The Beauty Contest: London. Tate Modern. Gauguin

London. First lecture of my scholarship at the City University
and last week of Guiguin's exhibition at Tate Modern
I'm rushing at 3 pm
but tickets are available only since 5, and Tate closes at 6
So, I decide. I'll be a Tate member
When I enter the first room, an old man says: "Welcome as a member"

From the presentation ... a visual (http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/624873206001)

This exhibition takes a fresh look at the work of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) by focusing on myth, storytelling and the construction of narrative in his life and art. Gauguin began his career as an Impressionist, but while his fellow artists used painting to capture their fleeting glimpses of the physical world, he argued that art should go beyond material appearances. He developed a radically simplified visual language, cutting through superfluous detail in order to explore complex ideas and construct poetic meaning. His work drew upon and synthesised a wide variety of visual and literary sources, including non-western art forms, classical sculpture, popular prints and caricatures as well as philosophical and anthropological texts, ancient myths and the Bible. His travels to the remote corners of the globe became the stuff of shrewdly cultivated legend, but Gauguin was also deeply immersed in the critical debates and social networks of avant-garde Paris. As well as the construction of visual narratives, the exhibition looks at his activities as a writer and journalist, and the ways in which he developed his public reputation and fostered discussion of his work. Rather than following a strictly chronological sequence, Gauguin: Maker of Myth is organised according to thematic sections that emphasise the parallels between different stages in his career. Bringing together works made in Paris, Martinique, Brittany, Tahiti and the Marquesas, it traces motifs and ideas as they are revisited and deepened in objects and images that he produced years and many thousands of miles apart.

The rooms are 9 (plus two devoted to his life)

Identity and Self Mythology
Making the Familiar Strange
Gauguin's Drawings
Landscape and Rural Narrative
Sacred Themes
The Eternal Feminine
Gauguin's Titles
Teller of Tales
Earthly Paradise

Identity and Self Mythology

Gauguin's self-portraits were a vital tool for the fashioning and refashioning of his identity. From bourgeois banker and family man to bohemian martyr and the notorious 'savage' of his later years, his shifting persona was a source of puzzlement and speculation for his contemporaries. These diverse guises can be seen as the careful crafting of a public image, but they also reflect a multiplicity of attempts to see and understand himself.The earliest work in this room shows him in his late twenties, wearing the soft black fez associated with bohemian artists and intellectuals. This was several years after his marriage to a young Danish woman, Mette Gad, and he was working as a stockbroker in Paris while pursuing painting as a hobby. Another self-portrait, made almost ten years later, shows him at his easel, attempting to establish himself as a full-time artist. The sloped beams of an attic room testify to his more constrained financial circumstances, as well as playing on the familiar image of the struggling artist in his garret. Rather than endure poverty in Paris, the family moved to Rouen and then to Copenhagen, where this self-portrait was made. Gauguin worked as a tarpaulin salesman but struggled to earn a living. After a few months, he returned to France, while Mette stayed on. They barely saw each other again Although he seems not to have painted any self-portraits during his first visit to Tahiti in 1891-3, several that he made back in Paris promote his image as the artist who had ventured to the far side of the world and 'gone native'. In one he identifies himself with his painting Manao tupapau 1892, which is also on display in this room. Another sets his thoughtful features alongside one of his own carved 'tikis' – a wooden idol based on Oceanic artefacts. His last painted self-portrait was made in 1903. By now he had returned to the South Seas and was living in the Marquesas, isolated and in ill health. His close cropped hair and white tunic suggest the appearance of an invalid, while the glasses convey an introspective quality. Yet even as he was constructing this image of vulnerable mortality, Gauguin was vigorously engaged in protracted battles with the colonial authorities.

Making the Familiar Strange

In Gauguin's hands, the still life is rarely straightforward. He disrupts the viewer's expectations or introduces a human presence – either directly, such as the girl peering at the edge of Still Life with Fruit 1888, or through a significant object – that alters our sense of what we are looking at. Several of these interior scenes represent a guarded reflection on aspects of domestic life, with hidden dramas played out through detail and allusion. The works of art that appear in the background of some early works may have been intended to emphasise his artistic vocation – increasingly a source of tension between Mette and himself. Inside the Painter's House, rue Carcel 1881 depicts their home in Montparnasse at the height of their family prosperity, not long before a stock market crash persuaded Gauguin to finally abandon his career in finance and become a full-time artist. Another glimpse of domestic life is provided by the portraits of Clovis and Aline sleeping, in which Gauguin seems to enter his children's imaginations. In The Little One is Dreaming, Study 1881 for example, the images of birds on the wallpaper, a jester doll and a musical inscription could allude to the dreams passing through the child's sleep as much as they record naturalistic detail. A number of paintings include objects crafted by Gauguin himself, appearing like a token of his own presence. Woodcarving had been a pastime of Gauguin's since childhood, and he continued to fashion objects or small sculptures throughout his life. He took up ceramics in the winter of 1886–7, working with the leading ceramicist Ernest Chaplet, and produced an inventive series of pots and clay sculptures. At a time when he was still struggling to develop his own distinctive style in painting, such works – influenced by pre-Colombian pottery – represented a significant assertion of his imaginative powers. This room also includes a cluster of works relating to Gauguin's friend Meijer de Haan. Gauguin became a mentor to the Dutch artist, and the two men shared studio and lodgings in Brittany. De Haan's distinctive features went on to appear in several of Gauguin's paintings, possibly functioning as a kind of alter ego.

Gauguin's Drawings

"A critic at my house… asks to see my drawings. My drawings! Never! They are my letters, my secrets." (Avant et après, 1903) While the Impressionists were associated with painting outdoors, transferring their visual sensations directly onto the canvas, Gauguin preferred to work in the studio, allowing imagination and a guiding intelligence to shape the composition. Nonetheless, direct observation – particularly of the human figure – was a crucial element in his creative process. Wherever he travelled drawing was a way to assimilate his surroundings, and he made numerous sketches of faces, bodies, postures, clothing, animals and plants that would be incorporated – sometimes repeatedly – into paintings. He wrote to a friend from Tahiti describing the content of his sketchbooks as 'a lot of research which can bear fruit, many documents that I hope will be useful for a long time in France'. Gauguin developed his own highly simplified, synthetic style of drawing, influenced by the powerful draughtsmanship of Edgar Degas, the incisive line of French caricaturists such as Honoré Daumier and Jean-Louis Forain, and the freedom of the Japanese artist Hokusai. His drawings emphasise contour and dispense with what he considered redundant analytical detail. When teaching drawing, as he did for a short time in a studio in Montparnasse, he paid less attention to correctness than to lapses of art or good taste. Technique, he claimed, developed with practice, all the quicker if one concentrated on something else.

The Loss of Virginity, 1890-91 (see the visual http://bcove.me/cq05sgde)