The Haunting Mystery of Gauguin's Masterpiece (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] [Music] when you think of a great French post-impressionist Gogan you usually think of these kinds of pictures don't you beautiful views of Tahiti with beautiful girls having beautiful dreams in his Tahiti pictures Dogen takes us to paradise he's running away from the real world looking for something more alluring more exotic and colorful [Music] [Music] but it's easy to forget that when he set off for Tahiti in 1891 Dogen was already 42 so a big chunk of his career had already happened and during this big chunk of his career he'd done marvelous things painted some haunting pictures of a kind no one had seen before the vision after the sermon it's good isn't it painted in 1888 and now hanging in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh where its colour and it's mystery seemed to belong to another world long before he got to Tahiti Goggan was already dreaming of faraway realities this was painted in Pont Aven in Brittany northern France and it shows a group of women in traditional Breton costumes praying outside a church they just heard a sermon from the priest about Jacob wrestling with the angel and when they come out of the church that's what they're thinking about they're not actually watching the wrestling match they're imagining it and see this brown bit here which looks like a path of the middle of the picture that's actually the trunk of an apple tree that's grown up and which symbolically separates the real world over here from the imaginary one up here but that's not all that's going on in this haunting and revolutionary picture there's a lot more to it and to understand it properly we need to know who she is who he is and what it all has to do with this [Music] as you can see in Ponte then where the vision was painted strange folk in strange costumes do strange things in a strange part of France why did Gogan fetch up here [Music] pont-aven was what they call an artists colony artists from all over the world came here to paint rents were cheap food was cheap and everywhere you looked there were these picturesque Breton subjects in Pont Aven artists didn't have to look far for something to paint the subjects were everywhere [Applause] the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel is actually told in the Bible on his way home from exile Jacob the founder of Israel meets a stranger by a river and starts wrestling with him the stranger is an angel but Jacob doesn't know that all night long they wrestle man vs angel human weakness versus divine strength so it's a battle between human desires and angelic ones between the low and the lofty and it was very popular in sermons now I went to a Catholic boarding school so I heard a lot of sermons it was generally the most boring bit of the mass the bit where you started to doze occasionally something profound was said something that rang a bell that is was painted he wasn't the first to tackle the great wrestling match dellacroix had already shown him how to do it man versus angel the savage versus the divine it's a struggle with which Gaughan was already familiar because Gauguin went to Tahiti and led a bohemian life we tend to think of him as being anti traditional anti religious but he wasn't Goggan actually grew up not in France but in Peru of all places where his grandfather was nothing less than the last Spanish Viceroy of the country Don Pio de Tristan Amos goes to the age of seven Goggan actually lived in the presidential palace in lima where he was exposed night and day to the especially fierce religious moods of Latin America and later when he became a painter it always showed he had a taste for powerful and primitive beliefs it's one of the reasons he came to Brittany to be connected with something deeper something more profound and the Breton's weren't French they were Celts they had their own costumes their own language and their own mysterious [Music] Goggan loved all that there's a line in one of his letters to his pal Shu Faneca where he writes that the sound he wanted from his pontiff n art was the sound of clogs resounding on granite soil he was after something primitive resonant and real something that spoke to the past as well as the future [Music] now the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel was probably the subject of a sermon here at the church in Pont Aven in the summer of 1888 now we're not sure that Gogan heard it but it's likely that he did because at this point in his life he was going to church a lot not because he was a good Catholic but because there were other things in the church that attracted him Jacob wrestling with the angel is a handy symbol for all sorts of struggles but it's especially handy as the symbolic encapsulation of a man wrestling with his conscience [Music] by the time he got to Pont Aven in 1888 Goggan had endured many such struggles it been a late arrival at art working first as a successful stockbroker who painted in his spare time he'd married the sparkling and international Metta from Denmark and they've had five beautiful children whom he obviously doted over but when Gogan decided to give up stock broking and become an artist missus family branded him a failure and kicked him out when he got to pontiff in in 1888 his life was at a crossroads and so was his heart [Music] [Music] this is the Pensione glow a neck we're go gang stayed it was run by a woman called Mattie Zhang blow a neck and on her birthday in 1888 Goggan gave her a beautiful still life some flowers some fruit and too lovey-dovey pears weirdly he signed the picture Madeleine not Gogan but Madeleine because he was already in his 40s when he came to pont-aven Gogan was older than the other artists and they looked up to him as a father figure a teacher one of those young artists was an 18 year old boy wonder for MU Bernard Bernard had studied in Paris the tools Lautrec and Van Gogh he was young progressive but also very religious and he wanted to make a modern art that was deep with religious meaning for Gogan all that was very interesting but the most interesting thing about Bernard was that he had a sister who was very beautiful his name was Madeleine Madeleine was just 17 vivacious cute and even more religious than her brother as soon as she got to Brittany she bought herself a traditional Breton costume and that's how she'd go to mass dressed as a local woman [Music] Goggan inevitably fell in love with her he developed an enormous crush on Madeleine Bernard but he didn't do anything about it not in real life anyway most of what we know about the vision after the sermon is what emile bernard tells us in a letter he wrote from egypt many years later bernard tells us that Gogan was heavily influenced by japanese prints the apple tree in the middle was borrowed from here or she gay and jacob and the angel were originally a pair of sumo wrestlers he also tells us that Gogan wanted to give the picture to a church and that he go again and another painter call Charles Laval carried it up here and tried to donate it but the priest turned it down his congregation he said wouldn't understand it [Applause] but which church was it Goggan tells us in a letter to Van Gogh that it was the church at Pont Aven but in Bernards version it was this one here in nizam it's certain that Gogan knew this church at Nissan because one of his most religious Pont Aven pictures that strange image known as the Green Christ was inspired by this statue in the cemetery Jesus on the cross with the three Mary's according to Bernard the three of them carried gogans picture into the church and found a place for it above the door Laval who was very tall lifted it up says Bernard and it fitted perfectly with the primitive wooden saints who were already in here and the grotesque carvings on the beans the trouble is none of that actually fits the door is too high to put anything above it the primitive wooden Saints aren't very primitive and there are no grotesque carvings on the beams now since gogans time the church has been extensively remodeled and that's usually given as the explanation for all the differences but I think this is the wrong Church in between Pont Aven and Nissan there's a beautiful woodland called the bladder more the forest of love Barnard actually painted Madeline here lying on the ground like a medieval effigy Madeline lebwa d'amour [Music] now this name Madeleine is the French version of Magdalene after Mary Magdalene the reformed prostitute in the Bible who became one of Christ's most loyal followers so it's a name loaded with big implications Madeleine is the archetypal sinner who changed her ways that's why in Victor Hugo's great novels live miserably the hero Jean Valjean or hugh jackman if you've seen the movie uses the pseudonym Monsieur Madeleine like Mary Magdalene Monsieur Madeleine is a sinner who's chosen the good path so what's this got to do with Gogan well something very specific actually because of exactly this time Goggan painted a self-portrait which actually called les miserables a' and in which he assumes the identity of Jean Valjean Monsieur Madeleine [Music] the struggle between good and bad the two sides of Madeline was on his mind up here at the end of the bladder or about a mile out of Punk'd of in there's this moody church the chapel at trabajo there's something primitive about it isn't there something powerful and unusual and if you think the outside is atmospheric wait till you see the inside you come in through this little wooden door and see how low the walls are with all these perfect places to hang the picture look up here the beams carved with medieval grotesques monsters and then see all these primitive wooden Saints in here just as bernard describes the chapel at tremolo is actually in the parish of nissan that's what it says on this old postcard of it and we know Gauguin came here because one of his most marvelous pont-aven paintings is the yellow christ based on that sculpture up there [Music] so Bernards memory was wrong and gogans memory was right this and not the church at Nissan was where he wanted to leave a vision after the sermon and how perfectly it would have fitted in here [Music] when you donate something to a church there's often a plaque or an inscription saying where it came from that's why on the frame of the vision after the sermon Goggan wrote the gift of tristan amos kozo the little boy who grew up in the president's palace in peru was showily donating a gift to the church look what else they've got here at the top of the aisle on the right that's Mary Magdalene or as they call her here madellaine and on the left that's st. Leger the Christian martyr was suffered and died for his beliefs in gogans time the statues of madeline and st. Leger flanked this sculpture here in which the holy Mary is being educated by her mother the education of the virgin when gogin came here to mass with Madeline and listen to the sermon his eyes would have wondered round the church the yellow Christ the symbolic beams and he would have seen st. Madeline and st. Leger flanking the education of the Virgin one on the right one on the left just like the two figures flanking the wrestlers in the vision after the sermon that's definitely Gogan the hook-nosed the deep-set eyes it's what you see in all his self-portraits and he's given himself a monkish hairstyle a tonsure just like st. Leger in the chapel at tremolo and that's Madeleine in her Breton costume with her beautiful lips deep in prayer and imagining the struggle between good and bad to sin or not to sin that is the question just as Liz miserab is about taking the right path or the wrong one so too is go ganz Pont Aven masterpiece and this isn't his only portrayal of Madeleine he also painted her in a picture which now hangs in Grenoble in which he emphasizes her naughty eyes and her luscious lips and makes our out to be something of a temptress just like Mary Magdalene so the vision after the sermon is a painting about temptation and desire she's 17 he's 40 what's the right thing to do even the apple tree isn't a coincidence what did Eve tempt Adam with in the Garden of Eden an apple from the tree of knowledge in the Bible Eve did the wrong thing but further along in the great teaching text Mary Magdalene did the right thing and so too did John Valjean in lay miserable ah and so as well did go again in pont-aven in 1888 with the vision after the sermon still wet on his easel he left Brittany to join his painter buddy van Gogh in the South of France Goggan never saw Madeline again and neither of them ever had cause to regret what they did or didn't do [Music] there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them

Channel: Perspective

Views: 148,721

Keywords: Cezanne, Dobson, European art history, European artists, Gauguin masterpiece, Perspective, art critique, art documentary, art history, art insights, art investigation, art mystery, artist's life, cultural exploration, famous artworks, famous paintings, painting exploration, religious symbolism, renowned artworks, temptation and desire, traditional art

Id: 0xPtGsTZjug

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020