Peter Doig: ‘I’m looking at Gauguin’s paintings, not trying to imagine what he got up to’
Amid a vast, wintry landscape, a solitary figure with a pair of orange skies strapped to his rucksack is standing on an icy ridge, dressed incongruously as a harlequin. When I first saw this painted scene, at London’s Courtauld Gallery earlier this year, I sensed immediately it was a masterpiece: a melancholic riposte to Romantic art of the sublime; a secular version of the Road to Calvary; a riff on the Modernist tradition of depicting characters in diamond-patterned costumes as artistic alter egos.
And, it seems, I wasn’t alone: a “pictorial phenomenon” is how the art historian Catherine Lampert, co-author of the definitive Rizzoli monograph about its maker, described this formidable, 10ft-high artwork, which feels as immense as the Matterhorn dominating its horizon, while imparting an unsettling message about Western uncertainty.
Yet, when I bring up Alpinist (2019-22) with Peter Doig, the artist who created it, ahead of his new exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, he professes surprise at this reaction. “It was a bit of an oddball,” reveals this devotee of alpine sports, who came to prominence in the 1990s for a series of similarly psychedelic, snowbound scenes, because it was “the only winter painting I started in Trinidad” – the Caribbean island that for two decades (until last year) he called home. Finishing the painting “took a long time … years, actually”, he adds, while he worried that its imagery was “a bit obvious”.
Despite looking like Grant Mitchell’s thickset, hard-man cousin, then, with a shaved skull and hairy arms revealed, on the day we meet, by an orange T-shirt, Doig is, for all his commercial and critical success, openly self-questioning. That could explain why, notwithstanding occasional public appearances (such as a recent turn on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs), this 64-year-old, bespectacled, Scottish accountant’s son, who may be Britain’s most influential living painter, still isn’t a household name.
“I don’t really want to be well-known,” he says at home, a former studio by the Regent’s Canal in east London now filled with large paintings by artists he admires. “I like being anonymous.”
Throughout our conversation, Doig is friendly and polite, but – perhaps he’s tired, since he often paints through the night – he also seems pensive, even wistful. When, for instance, I ask what he makes of the stupefying sums his work can fetch (two years ago, Swamped (1990), a typically eerie, enchanted-seeming early composition, featuring a white canoe against a bejewelled backdrop, sold at auction for almost ￡30 million), he looks like he wants to disappear. “Um, god, yeah … I don’t know,” he finally whispers.
“It’s complicated, because you think you could just make something and sell it – you know, the cliché about doing a drawing and paying for a meal.” Has he ever done that? “No. That wouldn’t be very satisfying.”
Then, there’s his take on the pre-eminence of contemporary painting, about which strangely, given that he’s partially responsible for the phenomenon, he has mixed feelings. When he was starting out, says Doig, who didn’t make a living from art until his forties, “there was no real figurative painting around in the contemporary world”; yet, today, he continues, “it just seems like there’s a glut of painting.” And that’s bad? “I don’t know how excited I get by it,” he replies. “Nothing blows me away.”
If he sounds weary, though, who would blame him? Doig has eight children, including, with his Iranian-born second wife, Parinaz Mogadassi (who runs a gallery in London and New York), two young girls and a boy; simply doing the school run, he tells me, can make him “feel like [I] need to go back to bed”.
Moreover, he is still reeling from a bizarre legal case fought over the past decade, which he describes as “a massive scam”, but which, nevertheless, proved “really nerve-wracking”. It centred upon the claim of a former guard at a Canadian prison who, supported by an art dealer from Chicago, said that he’d bought an early desert landscape directly from the artist when he was an inmate there during the 1970s – something that Doig, who spent his teenage years in Canada, but was never incarcerated, denied.
In the end, Doig won – it turned out the picture was by someone with a similar name (Pete Doige), who died in 2012 – but the affair, he tells me, was “immensely costly”, and he has lost hope of recouping his legal fees, which, he says, have run “well over $4 million”: “I don’t feel anger, but it does seem like I was totally taken advantage of.” He laughs bitterly. “I guess it’s part and parcel of having paintings that have sold for huge amounts of money … It would make a fascinating movie, in the right hands.”
Above all, though, there’s the sad event that prompted his recent move to Britain: the death, towards the end of 2019, just four months after she’d been diagnosed with cancer, of his first wife, Bernadette (Bonnie) Kennedy, from whom he’d separated, after 24 years of marriage, in 2012, but with whom, he says, he’d remained “close”. “It was just one of those terrible, terrible things,” Doig tells me softly. “Quite terrifying.”
Having divided his time, for years, between Trinidad and New York, he decided to return to London, where he’d spent much of the 1980s and ’90s, so that he and his children, several of whom were already living here, “could all be together”. Again, though, he sounds ambivalent: “It wasn’t like we had this desire to move to London, really.” Indeed, “starting from scratch”, he says, in an “empty” studio down the road in Bethnal Green, was “really quite depressing”.
So, is he still pining for Trinidad? Doig sighs before replying: “Um, yes and no. I mean, really, I do miss Trinidad. I feel like I’m a bit stranded, in a way. But … I’m so busy always that [there’s] not much time to think about it.”
His Musée d’Orsay exhibition may only intensify his nostalgia, since the 11 paintings he plans to show inside one of its grand, domed galleries are all linked to the island. In Night Bathers (2010-19), for instance, a blue-skinned woman (“partially based”, Doig says, on Mogadassi) moon-bathes, while wearing a yellow bikini, on a beach as smooth as cream, with surreal pink palm trees in the distance.
Doig will also display a dozen works from the permanent collection – chosen because, he explains, they “remind me of themes and things I’ve dealt with myself.” For instance, The White Horse (1898) by Paul Gauguin should evoke one of his finest creations, Grande Riviere (2001-02), which similarly depicts a pale pony within a lush, mysterious landscape of trees and swampy water.
After moving to Trinidad, a former British colony, Doig was often likened to Gauguin, who also upped sticks for tropical climes (in his case, French Polynesia). A decade ago, when I asked Doig if he ever tired of this comparison, he said it was “a compliment, surely”. Nowadays, though, Gauguin is routinely castigated for having sexually exploited underage Tahitian women, so does he find his work increasingly problematic? “I don’t know if you can reassess his importance,” Doig says quietly, after a long pause. “Yes, you can say that certain aspects of his life were dubious, maybe. [But] I’m looking at the paintings, not trying to imagine what he got up to.”
That said, he continues, “I understand that Gauguin went and he took, and he brought someone else’s culture back. I don’t know if I have done the same thing. I mean, I could always be accused of it.” Yet, he points out, he embedded himself in Trinidadian life, by running a popular film club in his studio, and befriending local artists. He chuckles wryly. “You think I’m defending myself?”
Rather, I wonder about the repercussions of this white-man-in-the-tropics narrative for his career. Why has he never had a big museum show in America? “Oh god,” he says again, before adding slowly, in a low voice: “I’ve got nothing to complain about.” Still, as Mogadassi puts it, “so many curators and museum directors say, ‘Now is not a moment that we’re focusing on white male artists.’”
“I think I’ve done fairly well as a white male artist,” Doig says immediately. Does he recognise, though, that there has been a change in the weather? “Well,” he replies, “everyone knows that.”
Peter Doig: Reflections of the Century opens at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris on Oct 17;musee-orsay.fr. Peter Doig (Rizzoli, ￡50) is out now