Tate Modern exhibition explores the myths behind artist Paul Gauguin
　 

In 1891 the painter Paul Gauguin set sail from Marseilles bound for the French Polynesian colony of Tahiti and what he hoped was a purer, more innocent world.
　

The vibrant and sensual images that he created there during the remaining 12 years of his life are among the most instantly recognisable and influential in modern art.

However, as an ambitious exhibition later this year will make clear, they were also wilful misrepresentations of what a disappointed Gauguin found in the South Seas, produced by an artist “with a canny eye to the main chance”.

Gauguin: Maker of Myth, at Tate Modern from September, will be the first major retrospective of the artist in Britain since the 1950s.

It will bring together more than 100 works from around the world, about a third of which have never been shown in Britain before.

Together they will depict a strikingly modern artist: a monstrous, exploitative, lying self-publicist with a flair for shock tactics and sensationalism who also happened to be a genius.

Belinda Thomson, the co-curator of the exhibition, said yesterday that the show would steer away from a strict chronological or stylistic examination of his career and instead focus on “the tendency towards myth-making, in his work and his presentation of himself”.

By the time that Gauguin left France he was thoroughly disillusioned with the art world. According to Ms Thomson, he thought that Impressionism “had been reduced to the eye and observations of light”. He wanted to reintroduce intellectual depth to creating art as well as reconnecting with a more naive and honest way of life.

However, when Gauguin arrived in Tahiti “he was disappointed to find European missionaries had been hard at work for a long time. Instead of luscious girls, he found women dressed up to the neck in smocks and going to church on Sunday”.