(jazzy music)
Female: We're standing here in the Courtauld Gallery
in front of Paul Gauguin's Nevermore from 1897.
Male: This is one of the paintings
that really lives up to our expectations of Gauguin,
the classic story that he goes off to Tahiti.
This was painted during his his second trip.
He's got a much more complex relationship
with Tahiti than I think is often acknowledged.
Female: I just love the idea of Gauguin
kind of going off to Tahiti with this idea
that he would be finding an untouched civilization
and people living freely and naturally without
what he saw as sort of the ruining
influence of modern society, and he got there
and it was much more developed
and a tourist center, and that wasn't at all the case.
Then he sort of painted it that way anyway!
Male: That's true, and yes, he does paint it that way,
but at the same time, this is in many ways
a traditional French painting of a nude.
He's really sort of creating our expectations
of a primitive society.
It's been roughly handled.
The colors evoke a sense of a pre-industrial culture.
There's some very radical ways in which he handles paint.
But at the same time, we have a full-length
nude reaching across the canvas up on her hip,
which in some ways is not so distinct
from the ways that nudes have been handled
in the Academy for many years.
Female: Right, but it's not a Venus.
Male: No.
Female: I do think there's something
kind of ambiguous about the way the nude
is portrayed, though, which may
have something to do with that.
Typically, in your Academic nudes,
the woman is very much kind of laid out
for the viewer's pleasure.
You can look at her and she's fairly passive,
and she's fairly exposed.
This woman, certainly with her face,
is given a bit more independent presence.
She has this sidelong glance, perhaps
looking back at the people in the background,
whether they're talking about her or not.
There's a way that her right arm comes
in front of her chest that suggests
a kind of protecting of her body
and the way that her left hand comes
up about her face that draws our eye up
to her head and her sense of her presence
and independence in a way that is different
than a kind of just the flirtatious typical
nude that would have been in the Academy.
Male: It's true.
In those cases you would not be able
to read into her at all.
Here, she has clear intention.
She's thinking and we can see her thinking.
We can see her reacting.
Female: And her head, the contrast with
that bright yellow of the pillow
right behind her head, too, I think
makes that a spot in the whole painting
that really draws your attention very strongly;
more than, perhaps, other parts of her body
which are contrasted against other dark areas of paint.
Male: There's really an interest in contour
and a very, very strong, very dark contour,
so much so that her left leg almost seems
like an independent unit
that's sort of been placed against her body.
Female: Look at all those curves;
of the bed-frame or headboard in the back
of the furniture that she's lying on,
the curve of her back,
the arabesques on the wallpaper.
There's a lot of flattening, decorative forms
that I think for Gauguin are an effort
to remove the figure from an everyday world
and place her more in a dreamlike space.
When you mentioned the yellow, that very bright yellow,
almost citron yellow, that her head is on,
it made me think that maybe what we're seeing
is her dream, is her imaginings on this bed;
not that we're looking at a real scene
of a woman on a bed, but a kind of imaginary space.
Male: You'll notice that that yellow shows up
only again in the clouds, so I think
there's something to what you're saying.
At her feet there's a red that shows up
again in the trees in the background.
Actually, that little bit of a trace of a landscape
that we see through the window
and through the doorway,
does feel very much almost like
an illustration for a children's book.
It feels very much like a fantasy, like a dream.
Female: It does have a very dreamlike quality.
I think this bird, this raven, which we assume
is connected to the title of the painting,
Nevermore, from the Edgar Allan Poe poem,
that bird is kind of done the same way.
There's a very flattened, decorative,
sort of dreamlike quality to the bird as well,
almost as though it's kind of one of the pieces
of patterning in the wall decoration in the background.
Male: There's something really psychological here,
something very emotive, and something that seem to be
getting at a kind of reality that is below the surface,
that sort of pulls away our expectations
and pulls away even what's visible to us
and seems to just try to evoke
a kind of internal emotional state.
Female: Exactly; and her emotional state.
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