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Impoverished, isolated, and unappreciated during his lifetime, Paul Gauguin was not the happiest of men. In fact, it took the ultra-tragic life of his painting buddy Van Gogh to make him feel better about his own existence, according to this lush 1988 documentary. Against the backdrop of Gauguin's arresting paintings (and footage of the South Sea Islands that inspired them), narrator Kathryn Walker describes Gauguin's transformation from bourgeois banker and family man to proto-hippie painter in Tahiti and, later, the exceptionally remote island of Hivaoa in the Marquesas. His urge to explore primitive cultures in a primitive style drove him to give up everything: his possessions, his family, and his health. In return, he got the chance to paint--and the 13-year- old Tahitian concubine he immortalized on many a canvas. But his work was considered incomprehensible while he was alive, and actor Donald Sutherland exudes Gauguin's bafflement and frustration as he reads the artist's own words throughout this 44-minute biography. Sutherland played Gauguin in the 1986 French film
Oviri and his authority shows, sweeping this mesmerizing story to its unfortunate conclusion. For art lovers, of course, Gauguin's posthumous story has a much better ending.
--Kimberly Heinrichs
Product Description
Gauguin's obsessive search for a "savage" alternative to his own culture led him to one of the most remote islands in the world, 4,000 miles off the coast of Peru. Shot on location in Tahiti and the Marquesas,
Paul Gauguin: The Savage Dream focuses on the painter's final years and his monumental artistic achievements during that period.
