Gauguin: Symbolism's Problem Child (Art History Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] [Music] on the way is the modern world has grown suspicious of the man who painted this picture [Music] all you need to know is that she was 15 when he painted her he was nearly 50 and she was his woman it doesn't sound good does it and gogan's passion for young girls isn't all that's held against him these days there's also the story often repeated that he deserted his wife and five children to become a painter and ran off to tahiti for the good times and the swinging [Music] even the madness of van gogh gets blamed on gogan because the razer vincent used to hack off his ear was meant originally for his annoying pal gogan what's to like about this man you might think well first off there's the art which needs no defense i reckon gogan painted some of the world's most alluring women and he put them into several of the world's most gorgeous pictures but what i really like about him is that he did it for big and noble reasons there's always more to a gogan than meets the eye this is the first film ever made that follows closely in gogan's footsteps where he went we go and now that i'm back take it from me that he had guts by the barrel load and with the life he led he needed them okay florence gaia [Music] the gogans came originally from round here orlean there's still lots of them in the phone book they were market gardeners green grocers the name gogan actually means walnut grower and the first of these walnut growers to split with the family tradition was gogan's father clovis who left this grim little house on the keyside to become a journalist in paris i wish i could show you what clovis looked like i want to know too but there's no pictures of him nothing he's faceless i can show you gogan's mother she was a dark beauty called aline and this alin had peruvian blood [Music] when gogan was won in 1849 his parents suddenly left france and came here to peru clovis's journalism that somehow got him into trouble so gauguin grew up in lima but not with his father around clovis died from a heart attack on the boat over and is buried somewhere near tierra del fuego [Music] the sudden death of his father must have had an incalculable impact on gogan's psyche he was just a baby ripped away from everything he knew suddenly fatherless and fetched up on the other side of the world in an exceptionally strange new life this is the house they lived in gauguin his mother and a shadowy sister called maria no one's filmed here before it looks crummy now but what you have to imagine is that when gauguin was here from the age of one to the age of seven this was the house wait for it of the president of peru yes the president because gogan's peruvian relatives the tristan imoscozos were right at the top of the spanish colonial pyramid when gauguin boasted in his memoirs that his uncle was the last viceroy of peru and that he was descended from the spanish borgias yes those borgias the most wicked family in the renaissance no one believed him but it was all true gogan's uncle pio a violent little reactionary really was a bulger and he really was the last spanish viceroy these days all that's left of uncle pio in his power base of arequipa are a few faded snapshots and some crumpled official documents in which he demands his favorite commodity money he had beautiful handwriting it was a family talent gogan had beautiful handwriting too [Music] uncle pio the belated borgia deliberately married his daughter to a political lackey called ichinike and this lackey became the president of peru while gauguin was living in his house and by a pleasing coincidence the old boy who lives there today makes his living painting nudes conquistador and saints senor how long have you been living in this house since 60 years 60 and a half to be more precise yeah it's not in very good condition now when you moved in here was it slightly smarter yes when i moved into this house which i bought the house was very beautiful it was in a word marvellous all the doors and windows had their antique frames which nowadays have completely disappeared do many people in peru uh know that gogan grew up here how important it was for his for his education and indeed for his whole world view um it was so crucial to everything he did the fact that he came from peru from this house nowadays most of the people don't they don't know there isn't even a you know plaque outside if if if he had been living in somewhere like london or paris people would have put a big sign saying this is the house that gauguin grew up in there's nothing here because people are different here if one puts a plaque outside they steal it it disappears [Music] one of gogan's few early memories of his mother is of her wearing the traditional costume of lima one eye peeping out seductively from beneath her manto the mysterious one-eyed veil which all women in lima went out in it was the key to women's power in lima she said so seductive but also the perfect disguise he was always drawn to women with a traditional look this must have been the first of the colorful female costumes that were to haunt his imagination but it obviously wasn't the last [Music] foreign [Music] gauguin was 18 months old when he got here he was nearly eight when he left some will tell you that these forgotten years in lima were irrelevant but don't you believe it it was in lima that gogan encountered his first art allen began collecting pre-columbian pottery extraordinary things disquieting and inventive with so little practical ambition the colonists like don pio dismissed these inca pots as barbaric eileen from paris was prescient and generous enough to admire and collect them this blackened demonic pot is the handiwork of a genuine pre-columbian this however is one of gogans it's a self-portrait with blood [Music] echenike with donpeo's keen assistance turned out to be the most corrupt president in peru's history he was going to be overthrown alien must have seen it coming it was time to flee [Music] but peru had done its job it had given gogan's art a completely different head start to anyone else's [Music] when his mother took him back to france he spoke no french at all he was a foreigner then and forever whose first and preferred language was peruvian spanish the walnut growers of orleans took them in and they settled in clovis's father's house on the key number 25 or what's left of it gogan can't have found it easy to arrive in aurelian no language no friends no sun [Music] he went to a couple of local schools and was then sent here a few miles up the road to the catholic boarding school of la chapelle mesman i went to one of these places too and hated every second of it as did gogan five in the morning the bell goes prayers off to the chapel morning service prayers lessons prayers more lessons more prayers it's a terrible way to bring up a child gogan spent three years at the petite seminary the la chapelle mesmer absorbing a hardcore catholic education training to become a priest there was no chance it must have been at this school that the teenage gogan decided what he was going to do with his life he was going to run away to see life on the waves free at last can you blame him has left us precious little information about his seafaring years what few memories there are concerns sex according to his own boastful account when the 17 year old gogan arrived here in brazil the local women threw themselves at him and he managed to seduce a famous brazilian actress from rio then there was the fat prussian passenger whom the captain fancied but who chose the teenage midshipman gogan instead some of it is probably true women did go for him and there's no doubt that the six years gogan spent on the seas popping in and out of ports amounted to an exceptionally exotic education there was also this constant reminder of his own exotic origins the way he too was different arriving in brazil for the first time must have seemed more like coming home than leaving home [Music] gauguin was somewhere in the caribbean when he found out his mother was dead she used to smack him around the head when he was lippy he was a lousy son but he loved her and when he was middle-aged he painted her from the only photograph he had and made her look forever young [Applause] this is the french stock exchange the boss in paris when gauguin finally blundered out of the navy his mother's sugar daddy a very very rich spanish banker called gustav arosa decided to cast him against type and get gogan a job here gogan was 23 he'd been at sea for seven years what can he possibly have known about high finance yet not only did he become a successful parisian businessman he stayed one for 11 years so that that's a file from mr berta stockbroker and we see that paul gogan was the chief liquidator at the at the firm that he had a salary of 3 000 francs at the time and earned one percent of the net earnings the employees of this department had to work very late that night to settle all the trades from the two weeks before and i've read in the papers that sometimes they ended the work at 2 30 a.m so essentially though it was a bookkeeping job he was putting all the figures together yes we don't know exactly what he did every day at the stocky channel but he was quoting some some stocks or working in in the pilot labors he must have also done some things outside of the official work he did for mr berta he seems to have traded also everybody did right yes most of the employees their main job you know apart from taking orders from clients going to the stock exchange but the main job was making money for themselves or their friends and so i guess he acted like everybody else gogan's famous for his wonderlust these huge journeys he undertook but once he got somewhere he tended to stay put almost immobile like a snail curled up in its shell his parisian life was concentrated almost claustrophobically around here the ninth arondi small quarter of a mile that way quarter of a mile the other way the boss where he worked is just down there he lived at roula bruyere over there at number 21. arosa lived in the big house at number five in that road and gogan was actually born at number 56 on the rue notre dame de lauret just behind me over there next door at 54 is where the painter delacroix lived while across the street is where the impressionist painter camille pisarro stayed when he first came to paris all in the same street businessmen couldn't help meeting artists around here and artists couldn't help meeting businessmen all around us are the cafes made famous by the impressionists they like to meet down there at the brasserie de marter and at the top of the hill is a boarding house at number 51 where gogan first encountered his wife she'd come from denmark on a holiday met sophie gad a well-built danish blonde for whom gogan fell immediately she needed some persuading i found this in a museum vault in copenhagen it's met drawn by gogan he must have carried it around with him a love token she looks so fragile but she wasn't this was a tough woman she smoked cigars loved dancing and parties expensive dresses they rushed into marriage and set up house in this posh apartment in the 9th herundisman of course she thought she was marrying an up and coming financial whiz kid what she didn't know was that her gogan had a terrible secret he'd got interested in art [Music] there are lots of tall stories told in art about prodigies artistic geniuses who could do wondrous things with a pencil from the moment they picked one up picasso was supposed to have been one rafael was another it's a useful myth to encourage about yourself gogan never did that but he certainly could have done here's the proof it's dated 1873 which makes this one of the two or three earliest pictures we know by him no teacher no art school completely self-taught yet look how good he is his mother remembers him making his first carving with a knife on the long sea voyage from peru with all those hours at sea to while away when he became a sailor there are presumably countless opportunities to sketch and whittle but nothing survives all we know for sure is that suddenly in 1873 at exactly the same time as he became a stockbroker he started becoming an artist too and an unusually gifted one at that i don't know if you can detect the slightest tremble of beginners hesitation from where you are but from over here there isn't any i don't think she had any idea of his passion for art i really don't not at the very first i think she saw it rather as an interesting hobby that kept him out of the bars and uh and cafes and things and and it was quite a safe hobby for a man to have so it's a good thing that he was interested in art yes kept him at home you know painting the children and her with better than out with a mistress or something but that began to change and she said to my grandfather you know she emphasized that she really had no idea that this was in him and it was quite a shock to her at how much of a passion this was and how how she felt unable to share it because i don't think she had any real passion for art people forget just how talented gogan was with his hands it's an obvious point to make but this was something that he carved after only a few lessons in marble carving it's astonishingly proficient it is i mean with some help i believe from his his neighbor the landlord yes i think he apparently rough carved it with the saw and then gogan finished it so yes i think it's incredibly well done [Music] this is met made extra pretty and ennobled and this is his son emil it was shown in the fourth impressionist exhibition of 1879 the only sculpture in the show [Music] impressionists had two of their revolutionary exhibitions in this street at number 11 and number six gogan was now working across the road with a banker at number 21. he couldn't avoid progressive french painters in the ninth orondis mall they were everywhere gauguin fell in with camille pizarro and used to visit him on sundays to paint in his garden this is it and look what we found at the back never filmed before gogan's first nervous attempt at a self-portrait so tempting he tried it twice gogan was running out of bourgeois compliance just as the french stock market was running out of gas for its bubble mitt was reluctant to cut back on her maids and her dresses gauguin was reluctant to cut back on his art so the posh houses had to go and with it the 9th errandism it was time to move down market and across the river to the poorer new urban sprawls of vajra this is the first house gogan lived in in which he had a studio a special room just for him to paint in up there on the third floor overlooking the garden at number eight rue carcel there are some nuns living here now who wouldn't let us film inside nuns don't like to let gogan through the door the nuns shouldn't have worried gauguin painted some of his most lyrical pictures the carcel his family in the garden the church at night [Music] the picture which i think is the first real gogan it's his daughter aline named after his mother of course aged about four asleep [Music] gauguin tiptoes into her room at night and sneaks right into her dreams of course it could just be the wallpaper it's this ambiguity that's so very him something else very significant happened here at the nuns house you know that bid on a birth certificate where the father has to write what his profession is well when gogan's fifth child was born a boy pola in december 1883 he wrote on the birth certificate that he was an artist for the first time at the age of 35 with five children after ten years of towing and throwing and being half a stock broker and half a painter here finally he committed himself to the way ahead it was hard on met she was so fond of elegant dresses and glittering parties and wasn't interested in poverty it wasn't what she married gogan for when her uncle turned up in ruan on a boat bound for denmark she got on it [Music] it was meant to be temporary a respite but as soon as she got to copenhagen met made up her mind to stay she didn't consult gogan he cashed in his life insurance early and decided quickly to follow her he was up for a new life too but the six months he spent in denmark were the most humiliating of his life i hate the danes he spat in his memoirs and in case we missed it he repeats himself i hate the danes before leaving france in a final lunge at respectability he'd managed to get himself a job here in copenhagen as a tarpaulin salesman for a french manufacturer of a new kind of waterproof cloth gogan was going to be their scandinavian representative he'd hoped to use mets contacts to sell this stuff to the railway companies for covering freight wagons unfortunately denmark already manufactured its own perfectly adequate tarpaulins so why buy french ones everything went wrong he couldn't speak the language he knew nothing about waterproofing danish businessman didn't like him and he didn't like danish businessmen and there was never any real chance of this wild stab at the scandinavian tarpaulin market paying dividends the stay in copenhagen turned quickly into an exercise in living more cheaply they couldn't afford the rent anywhere nice and had to move into the inner city of copenhagen not a good part of town in those days with no money coming in from the tarpaulin business met was suddenly the family's chief bread winner her old employer jacob elstrop for whom she'd been a nanny in her teens was now prime minister of denmark and leader of the conservative party and through his connections met began giving french lessons to trainee diplomats while gogan the embarrassing bohemian she'd brought back from paris was banished out of sight to the attic to this little room where by a skylight he painted his first real self-portrait [Music] gogan only painted a handful of pictures in copenhagen he liked the views well enough at first but it was just too cold to paint outdoors minus 10 when he arrived but they're charmingly lively these french impressionists impressions of a very cold city [Music] met was constantly embarrassed by him his political views his appearance the lack of income none of it went down well with her disappointed family either in the end the whole lot of them brothers sister mother ganged up on him and told him to go if he didn't leave copenhagen countess moltka who'd been paying for his son emile's schooling was going to stop the money met took her family's side in the confrontation she stayed he went it's usually said of gogan that he left his wife and abandoned his family what actually happened here in copenhagen was that she and her family threw him out perhaps they had good reason to but it is a different storyline [Music] he scuttled back to paris with a new job description penniless vagabond and that winter guess what he took up pottery yes pottery this is the first ceramic that gogan ever made it shows a thorn now forms satters the god pan various representations of of a man who was also half a goat were very popular in the 19th century in the age of darwin they struck a 19th century cord because they were taken as symbols of unbridled sexuality of the primitive savage man hiding within the civilized man this appealed to gauguin a lot of course and rather interestingly it's the first time he uses the monogram pgo which he later used on a lot of his paintings and you can just see it there at the bottom of the phone now pgo in french pago was apparently a word which had also picked up on his travels earlier as a sailor it was a kind of british nautical slang for a penis pago was apparently what sailors used to call each other when they had arguments on board ship so in choosing this monogram pago he was very deliberately harking back to his own sexual problems with met gauguin had gotten in touch with his primitive self and would spend the rest of his life hunting for more the westernmost tip of france is known as finistere the end of the earth which is what it must once have seemed to be to the early inhabitants of this remote corner of brittany but when gauguin got to pontaven in june 1886 this air of finality certainly wasn't there anymore ponte ven was that ghastly thing an artist's colony one in ten of the town's inhabitants was a painter there were around a hundred of them here in the summer of 1886 chiefly americans but also scandinavians scotsmen englishmen the dutch and even a few frenchmen gogan installed himself at the panchayan glonac in the main square where the landlady would usually accept credit in his early letters from ponte ven it isn't the picturesqueness of brittany that gauguin stresses but the quality and quantity of the food at the glower neck and he certainly wasn't getting much exercise if you map out the locations of the paintings gogan produced on this first trip to ponte ven you find that nearly all of them were sighted within 300 yards or so of the glow neck [Music] it was in pontoven that gauguin did international creativity an enormous disservice by inventing what we now think of as the typical artist's look he bought himself a blue fisherman's jumper which he set off with a jaunty beret trying to pass himself off as a working seafarer he later refined this indoor fisherman's look by adopting the coloured breton waistcoats which the locals wear to dances to complete his transformation into the instantly obvious artist he took up the regional footwear and bought himself some clogs later still he carved and decorated his own so very lovingly when a man makes his own footwear you feel he makes his own way in life [Music] he was 38 when he first came to pontaven double the age of most of the other rebels in town so it was natural that he came to be seen as their leader a visiting scottish painter called archibald standish hartick later published his recollections of gogan at ponteven and describes the leader surrounded by his new acolytes locking around like schoolboys they came past hartick one day on a boat rode by two breton fishermen with a naked gogan tied behind on a rope looking in hartick's phrase like a dead porpoise and enjoying himself hugely suddenly it was the end of the summer so everyone went back to paris gauguin didn't fancy pontaven on his own with just him and the bretons as the winter crept in he crept back to paris too and hatched a most unfortunate travel plan of all the hair brain schemes that gohan came up with in his life to get rich quickly and there were plenty of them the most ill advised of all was his decision in april 1887 to come to panama the digging of the panama canal was billed as the 19th century's greatest feat of engineering [Music] the french were going to show the americans on their own doorstep how to fashion a miraculous nautical shortcut that avoided the whole of south america by gouging a great trench through the isthmus of panama it sounded like such a good idea that money poured into the project investing in panama was the internet boom of the 1880s gogan didn't come to panama alone he'd managed to persuade his besotted disciple from pontavan charles laval to come with him gogan's sister was married to a colombian juan uribe and uribe was already in panama searching for the same pot of fool's gold gogan thought that uribe was running a bank here in panama city but it turned out to be a shabby general store and there was no job going for him anyway the focus of french colonial life was the grand central hotel in panama city it's derelict now a couple of squatters were the only inhabitants when i visited but in 1887 everybody met everybody in the grand hotel hello your colleagues couldn't really afford to stay here but that didn't stop him the central courtyard had a huge american bar a casino and a billiards table hotel grand centrality and this is this is the courtyard here where the vineyards table and the american bar yeah do you have a look there's a mysterious passage in gogan's memoirs where he describes himself as a champion billiards player who wins a momentous game against some americans with a famous display of french potting brilliance it must be some kind of blurred memory of a night here in the courtyard of the grand central hotel i don't doubt that gauguin was handy at billiards he was one of those fiddlers who try lots of things and get good at them he fenced he boxed when he took up musical instruments he soon learned to play the mandolin and the guitar and with this same restlessness he tried his hand at so many different ways of making art sculpture pottery [Music] all manner of print methods [Music] carving walking sticks and pipes people remembered gogan as someone who was always doing something with his hands he had a busy questing mind and fidgety fingers being good at billiards would have been his kind of skill [Music] the worst place of all the bottom of the cesspit was colon the caribbean terminal of the canal and main gateway from europe where the company excavating the great trench had its headquarters colon was one of the foulest places on earth and it still is there were no sewers the rats were notoriously large dead cats were thrown into the streets a few human corpses too and the french had created macabre mountains of bottles in cologne the size of two-story buildings from the wine they guzzled madly in preference to the deadly local water [Music] but this is where gogan and laval ended up hustling for work gogan wrote to meta that he'd become a labourer and was swinging a pickaxe from dawn to dusk which is unlikely he was probably a foreman or perhaps a clerk most of the laborers were black workers from jamaica an eminently expendable workforce easy to replenish within two weeks of getting his job in cologne gogan was fired he'd saved just enough to get out as soon as they could afford to buy a pair of tickets in steerage class gogan and laval were on the first boat out of colon headed for a proper caribbean paradise they'd spotted on the way over martinique [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] guess who stepped onto exactly this shore in 1502 and was so taken by what he found that he wrote in his diary he'd arrived at the most beautiful place on earth christopher columbus and if columbus was impressed by what he found here imagine how welcoming and gorgeous martinique must have seemed to gogan and laval after everything they'd been through in panama when they too fetched up exactly here in june 1887. [Music] they arrived at san pierre just over there in those days the largest and most elegant town in martinique little paris they called it the pearl of the antilles it sits in a large sandy bay and has looming over it an exceptionally picturesque volcano called montpellier [Music] the first task was to find somewhere to live not easy saint pierre was expensive they were broke and what tiny quantities of money they'd saved in panama had to be spent on medicine because almost immediately laval went down with the dreaded yellow fever [Music] survived in better health for a couple of months before he too succumbed to a ghastly combination of dysentery and malaria all picked up in panama of course thank heavens they got out of there two miles south of saint-pierre at la carbay they found an abandoned workers hut on a plantation a casa negra it was empty they moved in and lived there for nothing chiefly on fresh fruit picked from the trees some fish like everyone else life was not very difficult because there was many foods many foods there was a simple alimentation with bread food wet food bananas under the fish every every morning there were fishes from the sea so it's true what people say which is that basically even if you didn't do any work or didn't make any money you could get food because you you pick the fruit from the trees you get the fish and the i think the neighbors helped help them a lot the neighbours and neighbors because it is like that in martini so people people have one another even if they're french colonists arriving for a short visit like that still people would help them look after them see yes yes i think so the landscape outside the casa negra was magnificently luxuriant even today you look down across this jungle and there's 20 different greens down there all set off with glowing patches of tropical color like a jaunty quilt if anywhere was going to shake the hesitancy of impressionism out of gogan that french dab dab dabbiness that passes so easily for uncertainty it was here [Music] gogan wrote a very naughty letter from martinique back to his wife in which he describes an encounter with what he calls a damnably pretty who offered him some fruit a guava which he was about to eat when a local man a lawyer stopped him the damnably pretty said the lawyer had rubbed this fruit between her breasts to hex it if gogan ate it he'd have to take her as his woman did it really happen i don't think so it's too much like the story of what eve did to adam this giving of the irresistible fruit whether it happened or not from then on naughty fruit fruit as a symbol of desire begins appearing in his paintings it was in martinique that the grandest of gogan's themes the theme of temptation entered his art i suppose he may in some way have succumbed to the unarguable charms of the local beauties but let's not forget he'd been entirely faithful to met for 15 years since their first encounter at gustaferosa's party it may indeed have been in martinique that he finally gave in to temptation but it doesn't show immediately in his paintings these are not overly pretty paradise bunnies gliding sexily through the jungle not at all they're strong big boned hard-working women with a touch of melancholy about them in his martinique paintings gogan is paying warm tribute to the island people who welcomed him in paintings that are exceptional precisely because of their lack of phony exotic allure you feel he would gladly have settled in martinique like all the other french paradise hunters now over running the place but the local doctor told him to go home or he'd die the dysentery in the malaria was getting worse and worse gogan never came back to martinique although in his thoughts he never again left it i see you arrived back in paris ill but excited his martinique paintings were much admired notably by a young dutch art dealer in paris called teo van gogh there's a loft for sale here for 1.5 million euros and its selling point is that it's in the building in which teo's brother vincent van gogh used to work as an art dealer before he became a painter art dealing was the van gogh family business teo had been persuaded to buy a couple of the best martinique paintings by vincent in this concentrated artistic milieu of montmartre where everyone knew everyone else it was inevitable that van gogh and gogan should meet gogan's stories of martinique fired vincent with a similar ambition he too would seek the sun why didn't the two of them share a studio in the south they could eat together live together more cheaply yes yes said gogan let's do it he then promptly forgot the offer vincent never did instead of heading south gogan took the next train to pontaven the nearest thing he had in france to a home gogan's second visit to brittany began dismally it was february there was no one else there the others were too sensible to risk the winter weather in pontaven but gogan had nowhere else to go he was ill and hadn't recovered from the deadly mix of dysentery and malaria that had nearly killed him in martinique he spent most of the winter months at the glower neck in bed recovering unable to work [Music] when summer finally came boy was he ready for it [Music] heat and light surged into his art [Music] by july he was unmistakably well again [Music] gogan's gang had a crucial new member a 19 year old boy genius called emil bernard bernard was already friends with van gogh but in pontaven it was only gauguin who interested him bernard yanked gogan's attention away from the peasants the cows and the fields indoors to where the light did eerie things gohan already knew about the magic of stained glass from his own fiercely catholic past but he'd forgotten now bernard was reminding him this is one of the most important paintings that gohan ever produced it's called the vision after the sermon it was painted in probably september uh 1888 and it's a picture of the peasants the briton women in pontevall coming out of the church after the mass they've just been attending and according to gogan having this vision inspired by the sermon they'd heard of jacob wrestling with the angel which must be what the priest had chosen his theme of the day and he's taken the breton women and he's closed their eyes so that what you seem to be seeing is a dream they're having this isn't really happening it's something that's happening only in their imaginations so it's an attempt to take the ancient spirit of the bible of the apocalypse of the gospels and to bring it up to date and to deposit it right in the lap of the briton people in 1888 but of course gauguin thought this was quite rightly thought this was one of his greatest paintings he offered it to the church at ponte val and they refused it they didn't want it and that must rank as one of the biggest mistakes that the catholic church ever made [Music] emea wasn't the only bernard to impact dramatically on gogan that summer on the 15th of august emile's 17 year old sister madeline joined them in pontaven and gauguin promptly and dangerously fell in love with her this is a beautiful painting of madeleine by her brother emil when gauguin met her she was what 17 wasn't she yes but she seemed to be already very fiercely catholic a real believer she must always have been quite a believer very deep um very mystical you know and gauguin must have felt it you know even though she was only 17 and all this hasn't developed yet you know he painted a beautiful portrait of her in which he seems to have made her look older she's got this very alluring smile on her yes yes yes that's absolutely what he did you know doesn't look like a clumsy teenager you know when she has her hair pulled up you know which is something which women did and not young girls and uh he made her absolutely charming yes that for sure [Music] it couldn't work out because he was old enough to be her father but you know that's not an absolute obstacle but he had absolutely no money he had no place to live in he was living on credit most of the time he had no prospects of making great money and he was married you know so he couldn't propose no it's for sure he suffered huh lots of the paintings he did already in 1888 you know are i think a sign of sexual frustration you know like this painting which is called life cree which is in moscow you know it has a symbolical person uh looking at some fruit you know a supernatural look and it's obviously a scene of temptation you know and obviously it was inspired by his feelings when he was so frustrated because of this madeleine thing gogan's passion for madeline bernard isn't usually taken seriously enough all of us know what torture it is to want someone desperately that we can't have it isn't something that passes in weeks or months it takes years the impact of madeleine bernard on gogan's life and art was seismic [Music] madeleine also plays a covert role in the vision after the sermon he's on the left disguised as a breton woman those are her lips so is this on the right gogan as the older priest look at that nose that's him and the vision after the sermon is a painting about the struggle between the desires of an angel and those of a man [Music] for six months van gogh had been pestering gogan to come to all a sleepy south of france backwater where vincent had burned away the summer painting his yellowest works they could share ideas live cheaply start a confraternity of artists a studio in the south as vincent called it with gauguin as the senior monk or abbot it was through the post that this hounding of gogan went on you must come you must come he writes again and again and in this obsessive pursuit of gogan's presence there are signs already of imbalance what made the situation intrinsically precarious was the fact that gogan was temporarily imbalanced too he'd fallen in love with madeline bernard so it was a distraught moody heartbroken gogan who finally succumbed to vincent's relentless pleading and arrived just over there at all station at five o'clock in the morning on the 23rd of october 1888. he stayed here for just two months but they constitute two of the most notorious months in the annals of modern art [Music] vincent had rented a house it's gone now turned into this roundabout but it used to stand over there on the place la martine we think we know it well from vincent's deceptively delightful painting it was bright yellow welcoming and cozy [Music] but that's in the painting in reality it was yellow all right but pokey unusually messy inside and very very small not at all the sort of house in which two nervy egotists should ever have been cooped up [Music] on the first day van gogh showed gogan just about everything there is to see in all and then in the evening he took gauguin to his favorite brothel state-run the meson de tolerance number one where vincent had developed his own uncomfortable crush on a working girl called rachel he used to pay her just to talk to him gogan wouldn't have done that inside the yellow house chaos reigned housework wasn't vincent's forte so gogan said quickly about organizing things he did the cooking and they had two boxes full of money one was for the shopping and the other for necessities which they'd arranged in ascending order number three was rent number two was tobacco and at the top were what vincent called hygienic practices going to the brothel [Music] thus organized the two members of the studio of the south set about a painting schedule that would have driven many a man to madness i think we all know how stressful christmas can be but the one that van gogh and gauguin shared down here in al is in a league of its own when it comes to unpleasantness and trauma it marked the end not only of vincent's dreams of a studio in the south but also of much of his sanity and of course a large chunk of his ear for weeks they'd been cooped up in the yellow house drinking arguing competing while outside it rained and rained one of the wettest autumns on record it all came to a head on the night before christmas eve the only eyewitness account we have is gogans which some consider unreliable though it tallies with what the police recorded they'd gone out for a drink quarrelled and vincent had thrown a glass of absent at gogan it missed gauguin frog marched him home and put him to bed and then he went out for a walk on the place la martin suddenly he heard footsteps behind him footsteps he recognized he turned around and there was vincent about to attack him with a razor one of those that flick open dangerously gogan glared at him and vincent ran off into the night gogan slept in a hotel early the next morning he returned to the yellow house to find it ringed by police his friend the police told him had cut off his ear with the razor wrapped it in a newspaper and taken it round to the brothel where he'd left it for rachel she opened the gruesome gift and started screaming it wasn't his whole ear it was part of the lobe and i'm convinced that this notorious ear cutting was vincent's version of something that goes on in that huge bull fighting arena up there where the poor bull has its ear cut off after a particularly fine display by the matador who's presented with it afterwards as his reward vincent was surely signaling his emotional defeat something had happened some tragic development in affairs of the heart would be my suspicion in which gogan had done better than him whatever it was it triggered a breakdown from which van gogh never fully recovered vincent's brother tayo came down immediately and gogan caught the next train back to paris where a most unhappy new year awaited him in a peculiar act of solidarity with vincent gauguin made a self-portrait jug in which he too loses his ears the blood's still on his face and then this even stranger likeness of himself with his finger in his mouth which he asked specifically to be given to madeleine bernard it's so tongue tied isn't it gauguin once quipped that making pots is like cooking lobsters they go in one color and come out another he liked that it felt primal in the summer he hurried back to pontaven hoping to see madeleine bernard again she however had taken up with his formerly loyal disciple charles laval and gauguin with astounding arrogance began imagining himself as the most celebrated figure ever to be betrayed by a disciple [Music] oh the dead christ of this nervy breton summer are self-portraits lightly camouflaged he raided the local churches for influences to steal van gogh had infected him with a greed for yellow it became an addiction [Music] the tortures of love had uncorked gallons of heroic self-pity in gogan jesus on the cross becomes gogan betrayed this ludicrous empathy with christ was an unlikely route to great work and don't forget that among the praying marys at the foot of the cross is the one that we call the magdalene whom the french call madelaine when it became clear that the bernards would not be risking their daughter anywhere near him that summer he fled further to where brittany runs out where in a hamlet called lepaldu he'd found himself a new disciple another ginger dutchman with problems called mayor de haan this is la vive de la plage gogan settled there for about a year from winter 1889 to the next year he was looking for a wild place a primitive place that's why he came there so when gogan arrived he had no money at all but his friend mayor duan he was a rich man and he he gave money to gogar and in exchange goga taught him how to paint dahan was a hunchback about five feet tall with a head full of bright red hair and large poor like hands given how ugly de haan was it must have been galling for gauguin when the beautiful owner of this pokey bnb marie the doll they called her because of her good looks chose to have de haan's baby and not his gogan after all was a married man unlike the bachelor de haan so he had to make do not only with the smaller upstairs bedroom but also with the buuvets maid who slept downstairs in a tiny space at the back down to which gauguin would sometimes creep when the nights got lonely so now gogan's room it showed this room because he wanted to see nature but you need many imagination because at that period there weren't any cars or any trees and no houses too that it could see the sea that's why it shows this room so now we go in the dining room i've been looking forward to this the sistine chapel of dining rooms the winters are tough here there's nothing to do except spend the coldest months indoors redecorating so most of the works were doing by gogan and mayor duan and even the sailing was painted and the windows too uh there are self-portraits of gogan you you see the modesty of gogan gogan the saint and also the apples and the snakes which represent the temptation so you can see it represents the good and he thought that his friend mayor duane would be the devil mayor devon with all the characteristics of the devil hair like corns and strange eyes strange hands thus the guests face the daily choice between the good door and the bad [Music] gogan had started having serial affairs he was 41 so let's call it what it was a midlife crisis [Music] we know for sure that he'd managed to get pregnant a young seamstress called juliet and if this is her then that certainly is him which at least shows some vivid self-awareness [Music] but the work which most tangibly captures the sexual storm that was raging in gogan is this great wrestling match in wood now in boston [Music] museum and you'll be happy doesn't feel very happy though look how tenderly he remembers this woman's body look how conspicuously he renders her wedding ring and look who's popped up in the corner to tussle with her his finger in his mouth again these are the agonies of a man at boiling point [Music] gauguin was now determined to get out of france it seems to have been emil bernard who recommended tahiti bernard had picked up a booklet at the universal exhibition and according to this booklet tahiti was the french colonial paradise where a man could live by just reaching up in the trees and plucking the fruit that was it for gogan he was going there the ministry of colonies finally agreed to give him a 30 discount on his fare they might buy a picture when he returned gogan chose to present this more positively he was going to tahiti on an official government mission there was time for one last visit to copenhagen met had got fatter more manly but his alien was so pleased to see him and loved him so much there's only one record of gogan crying and that's from the pen of his poet friend shall maurice who remembers going out drinking with him just before he left for tahiti when suddenly gogan burst into uncharacteristic tears i've let down my family he sobbed i failed them as their breadwinner and he ran out of the cafe balling his eyes out he left marseille on april fools day 1891 nine weeks later on june the 8th his island paradise was on the horizon with perfect symbolic timing it was his birthday he was 43. [Music] gogan had packed ambitiously for the journey he brought a shotgun for hunting the wild game that he imagined to be roaming around tahiti the locals were astonished to see gogan he was wearing a brown velvet suit purple shoes and a cowboy stetson he'd picked up at the buffalo bill wild west show in paris most outrageously of all his hair was down to his shoulders the tahitians gathered around and titted at this unusual arrival they called him a mahu a man woman after the local cross cross-dressers who were and still are a mysterious feature of traditional tahitian society [Music] local girls it was said are wise to marry a mahu [Music] with its rows of identical planck houses and their rusting iron roofs the tahitian capital was dirty and dull [Music] as a painter on an official mission gogan was courted by the resident colonials who suspected that his painting might be a cover and that he was really there to spy on them for the french government they made sure they treated him well within days of arriving he wrote to met that he was going to meet the tahitian royal family who'd been alerted to his arrival it never happened a week after gauguin reached tahiti the last tahitian king pomari v abruptly died he drunk himself to death it was a family tradition his great grandfather his grandfather and his father had gone the same way pamari the fifth favorite tipple apparently was rum mixed with whiskey and brandy and some liqueur the monument they erected to him here in a delightful display of tahitian funeral irreverence is topped by a giant tribute to king pomari v's chief appetite a bottle of benedictine gogan was asked to supervise the decoration of the state funeral he refused insisting in an early display of empathy with the natives that the king's widow was in a better position to do that with the passing of the last tahitian king gogan complained maori history came to an end the civilization of soldiers traders and colonial officers he wrote had prevailed i feel a deep sadness the missionaries had certainly been busy imposing crude respectability on the natives the women were forced to wear shapeless mother hubbard dresses catholic burkas that enveloped them like tents and infantilized them it sailed halfway around the world imagining an unspoilt tropical paradise but the missionaries and the colonial hypocrites had got there before him well there was girls in pepe and some somewhere prostitute the girls who are prostitutes they would have medical visit compulsory and gogan painted that painting you know you see that painting of the woman sitting on the bench there which is which is in the basel museum you see well people say they have their fans like that but it isn't at all they're fun it is what it is a card to show and say look i'm in good health because my card has been signed by the doctor why is that because a ship just came in because if you look at the painting you find in the distance there's a naval ship and so the men are going to go ashore and timothy doesn't mean the market it means close to the market in taishan you see it means this is close to the market and this is where you could meet those girls so what you call a meat market today meat market that's right yes pepe was noisy dirty packed with colonists so he fled down the coast to somewhere he could use the shotgun perhaps to hear at matea where the palms and the pandanus trees overhang the beach and form secret glades that shelter you from prying eyes i was delighted to find when i got to tahiti that i already knew it quite well from his pictures he was much more truthful than we usually realize and sought always to evoke the real sensation of places tahiti is basically a mountain chain with a beach around it when you look at tahitian gogans it's useful to know that if the mountains are in front of you the sea will be behind you in the coastal strip with those shady pandanus glades was his favorite terrain means why are you jealous is tahitian a difficult language to learn now gogan used it of course in in so many of his titles well tahitian first was never written it was the missionaries who first wrote the haitian from what they heard but the asian language is easy to learn we have only the six vowels and eight consonants in our language so half of what you have in english or french so it makes it easy in one hour anyone from any country can read without really understanding what they're reading but correctly people forget i think there's quite a lot of english in the tahitian language yes because we need to remember that the british came first to visit our islands in 1767 when these people disembarked on the ships and came to bring their greetings to the king or the queen they would come to them and say your honor we bring you greetings from king george or whatever and the the heard that they didn't have such thing in their own language and then they learned to say yourana from your honor so and iorana is of course the title of one of gogan's most famous early tahitian paintings which is a tribute to mary in that painting of course imagines mary to be one lady here carrying jesus on their shoulder and so when people go to church in tahiti do they greet each other in the streets yes they call themselves my name and yorana they embrace because this is the custom here in our islands we kiss every occasion we have of course [Music] matea was close enough to paradise to be getting on with but something was missing he had the trees the fruit the sea the sand but adam didn't have his eve [Music] the local community was tiny no girls next door were free or keen and he was nervous of approaching his strange new neighbors so one day he set off on the stagecoach to the east of the island completely undeveloped in those days to faoni where he was invited into a bamboo hut by a typically hospitable local woman she offered him food and drink and then when he blurted out that he was looking for a wife she told him she knew exactly the right person her daughter taha amana who was 13. gogan records their courtship conversation are you afraid of me he asked no she replied would you live in my hut for good yes have you ever been ill no and that was it she went home with him on the way back to matea tahamana popped into another house in fiona where she introduced a second tahitian woman as her mother gogan didn't know then that it was the tahitian custom for children to have foster parents in addition to their biological ones to spread around the babies and the joy that came with them [Music] gogan fell in love immediately with tahamana she was his eve at last and he celebrated her origins in a demure painting he called meraki taha amana has many parents the picture seems to discover her ancient lineage but the funny hieroglyphs in the background are gogan's invention what do you think about gogan's taking of very young brides obviously in the west some people feel very uncomfortable about it well uh in the culture of the polynesian people a young lady being at the age of having children is considered a woman and in the case of gauguin of course he took her for for his station wife but it's not uncommon in many cases we have people here just one example my father was 36 years older than my mother but it didn't shock anybody people don't look askance at it and think that that's in some way immoral no no no they don't of course with with the influence of the missionaries that came later that was probably brought to the to the knowledge of the people that you know you shouldn't do this but the the hope for life here is about 13 years shorter than it is in europe and that's on statistics we die here at 50 so why wait until we're 20 to start having children when we can have them at 14. i mean that's one way to look at life tell us about the manual how do you understand that picture well goger has given the explanation so you have it no he says he had stayed in town for quite late when he came back there was no light and he found her completely frightened because of the spirit and the power which is a spirit you see so she was there frightened and it gives gugan the idea of that painting in the house he would keep the light on all night because of the spirits till today you see in some places because spirits wander at night you see today you have still some strange habits for instance they still go and dug the bodies when they have problems with [Music] with the tupa and so on they go in the cemetery and dogs the body of the person so they dig up a body of an ancestor or yes yes of course they who shared with him the secrets of the tahitian gods who told him her ancestral stories and revealed to him the mysteries of ancient tahiti this has to be nonsense as a 13 year old in a world where no one told those kinds of stories anymore she cannot have known any of the concoctions of myth and fable and sheer fancy with which gogan was now filling his paintings like one of pomare the fifth cocktails he was adding a bit of buddhism here a touch of india a sprinkling of greece some egyptian and coming up with a lurid and largely fictitious private mythology to replace the one that wasn't actually there but which should have been the first trip to tahiti ended on june 14 1893 he'd been here two years and successfully produced 66 revolutionary paintings and a cluster of remarkable sculptures taher mana was at the dockside crying dangling her feet in the water she threw wreaths of white flowers into the sea as tahitians do but as far as gogan was concerned that was the tahitian idol finished with there was no reason ever to come back as soon as he arrived back in paris he had to leave again for olion where his uncle zz had died gauguin was in for some money he should have divided up the inheritance with met but he didn't he was going to show them all oh yes by putting on an exhibition the exhibition tut paris was going to see what the savage from peru had brought back from polynesia uncle zizi's money went on brochures postcards and the framing gogan wanted most of the pictures to have white frames these white frames were invented by the impressionists to show off their colours better but the fiercest convert to them was gogan who hated gold frames and found them pretentious and bourgeois do you know i've scoured the world for this film and haven't found a single gogan painting still in its original white frame at one point they almost all had one you can see in the background of his still lives that his own impressionist pictures were framed in white but framing 42 pictures all at once is quite an undertaking the show the one that was going to wow them had to be delayed by a week the frames weren't ready it finally opened on november the 9th 1893 with a hesitant squeak rather than a big bang the show had all his tahitian masterpieces in it but the critics grumbled about it they accused gogan of trying to make himself artificially exotic with these dreamy tahitian girls under their coconut trees they mistrusted the authenticity of his feelings gogan made matters worse by turning up at the opening looking like a twit he wore a long blue cloak with a silver clasp loudly checked trousers and a large astracan hat [Music] there was enough stock broker left in him for him to know the value of standing out on a crowded shelf was decorated just as flamboyantly it was entirely yellow inside even the glass was painted yellow and on these yellow walls he hung a selection of his most outrageous pictures [Music] there are some hilarious photographs of the rue versus anger taurics some taken by gogan himself unfortunately they're in black and white and can't convey what must have been a wild full colour experience [Music] the black woman is his new mistress anna the javanese the art dealer vollard passed anna to gogan i say past because that's how she seemed to get around from person to person she was half malaysian half sri lankan they think but someone called her javanese and it stuck [Music] anna was tiny but unmissable she used to stick her tongue out of people in the street and went everywhere with her pet monkey [Music] there was an eyewitness to these bohemian shenanigans downstairs at the roover sangha torics lived a swedish sculptures ida and her 13 year old daughter judy [Music] judith developed the most enormous life-changing crush on gauguin she kept offering herself to him whenever they were alone judith left some racy memoirs of her life at roover sangatorix full of excited accounts of attempted gropes on the stairs you're the only man with a copy of the manuscript seems like it yes i let his plump hands caress the recent roundness as if they were caressing a clay pot she says of gogan these are mine he replied of course they were his but i could only remain silent it sounds as if they had a lot of fun in this house in the roo tourics yeah you bet they had i mean because yeah judy's mother eda she was a very very very poor girl from sweden and she was a sculptor but she married a william mullard a composer friend of satie or debussy dealers etc all the interesting composers were there and this is also where judy grew up as a young a little bit shy very beautiful girl and with of course many men wanting to have affairs with her and all the part is going on each week she describes the room that uh gauguin lived in which he covered in the cheap yellow wallpaper it sounds like an extraordinary looking space yes i need goga was a was a guy who knew how to make say as a stage set for himself and his art because you know he had a piano there and he had all his paintings on these beautiful yellow walls her mother ida foolishly agreed to let gogan paint judith nude halfway through the sittings she changed her mind so gauguin did something peculiar he turned judith into anna the javanese he gave the painting a tahitian title so no one could understand it [Music] the child woman judith is not yet breached it's a rumination upon virginity in which judith's role is played by anna one picture two women it was all getting very complicated [Music] gogan needed badly to get out of paris for the summer he chose predictably to revisit his old rural stomping ground of brittany where with anna on his arm and a gang of old pals in tow he made the unfortunate decision to go on a day trip to konkano [Music] there are nine of them three of gogans gang their girlfriends gogan of course anna the javanese and her monkey they were strolling along here on the key at konkano when a group of local kids began to taunt anna and throw stones at her so one of gogan's gang scolded their leader unfortunately the boy's father drinking in a nearby tavern saw his son's ear being pulled by these flashy strangers and out he lurched in a fighting mood gogan who loved boxing failed him with a single blow but it soon turned into a nasty brawl gogan sent two of them into the tidal mud when suddenly as he later recalled he felt as if he'd put his foot into a deep hole one of the thugs had kicked him in the shin with his wooden clogs gogan's ankle was shattered [Music] as he lay on the ground they kicked and kicked all gogan could do was to protect his face the police arrived there was a trial but surprise surprise the local magistrates were content to issue their men with warnings for gogan the consequences were much longer lasting shattered leg never really recovered the gift of pain was konkano's present to gogan anna went back to paris as gogan nursed his leg unable to move when he finally returned there himself he found that she cleared out all the furniture and left taking whatever she could though she had at least left him his paintings the last straw for gogan was when his ceramic masterpiece the sculpture he would later insist must be placed on his grave oviri the savage was rejected by the salon of 1895. that was it for him he said madly about collecting what money he could and managed to beg and borrow enough to buy his passage back to tahiti this time he would never return had had a makeover in the two years he'd been away electricity had been introduced a huge steam driven merry-go-round had been installed where the royal palace used to stand there were also french cyclists wobbling along the potholed roads which gogan didn't like and on the lawns outside the governor's house they were playing a fashionable new game called tennis pape in gogan's estimation had seriously declined [Music] there was one hospital on the island run by the french military he needed to be near it so he settled a short horse ride away at punawaya when you see a picture like this the poor fisherman it's called you assume gogan's dreaming making stuff up then you stand on his beach and oh you can weak at the knees this place was what he says it was termana had remarried a local boy while he was away she came quickly to see him but refused to move in i imagine because of the all too evident sores and weeping wounds that now covered his legs these runny saws that had sprung up were not all the handiwork of the brutal stevedores of brittany although they didn't help and the blood he was coughing up wasn't heart trouble as he'd assumed these symptoms were now unmistakable gogan had developed syphilis gogan first started showing signs of syphilis when he got to tahiti so people have naturally assumed that he must have picked it up there but the chances are that he probably picked it up earlier than that well if the difficult thing about about syphilis and there are quite often people who acquire syphilis in a distant past and then manifest symptoms of it many many years later when he started getting the sores on his leg how painful would that have been well these saws can be extremely painful and they also can spread ulcerate causing difficulty walking pain walking gogan began to take morphine to dull the pain that presumably was normal at the time oh very much so i mean morphine was on the few um effective medications available and it was used for a wide range of different painful conditions it's usually held against gogan that he went to tahiti and then infected all these young girls with it is that actually likely to have happened it's very unlikely by the time he was showing the signs of late syphilis he was no longer infectious he was no longer able to pass it on with tahar mana having turned him down gogan or koke as the tahitians called him needed a new vaheen he found a girl straight away from round here in punawaya among against tahitian vahines hawura has been the one most insultingly described she was stupid we're told slovenly a bad housekeeper not a patch on tehemana maybe but by my reckoning she did more for his art than any woman he ever painted she stayed with him on and off for six crucial years she was his greatest muse [Music] he always said that she was 13 too but her birth certificate which i've seen proves she was 15. why did he say it then to annoy us i think to cook a snook across the ages and taunt us with his transgressions [Music] during that first spring back in tahiti gogan learned that was going to have a baby and that this baby somewhat momentously was due at christmas christmas was always a charged occasion for gauguin his daughter aileen had been born on christmas eve it was at christmas that those awful events in all had unfolded that ended with vincent hacking off pieces of his ear so the thought that the baby was due at christmas would have filled gauguin with extra trepidation [Music] even before the baby was born he'd proclaimed its arrival in this unlikely tahitian nativity set in the south seas rather than bethlehem in which mary's place is taken by paula sporting a halo but it doesn't say anything in the bible about death being present at the birth of jesus in the unsmiling form of this attendant [Music] he was right to be anxious the baby was born sometime around christmas 1896. we know it was a little girl which would have delighted gogan but she died soon afterwards his response was to paint this a picture i've never been able to shake out of my imagination it's so haunting that's paula on her lemon yellow pillow looking out through us beyond us with so much wide-eyed sadness the title nevermoor which he scrawled up here is quoted from that chilling poem by edgar allan poe that americans like to read to themselves at halloween when they really want to frighten the children it's about a man who's lost his beloved a rare and radiant maiden says poe whom the angels named lenore in her place he's gained this thing an ugly black bird that's come in through the window and that refuses to leave the only word it ever says is never more gogan couldn't properly afford the house he actually built here it was huge 65 feet by 25 a traditional two-part dwelling with a straw roof and a studio attached it's long gone of course replaced by swimming pools and garages but you can see it looming up between the trees in some wobbly contemporary photographs the syphilis was now impacting unavoidably on his mood and health the sores had spread up both his legs he had to have them continuously bandaged everyone was sure that what he actually had was leprosy they wouldn't go near him except powder who managed again to get pregnant this is one of her descendants look at his nose it's unmistakable [Music] gogan took no pleasure in his fertility he was certain he was dying and that there was time for just one last summation a painting that set out deliberately to sum up everything he knew and feared the title asks three of the biggest questions a man can ask of his universe where are we from [Music] where are we going i'll tell you where we are we're down at the beach at punawaya it's twilight the sea is breaking on the reef and there's mourier the next island looming darkly over proceedings just as it always does that's the stage now here are the players gogan's familiar tahitian cast acting out the cycle of existence from birth to temptation to death and back again it's a buddhist message really refracted through a christian prism in the beginning was the end he said he wanted this picture to feel like a gospel and it does down at the beach in a twilight clearing a passion plays in progress quoting every portentous parable you've ever heard paula's there at the start and she's there again at the end like a quick change artist who's run around the back gogan ignored the divide between so-called civilization and so-called primitivism before anyone else of note in art when the great mural was finished gogan packed a bag of arsenic which he used to rub into his saws to cauterize them and although he could barely walk he set off up this hill which he called his calvary in order to commit suicide he climbed to the top ate the arsenic but couldn't hold it down he vomited it all up and just lay there in the sun unable to move only the next day was he able to stumble back down to his enormous surprise he was still alive and this unexpected reprieve seemed to revive him had reached that back in paris there was going to be another universal exhibition to see in the new century gogan roused himself from his druggie stupa to produce a gorgeous series of pictures aimed deliberately at the big show [Music] by the time he got them to paris it was over he'd missed it but these late tahitian pictures are some of his prettiest the morphine had soaked into his art and robbed it of its tension here's an imagination swinging in a hammock sticking in the needle and dreaming morphine costs money he didn't have any so he moved back to perpete where his talent for gratuitous rudeness landed him a surprising new job gogan's father had been a radical journalist yet no one could have expected that he too would follow this family calling and become a newspaper man but he did and he was briefly the most notorious muckraking journalist in the whole of tahiti and editor even of his own newspaper a sarcastic title if ever there was one gogan wrote it drew it published it and flooded it with some of the most pungent nastiness ever to be committed to homemade letterpress [Music] he was the tahitian unibomber sitting there in the dark abusing his fellows obvious cracks were appearing in his sanity that's the syphilis the booze the morphine taking their toll at his house in punaway he took to holding drunken sunday lunches for his new tabloid cronies where the girls would be encouraged to drink and strip [Music] a handmade menu by gogan let's see what he ate sodi saundar that's all sausage pate salad from dutch cheese and omelette o confit tour omelette with jam hmm he ate well pawara had left him the colonists loathed him his legs were rotting most of his good qualities had seeped out with the pus but there was one left perhaps the one that defines him best his courage he could barely walk but the urge was there for one more journey a big one the marquesas islands have a dubious distinction they're the point on our planet furthest removed from a land mass this makes them the ultimate destination for anyone seeking to get as far away as possible from the rest of us as he stepped off the boat gogan was mobbed and clapped by the locals word spread he was here people wanted to see him the irony is that what attracted the crowd wasn't his great fame as a painter but his notoriety as a journalist his relentless campaigns against the colonial authorities had gone down very well with the inhabitants of kiva [Music] the marches and men were renowned for their ferocity and rumored to be cannibals gogan believed it it's one of the reasons he came here he liked their art too and mimicked it in his carved coconuts [Music] no one has ever mounted a thorough survey of ancient markhasian art [Music] one look at the impenetrable mountain jungle that looms up over the entire centre of hiva and you see immediately why it's impossible but scattered around the island in clearings and glades are some of the most mysterious and brooding remains in the whole of the south seas [Music] gogan must have had a photo of the giant tiki of eva it must have been another of the reasons he came but he never saw the real thing his rotting legs could never manage the journey across the interior where gogan got off the boat is where he stayed oh my the island capital atona wasn't really a town just a collection of huts that had sprung up around two missions the catholic and the protestant to build his new house gogan needed to persuade the catholic mission to sell him some land so he started going to church every day trying to make a good impression and courting the local bishop the fierce and bearded monsignor joseph martin who fell for it at first the catholic mission sold him this choice piece of land of an acre or so 200 meters from the sea and the next day he stopped going to church gogan carved a statue of bishop martin as a horned devil it was his little joke the bishop didn't like it [Music] the house gogan built in ataona to his own designs was only the third two-story structure on the island the others were the catholic church and the local store [Music] guarding the entrance to the house were a pair of tall female nudes above the entrance was the memorable name he'd given to his marchesian abode maison de joey [Music] the meson de joui is usually translated tactfully as the house of pleasure but his meaning in french is more than that it's something like the house of orgasm and the catholic mission would have been alerted immediately to his true character when this sign went up on the walls inside amongst the family photos and the copies of his favorite paintings he pinned 45 pornographic photographs that he bought in port saeed during a stopover on his second voyage to tahiti gogan apparently enjoyed showing these to the local women and if they found them amusing he'd slip his hand under their wraps and whisper things in their ears it wasn't noble behavior but he was long past that his favorite composer was handel whom he'd play loudly on his harmonium [Music] he got a dog as well and called it pago in the provocative naval slang of his own monogram it means penis and gogan would have enjoyed shouting its name with an ear shot of the nuns running the catholic boarding school for girls that bordered his property so temptingly [Music] it was at this school that he found himself a new teenage vagine the obscure viojo about whom we know next to nothing and whom gogan appears never to have painted instead the native eve associated most closely with his marquesas interlude was a red-headed polynesian called tahota who seems also to have been his lover she was spectacularly beautiful gogan himself must have posed this photograph in preparation for the tributes he painted to his redheaded markhasean temptress they're as gorgeous as anything he ever did beauty even at the end could still stir him the wonder of it is that he painted anything at all they've just dug up the old well at his house in atuona and found inside it a small pharmacy of potions this is what he needed every day just to keep alive today's objectives kidney and liver remedy [Music] [Music] um [Music] hopelessly addicted to morphine with legs that no longer worked covered in open wounds that flies fluttered around he died in pain on the morning of the 8th of may 1903 from a syphilitic heart attack the last person to see him alive was the protestant cleric pastor vernier but vernier his final friend missed the actual funeral which took place so quickly the next morning that no one of note was able to attend three weeks later bishop martin sent his report of these developments to paris the only noteworthy event here he wrote has been the sudden death of a contemptible individual named gogan a reputed artist but an enemy of god and everything that is decent there's no doubt that martin hated him but the more likely reason for the rushed catholic burial was the syphilitic state of gogan's body which was decomposing rapidly and already smelling [Music] you can call what he did escapism and we usually do but it wasn't just the sun and the coconuts and the teenage lovelies that brought him here gogan wanted less civilization in his life and more meaning he was looking for something worth believing in prepared to go anywhere to find it [Music] most men in his shoes would have sailed closer to the doctors not further away he had guts and he had genius his message was that we're welcome to our world because he preferred another one [Music] [Music] i [Music] you

Channel: Perspective

Views: 504,223

Rating: 4.8510494 out of 5

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary, paul gauguin, history documentary, art history documentary, art history, documentary history, documentary movies - topic, paul gauguin documentary bbc, paul gauguin biography, paul gauguin documentary, hermitage, art critic

Id: p0n6HaLuLm8

Length: 119min 21sec (7161 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/pomod]

That was great.