GAUGUIN ON SCREEN

John A. Walker (copyright 2010)

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) achieved fame because of the opulent colours, decorative

beauty and enigmatic symbolism of his post-impressionist canvases and because of

his lurid biography - his late start as a painter, his financial and marital problems,

his egotistical and virile personality, and his supposed rejection of European

civilisation in favour the exotic, 'primitive' society of Oceania. Today, the name

'Gauguin' conjures up a whole cluster of legends and myths, many of which the

artist himself originated or endorsed.

Left Kirk Douglas as van Gogh. Right Anthony Quinn as Gauguin in Lust for Life.

A tense moment in the Yellow House in Arles.

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Gauguin is also famous for his friendship with Vincent van Gogh, a relationship

that ended disastrously. (Their 1888 encounter in Arles was depicted in Lust for Life

[1956] , a van Gogh biopic in which Gauguin was played by Hollywood’s all purpose

foreigner Anthony Quinn.) Inevitably, the artist’s career has fascinated novelists,

film and television directors and film stars. Three films will be considered.

The Moon and Sixpence (1942)

Left. Herbert Marshall as Wolfe; right, George Sanders as Strickland in a Parisian

cafe.

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In 1919, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote a fictionalised version of

Gauguin’s life entitled The Moon and Sixpence on which a screenplay by Albert

Lewin (1894-1968) was based. Lewin also directed the film. (The strange title was

derived from a remark about a young man who ‘was so busy yearning for the moon

that he never saw the sixpence at his feet’.) Maugham assembled a substantial art

collection that included one work by Gauguin. He discovered it - Bare-Breasted

Tahitian Woman Holding a Breadfruit, (also known as Eve with Apple) - a painting

on the glass panes of the door of a hut, in 1916, while researching his novel in

Polynesia.

Bare-Breasted Tahitian Woman Holding a Breadfruit;

Philadelphia, USA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, oil on the glass panes of a wooden

door, 100 x 75 cm; signed at bottom right: P G O. Private Collection.

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Maugham never knew Gauguin personally but in Tahiti he spoke to several people

who had and he frequented cafes in the Latin Quarter of Paris listening to anecdotes

about him by artists like Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940), an Irish painter who had

known Gauguin in Brittany and Paris.

The film’s storyline is simple: a 40-year old English stockbroker called Charles

Strickland who has long desired to be a painter deserts his wife and children and

moves to Paris where he does odd jobs but ends up starving and ill in a garret. A

fellow painter and his wife kindly take him into their home but when Strickland

recovers he callously steals his benefactor’s wife. Later, when Strickland abandons

her, she commits suicide. He then travels to Tahiti where he marries a native girl

and has a child. He creates some striking paintings and sculptures but becomes

blind and then dies from leprosy. Following Strickland’s orders, his wife burns the

hut containing his final large-scale mural and a statue.

The narrative is told indirectly through flashbacks and voice-overs, specifically

through the eyes of a writer called Geoffrey Wolfe (a surrogate for Maugham

himself) played by Herbert Marshall (1890-1966). Wolfe is a priggish character who

is shocked by Strickland’s ruthless rejection of middle-class family values. Hence,

Wolfe represents the category of moderate artists who are integrated into society as

against bohemian rebels like Gauguin. The latter is played by George Sanders

(1906-1972), an English actor who specialised in depicting hard-hearted, insolent

scoundrels. Sanders is persuasive as a person who cares about nothing except his

need to make art. We are told repeatedly that he is a genius but the evidence for this

is sparse. What is very implausible about him as an artist is that he has no desire to

exhibit or sell his work and is content for his supreme achievements to be consigned

to the flames after his death. The real Gauguin certainly did not share such lofty,

impractical attitudes; indeed, all his career moves were carefully calculated.

What feminists will find offensive about Strickland’s character is his caddish

behaviour towards, and misogynist opinions of, women. One advertisement for the

movie repeated these words of wisdom from Strickland: ‘Women are strange little

beasts! You can beat them like dogs … beat them to your arms ache … and still they

love you … But in the end they’ll get you and you are helpless in their hands.’

Actually, the only woman who ‘gets’ Strickland is the Tahitian girl Ata, played by

Elena Verdugo, because he becomes fond of her. No wonder - she is young and

sexually attractive, a devoted slave who regards beatings as a sign of love, and who

never complains about his obsession with art. The Hays Office, Hollywood’s

morality guardian insisted on a postscript warning cinemagoers not to value art

above life. Part of it reads: ‘Neither the skill of his brush, nor the beauty of his

canvas, can hide the ugliness of his life, an ugliness which finally destroyed him.’

While the film was in preparation Gauguin’s eldest son Emil (1874-1955), who was

then an engineer living in Philadelphia, learned about it and forbade the use of any

images of his father’s paintings and sculptures because he did not want his father to

be associated with such a disreputable fictional figure. Strickland’s paintings and

sculptures, therefore, had to be invented. One artist commissioned to produce what

turned out to be crude Gauguin-like pastiches was Dolya Goutman (1915-2001), a

Russian-born expressionist painter who came to the United States in 1931. Inspired

by Gauguin’s monumental canvas Where do we come from? What are we? Where are

we going? (1897), Goutman simulated a Gauguinesque mural featuring figures with

emphatic outlines and tube-like bodies.

Dolya Goutman, Simulated Gauguin used in the film. (1942) Photo source Time

Life.

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At the end of the film a phallic, primitivistic carved idol is consumed by flames as a

final reminder of Strickland’s virility. The sculptor responsible for it was an

Icelandic figurative artist called Nina Saemundsson (1892-1965) who had created

public sculptures in New York and Los Angeles during the 1930s. The film was shot

in black-and-white except for the last reel that was tinted various hues. Two-colour

Technicolor was reserved for the climatic view of the mural and the fire scene.

Lewin’s film must have pleased Maugham because he attended its world premiere

in Edgartown in the autumn of 1942 and even delivered a speech. Although the

principal actors perform well, The Moon and Sixpence is a tedious film with low

production values that lacks drama and fails to illuminate the nature of Gauguin’s

art.

The Wolf at the Door (1986)

Since Gauguin's wife Mette was Danish, the Danes have a special reason to be

interested in him. Henning Carlsen (born Aalborg, 1927) , the Danish producer-

director of The Wolf at the Door has explained that Gauguin had a poor reputation

in his country because abandoned his wife and five children in order to fulfil his

artistic calling. Carlsen's motivation for making a movie about Gauguin seems to

have been, therefore, a desire to present a more rounded portrait of the man; he

realised Gauguin was no saint, but he wanted to explain the reasons for his

unconventional behaviour. However, the film is unlikely to rehabilitate Gauguin in

the eyes of the Danes because the artist is permitted to describe Denmark as 'that

abominable little country'.

The Wolf at the Door, an Eastmancolour feature film was the result of an

international effort. A team of European film-makers collaborated with a leading

Canadian star - Donald Sutherland (b. 1934) - and a major Swedish star - Max von

Sydow. Christopher Hampton, a British theatre and television dramatist, wrote the

English-language screenplay; it was based on a scenario by Carlsen and Jean-

Claude Carriere which in turn made full use of the detailed biographies and vast

quantity of art-historical literature about Gauguin. Carlsen is a film-maker who is

fascinated by the plight of the radical modern artist in capitalist, bourgeois society.

Sutherland the 6' 4" star of the film, looks like Gauguin and convincingly evokes

the man's swagger and confidence in his artistic talent.

Donald Sutherland as Gauguin in The Wolf at the Door. Publicity still.

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The real Gauguin. Circa 1891. Photographer unknown.

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During the title sequence we are shown a number of Gauguin's famous paintings,

otherwise the film contains the usual mixture of real works, mediocre copies and

half-completed works created by 'special effects', that is, Francois Marcepoil and

Karl-Otto Hedal. The sets and costumes based on old photographs and

contemporary descriptions are more successful reproductions.

Carlsen's film focuses upon one short period of Gauguin's life, namely, the two

years from August 1893 to July 1895 which he spent in Paris and Brittany. He had

been to Tahiti and arrived back in France penniless but with a pile of canvases and

woodcarvings. Some of the first scenes of the film - dramatic ones - concern the

exhibition Gauguin held at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in Paris in November 1893.

Gauguin had hoped this show would mark a triumphant return to Europe. There is

a hostile public response and the critical reception is mixed. Only a quarter of the

paintings are sold, though one is bought by Edgar Degas. 'Gauguin', Degas remarks,

'paints like a wolf'. At the end of the film, having held an auction of his work which

raises even less money, Gauguin departs again for the tropics never to return. So a

central theme of the film is Gauguin's settling of accounts with European society.

Gauguin - the ex-stockbroker - came to believe that Europe was a decadent

civilisation, a corrupt, materialistic society obsessed with gold, but he too was a

European obsessed with money. Carlsen makes it clear that although Gauguin

travelled far from Europe, he could not escape it. His writer friend August

Strindberg - the part played by von Sydow - twice tells him so. There is one scene

designed to make clear Gauguin's critical attitude towards French colonialism: he

visits an official of the French Government to denounce the cruelty and corruption

of the colonists. Gauguin fled Europe to escape it but of course he took it with him,

and since some of the South Sea islands were French possessions, European

'civilisation' awaited him at the end of the voyage. Even if he had found an unspoilt

native culture and painted it, the market for 'primitivism' was in Paris not Tahiti.

The film shows that Gauguin was highly critical of the colonising process, that he

blamed it for ruining the Eden-like paradise, the simplicity and innocence he had

gone in search of in order to rejuvenate himself and art, but it doesn't quite bring

out the extent to which he too was part of the same process of exploitation,

domination and destruction. Gauguin made sexual use of the young women of the

islands just like any other lusty, male colonist. He appreciated and valued the

ancient, pagan culture of the islanders but he also appropriated it for his own

purposes.

Another major theme of the film is Gauguin's relationships with the opposite sex.

Scenes set in Denmark introduce us to his estranged wife Mette, played by Merete

Voldstedlund. Meanwhile, in Paris, Gauguin resumes sexual relations with his

mistress Juliette Huet - played by Fanny Bastien - who works as a seamstress to

support his bastard child.

Valerie Moréa as Annah and Sofie Grabol as Judith Molard. Publicity stills.

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Gauguin also has a flirtatious, erotic relationship with a fourteen year old Swedish

girl, Judith Molard, who is the daughter of a composer and sculptress who live in

the studio below Gauguin's. Sofie Grabol gives an assured, sensual performance as

Judith. After learning that Gauguin's 'wife' in Tahiti was only thirteen years old,

Judith develops a crush on Gauguin and poses for him in the nude. She wants him

to make love to her but in the end Gauguin refrains because the girl reminds him

too much of his favourite daughter Aline. Their relationship, therefore, has

overtones of paedophilia and incest.

Gauguin acquires from the art dealer Vollard a thirteen year old half caste from

Java called Annah - played by Valerie Moréa - whom he sleeps with and employs as

a model. She has to suffer the indignity of being called 'nigger' by the French, but

eventually she adopts European ways and deserts Gauguin after slashing one of his

paintings and stealing his money. The wittiest moment in the film occurs while

Gauguin is painting the well known study of Annah sitting naked in a blue chair

with a red monkey at her feet (Annah the Javanese, 1893-4): as the artist stares at

her brown flesh the film cuts to a close up of a tube of pigment being squeezed out

on to a palette; painting is thus equated with ejaculation. Finally, we see Gauguin

picking up a street prostitute. The film is less than frank at this point: it does not

explain that Gauguin acquired syphilis at this time, the disease that eventually

contributed to his death.

Gauguin has a perennial appeal because he fulfilled the daydream of freedom

shared by millions of men tied down by routine jobs and family responsibilities. The

dream of escape to a sunlight world of easy living and free love. At one point in the

film Gauguin compares himself to a wolf who prefers to starve to death rather than

submit to wearing a collar like a dog (the source is one of La Fontaine's fables). This

absurd, romantic notion is not questioned by the film (an artist who starves to death

will cease to make art, an artist totally divorced from society has no public or

patrons), but it does imply the ideology of freedom without responsibility has

negative consequences for the freedoms of others: the women left to bring up

children alone, the children left without a father. Bourgeois society is seen by

Gauguin as a cage or prison that restricts the artist's freedom rather than as the

very thing that makes fine art possible in the first place. Paradoxically, the radical

modern artists of the nineteenth century wanted to rebel against the conventions of

art and society and at the same time to be celebrated and financially rewarded by

that society.

The Wolf at the Door does not present a feminist critique of Gauguin's sexual

behaviour - a film made from Mette's point of view would be enlightening - but at

least the women in the film are not pathetic victims: Mette is bitter but she obtains

as much money as she can from the sale of the Gauguins in her possession. Juliette,

his ex-mistress, tries to be independent but in order to satisfy her own sexual needs,

she tolerates his fecklessness. Annah becomes disillusioned with Gauguin but she

exacts her revenge by stealing from him. Judith pursues Gauguin of her own

volition.

The film contains no footage of the tropics, though they are represented by the

paintings and carvings Gauguin has brought back with him. His explanations of the

meanings of their Tahitian titles and iconography are unconvincing; nor does the

script acknowledge that most of Gauguin's knowledge about Tahitian mythology

was derived not from the Polynesians themselves (after all, they had been

Christianised) but from an ethnographic book by Jacques Moerenhout published in

1837. Also, many of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings were based on European styles

and compositions (some were even based on photographs), so they were a synthesis

of European and Polynesian cultures. In fact, Gauguin borrowed from many

ancient cultures. Achieving a synthesis of the world's cultures might be considered

the central purpose of Gauguin's project.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's Paris - the grand boulevards, lively dance halls and

brothels - is also absent from the film. The action is mainly set in a quiet backwater

of the city, the courtyard and wooden studio complex in the Rue Vercingétorix,

Montparnasse. This is a bohemian enclave where artists and composers live, work

and relax by holding discussions, poetry readings and parties once a week on

Thursdays. Nothing is shown either of the political context: in Paris at that time

anarchists were throwing bombs and the Dreyfus case was underway.

There are some outdoor scenes set in Brittany and Denmark but mostly the action

takes place indoors in studios, cafés, galleries and auction houses. In the main, the

film consists of brief scenes that are shot and edited in a naturalistic style. Lamp-lit

interior scenes resemble paintings by nineteenth century Salon painters like Henri

Fantin-Latour rather than Gauguin's flatter, more abstracted compositions. Carlsen

did not question the assumption that the past can be faithfully reconstructed by the

cinema. (Some kind of contemporary commentary or cinematic meta-discourse was

surely needed to disrupt the historical, costume drama flavour of the film.)

Carlsen's use of dark interiors and bursts of doom-laden music gives the film a

brooding, melancholy atmosphere. Gauguin works sporadically and takes steps to

further his career but luck seems to be against him: he fractures his leg in a fight

with sailors in Brittany (however, the time and money consuming legal proceedings

that followed are not depicted); the final auction sale raises far less money than he

needs; the dealer Ambrose Vollard will not agree to send him a regular monthly

allowance in exchange for all of Gauguin's work; at the last minute his male friends

renege on their agreement to accompany him to the tropics to found an artists'

colony; in short, his fate seems determined by malevolent forces beyond his control.

He decides to return to Oceania because he ‘might as well starve in the tropics as in

France' and because he has to keep up the image of the artist who has renounced

civilisation for barbarism. As Vollard observes, people are confused to find Gauguin

in Paris; his presence there undermines the legend he has created.

The title The Wolf at the Door could be taken to mean poverty. The film has also

been distributed in some territories with the title Oviri, a Tahitian term for 'the wild

or savage one'. Despite having Donald Sutherland as its principal actor, The Wolf at

the Door remains an obscure film. Carlsen reports that the foreign distributor of

the film went bankrupt, so it appears that even modern film-makers experience a

hostile environment and are the victims of economic forces.

Paradise Found (2003)

Kiefer Sutherland is a major American movie and television star even though he

was born in London in 1966 and raised in Canada. Since he is the son of Donald

Sutherland, he has benefited from having a famous father (unlike Emil Gauguin

who once claimed that having a famous father was ‘a curse’). Remarkably, both

Donald and Kiefer have played the role of Gauguin in films. Donald appeared in

The Wolf at the Door and Kiefer starred in the Australian-French-German-UK co-

production Paradise Found in 2003.

Kiefer Sutherland as Gauguin. Publicity still.

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For the role, Kiefer grew a beard, wore his hair long and prepared by reading

biographies of Gauguin, viewing his father’s film and talking to some contemporary

painters about Gauguin’s significance and legacy. Also starring as Gauguin’s

Danish wife Mette was the German-born actress Natassja Kinski. Mette and Paul

were married in 1873 and had five children. (Paul had several other children by his

mistresses in Paris and Polynesia.) Two other famous nineteenth-century artists

were featured: Camille Pissarro, played by Alun Armstrong, and Vincent van Gogh,

played and Peter Varga.

During 2001, Paradise Found (the title is a play on Milton’s famous poem Paradise

Lost but the film should really have been entitled Paradise Invented) was shot near

Port Douglas, North East Queensland, a tropical setting that stood in for Polynesia

and in Prague, a city that substituted for Paris. It was premiered in 2003, the year

that marked the centenary of Gauguin’s death. This film did not have a cinema

release – it appeared on various television channels and on DVD. The screenplay

was by John Goldsmith (b. 1947), an experienced British novelist and writer for film

and television, and the producer/director was the Australian Mario Andreacchio (b.

1955). The plot of this partial biopic concerns episodes in Gauguin’s married life in

Paris, Rouen and Copenhagen during the 1870s and 1880s - when he was torn

between the need to provide for his wife and children, and a desire to paint - and in

the South Seas during the early 1890s after he has failed to make a living in

Denmark as a sales representative.

Early scenes in Paris portray Gauguin as a loving husband and father, a successful

stockbroker, art collector and amateur painter who enjoys a high standard of living.

He meets Pissarro, buys one of his landscapes and is flattered when Pissarro says

that Gauguin has natural talent as a painter. Gauguin gives up his job in order to

become a painter and the family soon slides into poverty. The film endorses Mette’s

opinion that Paul acted selfishly and irresponsibly. It does not explain that one

reason he switched from commerce to art was the stock market crash of 1882. His

decision to take up a career as a painter, therefore, was a rational one that in the

long term proved to be sensible because, eventually, his wife and children did

benefit from the sales of his collection and his own art. We see Gauguin in Paris

again in 1893 when he returns from Polynesia to mount an exhibition of his exotic

canvases. At the opening, the public responds with derisive laughter and even his

friend Pissarro finds the paintings’ non-naturalistic colours and strange symbolism

incomprehensible. Gauguin briefly explains the meaning of one canvas but his

speech is too glib to be persuasive. Since the exhibition is not the financial success

that Gauguin had hoped, he has to return to Polynesia in order to maintain the

myth of the artist-as-savage at odds with the decadent culture of Europe.

Omitted from the narrative are the periods Gauguin created art in Brittany in 1886,

1888 and 1894, in Panama and Martinique in 1887, and in Provence with van Gogh

in 1888. In order to dramatise and compress events, the filmmakers take many

liberties with the facts. Nor does the film depict the final years he spent in Polynesia

from 1895 to 1903 apart from a coda in which he executes the famous mural-size

canvas Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? The film,

therefore, ends on an upbeat note and avoids the painful details of Gauguin’s

illnesses, which included heart problems and syphilis, and the sores on his legs for

which he had to inject morphine daily.

Unusually, the film acknowledges that Gauguin was politically active in Polynesia:

in letters and satirical journals he attacked the French colonial rulers and the

Christian missionaries who were oppressing the indigenous population and

destroying their traditional way of life and their material culture, which Gauguin

particularly valued. The filmmakers dramatise this incident by having Gauguin

witness the burning of a stone idol. Father Maurrin (played by Nicholas Hope), a

fanatical Catholic priest, orders its destruction. (The character of Maurrin appears

to be based on Father Michel Bechu, a local priest with whom Gauguin came into

conflict.) In retaliation, Gauguin sets fire to a crucifix. Gendarmes arrest him, throw

him in jail and beat him up. (The real Gauguin did receive a jail sentence of three

months for libel, which actually occurred in 1903, but died before he could serve it.)

The narrative is presented in a non-linear fashion by alternating between Europe

and Oceania, and anyone unfamiliar with the chronology of Gauguin’s life may find

it confusing. Sutherland acts to the best of his ability, but the demands of the role

expose his limitations. The film is also lacklustre due to a pedestrian screenplay and

a tendency to over-exaggerate what is already a dramatic story. At times, we see

Gauguin painting but learn little about his ideas and techniques. Since no museums

possessing Gauguins are credited, one must conclude all the works depicted are

copies. Few film critics bothered to review Paradise Found and most who did

expressed disappointment.

Reluctantly one must conclude that, despite several attempts, filmmakers have so

far failed to do justice to the life and art of the so-called ‘noble savage’.

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John A. Walker is a British painter and art historian. He is the author of Art and

Artists on Screen and Art and Celebrity.