That an artist’s self-portraits can be highly revealing is well demonstrated in the first room of the blockbuster exhibition on the work of Paul Gauguin. A series of self-portraits set the tone of the exhibition in depicting the many guises in which Gauguin saw himself in a search for his own identity as both an artist and as someone reacting to the world as he experienced it. The images also illustrate the various styles he followed. In the earliest, painted when he was in his late 20s, he shows himself as youthful and fresh faced wearing a soft black fez, suggesting both a bohemian and an intellectual.
Born in France but brought up in Peru, Gauguin’s own childhood experiences informed his later desire to explore the more remote and, he hoped, unspoilt islands of distant lands. As a young man, he worked as a successful stockbroker and started to paint as a hobby, becoming a classic Sunday painter. Although aware of the difficulties of the life of an artist and despite having a family to support, he abandoned the stock exchange in favour of the life of an artist. A self-portrait of the painter in front of an easel in a garret evokes his penury and his struggle as an artist. Typical paintings from this period were of his family, some with psychological references such as showing his sleeping daughter with the sky filled with black birds, emblematic of darker times ahead.
Attracted by post-impressionism, Gaugin looked closely at leading artists such as Degas, but with pressing financial difficulties, he moved to Brittany where board and lodging were cheaper than in the capital, his Danish wife and children having gone to Copenhagen. Here he was captivated by the picturesque landscape and the traditional culture, whether in the clogs or the white headdress of the women – a combination of the wild and the primitive – all of which were pictured in his art. Although not a conventional believer, a series of richly-coloured biblical scenes such as a highly stylised Christ on the Cross and the Garden of Gethsemane successfully combined Roman Catholicism with ancient pagan rituals.
In search of an “earthly paradise”, Gauguin travelled to Tahiti, hoping to immerse himself in a pagan culture in a luxuriant tropical setting. Although bitterly disappointed to discover that the islanders had been converted to Christianity for more than a century, he took several “wives” and fathered several children. His paintings portray an unspoilt, almost naive image of the Tahitians, adopting a painting style that changed from a post-impressionist use of pure colour to a muted, more unified palette. Fascinated by the references to lost deities such as Hina, the goddess of the moon, they became subjects in his art. An underlying concern was the romantic myth of the “Eternal Female” of youthful, half-naked Tahitian women, which became a significant subject, rendered with harmonious, muted colour. A self-portrait, Self-portrait with Manao tu papau, includes such a painting in the background.
Gauguin’s final move was to the remote Marquesas Islands, a move that reinvigorated his art. Ill with syphilis, he died of a heart attack in 1903 at the age of 55, an artist who not only depicted myths in paintings, carving and ceramics, but in describing himself as a “savage”, also surrounded himself with an air of mystery with which we are still coming to terms.
Gauguin: Maker of Myths continues until January 16 2011 and is accompanied by an extensively illustrated catalogue with essays looking at different aspects of his life and work.
