Original subtitles

(animation ringing)

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] "I'm down,

but not defeated.

I am indeed a savage,

and civilized people sense it.

My work surprise and disturb them because they see in them,

the savage that I can't repress.

That's what makes my work inimitable.

The work of a man explains that man.

Today, you are an art critic,

I advise you to open your eyes,

and look at what I show you."

(music intensifies)

(music suddenly stops)

- [Mette] This is Pola, my grandfather,

drawn by his father, Paul Gauguin.

There's drawings of all his children,

similar little sketches, quite a few of them.

Certainly Pola was a bit of a chip off the old block

and he was a big, strong, quite loud man.

These are two of the woodcuts by Gauguin,

printed by my grandfather.

This is, "The Universe is Created",

but my mother had it on the mantle piece,

you know, with a fire below. (indistinct)

I said though, as soon as I realized,

God, you can't do that.

Oh, do one (indistinct) she said,

so I said, yes, please.

He signed a lot of things PGO,

but of course there's no O in Paul Gauguin.

And so it was his sort of nickname,

and he said it was sailor slang Pego,

which is slang for a penis apparently,

that's what he called himself.

(laughs)

(quiet music begins)

- [Christopher] I'm standing in front of this self portrait,

where Gauguin positions himself between a crucifixion,

a symbol of Western culture, Christianity,

and a pot that he had made himself,

but in imitation of the Peruvian indigenous pots

he had seen as a child.

Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848,

a year later, his father a left wing journalist,

decided he was not going to do well

under the new regime of Napoleon the Third,

and that the family should leave

to Gauguin's mother's native land, Peru.

Gauguin, was raised in Peru for five years.

And we actually have the pot itself,

and you see it is a grotesque head.

The gesture of the thumb in the mouth is very strange,

but it evokes that lost world of Peruvian antiquity

he had known as a child.

So he is saying, I am also part of this world,

this savage world from the other side of the world.

- [Mette] He became a Peruvian boy.

So when they returned, he spoke no French,

but he was sent to a local school and absolutely hated it.

I mean, born in France, traveled to Peru back to France,

mixed heritage, of Peruvian and French.

And so Gauguin felt he was an outsider,

and I think that's key to understanding his work.

(music playing louder)

- [Christopher] When he finally came back to Paris,

he has the guardian Gustave Arosa,

who is a major, major collector of contemporary art,

and who knew the artists.

Arosa is one of the great collectors of Delacroix,

for example, the great master of color,

the great master of romantic intensity,

and there it all was around the young Gauguin.

- [Mette] He was found a job with a firm of stockbrokers,

and Gauguin was making a lot of money.

Now Gustave Arosa gave parties,

and he was introduced to a couple of Danish girls,

one of them was Mette Gad.

She was vivacious, very blunt talking,

often using swear words, and Gauguin was smitten by her.

They got married within a year,

and had five children in fairly rapid succession.

My mother's theory is all the Gauguin men

were terribly sexy, she found my father. (laughs)

Gauguin was increasingly taken up with art.

His subjects were there at home,

He painted his wife and his children.

It's hard to pinpoint what point the art became an obsession

but it was a very exciting time,

the rise of the impressionists,

all sorts of things were changing.

- [Christopher] He soon falls in with the impressionists,

and particularly Camille Pissarro,

a Dane who grew up in the Caribbean.

They shared sense of being slightly alien.

And Pissarro is the most political,

he opposes colonialism, himself being a colonial,

he knew what it was like, what it could do.

It was just at the point that Pissarro was painting

a big bold impressionist landscape,

like this of a hillside at Pantoise,

that Gauguin was learning from him,

how to paint in the new impressionist style.

Small touches of color, broken brush strokes,

a very careful building up of colors,

suggesting a play of atmosphere and light.

(soft music playing)

- [Mette] He exhibited his paintings,

and so he felt he could be an artist,

but I think the stock market crash brought it to a head,

he lost his job.

They went through his quite considerable savings

quite quickly,

and Mette took the children,

and went to Copenhagen to live with them.

Paul followed her to sell French tarpaulins to the Danes.

He was spectacularly unsuccessful. (chuckles)

First of all, he spoke no Danish,

and the market was pretty much stitched up anyway.

So, things unraveled between them,

and Paul complained bitterly

about not having any kind of artistic friendships.

- [Narrator] "Love of my art is occupying too large a slice

of my mind for me to be a good business employee,

and on the other hand, I've too large a family,

and a wife who is completely incapable

when it comes to hardship.

Oh, my dear Pissarro,

what a horrible mess I've made of things."

(drums beating rhythmically)

- [Christopher] His primary strategy

is to go further and further away.

To get away from the sophistication,

to get back to something simpler,

something more direct and immediate.

A cult of Brittany had been forming in France

since the 1840s.

(music intensifies)

There was a mythology that it was the one place

where you could still see the old France,

where they carried on the way

they had done in the middle ages.

(soft music)

And if you went there,

you would be able to carry yourself back

to something where the way of life was pure.

(inspiring music)

- [Narrator] "Dear Mette,

I'm leaving on Thursday for Brittany.

I'll be able to work there

for seven to eight months continuously,

and really absorb the character of the people

and the locality.

This is essential if I am to paint well.

You have to remember, I have two natures,

the oversensitive, and the savage.

The sensitive one has disappeared,

enabling the savage to advance, unimpeded.

(paintbrush scraping)

- I mean, this is definitely a sort of archetype,

or impressionist way of working.

Instead of mixing colors,

you're putting them on quite strongly in a pure form,

and when you step back,

you're gonna get a sense of the landscape.

So it's a kind of a reaction to the smooth painting

that was happening. (indistinct)

But I think Gauguin works incredibly hard,

and catches up very quickly with his mentors,

and it isn't long before,

this kind of Northern European painting,

kind of isn't good enough for him.

The impressionists are painting over the light

that bounces off the surface

of a body, of a tree, of a landscape.

He's saying, what is the landscape, what is the body?

And I suppose it leads him away

from the purely visual light-based surface,

and into the heart of the matter, really.

(car engine rumbling)

- [Caroline] When Gauguin arrived in 1886 in Pont-Aven,

there was a very thriving artist colony there.

They were very traditional,

some were a little bit edging towards impressionism,

but there were a few like-minded people,

curious artists such as Emile Bernard,

who was 18, at the time Gauguin was 40.

And one of the new ideas was

that art did not have to copy nature anymore.

I mean, this to us is not an a radical idea,

but at the time, it was.

Gauguin worked in many studios around the world,

but this is the most spacious,

and I think the light here is the most beautiful.

When Gauguin was working here with Bernard,

one of the things they talked about was Japanese prints.

In fact, they would bring them with them,

and pin them up on the walls of their studio.

They loved the brilliant colors,

and the fact that the colors didn't necessarily follow

those of nature.

They were put on for purely decorative reasons,

and they created an atmosphere.

And Bernard showed him these works he was doing

based on his study of Japanese prints,

and medieval art, and stained glass windows.

The whole idea was to look at a tree, for example,

and make it flat, just a flat area of color,

and to make sure you understood

that this was an interesting, beautiful shape.

You'd put an outline around it,

just as you do in a stained glass window.

- [Christopher] Gauguin goes to Brittany

to get back to something more direct and immediate.

And it spurs him to this greater stylization,

greater simplification of form, greater intensity of color.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] "We are criticized for using colors

without mixing them, placing them next to each other.

On those grounds, we have to be the winners.

Being mightily helped by nature,

which proceeds in just the same way."

(singing together)

- [Caroline] In Brittany,

Gauguin was looking through the fantasy glasses

of somebody trying to find the ideal, simple life,

that peasants had lived for generations.

(singing together)

He loved the Breton costumes.

They're really gorgeous

with all this beautiful embroidery on them.

Great sense of color on the embroidered collars,

for example.

And so he adopted that, he got one for himself,

but also we wanted to identify with the peasants.

(group singing fades out)

(playful horn music)

(horn plays out)

His breakthrough painting came in late 1888,

stunningly beautiful painting

called Vision After the Sermon.

What he shows in the upper right-hand corner

is the battle of Jacob and the angel.

And then we have this tree, right out of a Japanese print,

dividing the reality,

which are the women in front of the tree,

from the biblical story in the back of the tree.

But I think the next level in that painting,

is the fact that the women are wearing the costume

of Pont-Aven.

And if you spend time in Brittany, you know for one thing,

there's a tradition of Breton wrestling,

and the poses of Jacob and the angel

are common to Breton wrestling match.

Then we have to the left, an animal, what is the animal?

It's not a sheep,

because in the biblical story, Jacob was a shepherd.

It's a cow,

which doesn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people,

unless you know, in Brittany,

the winner of a Breton wrestling match

goes home with a cow.

So there's always a cow tied to a tree,

and the people are all sitting in a circle

to see who the winner is going to be.

(cow mooing)

- [Christopher] Vision After the Sermon

is perhaps the masterpiece of the Breton years.

It is a visualization of the primitive faith

of these people,

but it is also a very knowing construction

on the part of Gauguin,

because the priest who was overseeing it, in that picture,

is Gauguin himself.

We recognize his distinctive nose.

So he is reading himself into this image of Breton piety.

(gentle music plays)

- [Caroline] This beautiful, mysterious chapel

was built in the late 1500s by fishermen and local peasants.

(strings playing)

And so the inside of the roof

looks like the inside of a boat,

and Gauguin loved it because it was primitive.

And I must say, when he used the word primitive,

to him it meant natural.

It meant unpolluted by the bourgeois values

that he was fleeing.

What he was attracted by,

when he walked in, in October,

beautiful golden light coming in,

was the Christ, the sculpture up on the sidewall.

And in his sketchbook,

he used yellow watercolor to quickly make a drawing.

And then when he painted the painting,

he painted it yellow.

And he did something else different,

allowing his imagination to contradict reality,

he put it outside,

he put it in the field

which is right outside the door of the chapel.

He wanted to show the piety of the everyday Breton woman,

sitting out in the field, praying,

before they went off to work, or to do their chores.

Because you see a little figure in the background

hopping over at the stonewall, going back to the village.

(soft music playing)

- [Narrator] "It's true, I've made a good deal of progress,

and you'd hardly be able to recognize my painting.

I've acquired a considerable reputation.

Everybody here asks me for my advice,

which I'm stupid enough to give."

(horn plays out)

- [Christopher] He had become a kind of cult leader

in Brittany,

and he was always competitive, and always messianic.

He wanted to pronounce,

and have people go, oh my God, you're right.

(music intensifies)

- [Narrator] "I went to the South, to Arles,

to see Vincent Van Gogh, after many solicitations from him.

He wished, he said, to found the atelier of the medie,

of which I was to be the director.

This poor Dutchman, he was all ardor, all enthusiasm.

(music swells)

I arrived at Arles towards the end of the night,

and waited for dawn in the little all night cafe."

(curious music playing)

(silverware clattering)

- [Cornelia] We are here in Arles, Van Gogh territory,

since he worked here for more than a year.

And this is actually the place

where he painted his famous Cafe de Nuit

with the starry sky.

It also shows how much tourism

has taken advantage of the myths about Van Gogh.

And of course, Gauguin was a fascinating part of this.

(gentle music)

Van Gogh's sunflowers are famous.

He identified with the sunflower as being his flower,

and he used those canvases to decorate the bedroom

in which Gauguin would sleep.

Now, Gauguin comes and sees the sunflowers,

and is flabbergasted,

and makes a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh

painting sunflowers.

Until the end of his life,

he continues to refer to these sunflowers.

For example, in 93, 94,

he wrote about waking up

in the bedroom with those sunflowers.

"In my yellow room...

- [Narrator] "Sunflowers with purple eyes

stand out on a yellow background.

They bathed their stems in a yellow pot, on a yellow table.

In a corner of the painting,

a signature of the painter, Vincent.

And the yellow sun that passes through

the yellow curtains of my room

floods all this florescence with gold."

- [Christopher] This is the painting

that Gauguin would have known,

that was in the famous yellow house

when Gauguin arrived in Arles in October of 1888.

But even though both of them painted

some of their greatest works, side by side,

relations just became more and more strained

because the instructions Gauguin was giving to Van Gogh,

Van Gogh was very much resisting.

He did not want to use just big areas of pure color.

He wanted, constantly, to refer to the natural motif

that Gauguin said was old fashioned by this point.

- [Cornelia] When there was bad weather,

and they convinced Madame Ginoux, the cafe owner,

to pose for them.

They were standing side by side.

Van Gogh dashes off a full-fledged painting within an hour,

while Gauguin uses that time making a very careful drawing,

without outlines, with shadings,

with incredible amount of detail.

And then Gauguin went back, without the model,

and painted the full-fledged night cafe

in which Madame Ginoux is sitting in the front,

and other friends and people from our Arles

are in the background.

(car engine rumbling)

So now let's imagine, this little yellow house,

which Van Gogh was so happy about to have,

and so proud to be able to offer his friend, is very small.

So there are two men, very individualist,

with very strong opinions, and very different lifestyles.

Gauguin hated Van Gogh's use of heavy paint

and his messiness of working with it.

So it was something that just drove him absolutely nuts.

And all that was boiling in these eight weeks

that they were together.

This period of time, very intense,

very creative, very competitive,

ends with the dramatic finale, (chuckles)

in which they have huge fights.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] "My God, what a day.

I'd almost crossed the Place Victor Hugo,

when I heard behind me a well-known step.

I turned about on the instant as Vincent rushed towards me,

an open razor in his hand.

(music intensifies)

My look at that moment must have had great power in it,

for he stopped, and lowering his head,

set off running towards home.

With one bound, I was in a good local hotel.

I couldn't get to sleep until around 3:00 AM so,

woke late around 7:30.

(sharp strings playing)

Reaching the square, I saw a large crowd gathered.

Van Gogh had cut off his ear, close to his head."

- [Cornelia] Van Gogh seems to have had a nervous breakdown,

and his brother came down to visit Vincent in hospital,

and Gauguin left with him, never to return.

(soft horn music)

Van Gogh painted two self-portraits with bandaged ear

after he'd come out of hospital.

And the work is showing his suffering, showing him injured,

showing him at loss.

The end of his dream of Arles,

and this community of artists,

it's just not going to work out.

(music plays louder)

Now Gauguin, at the same time,

has gone back to Paris, and makes a pot,

which is actually a self-portrait with blood on it.

And the pot is absolutely fantastic.

It has references to Peruvian pots.

The handle is like a braid,

and gives it a non-Western touch, which, of course,

ties into Gauguin's ongoing interest in non-Western art,

and his own identity as a Savage, a primitive,

all these words that he already started using.

Making works like this after this drama,

shows the artist suffering for their art,

as much as for themselves.

(Tahitian music playing)

- [Cornelia] Gauguin was feeling a bit lost,

and beginning to think about, well, what should I do next?

But then the 1889 World's Fair took place in Paris.

And he saw the Tahitian village that had been built,

and there were people from Tahiti who'd been brought over

in these totally artificial situations.

They were wearing their Tahitian clothes, and it was cold.

(musical tempo increases)

But he was absolutely enchanted.

He bought postcards,

and he said, I'm gonna go to the South Pacific,

I'm going to go to Tahiti.

(music stops)

(soft ocean breeze)

- [Narrator] "I'm leaving for Tahiti,

where I shall hope to end my days.

My art, I regard, is no more than a tender chute,

though one which I hope to develop

into a wild and primitive growth.

What I need to obtain this, is peace and quiet.

The European Gauguin has ceased to exist,

and no one will ever see his works again."

(upbeat guitar melody)

(singing Polynesian song)

- [Caroline] When he arrives in Papeete, he is horrified.

It's like a little Paris.

It's very, very European.

There were lots of French colonialists around,

they had their own club.

There was very little mixing,

and he really was taken aback.

And also when he arrived,

he thought he was going to be able

to become the Court Painter for the King.

Always Gauguin had these fantasies

about how he was going to be rich and famous,

but the very first day Gauguin arrived, King Pomare died.

He was the last king of this long, long, long line of Kings.

So all he could do was March in the funeral cortege.

And that was the end of the traditional structure,

and it became a pure colony of France afterwards.

(song plays out)

- [Narrator] "It was the Europe,

which I'd thought to shake off.

The imitation grotesque,

even to the point of caricature of our customs,

fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.

Was I've to have made this far journey,

only to find the very thing which I'd fled?

(cars engines rumbling)

- [Caroline] Very quickly,

he decided he was getting out of there.

So he put all of his belongings on a horse and cart

and went to the other side of the island,

looking for authentic Tahiti.

- [Mette] Gauguin was convinced he could be self-sufficient.

He took with him a gun, to shoot game.

And had this idea that he would fish,

and pick fruit and vegetables.

He realized once he got there, how difficult it was.

The game would never came out with the bush. (chuckles)

And you had to be a skilled hunter to catch anything.

So he ended up living on tin sardines and French Brandy.

- [Christopher] Gauguin wanted to have things both ways.

He wanted to go to Tahiti to get to a more primitive,

simpler way of life,

and yet he used money from the French government

to get there.

He went with official letters of introduction,

to show him around.

That is right from the beginning,

he was going to use his status as a colonial

to get what he wanted in Tahiti.

So there is a level of serious cynicism,

not too far below the surface,

in the whole Tahitian adventure.

(dramatic music plays)

- [Narrator] "I began to work.

Everything in the landscape blinded and dazzled me.

Coming from Europe, I was always uncertain

of a color making difficulties when there were none.

(soft music playing)

Why did I hesitate to pour on my canvas

all that gold, and all that joyous sunshine?"

(birds chirping)

(paintbrush scraping)

- [Tai Shan] That's funny, I'm trying,

I'm making the colors duller than they are,

because I can't believe them.

(scoffs)

(mumbles)

There's a slowness of the medium.

I'm pushing against the canvas,

it's a bit of a struggle, but in doing so,

I can get these subtle variations

that Gauguin's got in there.

And it works because there's a softness to the transitions,

where it goes from one color to the next,

but it only works when there's no space between the colors,

the jigsaw pieces.

If there's space, it doesn't work.

The colors need be next to each other

to get that sort of harmony going.

So as I'm filling it in, I'm realizing,

you really have to go up to the edges to make it work.

Everything is working together and it,

and it sort of vibrates.

And in his best paintings,

he starts putting colors next to each other, which is like,

which kind of form I kind of like,

it's almost like a musical chord,

and it kind of gets you in the gut.

And that's when he's absolutely at his best.

And no other artists can do that.

I mean, Gauguin's paintings are magical.

- [Christopher] Right from the moment he arrived,

he was beginning to understand

that the traditional, supposedly natural way of life,

was slipping away under colonialism very quickly.

So part of the image of the new Tahitians,

or with minimal dress,

is an attempt to restore what had been before he got there.

The direction of all of Gauguin's paintings

is toward mythology.

(mysterious music playing)

- [Andreas] I came here to Tahiti, right from art school.

And then I read a lot about Gauguin and his life, and stuff,

and finally I thought,

you can really see the person, how he was.

I found out that the Polynesians in Gauguin's painting

were not wearing colorful dresses.

They had, they were very poor.

They mostly had white calico dress

made of (indistinct) tissue, and stuff like this.

You have photos about this, all this is documented.

And it's Gauguin who imagined people

wearing beautiful, colorful dresses,

because he came here and he said,

I went to the other side of the Earth,

and I thought I found paradise,

but it was still the same Western civilization.

And I think then, at one point of the time,

he said, oh, I got it.

I invent paradise with my paintings.

It's not the reality, it's in his head,

this half fiction, half real life is,

he's a very modern artist.

When I read about Gauguin, that's changed all my art.

And I started to the Gauguin skull series

because for the people in the Pacific, the skull was sacred.

This is one of the first series, called Gauguin je Pot.

But as you know, Gauguin didn't sell a lot

while he was still alive.

And some collectors earned a lot of money with his work.

So they, each time, they sort of begun a (exclaims),

they had the jackpot. (laughs)

This is one of the recent ones,

it's, I think it's explains by itself.

It's one of these things for which Gauguin very well known.

He loved women.

(gentle music playing)

- [Narrator] "I've been anxious for some time

to do a portrait of a woman of real, Tahitian descent.

I was aware that in my painter's scrutiny of her,

there was an implicit demand for her to give herself to me,

a surrender without withdrawal,

a penetrating exploration of all that was within."

- [Christopher] When he was painting women in Polynesia,

he was very intensely, emotionally involved with them.

At the same time, he was in complete command

of his aesthetic and technical gifts.

He knew what he was doing.

And the two things combined

to make the most powerful art of his career

- [Caroline] After Gauguin had been alone for awhile,

did he actually go off looking for a wife?

We don't know, that's what he says.

But he'd met Tehura, and she was 14 or 15 years old.

And the mother introduced them.

(soft music playing)

- [Narrator] "That girl enchanted me, made me timid.

Almost scared me.

What's going on in her soul?"

- [Christopher] I think Gauguin wants to show Tehura,

whom he sometimes calls Tehamana,

this young girl he married, in some sort of way,

as a person in transition, her world is changing.

And so she is presented in Christian garb

in a missionary dress,

but all around her are symbols of the old Tahiti,

sculptures, mostly of Gauguin's invention,

but meant to evoke a past

that has nothing to do with Christianity.

And so he sets her up in this context,

where the tensions between those two worlds

are coming to bear on this young, very beautiful girl.

He was always very interested in cultures in collision.

(rain pouring)

- [Caroline] After being in Tahiti for a few months,

Gauguin was beginning to learn

there were strong traditions that still survived,

such as the fear of the dark,

because out in the dark, beyond the communities,

there were tupapau.

And these were evil spirits, they haunted the forest,

and if you went out after dark, they would take you.

- [Narrator] "I had to go to Papeete for a day.

It was one o'clock in the morning when I returned,

and when I opened the door, I saw with sinking heart.

That the light was extinguished.

Quickly, I struck a match,

and I saw Tehura immobile, naked,

with eyes inordinately large with fear.

I was afraid to make any movement

which might increase the child's paroxysm of fright.

How can I know what at that moment I might seem to her?"

- [Christopher] He realizes, having come upon this scene,

that there are whole levels of her experience

that he can't possibly, truly understand.

And so he turns it into a kind of myth.

- [Caroline] He shows a figure wearing a Breton head dress,

and she represents the tupapau.

And then in the background,

he has these sparkling, phosphorescent flowers,

and the local people believe

that the tupapau manifested themselves in the woods

as phosphorescent flowers.

And so he's showing the terror,

but he's also showing the beauty of her body.

She's very sensual, despite her terror.

He does highlight the buttocks.

- [Vercoe] Manao Tupapau is a painting

that has engendered a lot of debate

because of the positioning of this vulnerable,

young girl in such a prone pose.

The suggestion that she is framed as a sexualized object,

that the girl saw him as some kind of figure

that instilled this fear in her.

Many in the Pacific today,

see his paintings as a reflection of his privilege,

and his relative wealth.

It was more about a colonial male fantasy

projected into our part of the world.

(wind gusting)

(tattoo needle buzzing)

- [Tyla] My main practice is tattooing, or tatau,

a really important part of our cultural heritage.

But drawing and painting was always a big part

of what I was doing.

And I re-appropriated Gauguin's paintings.

The women in the photographs are my sister,

Diane, and her friend, Allison.

I had to direct them, in terms of their expressions.

I really wanted it to be authentic.

It was this form of questioning colonial representations

of Polynesian women.

And their sort of, dusky maidens.

It's always submissive, or sort of like, alluring.

It was also about, I guess,

making light of what is a difficult situation as well.

You know, reading about his young brides,

and the cavalier way in which they're referred to.

(thunder rumbling)

(rain dripping)

- [Debora] I heard all the stories that he was a pedophile,

but you have to put all your things

in the context of history.

At the time, women were a woman at 14 years old.

That's what Polynesian thought.

You cannot imagine that today,

but as soon as they had their period,

the population considered them as woman.

We have this view of judging people hundred years after.

It's not, it's not like that, you know.

Today we will consider that, because we change.

- [Tyla] I think about my children,

my 15 year old daughter, you know?

And so there is this notion that,

oh, that's just what happened back then.

Everyone was doing that, so it's okay.

And you know, for us, it's really not okay.

- [Vercoe] His painting has been used

as a point of provocation

by a number of different contemporary Pacific artists.

Graham Fletcher has created these patterned forms.

He uses the metaphor of camouflage,

of this kind of disruptive pattern material

to try and metaphorically protect these women.

African-American artist,

Kehinde Wiley recently went to Tahiti,

inspired by the portraits of Gauguin,

to work with the Mahu community, the so-called third gender.

- [Kehinde] It was very important for me

to work with the history of Tahiti,

specifically through the lens of Gauguin.

I love his paintings, but I find them a little bit strange.

The ways that we see black and brown bodies from the Pacific

are shot through his sense of desire.

But how do you change the narrative?

How do you change the way of looking?

I wanted to use Gauguin poses for these paintings,

but when the women came to do their poses,

they chose something completely different.

(bright music playing)

- [Narrator] "Farewell, hospitable land.

I was leaving older by two years,

but feeling 20 years younger,

more barbaric too, but much wiser."

- [Caroline] After two years and Tahiti,

he went to the French authorities,

and asked to be shipped back to France.

And so he left, he left Tehamana,

expecting not to return again.

- [Christopher] Much of the persona that Gauguin develops

in his career, is highly self-conscious.

I think one of the reasons he comes back,

he is now going to cash in

on this image of being the savage,

of being the person who has gone to Tahiti.

- [Mette] He had this idea that he would take Paris by storm

with his amazing pictures.

And it all fell apart for him.

Only 11 out of the 44 sold.

Degas and some of his friends bought them,

but they weren't snapped up.

- [Narrator] "The show has not, in fact,

given the results that might've been expected.

We must look facts in the face.

What is killing me is that damnable struggle for money."

- [Caroline] He was always trying to figure out,

okay, how am I going to become known?

Because he knew he was good.

And he hatched this idea that he should educate the public

about what he was trying to suggest in the paintings.

Oh, wow. Hmm.

(narrating) So he came up with writing a book

called Noa Noa, and he did beautiful illustrations for it.

And he thought that was going to explain to everybody,

and of course they would understand immediately,

and start to buy his work.

Wow. This is amazing.

Oh, wow.

Oh, these are wonderful.

Those are beautiful,

but look at the richness of the color.

He used, almost a scrapbook style method.

He would cut, he would paste, he would reuse.

He was fascinated to see

how one image would work with another.

We really sensed that he's just letting his mind

and his hand wander.

(music swells)

I'd love to know what's on that other page.

At the upper left-hand corner here,

we have a little self-portrait of Gauguin.

And on the right hand side,

we have Gauguin sticking a photograph in,

showing him in Paris,

and here he's trying to be stoic.

And then below we have a little bit of spilled red wine,

or dark rum, he liked that too.

Ah, Oviri.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful monoprint.

When Gauguin returned to Paris,

he did this marvelous work here, Oviri,

based on something he had learned in Tahiti

about a goddess who had been called Oviri,

which in Tahitian means savage.

So he decided to use this as a spiritual self-portrait

because he did choose this to be on his grave.

So it has to be a self-portrait.

He is the savage.

He, she, has just killed a large mother wolf.

You see the blood running off to the side.

And at the same time, he is saving a baby wolf.

It's hard to see the wolf, but there it is,

tucked underneath her arm, and she's saving it.

And so the symbolism for Gauguin, is he is telling the world

that the past has been destroyed

because of the audacity of his new work,

giving them the droit de tout oser,

the right to dare anything.

Do what you want to, follow your own dreams,

your own passions.

(wind gusting)

- [Narrator] "I'm now very weak.

The difficulty of earning a regular income,

and my taste for the exotic

have led me to make an irrevocable decision.

I shall set out again for the south seas.

Nothing will stop me from going, and it will be for good.

What foolish existence European life is."

- [Mette] What Gauguin found when he returned

was that Tehamana had married, and was no longer interested.

So he found himself a new wife, Pahura.

And I think some of his best paintings are of Pahura,

and some of the most tender.

There's a great picture where she's got a fan

behind her head, which almost looks like a halo.

And she's looking out,

full of confidence and self-assurance.

I mean, she's naked, but in full possession of herself.

- [Christopher] That picture ties in very closely

to Manet's Olympia.

It's very, in your face depiction of a naked prostitute.

It was the touchstone of modernity.

- [Tai Shan] Up to now, it had been the sell on painters

painting nudes of Diana being surprised by Axiom,

or some other, you know,

fanciful idea of a mythological figure.

And I think Gauguin recognize it when Manet said,

oh, you want to look at a woman's body?

And you, you want,

you're actually thinking about sex?

Well, I will give you a prostitute.

Let's be, let's bring, let's bring this out in the open.

- [Mette] He takes a reproduction of Manet's Olympia

to Tahiti with him,

and it always remains an important painting for him.

I think with Gauguin's nudes,

you always feel the person there.

I mean, she's proudly lying there,

which is a tremendous contrast

to his great painting, Nevermore,

where she's lying on a bed, her face full of sadness

as she had just lost a baby.

So Gauguin captures that moment,

that moment of vulnerability and loss,

and she's lying there on her own, in the foreground,

but behind her, the raven from Edgar Allen Poe's poem

about a lost love that he's never going to see again,

keep saying, nevermore, nevermore.

And there's sort of shadowy figures.

What are they talking about?

There's an air of mystery there.

(speaking French)

- [Mette] He set off for the Marquesas.

He felt that Tahiti had become too civilized,

too westernized.

The Marquesas were a long way away from Tahiti,

and a lot less developed.

So Atuona, where he landed,

was little more than a ramshackled settlement

around the missions, there.

(music swells)

- [Narrator] "In my solitude here,

I have what is needed to recharge my forces.

Here, poetry emanates from everything I see.

And when one is painting,

one has only to drift away into a dream to find inspiration.

All I need to achieve full maturity in my art

is two years of good health,

and not too much trouble with money."

- [Caroline] Gauguin designed and had built his own house,

and decided to name the house the Maison du Jouir,

the house of pleasure,

only in the French language at the time,

it meant house of prostitution.

So he would like this nuance.

And beautiful carvings around it,

Gauguin was fascinated by woodcarving,

he had been ever since he was a sailor.

And so he carved this wonderful series of panels

showing Marquesans.

(singing and banging drums)

- [Tai Shan] The Marquesans have

an extraordinary sense of decoration,

but today you won't find any of those beautiful objects

they used to make out of bone, tortoise shell, or iron wood.

(drums banging loudly)

That is thanks to the missionaries

who looked on carving and decorating as fetishism,

offensive to the Christian God.

(chanting in song)

So what we are witnessing,

is the sad sight of a race becoming extinct.

(song abruptly ends)

- [Debora] He was completely anti-colonial.

The colonial administration at the time imposed taxes.

The Marquesan people never heard about taxes.

He thought all that wasn't fair.

And he was really against the church,

he was making fun of the Bishop,

because the Bishop had the adventure

with two women at a time. (chuckles)

So he made a statue to make fun of the Bishop.

He had the Bishop plus the two woman

next to it, and it was in front of his house.

So everybody knew it was making fun of the Bishop.

(speaking French)

(bright music playing)

- [Christopher] The persona that Gauguin develops

in his career, is the birth of one kind of modern artist,

the outsider, a character who doesn't compromise ever.

And that is the position that he is working out,

almost up to the end.

I think one of the spectacular things

in the late self-portraits,

is the way all of this just drops away.

All the pretense, all of the stage crafting, disappear.

And in that final portrait,

you're confronted with the man himself.

- [Mette] Gone is the confident arrogance,

and what you get staring back at you

is a more tentative individual.

You can see the pain, you could see the loss in his face.

(music intensifies)

- [Narrator] "During the past two months,

I've been living with a sense of deadly unease.

It's because I'm not the Gauguin that I was.

In this condition, I lack all energy.

And there is no one else to comfort and console me."

- [Caroline] In those 20 months he worked in the Marquesas,

he wrote three books, he did at least 20 paintings,

and many, many, many drawings.

He was working very hard, but he got very, very ill.

Constant pain, he was addicted to morphine

because of open sores on his legs.

He could barely even walk at that point.

He had to even buy a horse and a carriage

just to get out and get some fresh air,

and go to the beach and watch at the end of the day,

when the local men would bathe their horses

and cool them down in the water.

(water gushing)

And he realized the end was coming.

(music stops)

- [Mette] He had a heart attack,

and he was found lying on his bed in the heat.

And by his side, on an easel,

was that painting of snow in Brittany.

But it is so strange to think of him,

surrounded all with heat and tropical vegetation,

with this snowy hillside of Brittany beside him.

It was a great time for him, then.

He felt he could be someone.

He was, he was the leader of a group of artists.

He felt he could change the world,

or at least change the way that people saw art.

His mind was probably going back to that and thinking,

where had it all gone?

What would his legacy be?

The grave is situated on a hill, overlooking Atuona Bay,

and it's shaded by a frangipani tree,

which was shedding his blossoms down.

His statue, Oviri is at the top, behind him.

The Bishop is buried in the same cemetery, above him,

in a grave surrounded with white railings.

(laughs)

To keep him away from Gauguin.

- [Christopher] I think of Gauguin very great artist

for his formal inventiveness,

for the richness of content in his art,

which we have not yet plumbed,

which we probably never will.

At the same time, one of the evidences of his greatness

is that he has become a kind of focus

for contemporary issues.

We can't help but think about bad behavior

in the treatment of women and girls in contemporary terms.

It means that he's still very much alive for us.

- [Vercoe] Gauguin's practices are enabled by the society

that people lived in at the times,

but also of our society today.

So from my point of view,

we shouldn't put Gauguin into the too hard basket.

This is a lasting reminder

of a problematic figure in history,

because if this legacy can be used

as a way of trying to create more diverse interpretations

of colonial relationships,

then his legacy will be of use and of value.

(inspiring music plays)

- [Mette] I think Gauguin would be very gratified to know

that all his paintings are all around the world

in every major museum, and they fetch phenomenal sums.

And I think he would find that very funny,

the millions that they are worth now,

when he got nothing for them,

and none of the family got nothing for them as well (laughs)

(music intensifies)

(music stops)

(animation ringing)