The direction of all of Gauguin’s portraiture is toward mythology.
He is creating not merely their image,
but a whole symbolic context in which to understand them.
So, yes they are individual people,
but Gauguin also wanted them to be seen as
representative of the culture which he was exploring.
There’s all these many, many layers of meaning,
these many different media: sculpture, writing, pottery.
All these things so that one can really see how multifaceted Gauguin's work really is.
For any artist, themselves they are their cheapest and most constant model,
they’re always available,
and so he began by painting himself often,
but then he realised that he could experiment with himself.
He could try on new guises, he could put himself in relation to other objects
and see where that took him in defining his own character.
Gauguin was constantly mythologising himself.
I suppose the most frequent allusion he makes is to Christ,
suffering, misunderstood, which was very much how Gauguin saw himself
through much of his career.
The early portraits of members of the family are highly conventio nal.
The portrait of his wife in our exhibition, it could be any society portrait,
but particularly with his children, he began to realise
that he could get at a sort of deeper psychological reading of them.
There is one portrait of his young son, Clovis, with very long blonde hair,
you would think it was a girl, but no, it’s Clovis asleep on a tabletop.
The wallpaper on the wall behind him is like a fantasy out of a dream.
The other person of course who plays a huge role is Vincent van Gogh.
They stay together in Arles for two months, this period of time,
very intense, very creative, very competitive,
and with the dramatic finale in which Van Gogh cut a part, or maybe his whole ear,
and Gauguin left never to return.
Gauguin, when he’s in the South Seas,
he has friends in Paris send him sunflower seeds, which he grows
and when the sunflowers bloom, he paints a series of big, bold flower still-lifes.
And so 10 years after Van Gogh has died,
sitting in the South Seas, Gauguin is evoking him
by painting a surrogate for Van Gogh, his sunflowers.
All of the people whom Gauguin portrayed were people with whom he had relationships.
The people were very often seen as generic Tahitians,
generic people of the South Seas.
We have begun to understand who these people were,
that they had their own lives.
By understanding that, it expands
our definition of portraiture in his work,
and I think one of the things this exhibition is doing is
really to insist on the individuality of these people.
I think of Gauguin as a 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.
It means that he’s still very much alive for us.