Why Is the Art World Divided Over Gaughins Legacy
Mahana No Atua (Day of the God), 1894.
Paul Gauguin
The Art Found of Chicago, Chicago
To some, Paul Gauguin is one of Modernism'due south great bohemian renegades, a giant of Mail service-Impressionism who broke free from Europe's bourgeois shackles in a trailblazing, soul-searching quest for creative liberation in the South Seas.
To others, he was a fraudulent cad, milking the myth of the noble savage to satisfy his exotic fantasies while boosting the market for his art dorsum home. He is i of history'due south corking dilemmas, and more than a century after he painted his controversial compositions of nude, brown-skinned Tahitian girls—including several of his pubescent lovers—the art world continues to grapple with his legacy.
Overlooking the ugly reality of Gauguin'south pretty paintings, museums have tended to turn the spotlight on his artistic achievements, which, to be fair, are non in dispute. His vibrant, balmy color harmonies and radically decorative, flattened surfaces had a huge impact (on the Western catechism, anyway), influencing anybody from Bonnard to Picasso and Matisse. And his move away from Impressionism toward a more narrative, personal, expressionistic fashion opened the door to weightier subject thing.
(Information technology's as well worth noting that his works command astronomical prices at auction, and his 1892 painting When Will You Marry? is thought to exist the second virtually expensive painting ever sold.)
But while in that location are enough of white, male artists whose troubling lifestyles tin exist understood somewhat separately from their art, the difficulty with Gauguin is that his behavior is laid blank on his canvases. It doesn't take a politically minded scholar or critic to recognize that his representations of nude Tahitians reflect a sexual and racial fantasy forged from a position of patriarchal, colonialist power.
Contes Barbares (Primitive Tales), 1902.
Paul Gauguin
"Paul Gauguin" at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, (2015)
Nafea faaipoipo ((When Will You Marry?), 1892.
Paul Gauguin
"Paul Gauguin" at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen (2015)
American University fine art history professor Norma Broude, a feminist scholar of 19th-century European art and editor of the forthcoming book Gauguin's Claiming: New Perspectives Subsequently Postmodernism (Bloomsbury Academic: 2018), describes the differing attitudes toward Gauguin equally a "vast chasm."
On the ane side is Gauguin'south "perennial popularity in the art world, fueled by aesthetically focused exhibitions that announced with regularity in major museums worldwide," she says, and on the other is the "mistrust and fifty-fifty abhorrence with which a segment of the academic world, unable to movement beyond earlier feminist and post-colonialist critiques, continues to regard him and his oeuvre."
The oft-told tale of Gauguin's journey from stockbroker to South Seas expat bears repeating. Born during the 1848 Revolution in Paris to a leftist journalist father and (ironically) the daughter of feminist activist Flora Tristan, Gauguin spent his earliest years with his family in Peru, hiding out from Napoleon'due south conservative new regime. He joined the merchant marines and navy in his late teens and, when he returned to Paris, he became a stockbroker and started painting and collecting Impressionist piece of work.
Unemployed and penniless after the stock market place crashed in 1882, he turned to painting full-fourth dimension, studying with Camille Pissarro. He shortly became fed up with the oppressive social mores of Parisian life (and the Impressionists), and poked effectually more pastoral locales, including Pont-Aven, a rural village in Brittany, where he fleshed out his early involvement in what he saw equally more authentic subjects unspoiled past modern life, like the devoutly Christian Breton villagers.
Why Are You Angry? (No Te Aha Oe Riri), 1896.
Paul Gauguin
Art Institute of Chicago
Inspired by popular accounts of the cruel and gratuitous-spirited ethos of the torrid zone, and seduced by the Tahiti exhibit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris (where France was promoting its new colony to potential European settlers), Gauguin grew determined to ready a studio in the Due south Seas. "At the atelier of the Tropics, I will perhaps become the Saint John the Baptist of the painting of the future, invigorated there by a more than natural, more primitive, and higher up all, less spoiled life," he wrote in 1890 to his friend Vincent van Gogh.
Gauguin spent two famously stormy months in Arles with the Dutch artist and and so hatched his plan, selling paintings to fund his voyage and finagling additional support from France'due south Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts nether the ruse that he would document life in Tahiti for the French regime.
But when Gauguin arrived in Papeete in 1891, he realized that French colonial dominion and a century of missionary intervention had spoiled his utopian vision. As he described in his Tahitian travelogue Noa Noa—a largely fictional, sexed-up business relationship that was plagiarized, in role, from before tales of Pacific Island conquest—the island was nothing similar he'd imagined.
"It was the Tahiti of former times which I loved," he wrote. "That of the nowadays filled me with horror." (To kickoff, the girls weren't naked; they were dressed in bulky high-necked gowns, courtesy of the church.)
He left the Tahitian capital for more than remote, pre-colonial parts of the island merely never quite institute his "exotic utopia of cultural difference," equally art historian Stephen Eisenman aptly described it. Then Gauguin, every bit many art historians agree, created his fantasy himself, in both his canvases and writings. The brilliant "tropical" fabrics we run across in his paintings were imported from Europe, and the mysticism he tried to pictorialize was a hybrid of European and ancient Tahitian traditions.
Cavaliers sur la plage (Two) (Riders on the Beach (II), 1902.
Paul Gauguin
"Paul Gauguin" at Fondation Beyeler
Matamua (In Olden Times), 1892.
Paul Gauguin
"Paul Gauguin" at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen (2015)
He spent his Tahitian years with an eye toward the French market, producing paintings, drawings, woodcuts, and ceramics full of tropical clichés to sell at home. He as well took three young wives (ages thirteen, xiv, and xiv), infected them with syphilis, and somewhen died from syphilitic complications at the age of 54 in the remote Marquesas Islands.
"There is a existent blind spot when it comes to the more problematic aspects of Gauguin's sojourn in Polynesia," says Caroline Vercoe, an art history professor and acquaintance dean at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, who has studied contemporary Pacific Island artists' responses to Gauguin. "A lot of the way that he is framed, similar many of the male 'hero' art figures in the canon, has more to practice with progressing the Euro American art canon to continue it equally Eurocentric as possible."
Information technology'due south like shooting fish in a barrel to have for granted that until the 1990s, which saw the ascension of identity politics, in that location was piffling discussion, if any, nigh the exoticist clichés and racial stereotypes—like that of the languorous, sensuous savage—that Gauguin perpetuated. Simply even in 1988, then-director of the National Gallery of Art in D.C., J. Carter Brownish, was well-aware that "The Art of Paul Gauguin," a massive traveling Gauguin retrospective, might benefit from a disclaimer.
In the forward to the catalog he writes: "At that place is some other motivation behind the title. Nosotros have chosen 'the fine art' not merely in preference to 'the painting' of Paul Gauguin, but also to underscore our opposition to an exhibition centering on the artist's life. Although the catalogue contains a thoroughly documented chronology, the exhibition stresses his product as artist rather than the exotic, troubled, and fascinating life that has attained almost mythological proportions and is amend left to biography and flick."
It was on the heels of this globetrotting blockbuster that two game-changing Gauguin texts emerged, Abigail Solomon-Godeau'southward Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism (1989) and Griselda Pollock's Avant-Garde Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (1992).
Both drew attention to Modernism'southward construction of the pre-modernistic "other," as well every bit to the unchallenged power and privilege of the white male person artist to exploit and erase ethnic female identities in the proper noun of art. Both initiated a moving ridge of critical Gauguin studies that continues today, ranging from investigations of racial attitudes in the late 19th century, what Eisenman has chosen "the aureate age of racial theories"—which prospered cheers to the West's demand to legitimize the slave merchandise—to fresh analyses of Gauguin's bear upon on female artists.
In Broude'due south forthcoming book, for example, Elizabeth Childs, an art history professor at Washington University in St. Louis, looks at gimmicky responses to Gauguin'south piece of work but also makes an argument that in the early 20th century, such female artists equally Paula Modersohn-Becker and Amrita Sher-Gil adapted Gauguin's style in their own self-portraits as a fashion of "painting themselves into the modernist idiom" from which they had been excluded.
Aha oe feii? (What! Are You Jealous?), 1892.
Paul Gauguin
"Paul Gauguin" at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen (2015)
In Tahiti, meanwhile, the tourism industry continues to market the archaic utopia that Gauguin had imagined. A luxury cruise ship named the Paul Gauguin is touted for its ability to reach smaller coves than the larger vessels, while there is no shortage on the island of merchandise emblazoned with facsimiles of the artist'south paintings.
But Gauguin'southward enduring presence has also provided gimmicky Pacific Island artists with a rich visual framework to underscore Gauguin'south stereotypes and clichés and "to craft an intervention in piece of work almost their own postcolonial identities," says Childs.
Rarotonga-based Kay George and Auckland artist Tyla Vaeau, for instance, both incorporate photographs of themselves and friends into facsimiles of Gauguin's paintings, drawing attending to how "colonial representations continue to influence Pacific representations," writes Vercoe.
Every bit for the curatorial sector of the art world that is more concerned with elevating Gauguin's achievements, Vercoe wonders if there might be "a backlash to the identity politics of the 1990s" at work. "I was invited to a curatorial roundtable in u.s. in 2013 to participate and to give a 'Pacific' response to Gauguin," she says, "and I was really intrigued past how surprised and almost offended everyone seemed to be that we didn't remember he was this great guy!"
—Meredith Mendelsohn
from Cocked News
Source: https://caveartfair.tumblr.com/post/163764320087/why-is-the-art-world-divided-over-gauguins