Exhibition: Gaugin: Maker Of Myth, Tate Modern

Exquisite exhibition for ghastly Gauguin. For whatever the legacy of works, his bold colours and startling "primitivism", the Frenchman's influence on masters such as Van Gogh and Picasso, Paul Gauguin leaves me cold. His works are flat, showy press releases proclaiming little more than the grandeur of the artist.

A clue is found in his method of operations. Whereas the French impressionists he rejected would paint direct from nature, driven by unmediated urgency, Gauguin would work from a studio where, free from sensation, he would plaster on a layer of meaning and significance direct from the same calculating part of his brain that was busy brewing the back-story of his own mythology.

"A great artist and I know it," he said.

A series of four self-portraits in this immense exhibition is telling. The first (1876) he is naïve and mellow. The last sees him soft and disappointed, near the point of death (1903).

The two in the middle, though, are arch and knowing, as if, from the canvas, he winks at his viewers and murmurs - have you figured out what I'm up to?

At the outset he painted works such as The Little One Dreaming (1881) a touching little birthday card rendition of his daughter asleep. But he left such unaffected daubs behind.

Later, he was forever interfering, adding bits and pieces, determined to show that his guiding intelligence was in charge, not the muse, Mother Nature or any other inspiration that could share top billing.

He was not a conduit, he was the entire process, he seemed to say.

He went to Tahiti in search of untouched paradise but found the islands and their people westernised and Christian.

So, undeterred, he imposed his own ideal, recreating the lost myths or, failing that, translating Christian iconography into a Polynesian setting (Nativity 1896). Where there was an absence of story, he invented one. An MO he had employed most zealously upon himself.

There's no doubt Gauguin was hugely influential. No doubt he found a voice through primitivism and some remarkable colours but I find his paintings entirely without beauty.

Yes, occasionally there is harmony but that is despite himself and, whenever anything threatens his supremacy, he quickly looks to add the jarring tics that reassert his authority.

This vast blockbuster exhibition provides evidence for every shade of opinion on the man and his work. It is masterly in its documentation of the artist's intellectual imperative and self mythologising, placing Gauguin on the highest of pedestals.

He would have loved that.

– From October 2010