Gauguin : A Dangerous Life

Paul Gauguin is one of the world’s most popular – and controversial – artists. Instantly recognisable, his paintings are in galleries across the globe and have been adored for their colourful beauty, the most famous celebrating serenely exotic women and landscapes of the Pacific Islands at a time when few could travel there. But Gauguin also led a life that was shocking, then and now. Committing himself utterly to his art and proudly proclaiming himself a savage due to his mother’s Peruvian roots, he left his wife and five children in France to search for a mythic paradise in the South Seas – and ‘married’ adolescent indigenous girls the age of his daughters; he manipulated his image with his friends and the art world and died, impoverished and alone, on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in 1903. He was of his time and also a completely singular, brilliant, ruthless, self-aggrandising but also selfpunishing artist. In recent years Gauguin’s life and his works have come under intense and often angry reassessment. With the rise of feminism, colonial studies and recognition of indigenous rights, this is the first film about the artist to view him afresh and ask the essential and fundamental questions about Gauguin’s role in perpetuating the prejudices and myths which have until now ruled much of our lives.