Broude Norma - Gauguins challenge: new perspectives after postmodernism

Gauguins Challenge

Gauguins Challenge

New Perspectives After Postmodernism

Edited by

Norma Broude

Works by Gauguin cited but not illustrated in this volume are referenced to one of the catalogs raisonns of Gauguins work, abbreviated as follows:

It is now several decades since postmodern critiques presented the art-historical world with a demythologized Paul Gauguin (18481903), a much-diminished image of the artist/hero who had once been universally admired as the father of modernist primitivism. This volume of essays is designed to consider, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, how this late-twentieth-century postcolonial and feminist dismantling of the long-standing Gauguin myth has positioned us now in the twenty-first century to deal with the life, work, and legacy of this still perennially popular artist.

To reassess the challenges that Gauguin faced in his own day as well as those that he continues to present to current and future scholarship, an international and cross-generational group of Gauguin scholars has come together here to share their latest work and thinking on a wide range of Gauguins production. Their essays explore the multiple contexts that influenced Gauguins thinking and behavior, and they incorporate a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, from anthropology, philosophy, and the history of science to gender studies and the study of Pacific cultural history. They challenge conventional art-historical thinking, highlight transnational perspectives, and offer both a provocative picture of the evolution of Gauguin scholarship in the recent postmodern era and clues to the directions that it may follow in years to come.

I am grateful, individually and collectively, to all of these scholars for the rich dialogue they have helped to create with their contributions to this book and for their generous support and cooperation as the project unfolded. My gratitude and theirs go in particular to our superb acquisitions editor at Bloomsbury Academic, Margaret Michniewicz, for her vision, professionalism, and unflagging support; and to the outstanding team of editors and designers at the press whose impressive skills have helped to bring this volume to fruition.

Norma Broude

Introduction:
Gauguin after Postmodernism

Norma Broude

American University

No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both; in the same way and in different ways You drag your double along with you, and yet the two contrive to get on together.

Paul Gauguin, Avant et aprs, 1903

In the late twentieth century, Paul Gauguin became an artist whom feminist art historians loved to hate. The initiating salvo was launched in 1972 by Linda Nochlins analysis of the artists Two Tahitian Women (Figure 3.7), who offer their breasts to the viewer along with the platters of ripe mangoes that they hold. Nochlin famously juxtaposed this painting with her own mock-pornographic photograph of a nude male model, posing with a platter of bananas beneath his genitals and exhorting the viewer, through the caption, to buy my bananas. Using sexual reversal, a powerful weapon of early feminist analysis, Nochlins visual joke exposed the gendered operations of the gaze in high art, and it was a wake-up call for emerging feminist art historians in the early 1970s. It was also a turning of the lens that told us perhaps as much about ourselves as it did about Gauguin: about the extent to which women as well as men in the twentieth century had come to accept the sexualized and possessive gaze of the male upon the body of the female as integral to the patriarchys definition of high art and universal cultural greatness.

This awakening, however, and the subsequent revelations it engendered did little to alter Gauguins place in the mainstream canon, if judged by the steady stream of major exhibitions that have continued to appear down to the present day.castigated, as much for his life as his art, in terms of late-twentieth-century standards and moralities in general and in terms of feminist and postcolonial ones in particular.

In 1989, it was Abigail Solomon-Godeau who fully exposed the mythic speech that undergirded art historys cultural valorization of Gauguin as the father of modernist primitivism in the visual arts, a narrative based on dual constructed fantasies: one of Tahiti as an exotic Paradise populated by available and compliant women (and feminized, unthreatening men); and the other of Gauguin as the artist/hero who had to journey outward to discover what was within, renouncing Western civilization to search for the primal origins of life and his own inner savage. Pointing to the colonial polarities on which such thinking was based, Solomon-Godeau effectively unmasked primitivisms constituent elements, notably the dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and powerboth colonial and patriarchalthat provides its raison dtre and continues to inform its articulation.

This enduring story constructed by and for Western men had been perpetuated into the second half of the twentieth century by adulatory exhibitions that were mounted regularly in major museums worldwide.

As part of her project of demythifying what it meant for Gauguin to go native, Solomon-Godeau foregrounded the disparities between Polynesian reality and Gauguins imaginary reconstruction of it. And she reviewed many of the prior representations, literary and photographic, that had made Tahiti available to Gauguin both before and after his arrival there. Gauguins art, in Solomon-Godeaus view, was a reprocessing of already constituted signs that collapse the feminine and the primitive into one another; and it was an art constituted out

But what Solomon-Godeau and Pissarro would characterize as Gauguins plagiarisms, others in his era and beyond have seen as a form of creative bricolage that constituted this artists unique brand of Symbolism.

Although we have become accustomed to crediting the postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the late twentieth century with opening up new ways of looking at Gauguins work, the issues that surround this artist and the questions that are raised by his art today are in reality not that far removed from many of the issues and concerns that troubled French critics who wrote about Gauguins Tahitian canvases in the 1890s, and for whom the complications of his position were already evident. In 1993, Karyn Esielonis offered a thought-provoking analysis of the historical context that shaped both the concept of the exotic and the reception of Gauguins pictures among French critics at the end of the nineteenth century. Even though these contemporary critics had very different ideas about how the paintings worked in French culture, they nevertheless saw them, she argued, not as escapist images of an imaginary exotic Paradise but And these diverging responses to the same pictures are strikingly reminiscent of the debates that continue to engage scholars and interpreters of Gauguins work today.

Collectively, the essays in the present volume seek to widen, deepen, and further complicate some of these ongoing debates over Gauguins art. Re-engaging with many of the disturbing questions that Gauguins work has posed for critics beginning in his own day and extending into our own, they help us to define and assess the extent to which postmodern critiques of the recent past have altered the terrain and the questions that we now ask about Gauguin and his art.