child are depicted as the mother Mary and the

infant Jesus. You can see their halos if you look closely. The composition itself is lifted from a

bas-relief he saw of a photograph from Bora Budur, a Buddhist complex in Indonesia.

In this painting, though, entitled We Shall Not Go to Market Today, you see he's used Egyptian wall

paintings for the poses, body shape, and composition of these Tahitian women. The women in this painting

were sex workers who received regular medical exams, and they are waiting near the port, holding up

their medical cards, showing they are cleared for work. One of Gauguin's most famous sayings was,

have always before you the Persians, the Cambodians, and a little of the Egyptian.

And it's clear in paintings like these, he took his own advice very literally.

And in this work, The Royal End of 1892, Gauguin depicts a grim, but again utterly inaccurate scene,

supposedly inspired by the death of the Tahitian king the year before. Whether he was referencing John

the Baptist, Judith and Holofernes, or his own fantasy, Gauguin says of the painting,

I have just finished, a severed canac, or Pacific Islander head, nicely arranged on a white cushion,

in a place of my invention, and guarded by women, also of my invention.

Undoubtedly though, paintings like these would have shocked and enthralled the French public back home,

and conformed with their expectations of exoticism and primitivism in the Pacific.

Subject matter aside, Gauguin is really hitting his stride artistically in Tahiti,

and these years are considered one of the high points of his career. The sunshine and golden glow

of the island had an impact on Gauguin's color. He gets increasingly bold with his palette,

often abandoning any local tones in favor of highly saturated, flat, bright colors. That said,

he tended to be a bit more truthful in his presentation of the landscape. Besides the obvious

color distortions, he usually showed natural features, vegetation, and beaches fairly accurately.

While at the same time, he's also exaggerating and stylizing many aspects within his paintings.

He gives us an incredibly bright, colorful, and magical Tahiti.

If he didn't find the island paradise he'd imagined when he left, he had found enough

inspiration there to recreate the paradise he wanted to see. However, his own lust and desire

seem to be the overarching theme of the majority of the work he makes in Tahiti. A title of this

painting, What? Are You Jealous?, seems to be bragging to his friends back home about his sexual

conquests, which was par for the course for Gauguin. These paintings are more about Gauguin than they

are about Tahiti. But within a couple of years, Gauguin is bored once again.

Taya Amana had become pregnant and had his child. So he's done, and anyway, he's run out of funds and

his health is declining. So he leaves Tahiti, saying goodbye forever to Taya Amana and his child with no

thought for their well-being. He has experience now, leaving those who depend on him. Fortunately, Taya Amana

would reclaim her life and marry a local man. Gauguin's luck is with him again when he returns to France.

His uncle has died and left him a decent inheritance, plus Serousier and some of his old artist friends

chip in to support his return. Rather than splitting his new income to support Mehta and the children,

he decides instead to mount a huge exhibition of his work. He buys flyers, posters, and postcards to

promote it. He hated traditional gold frames used at the time, so he had white frames made for each of

the paintings he made in Tahiti. To the opening, he wore a long blue cloak, loudly checked trousers,

and a very large hat. He didn't want anyone confused about who the artist was. This exhibition

had a mixed reception, but for the most part was not well received. Ironically, it received much of the

same criticism it receives today. He was accused of artificial exoticism, and critics were rightfully

suspect of his authenticity. And in Paris, he started seeing another teenager, Ana the Javanese,

as she was called, who was most likely part Sri Lankan and part Malaysian. She was a fascinating person

in her own right, who went everywhere with her pet monkey. He starts experimenting with woodblock prints,

creating some pretty groundbreaking work, using figures from Tahiti and gods and idols from around the

world, and sometimes of his own invention. But by 1895, it's become clear that this is not the

triumphant return to Paris he'd expected. His work is not especially popular, the money isn't rolling in,

and a major new sculpture he submits to the salon gets rejected. He quickly regrets leaving Tahiti,

scrapes together whatever money he can, boards a ship to return there for good.

Tahiti, though, wasn't the place he'd left just a few years ago. Now there was electricity,

and a big merry-go-round right there in town. Some people were playing tennis. He hated it.

Gauguin was not the same either. He looked and felt awful, with open sores all over his body. Like

many of his compatriots, he had syphilis. It's possible he had it before he left France.

Who knows how many partners he has given it to. He starts taking morphine and other painkillers.

He's still painting, though, and undeterred, he took a new mistress. Surprise, surprise,

it was another young teenager. Her name was Pao Ura, and she was 14.

Gauguin's sores were getting so bad, everyone thought he had leprosy and wouldn't go near him.

Everyone except Pao Ura, who didn't have a choice. As his new wife, she was considered his property.

Poor Pao Ura becomes pregnant. She would have a daughter who died just days after birth,

and later a son. Gauguin, though, seemingly only cared for his white children. And when he learns

of the death of his favorite daughter, Aline, who died of pneumonia back in Denmark,

he paints this epic mural-sized painting, over 12 feet long, about the stages of life. Entitled,

where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? It is considered one of his masterpieces.

In it, we see a young baby on the right and the old woman on the left and the stages of life in

between them. He wanted this to feel like a gospel. It's a Buddhist narrative told through

a Christian lens with Tahitian actors and made-up deities. True to form, it's the life cycle of women

that he's depicting here, with an Eve-like figure picking fruit and committing original sin right at

the center. She's contrasted with the innocence of girlhood, represented by the child sitting and

playing with the kittens to the side.

By now, though, Gauguin was constantly in pain and on morphine, becoming a crotchety old man,

making enemies in the small community of Tahiti. He started his own newspaper so he could talk trash

on everyone he didn't like. Soon, everyone hates him. Declaring that Tahiti has lost its cultural

identity and authenticity, and tellingly that it's getting hard to find models for his art, Gauguin sets

out on one last adventure and moves to Hivaoa in the Marquesas Islands, today part of French Polynesia.

The Marquesas are even more remote and tiny than Tahiti, with just a few thousand residents. Gauguin

was excited about rumors of cannibalism he had heard, and possibly of the almost utterly lawless

frontier society and exploitation of the locals practiced there. This was his last-ditch effort to

survive or go down in flames. When he arrived, he tricked the Catholic Church into thinking he was

a believer to buy a piece of land on to build a house. He takes yet another teenage mistress. Her

name was Veoho. He designed a sign around the door of his new house, adorned with naked women that he

carved, and he called it the House of Pleasure. Gross. He gets embroiled in the local politics and

generally creates trouble on the island, quickly falling out with the church and the authorities.

Some of his later art includes satires of his enemies. He will live out the last of his years

here. At the age of 54, he dies of syphilis in 1903. How many young girls he passed this on to,

no one knows. In a sweet karmic return, no one attended his funeral, and he has a rushed Catholic

burial, his syphilitic body quickly decomposing as his reputation back home begins to skyrocket.