BBC Radio 4

The last romantic, the leading light in Symbolist painting, the primitive sophisticate, 'decivilising' painter of the French colonial tropics and revolutionary colourist - Paul Gauguin's work shaped modern art. His rejection of the bourgeois Parisian lifestyle of a stockbroker and wild escape to an archipelago of tiny, remote Pacific islands is the stuff of modern artistic legend. But to this a day he remains a very controversial figure, lauded on the one hand and vilified by critics on the other.

On the occasion of the first major exhibition of paintings by the revolutionary artist, Paul Gauguin, at Tate Modern in September 2010, Louisa Buck explores the live-wire jolt he gave to visual art in the late 19th century.