(jazzy music) Female: We're standing here
in the Courtauld Gallery in front of Paul Gauguin's
Nevermore from 1897. Male: This is one of the paintings that really lives up to our
expectations of Gauguin, the classic story that
he goes off to Tahiti. This was painted during
his his second trip. He's got a much more complex relationship with Tahiti than I think
is often acknowledged. Female: I just love the idea of Gauguin kind of going off to Tahiti with this idea that he would be finding
an untouched civilization and people living freely
and naturally without what he saw as sort of the ruining influence of modern
society, and he got there and it was much more developed and a tourist center, and
that wasn't at all the case. Then he sort of painted
it that way anyway! Male: That's true, and yes,
he does paint it that way, but at the same time, this is in many ways a traditional French painting of a nude. He's really sort of
creating our expectations of a primitive society. It's been roughly handled. The colors evoke a sense of
a pre-industrial culture. There's some very radical ways
in which he handles paint. But at the same time,
we have a full-length nude reaching across the
canvas up on her hip, which in some ways is not so distinct from the ways that nudes have been handled in the Academy for many years. Female: Right, but it's not a Venus. Male: No. Female: I do think there's something kind of ambiguous about the way the nude is portrayed, though, which may have something to do with that. Typically, in your Academic nudes, the woman is very much kind of laid out for the viewer's pleasure. You can look at her and
she's fairly passive, and she's fairly exposed. This woman, certainly with her face, is given a bit more independent presence. She has this sidelong glance, perhaps looking back at the
people in the background, whether they're talking about her or not. There's a way that her right arm comes in front of her chest that suggests a kind of protecting of her body and the way that her left hand comes up about her face that draws our eye up to her head and her sense of her presence and independence in a
way that is different than a kind of just
the flirtatious typical nude that would have been in the Academy. Male: It's true. In those cases you would not be able to read into her at all. Here, she has clear intention. She's thinking and we
can see her thinking. We can see her reacting. Female: And her head, the contrast with that bright yellow of the pillow right behind her head, too, I think makes that a spot in the whole painting that really draws your
attention very strongly; more than, perhaps,
other parts of her body which are contrasted against
other dark areas of paint. Male: There's really
an interest in contour and a very, very strong,
very dark contour, so much so that her left leg almost seems like an independent unit that's sort of been
placed against her body. Female: Look at all those curves; of the bed-frame or headboard in the back of the furniture that she's lying on, the curve of her back, the arabesques on the wallpaper. There's a lot of
flattening, decorative forms that I think for Gauguin are an effort to remove the figure
from an everyday world and place her more in a dreamlike space. When you mentioned the yellow,
that very bright yellow, almost citron yellow, that her head is on, it made me think that
maybe what we're seeing is her dream, is her
imaginings on this bed; not that we're looking at a real scene of a woman on a bed, but
a kind of imaginary space. Male: You'll notice that
that yellow shows up only again in the clouds, so I think there's something to what you're saying. At her feet there's a red that shows up again in the trees in the background. Actually, that little bit
of a trace of a landscape that we see through the window and through the doorway, does feel very much almost like an illustration for a children's book. It feels very much like
a fantasy, like a dream. Female: It does have a
very dreamlike quality. I think this bird, this
raven, which we assume is connected to the title of the painting, Nevermore, from the Edgar Allan Poe poem, that bird is kind of done the same way. There's a very flattened, decorative, sort of dreamlike quality
to the bird as well, almost as though it's
kind of one of the pieces of patterning in the wall
decoration in the background. Male: There's something
really psychological here, something very emotive, and
something that seem to be getting at a kind of reality
that is below the surface, that sort of pulls away our expectations and pulls away even what's visible to us and seems to just try to evoke a kind of internal emotional state. Female: Exactly; and her emotional state. (jazzy music)