BBC Gauguin The Full Story_1of2
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00:00The film you're about to see is about him, Paul Gauguin, the infamous Paul Gauguin, one
00:00:15of the most controversial, confusing and some would say shameful artists that we've had.
00:00:23I wish I could tell you that opinion about Gauguin is divided, but unfortunately I don't
00:00:29think it is. In my experience, most people think the same bad things about Gauguin, that
00:00:37he ran away to Tahiti to prey on the native girls, that his pictures are phony and primitive.
00:00:44These Gauguin legends are deeply entrenched and they've turned lots of people against
00:00:51him. And that's wrong. Not only has Gauguin got nothing to be ashamed of, but the facts
00:00:58of his life have been coarsely manipulated and changed, told wrongly and even falsified.
00:01:08This film you're about to see is the only full length documentary biography of Gauguin
00:01:14that anyone's ever made. I made it in 2003, the centenary of his death, and to be honest
00:01:23I expected it to be part of a nationwide Gauguin celebration with lots of shows opening
00:01:30telling us how great he was, but there weren't any. We've had to wait till now for this
00:01:37fine new survey to open at Tate Modern and for a decent number of his works to arrive
00:01:43in Britain and bowl us over. Which I'm sure they will, because as I say in my film and
00:01:50want to repeat here, now, this is one of the truly great artistic careers. One of the
00:01:57most inventive, the most varied, the most exciting. This is an adventure like no one
00:02:05else's in art. A very special journey.
00:03:05The modern world has grown suspicious of the man who painted this picture. All you need
00:03:12to know is that she was 15 when he painted her, he was nearly 50, and she was his woman.
00:03:20It doesn't sound good, does it? And Gauguin's passion for young girls isn't all that's held
00:03:26against him these days. There's also the story, often repeated, that he deserted his wife
00:03:33and five children to become a painter and ran off to Tahiti for the good times and the
00:03:39swinging. Even the madness of Van Gogh gets blamed on Gauguin, because the razor Vincent
00:03:49used to hack off his ear was meant originally for his annoying pal, Gauguin.
00:03:57What's to like about this man, you might think? Well, first off, there's the art, which needs no defence.
00:04:07I reckon Gauguin painted some of the world's most alluring women, and he put them into
00:04:14several of the world's most gorgeous pictures. But what I really like about him is that he
00:04:21did it for big and noble reasons. There's always more to a Gauguin than meets the eye.
00:04:30This is the first film ever made that follows closely in Gauguin's footsteps. Where he went,
00:04:36we go. And now that I'm back, take it from me that he had guts by the barrel load, and
00:04:43with the life he led, he needed them.
00:04:51Gauguin, Gauguin, Gauguin, Gauguin, Bernard, Florence, Gaillet.
00:05:03The Gauguins came originally from round here, Orléans. There's still lots of them in the phone book.
00:05:09They were market gardeners, green grocers. The name Gauguin actually means walnut grower,
00:05:17and the first of these walnut growers to split with the family tradition was Gauguin's father,
00:05:24Clovis, who left this grim little house on the quayside to become a journalist in Paris.
00:05:35I wish I could show you what Clovis looked like. I want to know too, but there's no pictures
00:05:41of him, nothing. He's faceless.
00:05:47I can show you Gauguin's mother. She was a dark beauty called Aline, and this Aline had Peruvian blood.
00:05:55When Gauguin was one in 1849, his parents suddenly left France and came here to Peru.
00:06:03Clovis' journalism had somehow got him into trouble, so Gauguin grew up in Lima,
00:06:10but not with his father around. Clovis died from a heart attack on the boat over,
00:06:16and is buried somewhere near Tierra del Fuego.
00:06:21He was the only child of the family, and his father was the only heir to the throne.
00:06:29The sudden death of his father must have had an incalculable impact on Gauguin's psyche.
00:06:35He was just a baby, ripped away from everything he knew, suddenly fatherless,
00:06:40and fetched up on the other side of the world in an exceptionally strange new life.
00:06:46This is the house they lived in, Gauguin, his mother, and a shadow of his father.
00:06:53It looks crummy now, but what you have to imagine is that when Gauguin was here,
00:06:58from the age of one to the age of seven, this was the house, wait for it, of the president of Peru.
00:07:05Yes, the president. Because Gauguin's Peruvian relatives, the Tristan y Monserrat,
00:07:12had been living here for a long time.
00:07:18Because Gauguin's Peruvian relatives, the Tristan y Monserrat,
00:07:23were right at the top of the Spanish colonial pyramid.
00:07:29When Gauguin boasted in his memoirs that his uncle was the last viceroy of Peru,
00:07:35and that he was descended from the Spanish Borgias,
00:07:38yes, those Borgias, the most wicked family in the Renaissance, no-one believed him.
00:07:44But this was all true. Gauguin's uncle Pio, a violent little reactionary,
00:07:50really was a Borgia, and he really was the last Spanish viceroy.
00:07:56MUSIC PLAYS
00:08:08These days, all that's left of Uncle Pio in his power base of Arequipa
00:08:13are a few faded snapshots and some crumpled official documents
00:08:17in which he demands his favourite commodity, money.
00:08:22He had beautiful handwriting. It was a family talent.
00:08:27Gauguin had beautiful handwriting too.
00:08:35Uncle Pio, the belated Borgia, deliberately married his daughter
00:08:40to a political lackey called Echinique, and this lackey became the president of Peru,
00:08:46while Gauguin was living in his house.
00:08:49And by a pleasing coincidence, the old boy who lives there today
00:08:54makes his living painting nudes, conquistadors and saints.
00:09:01Señor, how long have you been living in this house?
00:09:0460 years.
00:09:0760 and a half, to be more precise.
00:09:12It's not in very good condition now.
00:09:15When you moved in here, was it slightly smarter?
00:09:19Yes. When I moved into this house, which I bought, the house was very beautiful.
00:09:25It was, in a word, marvellous.
00:09:32All the doors and windows had their antique frames,
00:09:36which nowadays have completely disappeared.
00:09:43Do many people in Peru know that Gauguin grew up here,
00:09:47how important it was for his education and indeed for his whole world view?
00:09:52It was so crucial to everything he did,
00:09:56the fact that he came from Peru, from this house.
00:10:00Nowadays, most of the people don't. They don't know.
00:10:03There isn't even a plaque outside.
00:10:06If he had been living in somewhere like London or Paris,
00:10:11people would have put a big sign saying,
00:10:14this is the house that Gauguin grew up in. There's nothing here.
00:10:18Because people are different here.
00:10:21If one puts a plaque outside, they steal it. It disappears.
00:10:35One of Gauguin's few early memories of his mother
00:10:38is of her wearing the traditional costume of Lima,
00:10:41one eye peeping out seductively from beneath her manto,
00:10:45the mysterious one-eyed veil which all women in Lima went out in.
00:10:49It was the key to women's power in Lima, she said,
00:10:53so seductive, but also the perfect disguise.
00:11:01He was always drawn to women with a traditional look.
00:11:04This must have been the first of the colourful female costumes
00:11:07that were to haunt his imagination.
00:11:10But it obviously wasn't the last.
00:11:40Gauguin was 18 months old when he got here.
00:11:43He was nearly eight when he left.
00:11:47Some will tell you that these forgotten years in Lima were irrelevant,
00:11:52but don't you believe it.
00:11:56It was in Lima that Gauguin encountered his first art.
00:12:00Aline began collecting pre-Columbian pottery,
00:12:04extraordinary things, disquieting and inventive,
00:12:08with so little practical ambition.
00:12:11The colonists, like Don Pio, dismissed these Inca pots as barbaric.
00:12:18Aline, from Paris, was prescient and generous enough to admire and collect them.
00:12:27This black and demonic pot is the handiwork of a genuine pre-Columbian.
00:12:34This, however, is one of Gauguin's.
00:12:39It's a self-portrait with blood.
00:12:50Echenique, with Don Pio's keen assistance,
00:12:53turned out to be the most corrupt president in Peru's history.
00:12:59He was going to be overthrown.
00:13:01Aline must have seen it coming.
00:13:05It was time to flee.
00:13:16But Peru had done its job.
00:13:18It had given Gauguin's art a completely different head start to anyone else's.
00:13:25When his mother took him back to France, he spoke no French at all.
00:13:30He was a foreigner, then and forever,
00:13:33whose first and preferred language was Peruvian Spanish.
00:13:46The walnut growers of Orleans took them in
00:13:49and they settled in Clovis, Italy,
00:13:51The walnut growers of Orleans took them in
00:13:54and they settled in Clovis' father's house on the quay,
00:13:57number 25, or what's left of it.
00:14:00Gauguin can't have found it easy to arrive in Orleans.
00:14:03No language, no friends, no son.
00:14:08He went to a couple of local schools
00:14:10and was then sent here, a few miles up the road,
00:14:13to the Catholic boarding school of La Chapelle Saint-Mesmer.
00:14:18I went to one of these places too and hated every second of it,
00:14:23as did Gauguin.
00:14:25Five in the morning, the bell goes. Prayers.
00:14:28Off to the chapel, morning service, prayers.
00:14:31Lessons, prayers. More lessons, more prayers.
00:14:35It's a terrible way to bring up a child.
00:14:39Gauguin spent three years at the Petite Seminary de La Chapelle Saint-Mesmer,
00:14:45absorbing a hardcore Catholic education,
00:14:49training to become a priest.
00:14:52There was no chance.
00:14:56It must have been at this school that the teenage Gauguin
00:14:59decided what he was going to do with his life.
00:15:02He was going to run away to sea, life on the waves, free at last.
00:15:07Can you blame him?
00:15:14Gauguin has left us precious little information about his seafaring years.
00:15:19What few memories there are concern sex.
00:15:25According to his own boastful account,
00:15:27when the 17-year-old Gauguin arrived here in Brazil,
00:15:30the local women threw themselves at him
00:15:34and he managed to seduce a famous Brazilian actress from Rio.
00:15:40Then there was the fat Prussian passenger whom the captain fancied,
00:15:44but who chose the teenage midshipman Gauguin instead.
00:15:50Some of it is probably true. Women did go for him.
00:15:53And there's no doubt that the six years Gauguin spent on the seas,
00:15:57popping in and out of ports, amounted to an exceptionally exotic education.
00:16:03CHANTING
00:16:11There was also this constant reminder of his own exotic origins,
00:16:15the way he too was different.
00:16:17Arriving in Brazil for the first time
00:16:20must have seemed more like coming home than leaving home.
00:16:24CHANTING
00:16:34Gauguin was somewhere in the Caribbean
00:16:37when he found out his mother was dead.
00:16:42She used to smack him around the head when he was lippy.
00:16:45He was a lousy son, but he loved her.
00:16:48And when he was middle-aged,
00:16:50he painted her from the only photograph he had
00:16:53and made her look forever young.
00:16:58CHANTING
00:17:01This is the French Stock Exchange, the Bourse, in Paris.
00:17:06When Gauguin finally blundered out of the Navy,
00:17:09his mother's sugar daddy,
00:17:11a very, very rich Spanish banker called Gustavo Rosa,
00:17:16decided to cast him against type and get Gauguin a job here.
00:17:23Gauguin was 23. He'd been at sea for seven years.
00:17:27What can he possibly have known about high finance?
00:17:31Yet not only did he become a successful Parisian businessman,
00:17:34he stayed one for 11 years.
00:17:39So that's a file from Mr Bertin, a stockbroker,
00:17:45and we see that Paul Gauguin was the chief liquidator at the firm,
00:17:54that he had a salary of 3,000 francs at the time
00:17:59and earned 1% of the net earnings.
00:18:03The employees of this department had to work very late at night
00:18:08to settle all the trades from the two weeks before,
00:18:12and I've read in the papers that sometimes they ended work at 2.30am.
00:18:19So, essentially, though, it was a bookkeeping job.
00:18:23He was putting all the figures together?
00:18:25Yes. We don't know exactly what he did every day at the stock exchange,
00:18:30but he was quoting some stocks or working in the Palais de la Bourse.
00:18:41He must have also done some things
00:18:44outside of the official work he did for Monsieur Bertin.
00:18:47He seems to have traded also.
00:18:50Everybody did, right?
00:18:52Most of the employees, their main job,
00:18:55you know, apart from taking orders from clients,
00:18:58going to the stock exchange,
00:19:00but the main job was making money for themselves or their friends,
00:19:04and so I guess he acted like everybody else.
00:19:16Gauguin's famous for his wanderlust, these huge journeys he undertook.
00:19:21But once he got somewhere, he tended to stay put,
00:19:25almost immobile, like a snail curled up in its shell.
00:19:30His Parisian life was concentrated almost claustrophobically
00:19:35around here, the 9th arrondissement.
00:19:39Quarter of a mile that way, quarter of a mile the other way.
00:19:44The Bourse, where he worked, is just down there.
00:19:47He lived at Rue La Bruyere, over there, at number 21.
00:19:52Arosa lived in the big house at number 5 in that road,
00:19:56and Gauguin was actually born at number 56
00:19:59on the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, just behind me, over there.
00:20:06Next door, at 54, is where the painter Delacroix lived,
00:20:11while across the street is where the Impressionist painter
00:20:15Pissarro stayed when he first came to Paris, all in the same street.
00:20:23Businessmen couldn't help meeting artists around here,
00:20:26and artists couldn't help meeting businessmen.
00:20:29All around us are the cafés made famous by the Impressionists.
00:20:33They like to meet down there at the Brasserie des Martyrs,
00:20:37and at the top of the hill is a boarding house at number 51,
00:20:41where Gauguin first encountered his wife.
00:20:46She'd come from Denmark on a holiday,
00:20:49met Sophie Gad, a well-built Danish blonde
00:20:53for whom Gauguin fell immediately.
00:20:56She needed some persuading.
00:21:02I found this in a museum vault in Copenhagen.
00:21:06It's Met, drawn by Gauguin.
00:21:10He must have carried it around with him, a love token.
00:21:15She looked so fragile, but she wasn't.
00:21:20This was a tough woman.
00:21:22She smoked cigars, loved dancing and parties, expensive dresses.
00:21:28They rushed into marriage and set up house in this posh apartment
00:21:32in the 9th arrondissement, of course.
00:21:35She thought she was marrying an up-and-coming financial whiz kid.
00:21:40What she didn't know was that her Gauguin had a terrible secret.
00:21:45He'd got interested in art.
00:21:56There are lots of tall stories told in art about prodigies,
00:22:00artistic geniuses who could do wondrous things with a pencil
00:22:04from the moment they'd picked one up.
00:22:06Picasso was supposed to have been one.
00:22:08Raphael was another.
00:22:10It's a useful myth to encourage about yourself.
00:22:13Gauguin never did that, but he certainly could have done.
00:22:18Here's the proof. It's dated 1873,
00:22:21which makes this one of the two or three earliest pictures we know by him.
00:22:25No teacher, no art school.
00:22:27Completely self-taught, yet look how good he is.
00:22:33His mother remembers him making his first carving
00:22:36with a knife on the long sea voyage from Peru,
00:22:39with all those hours at sea to while away.
00:22:42When he became a sailor,
00:22:44there were presumably countless opportunities to sketch and whittle,
00:22:48but nothing survives.
00:22:50All we know for sure is that suddenly, in 1873,
00:22:54at exactly the same time as he became a stockbroker,
00:22:57he started becoming an artist too,
00:23:00and an unusually gifted one at that.
00:23:03I don't know if you can detect the slightest tremble
00:23:06of beginner's hesitation from where you are,
00:23:09but from over here, there isn't any.
00:23:25I don't think she had any idea of his passion for art.
00:23:29I really don't, not at the very first.
00:23:32I think she saw it rather as an interesting hobby
00:23:35that kept him out of the bars and cafes and things,
00:23:39and it was quite a safe hobby for a man to have.
00:23:42So it was a good thing that he was interested in art.
00:23:45Yes, kept him at home, you know, painting the children and her
00:23:48was better than out in the country.
00:23:50Yes, kept him at home, you know, painting the children and her
00:23:53was better than out with a mistress or something.
00:23:56But that began to change, and she said to my grandfather,
00:23:59you know, she emphasised that she really had no idea that this was in him,
00:24:04and it was quite a shock to her at how much of a passion this was
00:24:08and how she felt unable to share it,
00:24:11because I don't think she had any real passion for art.
00:24:14People forget just how talented Gauguin was with his hands.
00:24:19It's an obvious point to make, but this was something that he carved
00:24:23after only a few lessons in marble carving.
00:24:26It's astonishingly proficient.
00:24:28It is. I mean, with some help, I believe, from his neighbour, the sculptor.
00:24:32His landlord, yes.
00:24:34I think he apparently rough-carved it with a saw and then Gauguin finished it.
00:24:38So, yes, I think it's incredibly well done.
00:24:45This is Met, made extra pretty and ennobled.
00:24:54And this is his son, Emile.
00:24:57It was shown in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879,
00:25:01the only sculpture in the show.
00:25:04The Impressionists had two of their revolutionary exhibitions
00:25:08in this street, at No. 11 and No. 6.
00:25:11Gauguin was now working across the road with a banker at No. 21.
00:25:17He couldn't avoid progressive French painters in the Ninth Arrondissement.
00:25:22They were everywhere.
00:25:24Gauguin fell in with a group of French painters,
00:25:27and they were all over the place.
00:25:30And look what we found at the back.
00:25:33Never filmed before,
00:25:35Gauguin's first nervous attempt at a self-portrait.
00:25:40So tempting, he'd tried it twice.
00:25:46Gauguin's first attempt at a self-portrait.
00:25:50He'd never filmed before.
00:25:52He'd never filmed before.
00:25:56Gauguin was running out of bourgeois compliance,
00:26:00just as the French stock market was running out of gas for its bubble.
00:26:05Met was reluctant to cut back on her maids and her dresses.
00:26:09Gauguin was reluctant to cut back on his art.
00:26:12So the posh houses had to go, and with it the Ninth Arrondissement.
00:26:20It was time to move downmarket and across the street.
00:26:24Downmarket and across the river,
00:26:27to the poorer new urban sprawls of Vaugirard.
00:26:33This is the first house Gauguin lived in, in which he had a studio,
00:26:37a special room just for him to paint in,
00:26:40up there on the third floor, overlooking the garden,
00:26:43at number 8, Rue Carcel.
00:26:46There are some nuns living here now, who wouldn't let us film inside.
00:26:50The nuns don't like to let Gauguin through the door.
00:26:56The nuns shouldn't have worried.
00:26:58Gauguin painted some of his most lyrical pictures at the Rue Carcel.
00:27:04His family in the garden.
00:27:07The church at night.
00:27:14The picture which I think is the first real Gauguin.
00:27:20The picture Aline, named after his mother, of course,
00:27:24aged about four, asleep.
00:27:32Gauguin tiptoes into her room at night...
00:27:37..and sneaks right into her dreams.
00:27:42Of course, it could just be the wallpaper.
00:27:45It's this ambiguity that so very him.
00:27:51Something else very significant happened here at the nuns' house.
00:27:56You know that bit on a birth certificate
00:27:58where the father has to write what his profession is?
00:28:01Well, when Gauguin's fifth child was born, a boy, Pola, in December 1883,
00:28:06he wrote on the birth certificate that he was an artist.
00:28:10For the first time, at the age of 35, with five children,
00:28:15after ten years of toing and froing
00:28:18and being half a stockbroker and half a painter,
00:28:21here, finally, he committed himself to the way ahead.
00:28:28It was hard on Mette.
00:28:30She was so fond of elegant dresses and glittering parties
00:28:35and wasn't interested in poverty.
00:28:38It wasn't what she married Gauguin for.
00:28:42When her uncle turned up in Rouen on a boat bound for Denmark,
00:28:46she got on it.
00:28:54It was meant to be temporary, a respite,
00:28:57but as soon as she got to Copenhagen,
00:29:00Mette made up her mind to stay.
00:29:04She didn't consult Gauguin.
00:29:07He cashed in his life insurance early
00:29:10and decided quickly to follow her.
00:29:13He was up for a new life too.
00:29:18But the six months he spent in Denmark
00:29:21were the most humiliating of his life.
00:29:24I hate the Danes, he spat in his memoirs,
00:29:28and in case we missed it, he repeats himself.
00:29:31I hate the Danes.
00:29:35Before leaving France in a final lunge at respectability,
00:29:41he'd managed to get himself a job here in Copenhagen
00:29:44as a tarpaulin salesman
00:29:47for a French manufacturer of a new kind of waterproof cloth.
00:29:51Gauguin was going to be their Scandinavian representative.
00:29:57He'd hoped to use Mette's contacts to sell this stuff
00:30:00to the railway companies for covering freight wagons.
00:30:04Unfortunately, Denmark already manufactured
00:30:07its own perfectly adequate tarpaulins,
00:30:10so why buy French ones?
00:30:13Everything went wrong.
00:30:15He couldn't speak the language, he knew nothing about waterproofing,
00:30:19Danish businessmen didn't like him and he didn't like Danish businessmen,
00:30:23and there was never any real chance of this wild stab
00:30:27at the Scandinavian tarpaulin market paying dividends.
00:30:31The stay in Copenhagen turned quickly
00:30:34into an exercise in living more cheaply.
00:30:42They couldn't afford the rent anywhere nice
00:30:45and had to move into the inner city of Copenhagen,
00:30:48not a good part of town in those days.
00:30:55With no money coming in from the tarpaulin business,
00:30:58Mette was suddenly the family's chief breadwinner.
00:31:02Her old employer, Jacob Elstrup,
00:31:05for whom she'd been a nanny in her teens,
00:31:08was now Prime Minister of Denmark and leader of the Conservative Party.
00:31:13And through his connections,
00:31:15Mette began giving French lessons to trainee diplomats.
00:31:19While Gauguin, the embarrassing bohemian she'd brought back from Paris,
00:31:25was banished out of sight to the attic,
00:31:29to this little room where, by a skylight,
00:31:32he painted his first real self-portrait.
00:31:54Gauguin only painted a handful of pictures in Copenhagen.
00:31:57He liked the views well enough at first,
00:32:00but it was just too cold to paint outdoors.
00:32:03Minus ten when he arrived.
00:32:05But they're charmingly lively,
00:32:07these French Impressionists' impressions of a very cold city.
00:32:12Mette was constantly embarrassed by him.
00:32:16His political views, his appearance, the lack of income,
00:32:20none of it went down well with her disappointed family, either.
00:32:24In the end, the whole lot of them,
00:32:26brothers, sister, mother, father,
00:32:29all of them were in the same boat,
00:32:32and Gauguin was the one to blame.
00:32:36Mette took her family's side in the confrontation.
00:32:39She stayed, he went.
00:32:43It's usually said of Gauguin that he left his wife and abandoned his family.
00:32:48But Gauguin was a man of his word.
00:32:51He was a man of his word.
00:32:53He was a man of his word.
00:32:55He was a man of his word.
00:32:57He was a man of his word.
00:32:59He was a man of his word.
00:33:01It's usually said of Gauguin that he left his wife and abandoned his family.
00:33:06What actually happened here in Copenhagen
00:33:09was that she and her family threw him out.
00:33:13Perhaps they had good reason to, but it is a different storyline.
00:33:22He scuttled back to Paris with a new job description,
00:33:26penniless vagabond.
00:33:28And that winter, guess what he took up?
00:33:32Pottery. Yes, pottery.
00:33:37This is the first ceramic that Gauguin ever made.
00:33:40It shows a fawn.
00:33:42Now, fawns, satyrs, the god Pan,
00:33:45various representations of a man who was also half a goat,
00:33:49were very popular in the 19th century.
00:33:51In the age of Darwin, they struck a 19th-century chord
00:33:55because they were taken as symbols of unbridled sexuality,
00:33:59of the primitive, savage man hiding within the civilised man.
00:34:03This appealed to Gauguin a lot, of course.
00:34:05And rather interestingly, it's the first time he uses the monogram PGO,
00:34:11which he later used on a lot of his paintings.
00:34:13You can just see it there at the bottom of the fawn.
00:34:16Now, PGO in French, pago,
00:34:18was apparently a word which he'd also picked up
00:34:21on his travels earlier as a sailor.
00:34:23It was a kind of British nautical slang for a penis.
00:34:27A pago was apparently what sailors used to call each other
00:34:30when they had arguments on board ship.
00:34:32So, in choosing this monogram PGO,
00:34:35he was very deliberately harking back to his own sexual problems with Met.
00:34:45Gauguin had gotten in touch with his primitive self
00:34:48and would spend the rest of his life hunting for more.
00:34:52The westernmost tip of France is known as Finistère,
00:34:55the end of the earth,
00:34:57which is what it must once have seemed to be
00:34:59to the early inhabitants of this remote corner of Brittany.
00:35:05But when Gauguin got to Pont-Aven in June 1886,
00:35:09this air of finality certainly wasn't there any more.
00:35:17Pont-Aven was that ghastly thing, an artist's colony.
00:35:20One in ten of the town's inhabitants was a painter.
00:35:23There were around 100 of them here in the summer of 1886,
00:35:26chiefly Americans, but also Scandinavians, Scotsmen, Englishmen,
00:35:31the Dutch and even a few Frenchmen.
00:35:36Gauguin installed himself at the Pension Gloanec in the main square,
00:35:40where the landlady would usually accept credit.
00:35:46In his early letters from Pont-Aven,
00:35:48it isn't the picturesqueness of Brittany that Gauguin stresses,
00:35:52but the quality and quantity of the food at the Gloanec.
00:35:57And he certainly wasn't getting much exercise.
00:36:00If you map out the locations of the paintings Gauguin produced
00:36:03on this first trip to Pont-Aven,
00:36:05you find that nearly all of them were sited
00:36:07within 300 yards or so of the Gloanec.
00:36:19HE SINGS IN FRENCH
00:36:32It was in Pont-Aven that Gauguin did international creativity,
00:36:36an enormous disservice by inventing what we now think of
00:36:40as the typical artist's look.
00:36:42He bought himself a blue fisherman's jumper,
00:36:45which he set off with a jaunty beret,
00:36:47trying to pass himself off as a working seafarer.
00:36:50He later refined this indoor fisherman's look
00:36:53by adopting the coloured Breton waistcoats,
00:36:56which the locals wear to dances.
00:37:03To complete his transformation into the instantly obvious artist,
00:37:08he took up the regional footwear and bought himself some clogs.
00:37:14Later still, he carved and decorated his own so very lovingly.
00:37:20When a man makes his own footwear, you feel he makes his own way in life.
00:37:27He was 38 when he first came to Pont-Aven,
00:37:30double the age of most of the other rebels in town,
00:37:33so it was natural that he came to be seen as their leader.
00:37:38A visiting Scottish painter called Archibald Standish Hartick
00:37:42later published his recollections of Gauguin at Pont-Aven
00:37:45and describes the leader, surrounded by his new acolytes,
00:37:49larking around like schoolboys.
00:37:52They came past Hartick one day on a boat
00:37:55rowed by two Breton fishermen
00:37:57with a naked Gauguin tied behind on a rope,
00:38:00looking, in Hartick's phrase, like a dead porpoise
00:38:04and enjoying himself hugely.
00:38:07Suddenly it was the end of the summer,
00:38:10so everyone went back to Paris.
00:38:13Gauguin didn't fancy Pont-Aven on his own
00:38:16with just him and the Bretons.
00:38:19As the winter crept in, he crept back to Paris too
00:38:24and hatched a most unfortunate travel plan.
00:38:41Of all the harebrained schemes that Gauguin came up with in his life
00:38:44to get rich quickly, and there were plenty of them,
00:38:47the most ill-advised of all
00:38:49was his decision in April 1887 to come to Panama.
00:38:59The digging of the Panama Canal
00:39:01was billed as the 19th century's greatest feat of engineering.
00:39:04The French were going to show the Americans on their own doorstep
00:39:08how to fashion a miraculous nautical shortcut
00:39:11that avoided the whole of South America
00:39:14by gouging a great trench through the isthmus of Panama.
00:39:21It sounded like such a good idea that money poured into the project.
00:39:25Investing in Panama was the internet boom of the 1880s.
00:39:30Gauguin didn't come to Panama alone.
00:39:32He'd managed to persuade his besotted disciple from Pont-Aven,
00:39:36Charles Laval, to come with him.
00:39:39Gauguin's sister was married to a Colombian, Juan Uribe,
00:39:43and Uribe was already in Panama
00:39:45searching for the same pot of fool's gold.
00:39:48Gauguin thought that Uribe was running a bank here in Panama City,
00:39:52but it turned out to be a shabby general's store,
00:39:55and there was no job going for him.
00:39:58The focus of French colonial life
00:40:00was the Grand Central Hotel in Panama City.
00:40:03It's derelict now.
00:40:05A couple of squatters were the only inhabitants when I visited.
00:40:09But in 1887, everybody met everybody in the Grand Hotel.
00:40:17Hello!
00:40:21Your Felix.
00:40:24Your Felix.
00:40:26Red. Hello, hello.
00:40:30Gauguin couldn't really afford to stay here, but that didn't stop him.
00:40:35The central courtyard had a huge American bar,
00:40:38a casino and a billiards table.
00:40:41Hotel Grand Central, see?
00:40:44And this is the courtyard here,
00:40:46where the billiards table and the American bar...
00:40:51Shall we have a look?
00:40:53There's a mysterious passage in Gauguin's memoirs
00:40:56where he describes himself as a champion billiards player
00:40:59who wins a momentous game against some Americans
00:41:02with a famous display of French potting brilliance.
00:41:06It must be some kind of blurred memory
00:41:09of a night here in the courtyard of the Grand Central Hotel.
00:41:13I don't doubt that Gauguin was handy at billiards.
00:41:17He was one of those fiddlers who try lots of things and get good at them.
00:41:21He fenced, he boxed.
00:41:23When he took up musical instruments,
00:41:25he soon learned to play the mandolin and the guitar.
00:41:29And with this same restlessness,
00:41:31he tried his hand at so many different ways of making art.
00:41:35Sculpture.
00:41:37Pottery.
00:41:39All manner of print methods.
00:41:43Carving walking sticks and pipes.
00:41:48MUSIC CONTINUES
00:41:52People remember Gauguin as someone who was always doing something with his hands.
00:41:56He had a busy, questing mind and fidgety fingers.
00:42:00Being good at billiards would have been his kind of skill.
00:42:13The worst place of all, the bottom of the cesspit,
00:42:16was Cologne, the Caribbean terminal of the canal
00:42:19and main gateway from Europe,
00:42:21where the company excavating the Great Trench had its headquarters.
00:42:27Cologne was one of the foulest places on earth, and it still is.
00:42:34There were no sewers, the rats were notoriously large,
00:42:38dead cats were thrown into the streets, a few human corpses too,
00:42:42and the French had created macabre mountains of bottles in Cologne
00:42:46the size of two-storey buildings.
00:42:48From the wine, they guzzled madly,
00:42:50in preference to the deadly local water.
00:42:55But this is where Gauguin and Laval ended up, hustling for work.
00:42:59Gauguin wrote to Meta that he'd become a labourer
00:43:02and was swinging a pickaxe from dawn to dusk, which is unlikely.
00:43:06He was probably a foreman or perhaps a clerk.
00:43:09Most of the labourers were black workers from Jamaica,
00:43:12an eminently expendable workforce, easy to replenish.
00:43:17Within two weeks of getting his job in Cologne, Gauguin was fired.
00:43:23He'd saved just enough to get out.
00:43:26As soon as they could afford to buy a pair of tickets in steerage class,
00:43:30Gauguin and Laval were on the first boat out of Cologne,
00:43:34headed for a proper Caribbean paradise
00:43:37they'd spotted on the way over.
00:43:39Martinique.
00:43:41MUSIC PLAYS
00:43:43MUSIC CONTINUES
00:44:06Guess who stepped onto exactly this shore in 1502
00:44:11and was so taken by what he found that he wrote in his diary
00:44:15he'd arrived at the most beautiful place on Earth.
00:44:21Christopher Columbus.
00:44:23And if Columbus was impressed by what he found here,
00:44:26imagine how welcoming and gorgeous Martinique must have seemed
00:44:30to Gauguin and Laval after everything they'd been through in Panama,
00:44:35when they too fetched up exactly here in June 1887.
00:44:40MUSIC CONTINUES
00:44:47They arrived at Saint-Pierre, just over there,
00:44:50in those days the largest and most elegant town in Martinique.
00:44:54Little Paris, they called it, the pearl of the Antilles.
00:44:59It sits in a large sandy bay and has looming over it
00:45:03an exceptionally picturesque volcano called Mont Pelée.
00:45:07MUSIC CONTINUES
00:45:15The first task was to find somewhere to live.
00:45:18Not easy. Saint-Pierre was expensive, they were broke,
00:45:22and what tiny quantities of money they'd saved in Panama
00:45:25had to be spent on medicine,
00:45:27because almost immediately,
00:45:29Laval went down with the dreaded yellow fever.
00:45:33MUSIC CONTINUES
00:45:38Gauguin survived in better health for a couple of months
00:45:41before he too succumbed to a ghastly combination
00:45:45of dysentery and malaria.
00:45:48All picked up in Panama, of course.
00:45:50Thank heavens they'd got out of there.
00:45:53MUSIC CONTINUES
00:45:57Two miles south of Saint-Pierre, at Le Carbet,
00:46:00they found an abandoned workers' hut on a plantation,
00:46:05It was empty. They moved in and lived there for nothing,
00:46:08chiefly on fresh fruit picked from the trees,
00:46:11some fish, like everyone else.
00:46:15Life was not very difficult,
00:46:18because there was many fruits,
00:46:24there was a simple alimentation with breadfruit,
00:46:31bananas, and there was fish.
00:46:34Every morning there were fishes from the sea.
00:46:39So it's true what people say,
00:46:42which is that basically even if you didn't do any work
00:46:45or didn't make any money, you could get food,
00:46:48because you pick the fruit from the trees, you get the fish.
00:46:51Yes, and I think the neighbours helped them a lot.
00:46:55The neighbours helped?
00:46:57Yes, because it is like that in Montigny.
00:47:01So people helped?
00:47:03People helped one another.
00:47:05Even if they're French colonists,
00:47:08arriving for a short visit like that,
00:47:11still people would help them, look after them?
00:47:13Si, si. Yes, yes, I think so.
00:47:19The landscape outside the Casa Negra was magnificently luxuriant.
00:47:24Today, you look down across this jungle
00:47:27and there's 20 different greens down there,
00:47:29all set off with glowing patches of tropical colour,
00:47:33like a jaunty quilt.
00:47:35If anywhere was going to shake the hesitancy of Impressionism
00:47:39out of Gauguin, that French dab-dab-dabbiness
00:47:43that passes so easily for uncertainty, it was here.
00:47:55HE SPEAKS FRENCH
00:48:08Gauguin wrote a very naughty letter from Martinique back to his wife
00:48:12in which he describes an encounter with what he calls
00:48:15a damnably pretty Negresse,
00:48:17who offered him some fruit, a guava,
00:48:20which he was about to eat
00:48:22when a local man, a lawyer, stopped him.
00:48:25The damnably pretty Negresse, said the lawyer,
00:48:28had rubbed this fruit between her breasts to hex it.
00:48:32If Gauguin ate it, he'd have to take her as his woman.
00:48:38Did it really happen?
00:48:40I don't think so.
00:48:42It's too much like the story of what Eve did to Adam,
00:48:45this giving of the irresistible fruit.
00:48:48Whether it happened or not, from then on, naughty fruit,
00:48:52fruit as a symbol of desire, begins appearing in his paintings.
00:48:58It was in Martinique that the grandest of Gauguin's themes,
00:49:02the theme of temptation, entered his art.
00:49:08I suppose he may in some way have succumbed
00:49:10to the unarguable charms of the local beauties,
00:49:13but let's not forget he'd been entirely faithful to Met for 15 years
00:49:18since their first encounter at Gustav Arosa's party.
00:49:22It may indeed have been in Martinique
00:49:24that he finally gave in to temptation,
00:49:27but it doesn't show immediately in his paintings.
00:49:30These are not overly pretty paradise bunnies
00:49:33gliding sexily through the jungle, not at all.
00:49:37They're strong, big-boned, hard-working women
00:49:41with a touch of melancholy about them.
00:49:44In his Martinique paintings, Gauguin is paying warm tribute
00:49:48to the island people who welcomed him,
00:49:51in paintings that are exceptional
00:49:53precisely because of their lack of phony exotic allure.
00:50:01You feel he would gladly have settled in Martinique,
00:50:04like all the other French paradise hunters now overrunning the place,
00:50:08but the local doctor told him to go home or he'd die.
00:50:12The dysentery and the malaria was getting worse and worse.
00:50:19Gauguin never came back to Martinique,
00:50:21although, in his thoughts, he never again left it.
00:50:39Gauguin arrived back in Paris ill but excited.
00:50:46His Martinique paintings were much admired,
00:50:49notably by a young Dutch art dealer in Paris called Theo van Gogh.
00:50:59There's a loft for sale here for 1.5 million euros,
00:51:04and its selling point is that it's in the building
00:51:07in which Theo's brother, Vincent van Gogh,
00:51:10used to work as an art dealer before he became a painter.
00:51:14Art dealing was the van Gogh family business.
00:51:19Theo had been persuaded to buy
00:51:21a couple of the best Martinique paintings by Vincent.
00:51:24In this concentrated artistic milieu at Montmartre,
00:51:28where everyone knew everyone else,
00:51:30it was inevitable that van Gogh and Gauguin should meet.
00:51:34Gauguin's stories of Martinique fired Vincent with a similar ambition.
00:51:38He too would seek the sun.
00:51:40Why didn't the two of them share a studio in the south?
00:51:44They could eat together, live together more cheaply.
00:51:47Yes, yes, said Gauguin. Let's do it.
00:51:50He then promptly forgot the offer.
00:51:53Vincent never did.
00:51:55Instead of heading south, Gauguin took the next train to Pont-Aven.
00:52:00The nearest thing he had in France to a home.
00:52:06Gauguin's second visit to Brittany began dismally.
00:52:10It was February. There was no-one else there.
00:52:13The others were too sensible to risk the winter weather in Pont-Aven.
00:52:17But Gauguin had nowhere else to go.
00:52:25He was ill and hadn't recovered from the deadly mix of diseases
00:52:29and the deadly mix of dysentery and malaria
00:52:31that had nearly killed him in Martinique.
00:52:34He spent most of the winter months at the Gloweneck in bed,
00:52:37recovering, unable to work.
00:52:47When summer finally came, boy, was he ready for it.
00:52:52Heat and light surged into his art.
00:52:59By July, he was unmistakably well again.
00:53:13Gauguin's gang had a crucial new member,
00:53:16a 19-year-old boy genius called Émile Bernard.
00:53:21Bernard was already friends with Van Gogh.
00:53:25But in Pont-Aven, it was only Gauguin who interested him.
00:53:32Bernard yanked Gauguin's attention away from the peasants,
00:53:36the cows and the fields,
00:53:38indoors, to where the light did eerie things.
00:53:46Gauguin already knew about the magic of stained glass
00:53:49from his own fiercely Catholic past, but he'd forgotten.
00:53:53Now Bernard was reminding him.
00:53:59This is one of the most important paintings that Gauguin ever produced.
00:54:03It's called The Vision After The Sermon.
00:54:05It was painted in probably September 1888.
00:54:09And it's a picture of the peasants, the Breton women in Pont-Aven,
00:54:13coming out of the church after the Mass, they'd just been attending.
00:54:17And according to Gauguin, having this vision,
00:54:20inspired by the sermon they'd heard, of Jacob wrestling with the angel,
00:54:25which must be what the priest had chosen as his theme of the day.
00:54:29And he's taken the Breton women and he's closed their eyes
00:54:33so that what you seem to be seeing is a dream they're having.
00:54:36This isn't really happening,
00:54:38it's something that's happening only in their imaginations.
00:54:43So it's an attempt to take the ancient spirit of the Bible,
00:54:47of the apocalypse, of the Gospels, and to bring it up to date
00:54:51and to deposit it right in the lap of the Breton people in 1888.
00:54:56But, of course, Gauguin thought this was, quite rightly thought,
00:54:59this was one of his greatest paintings.
00:55:01He offered it to the church at Pont-Aven and they refused it.
00:55:04They didn't want it.
00:55:06And that must rank as one of the biggest mistakes
00:55:09that the Catholic Church ever made.
00:55:12CHOIR SINGS
00:55:17Emile wasn't the only Bernard
00:55:19to impact dramatically on Gauguin that summer.
00:55:22On the 15th August,
00:55:24Emile's 17-year-old sister, Madeleine, joined them in Pont-Aven.
00:55:30And Gauguin promptly and dangerously fell in love with her.
00:55:36This is a beautiful painting of Madeleine by her brother, Emile.
00:55:40When Gauguin met her, she was, what, 17, wasn't she?
00:55:43Yes.
00:55:44But she seemed to be already very fiercely Catholic, a real believer.
00:55:49She must always have been quite a believer.
00:55:52Very deep, very mystical, you know.
00:55:56And Gauguin must have felt it, you know,
00:55:59even though she was only 17 and all this hadn't developed yet, you know.
00:56:03He painted a beautiful portrait of her
00:56:05in which he seems to have made her look older.
00:56:07She's got this very alluring smile on her.
00:56:10Yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:56:12That's absolutely what he did, you know.
00:56:14Doesn't look like a clumsy teenager, you know.
00:56:17And she has her hair pulled up, you know,
00:56:19which is something which women did and not young girls.
00:56:22And he made her absolutely charming, yes.
00:56:26That, for sure.
00:56:28CHOIR SINGS
00:56:34It couldn't work out, because he was old enough to be her father,
00:56:38but, you know, that's not an absolute obstacle.
00:56:42But he had absolutely no money.
00:56:45He had no place to live in.
00:56:47He was living on credit most of the time.
00:56:50He had no prospects of making great money.
00:56:53He was very poor.
00:56:55He had no money.
00:56:57He was very poor.
00:56:59He had no prospects of making great money.
00:57:03And he was married, you know,
00:57:05so he couldn't propose, you know.
00:57:09It's for sure he suffered, huh?
00:57:11Lots of the paintings he did already in 1888,
00:57:16you know, are, I think, a sign of sexual frustration.
00:57:20You know, like this painting which is called Les Fruits,
00:57:23which is in Moscow, you know,
00:57:25it has a symbolical person looking at some fruit,
00:57:28you know, a supernatural look,
00:57:30and it's obviously a scene of temptation, you know.
00:57:33And, obviously, it was inspired by his feelings
00:57:36when he was so frustrated because of this Madeleine thing.
00:57:41Gauguin's passion for Madeleine Bernard
00:57:43isn't usually taken seriously enough.
00:57:46All of us know what torture it is
00:57:48to want someone desperately that we can't have.
00:57:51It isn't something that passes in weeks or months.
00:57:54It takes years.
00:57:56The impact of Madeleine Bernard on Gauguin's life and art was seismic.
00:58:07Madeleine also plays a covert role in the vision after the sermon.
00:58:12She's on the left, disguised as a Breton woman.
00:58:15Those are her lips.
00:58:17So is this, on the right, Gauguin as the older priest?
00:58:22Look at that nose. That's him.
00:58:25And the vision after the sermon is a painting about the struggle
00:58:29between the desires of an angel and those of a man.
00:58:43For six months, Van Gogh had been pestering Gauguin to come to Arles,
00:58:48a sleepy south of France backwater,
00:58:51where Vincent had burned away the summer,
00:58:54painting his yellowest works.
00:58:58They could share ideas, live cheaply,
00:59:01start a confraternity of artists,
00:59:04a studio in the south, as Vincent called it,
00:59:07with Gauguin as the senior monk, or abbot.
00:59:11It was through the post that this hounding of Gauguin went on.
00:59:16You must come, you must come, he writes again and again.
00:59:19And in this obsessive pursuit of Gauguin's presence,
00:59:23there were signs already of imbalance.
00:59:28What made the situation intrinsically precarious
00:59:32was the fact that Gauguin was temporarily imbalanced too.
00:59:37He'd fallen in love with Madeleine Bernard.
00:59:40So it was a distraught, moody, heartbroken Gauguin
00:59:44who finally succumbed to Vincent's relentless pleading
00:59:48and arrived just over there at Arles Station
00:59:51at five o'clock in the morning on 23rd October 1888.
00:59:56He stayed here for just two months,
00:59:59but they constitute two of the most notorious months
01:00:03in the annals of modern art.
01:00:07Vincent had rented a house.
01:00:10It's gone now, turned into this roundabout,
01:00:13but it used to stand over there on the Place Lamartine.
01:00:18We think we know it well from Vincent's deceptively delightful painting.