BROUDE, Norma. Gauguin's Challenge

Gauguin’s Challenge
Gauguin’s Challenge
New Perspectives After Postmodernism
Edited by
Norma Broude
BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS
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Contents
Platesvi
Figuresvii
Abbreviationsxiv
Preface and Acknowledgementsxv
Introduction: Gauguin after Postmodernism Norma Broude 1
Part One Constructing Multiple Identities 13
1 Gauguin’s Alter Egos: Writing the Other and the Self Linda Goddard15
2 Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portraits in Polynesia: Androgyny and
Ambivalence Irina Stotland41
3 Flora Tristan’s Grandson: Reconsidering the Feminist Critique
of Paul Gauguin Norma Broude69
Part Two Symbolism, Science, and Spirituality 101
4 Gauguin and the Challenge of Ambiguity Dario Gamboni103

5 On Not Seeing Tahiti: Gauguin’s Noa Noa and the Rhetoric
of Blindness Alastair Wright129
6 Evolution and Desire in Gauguin’s T
ahitian Eve Martha Lucy 157
7 Gauguin: Vitalist, Hypnotist Barbara Larson179
8 “All men could be Buddhas”: Paul Gauguin’s Marquesan
Diptych June E. Hargrove203
Part Three Reception: Resistance and Empowerment 227
9 Taking Back Teha’amana: Feminist Interventions in Gauguin’s

Legacy Elizabeth C. Childs229
10 Re-Possessing Gauguin: Material Histories and the Contemporary
Pacific Heather Waldroup251
Notes on Contributors 275

Bibliography 279
Index 298
Plates
1 Paul Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the

Angel), 1888, oil on canvas, 28½ × 36⅓ in. (72.2 × 93.0 cm).
NG1643; 4940. Purchased 1925. National Galleries of Scotland.
Photo: courtesy National Gallery of Scotland, Dist. RMN-Grand
Palais/Art Resource, New York, USA
2 Paul Gauguin, Marine avec vache ou Au-dessus du gouffre/Seascape
with Cow or Above the Abyss, 1888, oil on canvas, 28½ × 24 in.
(72.5 × 61 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: © Musée
d’Orsay/RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt/Art Resource, New
York, USA
3 Paul Gauguin, Te nave nave fenua (Delightful Land), also called
“Tahitian Eve,” 1892, oil on canvas, 36 × 28½ in. (91.3 × 72.1 cm).
Courtesy Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan
4 Paul Gauguin, The Ancestors of Teha’amana, or Teha’amana Has
Many Parents (Merahi metua no Tehamana), 1893, oil on canvas,
301⅜16 × 21⅜ in. (76.3 × 54.3 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago,
Chicago, USA. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Deering McCormick,
1980.613. Photo: courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago/Art
Resource, New York, USA
5 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1894, oil on canvas, 21¾
× 18 in. (55 × 46 cm). Private collection. © Erich Lessing/Art
Resource, New York, USA
6 Paul Gauguin, Bathers, 1902, oil on canvas, 36¼ × 28¾ in. (92 ×
73 cm). Private collection, New York, USA. Photo: courtesy the collector
7 Paul Gauguin, Marquesan Man in Red Cape or Sorcerer of Hiva
Oa, 1902, oil on canvas, 36¼ × 28¾ in. (92 × 73 cm). Musée
Boverie, Liège, Belgium. Photo © Liège, Musée des Beaux-Arts de
la Boverie
8 Tyla Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou. When Will You Marry? (Dee and Dallas Do
Gauguin Series), 2009, digital montage, 8 × 11 in. (20.32 × 27.94
cm). Private collection. Image: courtesy the artist
Figures
1.1 Paul Gauguin, page from Noa Noa with photographs of a

Tahitian family and two idols, 1895–9, watercolor, brown ink
and photographs, 12⅜ × 18⅛ in. (31.5 × 46 cm). Musée du
Louvre, Paris, France, RF 7259 Folio 30 verso. Photo: courtesy
Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource,
New York, USA 18
1.2 Paul Gauguin, autograph annotations and caricature self-portrait,
from the Noa Noa album, 1895–9, pen with blue and brown ink,
12⅜ × 18⅛ in. (31.5 × 46 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris, France,
RF7259-224-folio118 verso. Photo: courtesy Hervé Lewandowski.
© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York, USA 20
1.3 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (Notebook for Aline), 1893.
Courtesy Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art,
Paris, France, MS 227 22
1.4 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (Notebook for Aline), 1893.
Courtesy Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art,
Paris, France, MS 227 23
1.5 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (Notebook for Aline),
reproduction of Camille Corot’s Italian Woman Playing the
Mandolin, 1893, watercolor and ink on paper, 8¾ × 13½ in. (22.2
× 34.2 cm). Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art,
Paris, France, MS 227 © INHA, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, New York, USA 29
1.6 Paul Gauguin, page from the album Noa Noa with drawing by
Vincent van Gogh, 1895–9, pen and ink, 12⅜ × 9 in. (31.5 ×
23.2 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France, RF7259, Folio106 recto.
Photo: courtesy Hervé Lewandowski. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
2.1 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait of the Artist at His Drawing Table,
Tahiti (Ja Orana Ritou), 1891–4, watercolor and pencil on paper,
12⅝ × 8⅜ in. (32 × 21.4 cm). Private collection. © Private
Collection/Bridgeman Images 47
viii Figures
2.2 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait of the Artist with the Idol, 1893, oil
on canvas, 18⅛ × 13 in. (46 × 33 cm). McNay Art Museum, San
Antonio, USA. © McNay Art Museum/Art Resource, New York, USA 50
2.3 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, 1893, oil on canvas, 18.2 × 15 in. (46.2
× 38.1 cm). Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, USA. © Detroit
Institute of Arts, Detroit, USA. Gift of Robert H. Tannahill/
Bridgeman Images 51
2.4 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with a Hat, 1893–4, oil on canvas, 17.7
× 15 in. (45 × 38 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © Scala/Art
2.5 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, Oviri, 1894–5, bronze relief. Private
collection. The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, USA, 1963.
Cat. 109. From Christopher Gray, Sculpture and Ceramics of
Paul Gauguin56
2.6 Paul Gauguin, Oviri, 1894, partially enameled stoneware, 29.5 ×
7.5 × 10.6 in. (75 × 19 × 27 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.
2.7 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait near Golgotha, 1896, oil on canvas,
29.9 × 25.2 in. (76 × 64 cm). São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo,
Brazil. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York, USA 60
3.1 Unknown artist, Portrait of Flora Tristan, in Le Charivari &
Galérie de la Presse, 1839. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris,
France. Photo: courtesy Snark/Art Resource, New York, USA 70
3.2 Paul Gauguin, transcription from Flora Tristan’s Promenade dans
Londres, ink on paper, 6⅜ × 4½ in. (16.2 × 11.4 cm). Museum of
Modern Art, New York, USA. Gift of Arthur G. Altschul. Photo:
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource,
New York, USA 77
3.3 Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan, 1889, watercolor
and pencil on paper, 6⅜ × 4½ in. (16.2 × 11.4 cm). Museum of
Modern Art, New York, USA. Gift of Arthur G. Altschul. Photo:
© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource,
New York, USA 78
3.4 Paul Gauguin, Gathering Grapes at Arles – Human Misery, 1888,
oil on jute sackcloth, 29 × 36¼ in. (73.5 × 92 cm). Ordrupgaard
Museum, Copenhagen, Sweden. Photo: courtesy Erich Lessing/
Art Resource, New York, USA 81
Figures ix
3.5 Paul Gauguin, Two Women, 1901 or 1902, oil on canvas, 29 × 36¼
in. (73.7 × 92.1 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
USA, The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection. Gift of
Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1997, bequest of Walter H.
Annenberg, 2002. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Image source: Art Resource, New York, USA 87
3.6 Henri Lemasson, Two Women from Tahiti, 1898, photograph
from one of the albums of governor Callet inv. 98.2.1; inv. 98.2.2.
Repro-photo: Michèle Bellot. Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques
Chirac, Paris, France. Image: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource,
New York, USA 88
3.7 Paul Gauguin, Two Tahitian Women, 1899, oil on canvas, 37 × 28½
in. (94 × 72.4 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.
Gift of William Church Osborn, 1949. Image: © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York, USA 90
4.1 Paul Gauguin, Double-vessel in Unglazed Stoneware, Decorated
with Cats Painted with Black and Leaves Painted with Greenish
Glaze, 1887-8, height 6½ in. (16.5 cm). Private collection.
Courtesy private collector 105
4.2 Paul Gauguin, Les Meules jaunes ou La Moisson blonde/The Yellow
Haystacks or The Blonde Harvest, 1889, oil on canvas, 28¾ × 36¼
in. (73 × 92 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: © RMN-
Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York, USA 106
4.3 Paul Gauguin, Auti Te Pape, from the “Noa Noa Suite,” 1893/4,
wood-block print in pale orange and black, over transferred
yellow, pink, orange, blue, and green wax-based media, on cream
wove Japanese paper, laid down on cream wove Japanese paper,
8 × 13 in. (20.3 × 35.3 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago,
USA, Clarence Buckingham Collection, 1948.264. Photo: courtesy
the Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York, USA 108
4.4 Paul Gauguin, La Petite rêve/The Little One is Dreaming, 1881,
oil on canvas, 23½ × 29 in. (59.5 × 73.5 cm). Ordrupgaard,
Copenhagen, Sweden. Photo: courtesy Pernille Klemp 109
4.5 Vincent van Gogh, Portrait de Gauguin/Portrait of Gauguin,
1888, oil on burlap, 15 × 13⅓ in. (38.2 × 33.8 cm). Courtesy Van
Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Vincent van Gogh
Foundation)111
x Figures
4.6 Paul Gauguin, Bretonnerie/Breton Matters, c. 1889, pencil on

paper, 12½ × 19⅓ in. (31.6 × 49.1 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts de
Reims, Reims, France. Photo: © C. Devleeschauwer 114
4.7 Paul Gauguin, Stoneware Pots, Chaplet, c. 1887–9, gouache,
watercolor and charcoal on paper, 12½ × 16½ in. (31.8 × 41.6 cm).
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie,
New York, USA. Bequest of Sarah Hamlin Stern, class of 1938, in
memory of her husband, Henry Root Stern, Jr 117
5.1 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: draft manuscript, 1893, detail of sheet
of paper pasted in between page 6 and page 7. Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles, USA. Photo: courtesy Getty Research Institute 136
5.2 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: draft manuscript, 1893, detail of page 39.
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, USA. Photo: courtesy Getty
Research Institute 138
5.3 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, 1893/4, woodcut. Private collection.
Photo: courtesy HIP/Art Resource, New York, USA 142
5.4 Paul Gauguin, Maruru, 1893/4, woodcut, 9¼ × 15½ in. (23.5 ×
39.1 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA. Gift of Edward
McCormick Blair, 2002.249. Photo: courtesy the Art Institute of
Chicago/Art Resource, New York, USA 143
5.5 Paul Gauguin, Mata Mua, 1892, oil on canvas, 35¾ × 27¼ in.
(91 × 69 cm). Collection Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, on
deposit at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. Photo:
courtesy Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala/Art Resource, New
York, USA 144
5.6 Paul Gauguin, Te Faruru, 1893/4, woodcut, 14 × 8 in. (35.7 ×
20.5 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA, Clarence
Buckingham Collection, 1950.158. Photo: courtesy the Art
Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York, USA 146
5.7 Paul Gauguin, Nave nave fenua, 1893/4, woodcut, 15⅓ × 10 in.
(39.0 × 24.9 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA. Gift
of Edward McCormick Blair, 2002.256. Photo: courtesy the Art
Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York, USA 148
6.1 “Habitation Lacustre,” from L’Exposition Universelle de 1889
(recueil de couverture de cahiers scolaires, avec vues coloriées
des curiosités de l’Exposition), 1889, p. 13. Paris, France. Photo:
Bibliothèque nationale de France 160
Figures xi
6.2 Armand de Quatrefages, cover, Hommes Fossiles et Hommes

Sauvages, 1884. J.-B. Baillière et Fils, Paris, France 162
6.3 Paul Gauguin, Mahana no Atua (Day of the God), 1894, oil on
canvas, 27 × 36 in. (68.3 × 91.5 cm). Art Institute of Chicago,
Chicago, USA, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection,
1926.198. Photo: courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago/Art
6.4 Paul Gauguin, L’Univers est crée (The Universe is Created), 1893–4,
woodcut printed on Japanese paper, pasted onto light blue-gray
mount, 10½ × 17 in. (26.8 × 43.2 cm). Princeton University Art
Museum, Princeton, USA, Felton Gibbons Fund, 2009-106 166
6.5 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: Nave Nave Fenua (Fragrant Isle), 1893–4,
color woodcut, 15 × 9 in. (38.5 × 22.8 cm). Cleveland Museum of
Art, Cleveland, USA. Gift of the Print Club of Cleveland, 1933.444 168
6.6 Odilon Redon, cover-frontispiece for Les Origines, 1883,
lithograph in black on dark gray wove paper, 12 × 9 in. (30.7 ×
22.5 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA, the Stickney
Collection, 1920.1577. Photo: courtesy the Art Institute of
Chicago/Art Resource, New York, USA 173
7.1 Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan, 1889, oil on wood,
31⅜ × 20⅜ in. (79.6 × 51.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, USA. Fractional Gift to the Museum of Modern Art
from a private collector. Image: © The Museum of Modern Art/
Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York, USA 182
7.2 Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Meyer de Haan, c. 1889–90,
polychromed wood, 23 × 11¾ × 9 in. (58.4 × 29.8 × 22.8 cm).
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, Acc #15310 184
7.3 Paul Gauguin, French, 1848–1903, Nirvana: Portrait of Meyer
de Haan, c. 1889–90, gouache and bronze paint on cotton, 8 ×
11½ in. (20.4 × 29.3 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art,
Hartford, USA, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner
Collection Fund, 1943.445. Photo: courtesy Allen Phillips/
Wadsworth Atheneum 185
7.4 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, 1889, oil on wood, 31⅜16 × 20⅜16 in.
(79.2 × 51.3 cm). Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.150. National
Gallery of Art. Photo: courtesy Art Resource, New York, USA 191
xii Figures
7.5 Paul Gauguin, Upa Upa (Fire Dance), 1891, oil on canvas, 28¾ ×
36¼ in. (73 × 92 cm). Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. Photo:
courtesy Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York, USA 194
7.6 Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where
Are We Going?, 1897–8, oil on canvas, 54¾ × 147½ in. (139.1 ×
374.6 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA, Tompkins
Collection-Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund, 36.270. Photo:
© 2017, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA 196
7.7 Paul Gauguin, Vairumati, 1897, oil on canvas, 28¾ × 37 in. (73
× 94 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France, Collection Ambroise
Vollard, 1898, RF 1959-5. Photo: courtesy Hervé Lewandowski.
8.1 Paul Cézanne, The Bathers (Large Plate), 1898, colored lithograph,
19 × 24¾ in. (48.2 × 62.9 cm). National Gallery of Art,
Washington DC, USA. Gift of Karl Leubsdorf, 1979.58.1. Courtesy
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA 206
8.2 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Madonna of the Goldfinch, c. 1767/70,
oil on canvas, 2413⅜16 × 1913⅜16 in. (63.1 × 50.3 cm). National Gallery
of Art, Washington DC, USA, Samuel H. Kress Collection,
1943.4.40. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA 209
8.3 William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World, 1860, print after
by William Henry Simmons. Line and stipple engraving on ivory
chine mounted on off-white plate paper, 35½ × 20¼ in. (90.1 ×
51.2 cm). Private collection. Photo: courtesy author 211
8.4 Gnostic seal, Horus and Christ as a symbol of resurrection, from
Gerald Massey, The Natural Genesis, 1883, p. 454. Photo: courtesy
author.214
8.5 Griffon and bird, detail of the Saint-Martin capital from the
Romanesque cloister of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, twelfth century,
c. 1885, postcard. Private collection. Photo: courtesy author 218
9.1 Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with an Amber Necklace
II, 1906, oil on linen, 24 × 20 in. (61.1 × 50 cm). Kunstmuseum
Basel, Switzerland, Inv. NR 1748. Photo: courtesy Martin P. Bühler 237
9.2 Amrita Sher-Gil, Child-Wife, 1936, oil on canvas. Private
collection. Image: The Estate of Amrita Sher-Gil 239
Figures xiii
9.3 Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian, 1934, oil on canvas,

357⅜16 × 22⅛ in. (90 × 56 cm). Collection of Navina and Vivan
Sundaram. Image: The Estate of Amrita Sher-Gil 240
9.4 Vivan Sundaram, Self as Tahitian, 2001, digital print, 23¼ × 11¾
in. (59 × 30 cm). Collection of the artist. Image: courtesy Vivan
Sundaram242
9.5 Kay George, Looking Forward, 2009, digital montage, 19¾ ×
32¼ in. (50 × 82 cm). Private collection, New Zealand. Image:
courtesy the artist 245
10.1 Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau, 1892, oil on burlap mounted
on canvas, 28¾ × 36⅜ in. (73.025 × 92.3925 cm). Albright-
Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA, Conger Goodyear
Collection. Reproduced with permission of the Albright-Knox
Art Gallery and Art Resource, New York, USA 259
10.2 Adrienne Pao, Seeking Liberty in the Dole Plantation/Hala-kahiki
Kapa (Pineapple Covering), 2005, C Print, 30 × 26 in. (76.2 ×
66.04 cm). Reproduced with permission of the artist 263
10.3 Adrienne Pao, Lei Stand Protest/Kapua Leihua Kapa (Lei
Flower Covering), 2004, C Print, 30 × 26 in. (76.2 × 66.04 cm).
Reproduced with permission of the artist 264
10.4 Adrienne Pao, I Always Wanted to Be a Mermaid/Pupu Kapa
(Shell Covering), 2005, C Print, 30 × 26 in. (76.2 × 66.04 cm).
Reproduced with permission of the artist 265
10.5 Debra Drexler, Gauguin’s Zombie, 2002, multimedia installation
at the Honolulu Museum. Reproduced with permission of the
artist. Courtesy the Honolulu Museum. Photo: Shuzo Uemoto 266
10.6 Debra Drexler, Gauguin’s Zombie, 2002, multimedia installation
at the Honolulu Museum. Reproduced with permission of the
artist. Courtesy the Honolulu Museum. Photo: Shuzo Uemoto 267
10.7 Debra Drexler, Neo Neo, 2002, relief print on paper, 12 × 15 in.
(30.48 × 38.10 cm). Reproduced with permission of the artist 268
10.8 Debra Drexler, Old Habits, 2002, oil on canvas, 72 × 72 in.
(182.88 × 182.88 cm). Reproduced with permission of the artist 270
Abbreviations
Works by Gauguin cited but not illustrated in this volume are referenced to one
of the catalogs raisonnés of Gauguin’s work, abbreviated as follows:
GRAY Gray, Christopher, Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963).
GUERIN Guérin, Marcel, L’Oeuvre gravé de Gauguin (Paris: H. Floury,

1927).
W. Wildenstein, Georges, Gauguin, I (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts Editions

d’Etudes et de Documents, 1964).
Preface and Acknowledgements
It is now several decades since postmodern critiques presented the art-historical

world with a demythologized Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), 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 Gauguin’s production.
Their essays explore the multiple contexts that influenced Gauguin’s 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 après, 19031
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
Nochlin’s analysis of the artist’s 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.”2
Using sexual reversal, a powerful weapon of early feminist analysis, Nochlin’s
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 patriarchy’s definition of high art and
universal cultural greatness.
This awakening, however, and the subsequent revelations it engendered did
little to alter Gauguin’s place in the mainstream canon, if judged by the steady
stream of major exhibitions that have continued to appear down to the present
day.3 But it did lead at the time to a vehement rejection and repositioning of
Gauguin in the feminist art-historical literature, where he soon came to be
2 Gauguin’s Challenge
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 history’s 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 “primitivism’s
constituent elements, notably the dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies
and power—both colonial and patriarchal—that provides its raison d’être and …
continues to inform its articulation.”4
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.5 These
appear to have fulfilled the fantasies of countless ordinary middle-aged men
who, like Gauguin, might have dreamt of abandoning the encumbrances of
bourgeois jobs and families to start anew and enjoy the physical pleasures
and economic freedoms that were reportedly to be discovered in the South
Seas, as well as those, no doubt, of many early Gauguin scholars, who were
predominantly male (a situation that has interestingly begun to reverse itself
in recent decades), and who, not surprisingly, constructed and justified the
Gauguin myth from their own point of view. A particularly egregious example
cited by Solomon-Godeau is the art historian René Huyghe’s effort to naturalize
Gauguin’s sexual relationships with very young girls in Tahiti by assuring his
readers “that the thirteen year old Tahitian girl is ‘equivalent to 18 or 20 years
in Europe.’”6
As part of her project of “demythifying what it meant for Gauguin to ‘go native,’”
Solomon-Godeau foregrounded the disparities between “Polynesian reality
and Gauguin’s 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. Gauguin’s art, in Solomon-
Godeau’s 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
Introduction: Gauguin after Postmodernism 3
of a series of “plagiarisms,” both visual and verbal. The latter characterization of

Gauguin’s enterprise was one that had originated among his own contemporaries.
As the artist Camille Pissarro memorably put it: “Gauguin is always poaching on
someone’s land; nowadays, he’s pillaging the savages of Oceania.”7
But what Solomon-Godeau and Pissarro would characterize as Gauguin’s
“plagiarisms,” others in his era and beyond have seen as a form of creative
“bricolage” that constituted this artist’s unique brand of Symbolism.8 Today, in
a globally linked and multicultural world, where we have become accustomed
to appreciating the fruits of a diversity of cultures that routinely cross-fertilize
one another, the habit of castigating Gauguin for “plagiarizing” and “pillaging”
the art of other cultures may now begin to seem anachronistic. But it lingers in
our art histories and in our postcolonial psyches, as we continue to negotiate
the unstable borders between colonialism and multiculturalism. Thus, we might
ask, was Gauguin’s appetite for difference and the diversity of “others” a prescient
and creative expansion of his own identity and point of view as an already
multicultural Frenchman, constituting a legitimate chapter in the history of
French and world art? Or should his art be seen instead as a misguided and
insufficiently informed translation of indigenous cultures that were not his own,
a cross-cultural appropriation and commodification that failed to enrich the
cultural content or to respect the point of view of its traditional sources?9 The
central problem that stands in our way as audiences worldwide seek to make
multicultural peace with Gauguin and his art in the twenty-first century is
the underlying and intertwined stigmas of both colonialism and sexism, with
their power structures of dominant and subordinate, creating ethical as well as
aesthetic issues with which our art histories are still insufficiently able to cope.10
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 Gauguin’s 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 Gauguin’s
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 Gauguin’s 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
as sites of ideological struggle that were fully in contact with contemporary

Tahiti and with the politics of contemporary France. Critics such as Camille
Mauclair and Gaston Méry, who disliked the Tahitian pictures, saw them as part
of the same exploitative discourse that legitimized colonialism and its policies of
assimilation, similar in spirit to the ethnologic displays that had been featured at
the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition; while other critics, such as Octave Mirbeau,
Victor Barrucand and Julien Leclercq, who defended the paintings, found in them
complexities that resisted and disrupted the conventional signs and stereotypes
about non-Western people and exotic cultures.11 And these diverging responses
to the same pictures are strikingly reminiscent of the debates that continue to
engage scholars and interpreters of Gauguin’s work today.
Collectively, the essays in the present volume seek to widen, deepen, and
further complicate some of these ongoing debates over Gauguin’s art. Re-
engaging with many of the disturbing questions that Gauguin’s 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.
Part One, “Constructing Multiple Identities,” presents essays that take
on, in different ways, the challenges Gauguin faced in negotiating his already
fragmented social, sexual, and artistic identities in the Pacific, while they also
address the instability of the “civilized/savage” persona that he proclaimed for
himself. In “Gauguin’s Alter Egos: Writing the Other and the Self,” Gauguin’s
penchant for role-playing and the multiple identities he assumed in his writings
are examined by Linda Goddard in relation to the realities of his existence in
Polynesia and are seen as a tool for negotiating the racial and gendered power
structures of colonialism and “his own, awkward position as an outsider to
both the colonial and indigenous communities.”12 Arguing that the artist’s
“primitive” writing style was a deliberate aesthetic strategy, Goddard presents the
“fragmentary and repetitive structures” of Gauguin’s writings, his appropriation
of multiple sources, and the scrapbook assemblage qualities of the texts and
images in his physical manuscripts, as textual parallels to the multiple authorial
positions that Gauguin assumed and used to upset “related binary oppositions
between male and female, civilized and savage, writer and artist.” Goddard’s
focus on Gauguin’s literary strategies and on his extensive body of writings adds
new dimensions to recent understandings of the mutability and instability of the
artist’s colonial identity. And her essay sets the stage for the prominent position
accorded to the writings by several of the authors in this volume, who join
Goddard in seeing the literary oeuvre as integral to Gauguin’s creative agenda,
process, and achievement.
The role of gender ambivalence and androgyny in Gauguin’s art, a subject
opened up in the 1990s by the path-breaking work of Stephen Eisenman,13 is
revisited and significantly expanded upon by Irina Stotland, who applies it
for the first time to an analysis of the nine self-portraits that Gauguin painted
after his removal to Tahiti in 1891. Providing new contextual framing for
these challenging works, Stotland presents the self-portraits as hybrid and
androgynous images in which Gauguin created for himself multiple identities
that probe and resist his era’s norms of bourgeois masculinity. At the same time,
she contends, the multiple identities that Gauguin assumed in his self-portraits
reflected the ambivalence of nineteenth-century cultural attitudes towards the
androgyne, a figure seen in French culture as transcendent on the one hand and
as threateningly transgressive on the other. “Each of the self-portraits,” Stotland
writes, “is a presentation of hybridity that contains masculine and feminine,
heterosexual and homosexual, colonial and colonized. Gauguin’s Polynesian
self-portraits become spaces where he negotiates between multiple identities
and undermines the structures of colonialism by effacing its categories of gender,
desire, and status, substituting fluidity for normativity in his presentation of
self.”
In “Flora Tristan’s Grandson,” Norma Broude explores Gauguin’s debt to
the writings and persona of his grandmother, Flora Tristan (1803–44), the
utopian socialist and feminist reformer whom he never met, but of whose
challenges to capitalism and patriarchy we now know he was deeply aware.
Inviting feminists to consider the ways in which Gauguin may have threatened
patriarchal thinking, Broude draws attention to aspects of his identity as social
reformer and advocate for the rights of women that have been obscured by
earlier critiques. She newly interprets the predominance of women in Gauguin’s
work, not as a strategy to infantilize and sexualize the Polynesian world, but as
a preoccupation with alternative forms of social organization that privileged
the female role in pre-colonial myth and culture. Gauguin’s attentiveness
to the survival or demise of these older forms of societal organization in the
colonial present is here connected with the role of strong women in his own
family structure and with the Victorian era’s fascination for anthropological and
literary accounts of matriarchy and matrilineal descent in ancient and primitive
societies.
As this and several of the essays that follow in this volume suggest, Gauguin’s
expectations—what he went looking for in Polynesia and what he brought
to his work there—were conditioned not only by the explorer literature of
Captain James Cook, Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, Pierre Loti, and others
(whose expectations were in fact often quite different from his own), but by
the changing cultural norms and assumptions of European science and cultural
anthropology and by the less than normative patterns of his own family life
and background. His experiences in Polynesia were also inevitably inflected by
his own contrarian nature, creating conflicts and contradictions with which,
even after postmodern enlightenment, we must continue to grapple. As June
Hargrove puts it in her essay below: “He found himself in the paradoxical
situation of advocating ferociously anti-colonial sentiments at the same time
he was a de facto colonist. As strongly as he may have come to identify with the
native population at the end of his life, he was irrevocably a colonizing ‘other’
in their land.”
The next essays in this volume explore the convergence of Symbolism
with science and spirituality in Gauguin’s work and worldview, highlighting
his active efforts to reconcile the teachings of modern science with his own
spiritual quest. They present new thinking about the role of the European legacy
in Gauguin’s formation as an artist, freshly examining and articulating some of
the important ways in which he remained rooted in late-nineteenth-century
European thought and culture, with its anti-materialist currents, its poetic
nostalgia for lost origins, and its scientific and pseudo-scientific debates over
evolution and the sensory connections between the self and the natural world.
Despite his alleged desire to abjure and escape from them, Gauguin carried
those European experiences and mind sets with him to Polynesia, where he
managed to remain closely in touch and engaged with the philosophical and
scientific debates of his era.
The perceived ambiguity of Gauguin’s imagery, long associated in the literature
with the Symbolist search for “mystery,” is revisited here by Dario Gamboni,
who examines the ways in which critics and art historians have received and
interpreted this essential component of Gauguin’s work across several media.
Noting that the modernist binary between “abstraction” and “representation”
has left little room for the implied or ambiguous, Gamboni traces the reluctant
acceptance among Gauguin scholars of ambiguity and polyiconicity, the so-
called double imagery in Gauguin’s work, which Gamboni sees as a self-conscious
aesthetic strategy, a withholding of legibility designed to stimulate participatory
interpretation. He analyzes several of the unconventional techniques used by

Gauguin in his sculpture and ceramics as well as in printmaking and painting
to promote such visual and interpretive ambiguity. But Gamboni notes, too, the
continuing discomfort and the tendency on the part of modern Western art
historians, as distinct from non-Western specialists, to marginalize modes of
communication that may privilege subjectivity of perception and imaginative
participation. He thus raises larger methodological questions about the
discipline of art history and its future, by bringing into focus yet another of
Gauguin’s challenges for the twenty-first century, a time, Gamboni says, “when
a new process of ‘globalization’ transforms the discipline and opens up new
horizons of study, in which visual ambiguity plays an important role.”
In an essay provocatively entitled “On Not Seeing Tahiti: Gauguin’s Noa Noa
and the Rhetoric of Blindness,” Alastair Wright focuses more specifically on the
visual ambiguities and complexities of technique and iconography offered by
Gauguin’s Noa Noa (1893–4) and other print projects of the 1890s, seeing them
through the analytical lens of Paul de Man in the manner of Mallarmé, as a
quintessentially Symbolist “strategy to suggest that neither eye nor mind can
grasp the full significance of the world.” It was through Mallarmean ambiguity,
as conveyed by the fragmentary text of Noa Noa and the nearly illegible
darkness and deliberate technical crudity of its woodcuts, that Gauguin was able
to present Tahiti as an object of desire that can never be fully understood or
possessed. Using an allusive writing style and unorthodox woodcut techniques
that masked the legibility of forms, Wright argues, Gauguin invoked the rhetoric
of blindness as a potent metaphor for his “melancholy awareness both that the
Tahitian idyll he had dreamed of finding no longer existed and that he remained
an outsider unable to understand what remained of its culture.”
In her essay “Evolution and Desire in Gauguin’s Tahitian Eve,” Martha
Lucy offers a different context for the atmosphere of loss that emanates from
such paintings as Gauguin’s Te nave nave fenua (“Tahitian Eve”) of 1892 (Plate
3). Lucy sees this painting not in terms of Symbolist-inspired ambiguity and
cultural bricolage, but as an origins fantasy that had its historical roots in
Darwinism and that intersected empirically with the scientific discourses of the
period, namely the evolutionary sciences and paleontology. These concerned
themselves with retrieving the prehistoric past and restoring origins. But like
Gauguin’s nude bodies, their explorations were marked by a sense of loss that
stemmed from “the longing to know and possess an original body that was just
out of reach.” Expanding on the analyses of Wright, who presents the innovative
woodcut techniques of the Noa Noa suite as a formal metaphor for Gauguin’s
personal feelings of loss and distance from a disappearing culture, Lucy sees
those techniques more broadly as metaphors for human history and “the
melancholy process of evolution.” She writes: “As much as Gauguin’s melancholy
was about the vanishing paradise of Tahiti, it was also rooted in the most basic
existential questions concerning the self ’s place in the universe,” questions that
were being foregrounded by the discoveries of evolutionary science. The shifting
and evolving prints, Lucy argues, are works that give visual form to “Gauguin’s
melancholia about the mystery of our origins in an ever-changing universe”;
while the frozen and firmly articulated forms of his painted Tahitian Eve present
an unnaturally “fossilized” image of an “original body” surrounded by tropical
plenitude, an image that acknowledges both the disappearance of that body
and the role played by Western male desire in bringing about its evolutionary
transformation and demise.
In “Gauguin: Vitalist, Hypnotist,” Barbara Larson newly investigates the role
of science and, in particular, neurology, as a context for Gauguin’s aesthetic
agenda and his belief in what he described in his 1897 treatise, “The Catholic
Church and Modern Times”, as “the mysterious affinities that exist between
our brains and arrangements of color and line.” Taking as her starting point
the philosophical agenda that Gauguin put forth in that treatise, Larson writes:
“Like the Idéistes, Gauguin thought of himself as a student of science, but he
rooted his agenda in medical vitalism (which included a foregrounding of the
role of the neurological system) and Lamarckian evolutionism.” Positing the
relevance for Gauguin of scientific inquiries into the “neurological effects of
sensory stimuli on the brain,” she points to contemporary theories that linked
color and hypnosis; and she likens the use by psychiatrists and neurologists of
bright light and large fields of brilliant color to inspire mesmeric and hypnotic
states to Gauguin’s use of a brilliant red field in his painting Vision of the Sermon
(Plate 1) to both describe and implicate the viewer in a scene of group hypnosis.
By thus shedding light on the artist’s scientifically sanctioned deployment of
vividly expressive and “hypnotic” color in this and several other of his major
works, Larson offers us here a fresh context for understanding one of Gauguin’s
defining formal strategies.
The essays in this section conclude with June Hargrove’s “‘All men could be
Buddhas’: Paul Gauguin’s Marquesan Diptych,” an exploration of the unsuspected
intersections between symbolism and spirituality in two of Gauguin’s late
works painted in the Marquesas in 1902, Bathers and Marquesan Man in
Red Cape (also known as the Sorcerer of Hiva Oa) (Plates 6 and 7). Hargrove
newly examines the relationship between these two paintings as a reflection
of Gauguin’s “spiritual enterprise, representing the two components of the
soul’s existence, the physical and the spiritual,” with the Bathers functioning
“as the earthly foil to the spiritual ideal of the Marquesan Man.” In the latter,
an androgynous figure representing spiritual transcendence, she proposes
that Gauguin created a syncretic image of an ideal spiritual type to which all
could aspire. Drawing on Gauguin’s fascination with reincarnation and the
transmigration of the soul, his privileging of the artist as prophet and spiritual
leader, and his propensity for merging the world’s religions into a personal
syncretic construction of Christian, Buddhist, and Maori tenets, Hargrove
presents the late diptych and the spiritual journey it re-enacts as a product of
Gauguin’s belief that the artist can achieve immortality through his art and also
as an expression of personal anxiety during his last years over the survival of his
own legacy in these terms.
The final two essays of this volume re-examine the reception of Gauguin’s
work in the century since his death, with new and special focus on his
importance for women artists, both in Europe and the Pacific, whose responses
of creative resistance and reinvention are inviting more considered treatment in
the literature. In “Taking Back Teha’amana: Feminist Interventions in Gauguin’s
Legacy,” Elizabeth Childs begins by presenting Gauguin from the perspectives
of his female consorts in Polynesia, in particular the teenaged Teha’amana,
who looms large in the later Gauguin mythology. Contextualizing the little
that is actually known about her within an ethno-history of how Polynesian
women encountered French men, Childs explores new avenues for reclaiming
Teha’amana’s voice within a larger historical framework. For not only did
Teha’amana have many ancestors, as Gauguin tells us in his single named image
of her (Plate 4), she also had many progeny globally, as Childs demonstrates
by exploring both contemporary and later responses among women artists
to Gauguin’s work. Focusing on the work of the German Paula Modersohn-
Becker and the Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil, Childs brings new
attention to the over-looked ways in which emerging women modernists in
early-twentieth-century Europe took on “the mantle of Gauguin as a kind of
gateway, to paint [their] way into a recently established canon.” And she points to
the ways in which more recent contemporary women such as the Maori artist Kay
George and the Samoan Tyla Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou (Plate 8) have “deliberately engaged
the image of women in Gauguin’s art, appropriating those images to intervene in
his legacy, by inserting their own subjectivities and personae into the currents
of modernism.”
The volume closes with an overview essay by Heather Waldroup, entitled
“Re-Possessing Gauguin: Material Histories and the Contemporary Pacific.”
Here, the author engages with Pacific history and Pacific studies scholarship
to consider the shifting roles that Gauguin and his art continue to play for
Oceanic peoples in the twenty-first century, as they seek to reclaim and honor
traditional identities on the one hand and to assert modern agency on the
other. Waldroup points to the romantic-primitivist myth that has survived
in the recent Gauguin literature, even as Western art historians continue to
struggle with repositioning this artist in the visual economy of colonialism and
tahitisme then and now. And she presents the work of two contemporary Pacific
Island artists, Debra Drexler and Adrienne Pao, as satirical and evocative
efforts to “re-possess” Gauguin in newly relevant terms that interrogate and
critique those resilient romantic-primitivist myths. Bringing the perspectives
of material culture newly to bear on disentangling the multiple meanings of
Gauguin’s legacy for the Pacific world, Waldroup evocatively likens that legacy
to “cargo” washed up on a Pacific beach. “The material objects he has left us,”
she concludes, “can only be vessels for continued conversations in the future.
Why, then, are we still talking about Gauguin? The answer is simple: because
the conversation is not finished.”
That the conversation is indeed not finished has been amply demonstrated by
the essays in this volume, which present many different and differing points of
view on the life and work of Paul Gauguin. While they complement and provide
an enlightening counterpoint to one another, these essays do not present, nor
are they intended to present, a coherent vision of this artist, whose once-upon-
a-time seamless modernist persona, a product of the false mythologizing
of earlier generations, has long been picked apart and destabilized by the
postmodern and multicultural critiques of the late twentieth century. As a
result of those critiques, after postmodernism, how do we or should we now
understand Gauguin? Does the shattering of mythic and long cherished illusion
destroy or enhance for us the importance of his art today and its efficacy going
forward?
To consider these questions productively, viewers today will need to resist
the temptation to judge the past exclusively and ahistorically by the standards
of the present. And they will also need to remember that Gauguin shared one
very important habit of mind with his later postmodern critics: his propensity
for challenging the orthodoxies of his own time. As these essays show, Gauguin’s
art today remains a potent catalyst for exploring the socio-political, cultural, and
aesthetic issues that were foregrounded by early postmodern critiques. But as
they also suggest, those earlier critiques must now be further interrogated and
qualified if we are to have a meaningful and nuanced discussion of the challenges
that Gauguin continues to present to his audiences.
Notes
1 “Personne n’est bon, personne n’est méchant; tout le monde l’est semblablement
et autrement. … On traîne son double et cependant les deux s’arrangent.” Paul
Gauguin, Avant et après, avec les vingt-sept dessins du manuscript original (Paris: G.
Crès et cie, 1923), 224–5. Translation by Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Gauguin, Intimate
Journals (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 240.
2 Linda Nochlin, “Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art,” in
Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730–1970, eds. Thomas B. Hess and
Linda Nochlin, Art News Annual 38 (New York: Newsweek, 1972): 8–15. Nochlin’s
photograph appears on p. 13.
3 With few exceptions, these have generally avoided taking on or even
acknowledging anything in the earlier postmodern critique of Gauguin that
might threaten his canonical status. Many perpetuate old myths or simply
change the subject entirely, focusing instead, for example, on such subjects
as collecting practices, or on issues of artistic process, media, materials, and
techniques. The major international museum shows on Gauguin in our century
have included: Lure of the Exotic Gauguin in New York Collections (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002); Gauguin in Tahiti (Paris: Galeries nationales
du Grand Palais, and Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2004); Gauguin and
Impressionism (Copenhagen: Ordrupgaard, and Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum,
2005–6); Gauguin: Maker of Myth (London: Tate Modern, and Washington, DC:
National Gallery of Art, 2010–11); Collecting Gauguin: Samuel Courtauld in
the 20s (London: The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2013); Gauguin and Polynesia
(Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glypyotek, and Seattle, Washington: Seattle Art
Museum, 2012–13); Gauguin: Metamorphoses (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 2014); Paul Gauguin (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2015); and Gauguin: Artist as
Alchemist (Chicago: Art Institute, and Paris: Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais,
2017–18).
4 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of
Primitivist Modernism,” Art in America 77 (July 1989): 118–29; reprinted in The
Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D.
Garrard (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 313–29; 315.
5 Among these, the show that had elicited Solomon-Godeau’s deconstructive
response was the National Gallery of Art’s 1988 encyclopedic survey, The Art of
Paul Gauguin, featuring 280 works by Gauguin across all media. Other venues for
this exhibition were the Art Institute of Chicago (1988) and the Galeries nationales
du Grand Palais, Paris (1989).
6 René Huyghe, “le Clef de Noa Noa,” in Paul Gauguin, Ancien Culte mahorie (Paris:
La Palme, 1951); cited by Solomon-Godeau, p. 326. This justification was not
original to Huyghe. It was first made by Charles Morice in a note added to the 1901
edition of Noa Noa.
7 Camille Pissarro, in Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1943), 221.
8 Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” in Broude and Garrard, The Expanding
Discourse, 328.
9 For an indigenous perspective on related issues of cross-cultural appropriation
and intellectual property rights in the Pacific world today, see Deidre S. Brown,
“Traditional Identity: The Commodification of New Zealand Maori Imagery,”
talk presented at the IPinCH Cultural Commodification, Indigenous Peoples &
Self-Determination Public Symposium on May 2, 2013 at the University of British
Columbia. Video available at http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/resources/videos/trading-
identity-commodification-new-zealand-maori-imagery (accessed August 2015).
10 In the field of postcolonial studies, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978) for the seminal articulation and analysis of Western cultural
imperialism and oppression. Taking up and both extending and qualifying Said’s
work, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) posited
ambivalence and anxiety on the part of the dominators and potential agency on the
part of the culturally oppressed. Bhabha also introduced the idea of “hybridization,”
whereby colonialism continues to leave its mark in cross-cultural relations and new
forms of culture that have emerged in a multicultural world.
11 See Karyn Esielonis, Gauguin’s Tahiti: The Politics of Exoticism (Ph.D. diss., Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA. Ann Arbor, UMI Press, 1993), especially Chapter 1,
“The Criticism of Gauguin’s Tahitian Canvases,” 18–104.
12 This and subsequent quotations are from each author’s essay, below.
13 Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London and New York: Thames and Hudson,
1997), Chapter 2: “Sex in Tahiti,” 91–147.
Part One
Constructing Multiple Identities

1
Gauguin’s Alter Egos: Writing the Other

and the Self
Linda Goddard
University of St. Andrews
Responses to Gauguin’s art have been inseparable from reactions to his

controversial life and self-curated persona. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau
described in her classic essay of 1989, “Going Native,” Gauguin was a “persuasive
purveyor of his own mythology,” through self-portraiture, photographs that
he liked to circulate among his disciples and statements in which he cast
himself as a misunderstood genius.1 This role-playing fed into the triumphalist
presentation of the artist as the “founding father of primitivism” in biographies
and exhibitions. Gauguin colluded fully, she argued, in the potent art-historical
myth whose goal was to chart his “assumption of the role of savage,” a cynical
masquerade that occluded the realities of racial and gendered power structures
in the colonial context.2
Subsequent scholars, notably Stephen F. Eisenman, Lee Wallace and Hal
Foster, have drawn attention to the fragility and insecurity of Gauguin’s white
masculinity. Despite their internal differences, collectively these readings have
led to a focus in the Gauguin literature on the mutability and hybridity of the
self, in its psychic, social, and sexual dimensions, premised on an understanding
of the colonial encounter as both reciprocal and ambivalent.3 My claim is that a
study of Gauguin’s writings that gives due weight to their literary strategies has
much to add to these newer perspectives on his colonial identity. The perception
of racial and sexual difference, mixed with a desire to transcend it, which
structured his primitivist outlook, is also pertinent to Gauguin’s sense of the
different characteristics of visual and verbal expression, and a serious account
of his writings needs to acknowledge their conscious primitivism.4 Gauguin
aligned the visual artist with the “savage” and the writer with the “civilized,”
contrasting the intuitive sensibility of the former with the rote learning of the
latter, but was ambivalently suspended between the two.5 As is well known, he
sought to protect Polynesian society from “civilization,” but remained implicated
in the imperialist culture that he denounced. Equally paradoxically, he defended
artists against verbal intervention, but was a prolific writer himself, producing
five extant manuscripts, published essays and correspondence, and editing two
newspapers.6 In its uneasy confrontation of roles that he sought to distinguish,
his hybrid identity as an artist-writer complements his liminal status as a critical
primitivist or reluctant colonizer, on the margins of both the indigenous and
settler communities.7
Gauguin’s writings also foreground the constructedness of identity
in the sense that their fragmentary and repetitive structure prevents the
establishment of a unified authorial voice. Civilized and savage were terms
that Gauguin set in opposition, in line with the rhetoric of imperialism, but
also combined, inverted and moved between. His statements draw attention
more often to the divisions in his persona than to any stable sense of self.
They trade in stereotypes, but allow for relativity and fluctuation: “To them
[the Tahitians] I was a ‘savage,’” he wrote in Noa Noa; in a letter to a French
acquaintance he called himself a “civilized savage”; to Emile Schuffenecker
a “savage from Peru”; and in Avant et après a “coarse sailor” but also a
“descendant of a Borgia of Aragon.”8 In this essay, I will show how his volatile
self-positioning is paralleled by the way in which he constructed his writings.
In a process that has been little studied, he created multiple authorial positions,
both by borrowing the words of others, and by writing under different guises
himself. The principle of assemblage that governs the narrative content of
his manuscripts extends to their physical format, resulting in a striking
scrapbook aesthetic that is lost in the printed editions, and rarely taken into
account when his writings are consulted for their biographical interest, or to
assist in the iconographical interpretation of his art works.
“Scattered notes, without sequence like dreams, like life all made up
of fragments.” Gauguin characterized three of his manuscripts this way,
highlighting their disjointed structure.9 In two cases he added “And because
others have collaborated in it, the love of beautiful things seen in your
neighbor’s house,” thus also drawing attention to their multiple sources.10 If we
interpret his writings as an integral component of his creative practice, rather
than a commentary upon it, then the qualities of reiteration and appropriation
that are typical of his work, and which have excited scholarly interest in the
Gauguin’s Alter Egos: Writing the Other and the Self 17
context of recent exhibitions of his prints, come into sharper focus. For not
only is Gauguin’s fragmentary manner of textual composition equivalent to the
procedure that he adopted for his painting, sculpture, and printmaking, but the
manuscripts vividly materialize the process of appropriation, so that it becomes
much more palpable and obvious in this format. If, arguably, Gauguin’s habitual
borrowing is concealed in his painting (such as his sampling of poses from
the photographs that he owned of the Borobudur Temple reliefs of the Life of
Buddha), in the cut-and-paste composition of his illustrated manuscripts it is
immediately apparent.
A couple of examples will illustrate this point. In the manuscript of Noa
Noa held in the Musée du Louvre, which is Gauguin’s copy of the text he
drafted in 1893 then revised in collaboration with the poet Charles Morice,
he incorporated several sequences of images that confront originals with
reproductions.11 In one layout combining photographs, original watercolors,
and a pasted-in fragment of a woodcut, the possibility of doubling suggested
by the inherently reproductive media of print and photography is heightened
by a series of pairings (Figure 1.1). In the lower register of the left-hand page,
two almost identical photographs capture Gauguin’s sculpture Head with Horns
from alternative angles, in images of slightly different scales. Two Polynesian
women (in one case, the prominent figure in a group), each photographed from
the waist up and with their naked torsos angled a little towards each other,
echo each other across the double-page spread, the similarity in pose and
photographic format suggesting that they are intended to be emblematic of
Polynesian femininity: different and yet the same.
At the top of the left-hand page, Gauguin has painted directly on the page
around the group photograph, as though the women were imagining—or perhaps
metamorphosing into—the ghostly figures that emerge from an amorphous
mass of colored shapes that encroaches upon, or emanates from, them. Such
a provocative juxtaposition of the mechanical and the artist’s hand may be
intended to privilege the latter, implying that it is he alone, with his imaginative,
semi-abstract inventions, who has the power to extract the spiritual core of
Tahiti from the tourist vision conveyed in photographs. The intimate physical
overlap between painting and photograph, however, also calls that hierarchy
into question. Gauguin’s activation of the creative tension between media recalls
the assortment of sketches, copies, reproductions, and photographs found in
the albums or keepsakes of nineteenth-century amateur women artists, or the
sketchbooks of Edgar Degas, whose own experimental printmaking challenged
Figure 1.1 Paul Gauguin, page from Noa Noa with photographs of a Tahitian
family and two idols, 1895–9, watercolor, brown ink and photographs, 12⅜ × 18⅛
in. (31.5 × 46 cm).
the distinction between creating and reproducing.12 Addressing the physical

format of Gauguin’s manuscripts therefore allows us to place them in a visual
and material cultural tradition that befits his description of Noa Noa, in the
preface of the Louvre version, as a “book to be seen as well as read.”13
Different voices, as well as media, come into play on the pages of Diverses
choses, whose title (Various Things) reflects its compilation of words and images
from many sources (Figure 1.2).14 In one double-page spread, Gauguin writes as
himself, in the guise of a scathing imaginary letter to a critic (which concludes, at
the bottom of the right-hand page, “agréez cher critique, etc …. Paul Gauguin”),
Figure 1.2 Paul Gauguin, autograph annotations and caricature self-portrait, from
the Noa Noa album, 1895–9, pen with blue and brown ink, 12⅜ × 18⅛ in. (31.5 × 46 cm).
copies verses from Paul Verlaine, pastes in a critic’s review of his work, and
imagines himself as viewed through the eyes of another in the self-portrait
sketch at the top of the left-hand page, which is captioned “my portrait by my
vahine Pahura” (mon portrait par ma vahine Pahura). Adding to the visual
interest already supplied by the combination of writing, sketch and reproduced

photographs of Gauguin and his work is the arrangement of Gauguin’s
handwriting in a variety of configurations dictated by the conventional formats
of diverse literary genres: poem, letter, caption, newsprint and, elsewhere on the
page, proverb or aphorism.15
Citation is central to Gauguin’s writing. On the opening page of his first

manuscript, dated 1893, which he dedicated to his daughter, Aline, four
names appear in succession, initiating the chorus of voices that continues in
the remainder of the volume: Aline, in the handwritten dedication at the top of
the page; Gauguin, Charles Morice and Jean Dolent, as the subject, dedicatee,
and author, respectively, of a collaged newspaper article—the multivocality
emphasized by the combination of handwriting and newsprint (Figure 1.3).16
Figure 1.3 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (Notebook for Aline), 1893.
The book then continues with another voice, that of Edgar Allan Poe, in a series
of excerpts from his Marginalia (1844–9) that reappear in Diverses choses (so
that we have multiplicity and reiteration).17 The extracts from Poe, which are,
after all, his Marginalia, or gathered reflections, end with quotations from
other famous epigrammatists, Nicolas Chamfort and Epicurus. Poe’s borrowed
thoughts are followed by the words of Richard Wagner, likewise cited on other
occasions by Gauguin.18 In both cases, the “guest author,” as it were, is clearly
announced. But at the same time a principle of proverbialism, of shared and
potentially anonymous authorship, is established. This is emphasized by the
segue between the aphorisms embedded in the Poe text, and those that follow
on, either of Gauguin’s own invention, or too commonplace to be attributed, for
example, “Everything is forgiven, nothing is erased, everything that has been
will always be.”19
The manuscript concludes, as it began, with newspaper cuttings, which fill
the eighteen pages prior to the decorated endpaper (Figure 1.4). For the most
part, these are reviews of an exhibition of Gauguin’s work at the Galerie Durand-
Ruel in 1893, during his two-year return to Paris, sent to him by a press-cutting
agency. This literal, physical cutting and pasting of newspaper corresponds
to the figurative cut-and-paste of textual fragments in the main body of the
manuscript. It also continues the free play between anonymity and attribution
Figure 1.4 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (Notebook for Aline), 1893.
found there. For instance, on one double-page spread, Gauguin copied out part
of an article by Félix Fénéon, including his name, so that an author is identified
but his words rendered in another hand. To the lower right of this passage he
pasted a newspaper cutting, whose mechanically printed words lack title or
author, while on the opposite page, Octave Mirbeau’s name is emblazoned on
the first page of a collaged article announcing Gauguin’s departure (in 1891)
for Tahiti. This principle of citation is crystallized on a page of Diverses choses,
onto which Gauguin pasted a small piece of paper containing some printed
lines attributed to Charles Baudelaire. Extracted from its original context (the
poet’s essay of 1861, “Richard Wagner and Tannhaüser in Paris”), the quotation
marks that frame the passage reveal that Gauguin excised it from another,
now unknowable source.20 Iteration itself is foregrounded here, the dislocated
quotation marks signaling the adaptability of such textual fragments.
Gauguin’s literary borrowings, then, are not unacknowledged or subsumed
into a single unifying personality, instead they are made explicitly manifest,
visually and materially. He neither disguised them, nor troubled to attribute them
correctly, but foregrounded their mutability. But what is the significance of this
practice? Until recently, there had been little investigation into his distinctive use
of appropriation and reiteration, other than steadily to identify and document
the myriad sources—European, Polynesian, Indonesian, South American—
which he mined for visual motifs, very often via reproduction. Critical judgment
of this procedure did, however, begin with Camille Pissarro, whose frustration
with his pupil’s preference for mystical themes over social realities prompted
his charge, in 1893, that the younger artist, having worked his way through the
European repertoire, was now “pillaging the savages of Oceania.”21 Pissarro’s
statement provided a model for criticizing Gauguin’s source sampling not just
on artistic, but on ethical grounds. Most notably, Solomon-Godeau saw his
tendency towards quotation and repetition as symptomatic of the artifice of his
tourist vision. His claim in Noa Noa, for instance, that he learned the Polynesian
creation myths that he recounts there from his Tahitian wife (named Tehura in
the Louvre manuscript), when in fact he derived them from a book by the French
consul Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, is a case of “paradigmatic plagiarism.”22
Solomon-Godeau’s analysis brilliantly shows how Gauguin’s representations
of Polynesia are mediated through layers of pre-existing texts and images in a
form of mythic speech. However, it also assumes a level of deceit on Gauguin’s
part that is not always borne out by the evidence. Gauguin’s “double denial,” as
Solomon-Godeau has it (concealing that he copied the legends from a secondary
source, and failing to acknowledge that his Tahitian companion could not
have known them anyway, since the native culture had been stamped out by
Europeans) is in fact more of a double attribution.23 Moerenhout is acknowledged
on several occasions in the Louvre manuscript of Noa Noa.24 Sometimes, he and
Tehura are identified as simultaneous informants about Polynesian myths, as
when the narrator ponders: “Who created the sky and the moon? Moerenhout
and Tehura replied to me ….” A multiplicity of origins is proposed here, rather
than a single indigenous one. The variety of sources (whether intended as doubly
authenticating, or mystifying) seems to be the point, rather than a guilty secret
that is obscured.25
The counter tendency, starting with an often-cited article of 1960 by
Richard Field, has been to normalize his copying by stressing that artists
throughout history have incorporated visual sources without feeling the need
to acknowledge them.26 With an exclusive focus on the visual production, Field
showed in detail how Gauguin reworked a borrowed image to fit its different
contexts. He concluded that, as an anti-realist, it was logical for Gauguin to draw
inspiration from an archive of images rather than from direct observation of
nature.27 Richard Brettell continued in this tradition when he proposed that
the artist absorbed his sources so fully that “his own identity—Gauguin—was
stamped on everything he made.” Focusing on Gauguin’s works on paper,
including his writings, he showed how the mobility of this material facilitated
the artist’s fondness for reproduction, but—like Field—he downplayed the
significance of repetition as such. Once copied, according to Brettell, the passages
that he borrowed from other authors “become Gauguin.”28 In these accounts,
appropriation paradoxically restores the artist’s sovereign authority as a single,
unified subject. His ability inventively to adapt existing motifs only confirms his
originality and authenticity as creator.
Recent accounts, by contrast, have highlighted reproduction as an active
principle in Gauguin’s work, with a focus on its implications for his subjectivity
in the colonial context. It is this aspect that I want to build on here, following
my previous exploration of “creative plagiarism” and collective authorship in
Diverses choses.29 In the catalog for the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s
exhibition of 2014, Metamorphoses, Hal Foster points to bricolage, diversity and
pastiche as aspects of Gauguin’s practice that give the lie to any simple aspiration
to primitive purity, instead revealing the colonial encounter to be constituted
by hybridity.30 Foster defines the “primitivist’s dilemma,” of which Gauguin is
emblematic, as the unresolvable conflict between the desire to identify with a
non-Western “other” and the awareness of difference that facilitates that desire
in the first place. He finds an analogue for this suspension between identification
and distance in Gauguin’s practice of repetition and transformation. When
Gauguin reiterates a motif, but alters it to fit its new situation, he holds in balance
the tension between sameness and difference that constitutes the primitivist
mentality.
Writing about Gauguin’s suite of Noa Noa prints for an exhibition in Princeton
in 2010, Alastair Wright identified a “melancholy logic of reproduction” in
Gauguin’s distinctive approach to printmaking. Exacerbating the medium’s
inherently reiterative properties, Gauguin introduced slight variations—
reworking the block, applying different color ink—so that the uniqueness of
each iteration paradoxically drew attention to the very fact of reproduction.
For Wright, Gauguin’s foregrounding of repetition conveyed to the viewer his
awareness that the “original” Tahiti could never be experienced or represented
directly, only filtered through a web of preexisting texts and images. To support
this argument, he found parallels in other aspects of Gauguin’s life and work,
namely his fondness for role-playing and the constant citation and borrowing
in his writing.31 The elusiveness of a genuine sense of self, as indicated by
the proliferating personae of Gauguin’s portraits and statements (Peruvian,
sailor, savage and so on) mirrors the difficulty of pinning down in his visual
representations a true image of Polynesia.32
I want to pursue a somewhat different line of argument by emphasizing
Gauguin’s practice of assuming different authorial roles and foregrounding the
process of movement between them. We might see this as registering not a loss
of self, exactly, but an interest in the performative nature of identity and the
interdependence of self and other. Gauguin’s knowledge of previous writing on
Polynesia means that he was familiar not only with the myth of an untainted
paradise, but also with the trope of disappointment and nostalgia that almost
invariably accompanied it, from Louis-Antoine de Bougainville to Pierre Loti.33
In this respect, at least, his sense of loss in the encounter with a dying culture
was scripted in advance, and his explorations of selfhood in the colonial context
more knowing and ambivalent than melancholic. By adopting different identities
as a writer, he could temporarily become someone other than himself, and in the
process unsettle a series of related binary oppositions between male and female,
civilized and savage, writer and artist.
The best-known instance of Gauguin’s use of pseudonyms is an aesthetic
credo that he circulated among artists and critics including Georges Seurat,
Pissarro and Fénéon in 1886, which he passed off as the words of “Mani, the
painter giver of precepts,” or in later renditions “the great professor Mani Vehbi-
Zumbul-Zadi.” It has been suggested that this pseudonym conflates the historical
figures of Mani, founder of Manicheism in third-century Persia—whose status
as a persecuted prophet and reputed painter clearly would have appealed to
Gauguin—and an eighteenth-century Ottoman poet, Vehbi Sünbülzade.34
Regardless of his potential sources of inspiration for the name, Gauguin
deliberately gave his alter ego the vaguest of historical coordinates as an “artist in
Barbarian times,” who delivered his counsel “in the time of Tamerlane” [which
would be fourteenth century] “in the year X before or after Christ,” adding that
the precise date did not matter, since “precision is often harmful to the dream.”35
“Mani” advises painting from the imagination, not the model, using color
harmonies and static poses, and compares inspiration to boiling lava, in a
Baudelairian metaphor that recurs in Gauguin’s texts.36 In other words, his
ideas are suspiciously close to Gauguin’s own. It is now accepted that the “great
professor” was Gauguin himself. What has not been emphasized is how he
recycled and reframed his fake treatise, in a manner antithetical to a forger’s
dependence on consistency. His initial conceit was that it was an extract from an
Oriental Livre des Métiers (Book of Crafts), and this is how it was presented when
Fénéon published it in L’Art Moderne in 1887.37 But when Gauguin included the
credo in Diverses choses (and later Avant et après) he gave it the more fanciful
form of a lecture to disciples, overheard in a wood in the Levant: the reader is
invited to join a group of long-haired youths, gathered to hear Mani’s words.38
He also quoted a favorite sentence in his letters and elsewhere, either describing
it as “Mani’s Arabic words,” or simply incorporating it into his own sentences
without attribution.39 Gauguin may have been amused at the idea of fooling his
peers, especially rivals like Seurat, with his assumed identity, and no doubt he
enjoyed lending his words the authority of an ancient, Oriental perspective, but
this was less a serious effort at deception than an experiment with the framing
and attribution of text.40
Gauguin’s incarnation as Mani represents his most blatant adoption of
a pseudonym, but it was not the only occasion on which he recast himself.
Returning to the manuscript of 1893 dedicated to his daughter, “Notebook for
Aline” (Cahier pour Aline) is the title that it is generally given, but in fact its name
has been extrapolated from the dedication on the first page: “To my daughter,
Aline, this notebook is dedicated.” The assumption that the text was conceived
for his daughter allows it to be read as private, and fits with the inclination to
interpret artists’ writings as personal and spontaneous, not written with a view
to public consumption. It has led commentators to puzzle over why he might
think that his fifteen-year-old daughter would be interested in his musings
on aesthetics, politics and morality, including passages on prostitution, free
love and executions. But a dedicatee is not usually a book’s unique intended
recipient, or even necessarily its ideal reader. It tends to be someone whom the
author wants to thank, honor or celebrate, such as parents, perhaps, or a new-
born grandchild. In fact, the presence of a dedication generally marks a book as
public, rather than private.
Nonetheless, the case is complicated because Gauguin originally penned a
longer dedication, later discovered during the manuscript’s conservation, before
obscuring all but the first line with newspaper cuttings (see Figure 1.3).41 Asking,
“Will my thoughts be useful to her? No matter, since she loves and respects
her father, I will give her a keepsake,” and reassuring himself that Aline has a
“sufficiently noble head and heart not to be shocked—corrupted by contact with
the devilish mind that nature has given me,” these words do seem to indicate
that he expected his daughter to read the volume.42 His subsequent decision to
conceal the bulk of the dedication might indicate a change of heart about the
book’s intended audience. And yet, had it originally been destined for Aline’s
eyes alone, his address would have been in the second person, as in: “will my
thoughts be useful to you?” Instead, it reads more like a public declaration of
association, a projection of his own self-image onto her: “She too is a savage,
she will understand me.”43 We could say that for Gauguin, Aline operates more
as an alter ego than an imagined reader; it is a case of writing as rather than
writing for her. This interpretation is suggested by the barely visible phrase that
appears at the bottom of the front cover: “Journal de jeune fille” [the journal of
a young girl]. If the notebook has a title, then this is it, although it has all but
disappeared—the Journal of a young girl, not the Notebook for Aline.44
Starting from this premise, the persona of the young girl as surrogate author
is further implied by the placement on the inside front cover of a reproduction
of Camille Corot’s Italian Woman Playing the Mandolin, which establishes a
youthful female figure at an inaugural position in relation to the text (Figure
1.5), especially if one compares it to the opening page of Diverses choses, where
Vincent van Gogh’s sketch of his painting of a young provençal girl, La Mousmé,
accompanies those same lines with which both books open: “scattered Notes,
without sequence like dreams, like life all made up of fragments; and because
others have collaborated in it” (Figure 1.6).45 The collaborative and reproduced
Figure 1.5 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (Notebook for Aline), reproduction of
Camille Corot’s Italian Woman Playing the Mandolin, 1893, watercolor and ink on
paper, 8¾ × 13½ in. (22.2 × 34.2 cm).
nature of the images is equally undisguised—the Corot culled from the sales
catalog of the collection belonging to Gauguin’s guardian Gustave Arosa (a key
source for the artist’s image bank), and the van Gogh snipped from a letter that
he received from the painter—the prominence of the artist’s name in each case,
the torn edge of the letter and the messy cutting out of the reproduction making
their incorporation into Gauguin’s aesthetic universe far from concealed or
seamless.
Gauguin adopted a feminine persona on other occasions, as in the sketch
from Diverses choses captioned “my portrait by my Vahine Pahura” (see Figure
1.2). This, of course, is Gauguin depicting himself as if through the eyes of a
young girl, who is presumed to see him as exaggeratedly masculine with his
hard-edged jaw. Youth is implied by the naivety of the drawing, and by the
discursive connection between the childlike, the feminine and the primitive that
the Tahitian Vahine symbolizes in Gauguin’s work and more widely. To write (or
in this case draw) in a childlike way accords with Gauguin’s self-image as savage.
Within the codes of primitivism, a psychic return to infancy summoned up
the collective childhood of humanity, and there are numerous instances of this
association in Gauguin’s writing, as when he described his efforts, in Diverses
Figure 1.6 Paul Gauguin, page from the album Noa Noa with drawing by Vincent
van Gogh, 1895–9, pen and ink, 12⅜ × 9 in. (31.5 × 23.2 cm).
choses and Avant et après, to cast his mind back “further than the horses of the
Parthenon—to the hobbyhorse of my childhood, the good old wooden horse.”46
His confession in both texts that his “scattered notes” contain “childish things”
implies that his repetitive, unstructured style facilitates a childlike authorial
voice that his feminine proxies are conjured to represent.47
Additionally, in Le Sourire, the newspaper that he wrote, printed and

distributed in Tahiti, he assumed, in the opening issue, the identity of a female
theater critic. In a review of a one-act play by a Tahitian woman, he wrote: “I
must confess that I am a woman, and that I am always prepared to applaud
when I see another woman who is bolder than I fighting for equivalent
moral freedoms to men.”48 In the voice of the female reviewer, he goes on to
describe how Anna, the play’s protagonist, believes in friendship and sexual
freedom, but mocks romantic love and marriage. Wishing to dissuade her
naïve suitor from his insistence on marriage, she confesses to having had a
sexual relationship with her father, the one true love of her life; the play closes
as her would-be fiancé dies of shock at this revelation. The review ends with
a call to arms, entreating men to help liberate women, body and soul, from
the enslavement and prostitution of marriage, since “We women don’t have
the strength to free ourselves.” It is signed “Paretenia”—Tahitian for Virgin.49
At the base of the page, underneath the byline Paretenia, is a sketch of a
puppet theatre, and, alongside, one of customers rushing to buy Gauguin’s
newspaper, with the caption “Hurry, hurry, let’s go and find Le Sourire.”50 Via
the guignol, an emblem for his own satirical broadsheet, Gauguin affiliates
his publication with the subversive morality of the (probably fictional)
Polynesian theatre.
He also connects Le Sourire—of which nine issues were printed, each in about
thirty copies, using a mimeograph machine—with his other writings by using
the same words to describe its apparently casual structure. Like both Diverses
choses and Avant et après, he claims it was written “partly for relaxation, partly
to bring together certain favourite ideas.”51 Many of these ideas, on art, politics
and local gossip, are also found elsewhere, especially in Avant et après, written
a few years later. This book, misleadingly translated as Gauguin’s Intimate
Journals, consists of personal reflections and reminiscences, but resists a linear
narrative of developing selfhood, in favor of a jumbled chronology suggested by
its actual title, Before and After.52 The fact that many of its episodes previously
appeared in Gauguin’s publicly distributed newspaper likewise undermines
the conventional privacy of the diary form. As a newspaper, Le Sourire entails
mass reproduction, albeit on a limited scale. The reiteration that this implies
is reflected in the way in which it recycles episodes from previous texts and
supplies fresh ones for later reuse. In the overlapping of these texts, we witness
not the private unfolding of a coherent self, but the public dissemination of a
fragmented one.
Le Sourire also avoids adopting a coherent perspective by foregrounding

shifts in tone and authorship. Issues are variously titled either “Journal sérieux”
or “Journal méchant” and they consist largely of satirical attacks on the venality
and hypocrisy of colonial officials, who are caricatured in both text and image.53
But the woodblock headpieces were also reprinted and sent to Gauguin’s dealer
Ambroise Vollard back in France as free-standing works of art; they were
sometimes incorporated into other works, such as oil transfer drawings, or
pasted into Noa Noa—thus establishing a crossover between his visual art and
writing, and between “high” and “low” art forms. This blend of the popular and
the esoteric is characteristic of other fin-de-siècle projects, such as La Dernière
Mode, the fashion journal written and edited in 1874 by the symbolist poet
Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Gauguin admired and whose Tuesday soirées he had
attended.54
Like Gauguin in Le Sourire, Mallarmé directed and wrote the entire
publication under the guise of various pseudonyms, including female monikers
such as Miss Satin, Marguerite de Ponty, or, more generically, “une dame créole,”
in what has been called a “proto-camp document.”55 Gauguin’s attribution of a
theatre review to the Tahitian “Paretenia” is not so different from Mallarmé’s
offering of a soup recipe, in an alter ego combining racial classification with
artistic allusion, by “Olympe, négresse.”56
Gauguin employed another pseudonym in Le Sourire: although all of the
journal’s content was written by him, the majority of the articles are signed
with the scabrous moniker “Tit-Oil,” while for the remainder Gauguin signs as
himself. Mostly, Tit Oil engages in the main task of taking down the governor
and his cronies, but on a couple of occasions he indulges in autobiographical
reminiscences, and both of these entail displays of masculine bravado. “Tit Oil’s
first incarnation,” as the piece is titled, in which he specifically identifies himself
as a Frenchman, describes him beating a group of Americans at a billiards
game in New York, remaining calm and collected as an intruder showers them
with bullets.57 In the “second incarnation” he is a circus ringleader whose wife
is also a “wild animal.”58 These tales fit with Gauguin’s propensity for self-
aggrandisement, if not the precise factual details of his life history, but the image
of macho nationalism that they present is so caricatured that it is tempting to see
them as parodic.
In addition to the ancient barbarian painter Mani, the Tahitian female theatre
critic Paretenia and Tit-Oil the circus owner, Gauguin also writes “as an artist.”
He opened Racontars de rapin, or Dauber’s Gossip, of 1902, his diatribe against
professional art critics, with the phrase, “I am going to try to talk about painting,
not as a man of letters, but as a painter.”59 And in Avant et après, a year later, he
expressed a similar aspiration: “I should like to write as I paint my pictures—
following my fancy, following the moon, and finding the title long afterwards.”60
Although “painter” is the one role to which he could authentically lay claim,
it is also, in these instances, a position to be consciously adopted. From the
point of view of the writer, the artist is an alternative incarnation of the “other.”
“Artist” is an attribute that joins “Tahitian,” “female,” and “childlike” as a sign
of the primitive under which Gauguin writes. He compared artists to children
in Diverses choses, entreating “learned men” to “forgive these poor artists who
have never grown up; if not out of pity, than at least for the love of flowers and
heady scents, for they often resemble them.” He likened the artist’s condition to
that of a “primitive” culture coming into contact with civilization, coding them
also as feminine: “Like flowers, they bloom at the slightest ray of sun, releasing
their perfume, but they wither at the impure contact of the hand that tarnishes
them.”61
In Gauguin’s writings, there are many indications of instability that undercut
the masculine mastery of the colonial gaze (or voice). Whether autograph
Gauguin, attributed quotation, unacknowledged borrowing, false attribution,
invented author or pseudonym, all are presented as equivalent, but without
the shifts between them being concealed. Gauguin’s experimentation with
authorial identities is not simply a cynical wearing of masks or a nostalgic
lament for a true self, but a working-through of his own, awkward position
as an outsider to both the colonial and indigenous communities.62 It is also
an attempt to deal with the paradox of writing as an artist who vociferously
resisted literary authority, by exposing the essentially performative nature of
the writer’s position. When Gauguin adopts the voice of a Polynesian woman
or an ancient painter of imprecise Eastern origin, it allows him to flirt with
“exotic” identities without losing the cultural advantages of his own subject
position, but it is also an instance of a wider literary engagement with citation,
and anonymous or pseudonymous authorship among writers who challenged
literary masculinity through their association with subjects or modes of writing
considered feminine.63 Gauguin’s textual alter egos add a further dimension to
studies of his work that have attended to its ambiguous and even subversive
engagement with questions of gender and colonial identity. His textual strategies
of appropriation, reiteration and assemblage position his writing as a vital part
of his interdisciplinary practice.
Notes
1 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of

Primitivist Modernism,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History,
eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper Collins/Icon Editions,
1992), 315.
2 Ibid., 314.
1997); Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 109–37; Hal Foster, “Primitive Scenes,”
in Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004), 1–52. For an
assessment of Gauguin’s critical distance from dominant colonialist narratives,
focused on Noa Noa, see Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial
Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
246–64.
4 Typically, commentators have accepted at face value Gauguin’s own denials of
literary expertise, and dismissed his writings as amateur. In previous publications
I have argued that his “primitive” writing style was a deliberate aesthetic
strategy, rather than the result of a lack of professional literary experience. See
Linda Goddard, “‘Following the Moon:’ Gauguin’s Writing and the Myth of the
‘Primitive,’” in Gauguin: Maker of Myth, ed. Belinda Thomson (London: Tate
Publishing/Princeton University Press, 2010), 32–9.
5 For instance, in Racontars de rapin, written in 1902, he contrasted “le critique
soi-disant instruit” (the so-called learned critic), whose expertise amounts to the
recognition of names in catalogs, with the unassuming knowledge of the artist, who
with his “dons spéciaux” (special gifts) barely succeeds “à connaître les secrets des
maîtres” (in knowing the secrets of the masters). Paul Gauguin, Racontars de rapin:
facsimile du manuscrit de Paul Gauguin, ed. Victor Merlhès (Taravao: Avant et
après, 1994), 3.
6 For a comprehensive list of Gauguin’s writings, see the bibliography in
Richard Brettell, Françoise Cachin, Claire Frèches-Thory, Charles F. Stuckey
and Peter Zegers, The Art of Paul Gauguin, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institue of
Chicago/Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1988). The only collected
edition currently available is Paul Gauguin, Oviri. Écrits d’un sauvage, ed. Daniel
Guérin (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), which consists of brief, often heavily edited,
excerpts. Where possible I cite from the original manuscripts or facsimile
editions.
7 The notion of Gauguin’s “critical primitivism” was proposed by Eisenman,
Gauguin’s Skirt, 29; 201.
8 “sauvage civilisé,” letter of February 1899 “à une inconnue”; “un sauvage du Pérou,”
letter of July 8, 1888 to Emile Schuffenecker, in Paul Gauguin, Lettres à sa femme et
à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1946), 285, 133; “j’étais
pour eux le ‘sauvage’,” Paul Gauguin and Charles Morice, Noa Noa (Stockholm:
Jan Förlag, 1947), 43; “je descends d’un Borgia d’Aragon”; “grossier matelot.” Paul
Gauguin, Avant et après (Copenhagen: Scripta, 1951), 1, 89.
9 “Notes éparses, sans suite comme les rêves, comme la vie toute faite de morceaux.”
Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline, ed. Philippe Dagen (Paris: Editions du Sonneur,
2009), 17; Avant et après, 16; Paul Gauguin, Diverses choses (Paris: Musée du
Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, Fonds du Musée d’Orsay, RF7259),
205. Alastair Wright has eloquently explored the centrality of reproduction to
Gauguin's practice, especially in relation to his prints, but also to his writing, as
well as his adoption of alter egos, in “Paradise Lost: Gauguin and the Melancholy
Logic of Reproduction,” in Alastair Wright and Calvin Brown, Gauguin's Paradise
Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum/
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).
10 “Et de ce fait que plusieurs y collaborent, l’amour des belles choses aperçues dans la
maison du prochain.” Paul Gauguin, Avant et après, 16; Diverses choses, 205.
11 Gauguin and Morice, Noa Noa. The first draft manuscript of Noa Noa, written in
1893, is in the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. On the history of the different
versions of Noa Noa, see Isabelle Cahn, “Noa Noa: The Voyage to Tahiti,” in
Gauguin, Tahiti, eds. George T. M. Shackelford and Claire Frèches-Thory (Boston:
MFA Publications, 2004), 91–113; Nicholas Wadley, ed./intro., Noa Noa: Gauguin’s
Tahiti, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985). On the implications of this
partnership for our understanding of Gauguin as a writer, see Linda Goddard, “The
‘Writings of a savage’? Literary Strategies in Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 71 (2008): 277–93.
12 See Stephanie O’Rourke, “The Singular Multiple,” in Degas: A Strange New Beauty,
ed. Jodi Hauptman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016), 56–9; Anne
Higonnet, Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), 50–3. Wright, “Paradise Lost,” 81–5, analyzes the confrontation of
original and reproduced images in Cahier pour Aline and the Louvre manuscript of
Noa Noa, including the pages I discuss here.
13 “livre à voir et à lire,” Gauguin and Morice, Noa Noa, 1.
14 Diverses choses is dated 1896–7 on its title page, 205, but ends with “fin du volume,
janvier 1898” final page, 346. The manuscript is bound in the same volume as the
Gauguin’s revised version of Noa Noa (Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts
Graphiques, Fonds du Musée d’Orsay, RF7259) and both are reproduced on the
CD-ROM Gauguin écrivain: Noa Noa, Diverses choses, Ancien culte mahorie
(Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2003). There is currently no print edition of
the full text of Diverses choses.
15 I discuss the symbolic associations of the texts and images in this double-page
spread in Linda Goddard, “Scattered Notes: Authorship and Originality in
Gauguin’s Diverses Choses,” Art History 34, no. 2 (April 2011): 356–7.
16 The manuscript is held in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut Nationale D’histoire de l’Art
[INHA] (MS 227) and is accessible online at http://www.purl.org/yoolib/inha/5749
(accessed August 2, 2017). There are two facsimile editions (1963 and 1989; reprint
2014). Since the manuscript is unpaginated, for ease of reference I refer to the
transcript (see n. 9) when citing from the text, but this edition does not reproduce
the illustrations or press cuttings.
17 Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (2009), 19–22; Diverses choses, 213–15. Gauguin’s
source was probably the translation by Emile Hennequin, Contes grotesques par
Edgar Poe (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1882); see Victor Merlhès, “Le ‘Cahier pour Aline,’
Histoire et signification,” in Gauguin, A ma fille, Aline, ce cahier est dédié: notes
éparses, sans suite comme les rêves, comme la vie toute faite de morceaux: journal
de jeune fille, ed. Victor Merlhès, 2 vols. (Paris: Société des amis de la Bibliothèque
d’art et d’archéologie, 1989), 1:44.
18 Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (2009), 23–6. Gauguin’s source was Camille Benoît,
Richard Wagner, musiciens, poètes et philosophes: aperçus et jugements (Paris: G.
Charpentier, 1887), and his extracts combined citations from Wagner’s articles
and letters with Benoît’s commentary; see Merlhès, “Histoire et signification,”
50–4. Gauguin first copied passages from this source in an untitled and undated
manuscript (c.1885–6) held in the Département des manuscrits Occidentaux,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (NAF 14903), where unattributed passages
from Wagner and from Robert Schumann (fols 44–5) are followed by a passage
“Tiré du livre des métiers de Vehbi-Zumbul Zadi” (fols 45–6), discussed below.
Gauguin reproduced these passages from Wagner again in Diverses choses, 215–17,
and shorter extracts on several other occasions.
19 “Tout se pardonne. Rien ne s’efface, ce qui a été toujours sera.” Gauguin, Cahier
pour Aline (2009), 22.
20 Gauguin, Diverses choses, 208.
21 Camille Pissarro, letter of November 23, 1893, Camille Pissarro: lettres à son fils
Lucien, ed. John Rewald (Paris: Plon, 1950), 217.
22 Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” 326.
23 Ibid., 326.
24 Gauguin and Morice, Noa Noa, 130, 132, 134, 153.
25 As Hal Foster has recently put it, since Gauguin’s primitivism was a “bricolage
of diverse scenes and sources; it is pointless … to criticize it for what it patently
is, a matter of pastiche.” Hal Foster, “The Primitivist’s Dilemma,” in Gauguin:

Metamorphoses, ed. Starr Figura (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 50.
26 Richard Field, “Gauguin plagiaire ou créateur,” in Gauguin, texts by René Huyghe
et al. (Paris: Hachette, 1960), 139; Richard Brettell, “Gauguin and Paper. Writing,
Copying, Drawing, Painting, Pasting, Cutting, Wetting, Tracing, Inking, Printing,”
in Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth and Dream, ed. Stephen Eisenman (Milan: Skira,
2007), 61.
27 Field, “plagiaire ou créateur,” 139, 141.
28 Brettell, “Gauguin and Paper,” 65.
29 Goddard, “Scattered Notes.” My focus in this article was to align Gauguin’s interest
in textual appropriation and fragmentation with similar tendencies in late-
nineteenth-century literature, and to show that “plagiarism” had a different value
among writers in this period.
30 Foster, “The Primitivist’s Dilemma.” Gauguin’s creative recycling of motifs between
media was the emphasis of the exhibition as a whole, with a particular focus on his
printmaking. The exhibition’s curator Starr Figura links this recombinatory practice
to “the Symbolist tendency to fuse disparate elements, a pre-Freudian game of free
association,” in “Gauguin’s Metamorphoses: Repetition, Transformation, and the
Catalyst of Printmaking,” in Gauguin: Metamorphoses, ed. Starr Figura (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 29.
31 Wright, “Paradise Lost,” 88.
32 Ibid., 73.
33 See Linda Goddard, “Gauguin’s Guidebooks: Noa Noa in the Context of
Nineteenth-century Travel Writing,” in Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics in
the Nineteenth Century, eds. Francesca Frigerio and Francesca Orestano (Oxford
and New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 233–54.
34 Fereshteh Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse and Kandinsky
(New York: Garland, 1991), 46–63. Daftari details Gauguin’s different iterations
of this text and the circulation of copies among the Neo-impressionists, and
identifies, but rules out, potential Ottoman sources, concluding that he invented
it. In an untitled manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (NAF
14903, fol. 45) under the heading Tiré du livre des métiers de Vehbi-Zumbul Zadi,
Gauguin began “Ainsi parle Mani, le peintre donneur de préceptes,” which gives
the impression that he is recording “Mani’s” words as cited in a Book of Crafts by
Vehbi-Zumbul Zadi. However, when he included a version of the text in Diverses
choses (209–12) and Avant et après (35–7), he combined the names to form “le
grand professeur Mani Vehbi-Zumbul-Zadi, le peintre donneur de préceptes.” A
briefer extract in Cahier pour Aline (2009), 27, refers instead simply to “Zumbul-
Zadi.”
35 “Ce fut à l’époque de Tamerlan je crois en l’an X avant ou après Jésus Christ—
Qu’importe; souvent precision nuit au rêve, décaractérise la Fable”; he adds “Si vous
êtes curieux de savoir ce que pouvait dire cet artiste en des temps barbares écoutez.”
The episode finishes “En l’an X tout ceci se passa.” Gauguin, Diverses choses, 209;
212; Avant et après, 35; 37.
36 Mani warns that with too much detail “you cool down the lava and turn boiling
blood into a stone” (vous en refroidissez la lave et d’un sang bouillonnant vous
faites une pierre), while Baudelaire, as cited by Gauguin in Diverses choses,
compares artistic inspiration to “burning bitumen on the volcano floor” (le
bitumen enflamé dans le sol d’un volcan). Gauguin, Diverses choses, 212, 208.
Gauguin used this metaphor for creativity on other occasions, as discussed by
Dario Gamboni, “Volcano Equals Head Equals Kiln Equals Phallus: Connecting
Gauguin’s Metaphors of the Creative Act,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/4
(Spring/Autumn 2013): 93–107.
37 “M. Félix Fénéon nous envoie la traduction de quelques passages du Livre des
Métiers, de l’hindou Wehli-Zunbul-Zadé.” “Préceptes,” L’Art Moderne de Bruxelles
(July 10, 1887), reprinted in Félix Fénéon, Oeuvres plus que completès, ed. Joan U.
Halperin, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 1:81.
38 Any remaining illusion is definitively shattered when Mani is interrupted by
“some offensive words. Naturalist. Pompier etc.” (quelques paroles malsonnantes.
Naturaliste. Pompier, etc.) issuing from the woods but carried away on the wind.
Gauguin, Diverses choses, 209; 212; Avant et après, 35; 37.
39 “cette phrase arabe de Mani.” Paul Gauguin, “Exposition de la libre Esthétique,”
Essais d’art libre 4 (May 1894), 30. In Racontars de rapin, 59, the sentence in
question (with minor variations), “Ne finissez point trop après coup; d’un sang
bouillonnant vous en refroidissez la lave; vous en faites une pierre. Fut-elle un
rubis, rejettez la loin de vous” is prefaced by “le peintre de l’Orient dit à ses
disciples.” Gauguin also included it, without any attribution, in a letter of February
1899 “à une inconnue” (probably Madame Morice). Gauguin, Lettres à sa femme,
286.
40 Seurat and Gustave Kahn may have been fooled, as the latter wrote, “Seurat
was worried by what people called Gauguin’s paper … it was an extract from an
oriental text on the coloring of carpets.” Gustave Kahn, “Au temps du pointillisme,”
Mercure de France 171 (April 1924): 16. However, Gauguin’s early biographers
saw through the ruse; see Charles Morice, Paul Gauguin (Paris: H. Floury, 1920
[1919]), 230; Jean de Rotonchamp, Paul Gauguin, 1848–1903 (Paris: E. Druet, 1925
[1906]), 247.
41 Merlhès, “Histoire et signification,” 39. In the 1963 facsimile the longer dedication
is obscured. In the 1989 facsimile, and on the INHA website (see n. 16), the full text
appears (as in the 2009 transcript), the newspaper cuttings re-glued onto a separate
page by the conservators.
42 “Mes pensées lui seront-elles utiles? Qu’importe, ainsi qu’elle aime son père,
qu’elle le respecte, je lui donne un souvenir”; “Aline a dieu merci la tête et le
coeur assez haut placés pour ne pas s’effaroucher—se corrompre au contact du
cerveau démoniaque que la nature m’a donné.” Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (2009),
unpaginated [p. 15].
43 “Elle aussi est un sauvage, elle me comprendra.” Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline
(2009), unpaginated [p. 15]. On Gauguin’s identification with another female
member of his family, his grandmother Flora Tristan, and their shared interest in
the constructed nature of identity, see Alexandra Wettlaufer, “She is Me: Tristan,
Gauguin and the Dialectics of Colonial Identity,” Romanic Review 98, no. 1 (January
2007): 23–50.
44 The phrase was identified by Suzanne Damiron in her 1963 facsimile edition of
Gauguin’s Cahier pour Aline, ed. Suzanne Damiron, 2 vols. (Paris: Société des
amis de la Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie de l’Université de Paris, 1963), vol.
1, unpaginated. As part of his discussion of Gauguin's textual “ventriloquism,”
Wright, “Paradise Lost,” 75, also interprets Cahier pour Aline's original title to mean
that “Gauguin began writing it as an adult male using the voice of a girl.”
45 See “Notes éparses,” Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline, 17; Avant et après, 16; Diverses
choses, 205.
46 “plus loin que les chevaux du Parthénon … jusqu’au dada de mon enfance, le bon
cheval de bois.” Gauguin, Diverses choses, 207; Avant et après, 16.
47 “notes éparses.” Gauguin, Diverses choses, 205; Avant et après, 16. “choses
enfantines.” Diverses choses, 206. “choses parfois enfantines.” Avant et après, 16.
48 “Il faut vous dire que je suis une femme et que je suis toujours prête à applaudir
lorsque j’en vois une autre plus hardie que moi combattre pour notre liberté
de moeurs à l’égal de l’homme.” Paul Gauguin, Le Sourire 1 (August [1899]),
unpaginated, in Le Sourire de Paul Gauguin: collection complète en facsimile, ed. J. L.
Bouge (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1952).
49 “nous autres femmes nous n’avons pas la force de nous libérer nous même.” Ibid.
50 “vite, vite, allons chercher le Sourire.” Ibid.
51 “Tant de délassement personnel, tant de classement d’idées aimées, quoique folles,
peut-être, je rédige Le Sourire.” Gauguin, Le Sourire 1 (August [1899]); Diverses
choses, 206; Avant et après, 16.
52 See Richard Hobbs, “Reading Artists’ Words,” in A Companion to Art Theory, eds.
Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 173–82.
53 The first four issues are subtitled “Journal sérieux”; issues five to seven are subtitled
“Journal méchant”; issue eight has no subtitle but begins with an article titled
“choses sérieuses”; the ninth issue has no subtitle and begins with an article titled
“Racontars improbables.”
54 Stéphane Mallarmé, La Dernière Mode: gazette du monde et de la famille (1874)
(Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1978). He produced eight issues between September and
December 1874.
55 Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the fin de
siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 48.
56 Mallarmé, La Dernière Mode 8 (December 20, 1874), 60. On La Dernière Mode’s
“hybridity as both private artwork and public circular,” see Heidi Brevik-Zender,
“Family Matters: Mallarmé’s gazette du monde et de la famille,” The Modern
Language Review 111, no. 3 (July 2016): 687. Wright, “Paradise Lost,” 99, n. 93,
observes that Le Sourire combines “the technology of mass circulation and the look
and sound of something like a rarified Symbolism.”
57 “Première incarnation de Tit-Oil.” Gauguin, Le Sourire 2 (September 1899). This
tale also appears in Diverses choses, 329, and Avant et après, 29–30, but is not
attributed to Tit-Oil on these occasions.
58 “deuxième incarnation”; he and his wife are “des fauves aussi.” Gauguin, Le Sourire
3 (October 1899).
59 “Je vais essayer de parler peinture, non en homme de lettres mais en peintre.”
Gauguin, Racontars de rapin, 1.
60 “Je voudrais écrire comme je fais mes tableaux c’est-à-dire à ma fantaisie selon la
lune et trouver le titre longtemps après.” Gauguin, Avant et après, 1.
61 “pardonnez à ces pauvres artistes restés toujours enfants, si ce n’est par pitié,
du moins par amour des fleurs, et des parfums enivrants, car souvent ils leur
ressemblent. Comme les fleurs ils s’épanouissent au moindre rayon de soleil
exhalant leurs parfums mais ils s’étiolent au contact impur de la main qui les
souille.” Gauguin, Diverses choses, 207.
62 Elizabeth C. Childs, Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2013), xxi,
describes Gauguin as “living on the margins of both colonial society and the
Tahitian communities.”
63 Garelick, Rising Star, 61–2, interprets Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode as a “precursor
of a modern drag performance” and discusses other nineteenth-century French
authors who adopted female pseudonyms, were involved with fashion journals, or
generally exhibited the “sexual ambiguity” associated with dandyism. On models
of literary masculinity, and challenges to them, in the nineteenth century, see also
Nigel Harkness, Men of Their Words: The Poetics of Masculinity in Nineteenth-
century Fiction (Leeds: Legenda, 2007).
2
Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portraits in Polynesia:

Androgyny and Ambivalence
Irina Stotland
Montgomery College LLI
Paul Gauguin had a passion for challenging the boundaries of self, such as the
prevailing colonial limits on identity in nineteenth-century Polynesia, where he
created nine of his many self-portraits. By presenting a self that encompasses
masculine-feminine and civilized-savage identities, these works ostensibly
undermine the colonial framework. Gauguin’s concept of a transcendent
androgyny allowed him to probe the cultural restrictions of gender and race
and defined his pictorial and textual images of self. Gauguin’s figurations of
androgyny, however, also revealed the ambivalences of his time. In colonial
discourse, androgyny belongs to the “primitive” domain and appears as both
superior and inferior to the “civilized” world, where utopian unified gender
and racelessness also threaten homosexuality and regression. In nineteenth-
century French literature as well, this uncertainty shapes androgyny as both a
transcendence and a transgression. Thus, a nightmare of Honoré de Balzac’s
Louis Lambert (1832) becomes a fantasy in his Séraphîta (1834) and an image
of weakness in Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834) and Joris-
Karl Huysmans’s Against the Grain (1884). Gauguin’s Tahitian self-portraits and
writings reveal the same dualism.
Scholars such as Stephen F. Eisenman, Elizabeth Childs, Hal Foster and
Lee Wallace have analyzed Gauguin’s explorations of identity in relation to
contemporary colonial discourse.1 For Eisenman, who was among the earliest
to introduce the issue of sexual hybridity into discussions of Gauguin’s life and
art, the artist consciously challenged the status quo and his paintings “mirrored
his own liminal stance on the contested border of sexual and colonial identity.”2
Although Eisenman sees Gauguin’s art as embracing “sexual and racial hybridity,”
he also understands Gauguin’s inclusiveness as masking a secret “wish to be

master within the colonial system.”3 Childs similarly sees Gauguin’s identity
as “a cultural hybrid” of a French bohemian artist and a Polynesian. Gauguin’s
objective emerges as a conscious attempt “to craft an idiosyncratic, avant-garde
identity in the margins between the worlds” of Paris and Tahiti.4 For Foster,
Gauguin’s paintings betray the ambivalence that characterizes colonial identity.
Gauguin’s art pressures “white masculinity to the point of crisis”; however, the
artist also attempts to sustain the colonial binaries of “white and black, male and
female, active and passive, pure and perverse, heterosexual and homosexual.”5
In discussing this same ambivalence, Wallace portrays Gauguin’s “hybridized
aesthetic” as containing both the colonizer’s and colonized people’s discourses,
while demonstrating a conventional heteronormative anxiety about the threat of
homosexuality.6
Although ambivalence, androgyny, and colonial hybridity are widely used
in analyzing Gauguin’s concept of gender and sexuality, their systematic
application to his self-portraiture is lacking in the literature. Gauguin’s
need to transcend conventional boundaries shapes his construction of
self, and his self-portraits show how he challenges colonial definitions of
identity by presenting himself as male and female, civilized and savage, and
heterosexual and homosexual. Moving chronologically, this essay explores
the visual and written sources for each of Gauguin’s nine Polynesian self-
portraits and reveals how he introduces the discourse of hybridity to his
images of self.
Paul Gauguin’s concept of androgyny
Gauguin’s notion of androgyny follows the evolution of the concept during the
nineteenth century, which reflected the change of the sociocultural paradigm
of the period. The earlier Romantic utopian philosophy developed an ideal of
an androgynous humanity—a harmonious unity that transcends all differences.
However, the later nineteenth century perceived the androgynous body, in its
defiance of the binary gender classification, as a threat to social stability.7 The
process of transcending gender implies a transgression of boundaries and, as
such, carries an implication of perversity to the colonial mind. The anxiety
associated with this threat manifests in Gauguin’s distancing suggestions
Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portraits in Polynesia: Androgyny and Ambivalence 43
of androgyny from his images of self and incorporating the iconography of

corruption and depravity into such representations.
Gauguin frequently uses the earlier idea of androgyny to create an image of
a transcending, hybrid identity. The term androgyne first appears in the artist’s
1888 letter to an adolescent Madeleine Bernard. He writes that her happiness
depends on becoming an “Androgyne, without sex. By that I mean that heart
and soul, in short all that is divine, must not be the slave of matter, that is, of
the body. The virtues of a woman are exactly the same as the virtues of a man.”8
In other words, Gauguin conceives of androgyny as a utopian symbol of erased
distinctions of gender and desire.
Gauguin’s notion of a transcendent androgyny parallels the writings of his
maternal grandmother, feminist writer Flora Tristan (1803–44).9 Tristan was
part of the circle of the socialist philosophers, Simon Ganneau and Eliphas Lévi,
who viewed androgyny as a psychological unity of masculine and feminine
aspects.10 In her writings, Tristan styles herself as the androgynous Mary-Christ
and takes on the title “Great Mother of Humanity.”11 For Tristan, women endure
suffering in order to give birth to new souls, since “that is being God, creating
in the universe!”12 Similarly, Gauguin describes himself as a martyr, turning to
the image of self as a sorrowful messiah. Like Tristan, Gauguin links himself to
Christ through the combined themes of suffering and motherhood, describing
how “laughing, you climb your Calvary; your legs stagger under the weight of
the cross; reaching the top, you grit your teeth—and then, smiling again, you
avenge yourself. Spend yourself again! Woman, what have we in common?—The
children!!! They are my disciples, those of the second Renaissance.”13 Gauguin
sees suffering (crucifixion, childbirth, art making) for the sake of creation
(resurrection, children, art) as a path to divinity that ties Christ, woman, artist
together. Unlike Tristan, Gauguin also connects motherhood as art making to
sex.
This voluntary martyrdom of sexual experiences and maternity reveals
Gauguin’s artist-Christ as a “crucified maiden.”14 The creation of art appears to
Gauguin as a delivery.15 The painter Jan Verkade relayed Gauguin’s explication
that “the painter ought not to rest until the child of his imagination, which
his intellect has begotten in a union of love with reality, shall have been born
again … in a more perfect form.”16 A masculine intellect and reality produce a
feminine imagination, which births a transcending ideal through suffering. In
this way, Gauguin’s art emerges as androgynous.
Tristan died before Gauguin was born, but he owned her books, and
mentioned her several times in his writings.17 A divorcee from an abusive
husband and a feminist, Tristan was infamous. Like Tristan, Gauguin cultivated
the self-image of a social outsider.18 Fifty-five years after Tristan’s appropriately
titled Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), Gauguin wrote his own travelogue, one
of an outcast from the Western world.
Noa Noa (1893–4): Performativity and androgyny
Gauguin’s Noa Noa (1893–4) is a utopian narrative that consistently challenges

colonial divisions by highlighting the performativity of identity. At the outset,
Gauguin establishes “savage” as an arbitrary label. He describes being “an object
for observation” for Tahitians and considers that if “each one of them was a savage
to me, so was I a savage to each one of them. And which of us two was wrong?”19
This disruption of colonial categories takes place in the hybrid space of mutual
recognition. Androgynous hybridity also defines Gauguin’s Tahitian bodies,
which he describes as having “something virile in the women, and something
feminine in the men,” thus blurring genders.20
Gender indeterminacy and performativity allow for the appearance of
non-normative desire. However, the specter of homosexuality can always be
dissipated within the mirage of androgyny. This technique is commonplace in
the nineteenth-century novels of Gautier and Huysmans.21 Similarly, in Noa
Noa, Gauguin’s desire for his woodcutting guide disappears when he sees a man
in place of an androgyne.22 The native androgynous bodies allow Gauguin a
momentary “weariness of the role of the male who must always be strong” and
the desire “to be for one minute the weaker being.”23 Ostensibly, the existence of
the “primitive” androgyne catalyzes his gender switching.
In another episode of Noa Noa, Gauguin takes on a feminine role, turning
a victim of his wife’s “savage” passions. He becomes a virginal sacrifice to an
animalistic native. Alone in a cage with Gauguin, “the great royal tiger” pressures
him, “showing by movements of his beard and claws that he likes caresses. He
loves me. I dare not strike him; I am afraid and he abuses my fear. In spite of
myself I have to endure his disdain. At night my wife seeks my caresses. She
knows I am afraid of her and she abuses my fear.”24 Gauguin reveals his fears
of being dominated and subsumed by the “primitive” while simultaneously
challenging colonial anxiety by exposing the mutability of any identity.
Paul Gauguin’s Polynesian self-portraits
After moving to Tahiti in 1891, Gauguin created nine self-portraits within a

three-fold, interconnected definition of an artist: a Christian martyr, an outcast
and a victim of sexual transgression. His civilized-savage and male-female
personae transcended the time’s normative binaries, allowing him to negotiate
among his multiple identities.
This was also true of the self-portraits painted before his departure for Tahiti:
Gauguin becomes a martyr in Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889; Palm Beach:
Norton Museum of Art, W. 326), a priest in Vision of the Sermon (1888; Plate 1),
a wanderer in Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin (1889; Prague: National Gallery in
Prague, W. 322), and a fisherman in Self-Portrait at Lezaven (1888; Washington
DC: National Gallery of Art, W. 384), to name a few.25 In all of them, Gauguin
appears as a figure of marginality vis-à-vis the bourgeois. He highlights the
performativity of his identity by costuming himself. The masquerade allows
Gauguin to temporarily and, thus, safely try on multiple social identities. This
process of posing is also gender ambiguous, the simultaneous masking of
self and its theatrical display challenging conventional norms of masculinity.
Gauguin takes on a feminine role. According to Amelia Jones, such “exhibitionist
articulation of masculinity through vestimentary codes, itself has feminizing
connotations: the male body, veiled and made to mean through clothing, is the
object of the audience’s spectatorial gaze.”26 Consequently, Gauguin’s adoption of
a variety of costumes can be seen as “a form of drag.”27
Gauguin’s self-portraits can be divided into two categories: the embodiment
self-portraits, where he takes on a role; and the insertion self-portraits, where a
secondary image in the background defines his representation of self. In both
categories, Gauguin suggests androgyny as a discourse. The embodiment self-
portraits imply androgyny within the representations of self and the insertion
self-portraits suggest femininity to images of self from a distance. In both types of
self-representation, Gauguin strives for transcendent androgyny and dreads its
social transgressivity, both types appear in his nine Tahitian works. Self-Portrait
of the Artist at His Drawing Table, Tahiti (1891–4) shows a passive martyr-
artist; Self-Portrait of the Artist with the Idol (1893) complicates the presentation
of Gauguin as a virile Breton by means of an inset image of an omnipotent
femininity; Self-Portrait (1893) inserts an image of paradise lost into another
portrayal of self as a Breton; Self-Portrait with a Hat (1893–4) incorporates Spirit
of the Dead Watching (1892; Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, W. 457), which
introduces the theme of sexual victimization to the painting. In Self-Portrait

with Palette (1894; Private Collection, W. 410), Gauguin is a flamboyant gender-
idiosyncratic character; in Self-Portrait, Oviri (1894–5) Gauguin is a victim;
the Self-Portrait near Golgotha (1896), Portrait Dedicated to Monfreid (1896;
Paris: Musée d’Orsay, W. 556), and Portrait of the Artist with Glasses (1902–3;
Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, W. 634) present him as a martyr. In all of these self-
portraits, Gauguin switches identities with ease, destabilizing distinctions of
race and gender.
Self-Portrait of the Artist at His Drawing Table, Tahiti (1891–4)

In the watercolor Self-Portrait of the Artist at His Drawing Table, Tahiti, Gauguin
takes on the role of a martyred artist (Figure 2.1). With his back to the viewer,
Gauguin works at his easel next to an unmade bed. The inscription “Ja Orana
Ritou” (“Hello Work”) appears on one of the walls. The self-portrait is an exercise
in opacity, resisting any reading: the downward bend of the head obscures
Gauguin’s face, a long-sleeved white shirt covers his torso, and a colorful paréo,
a garment worn primarily by Tahitian women in his images, conceals his lower
body.28 The theme of vulnerability defines this painting, which is the only
known self-portrait depicting Gauguin from the back.29 The motif of a bowed
nude upper body is both compositionally and thematically linked to Gauguin’s
iconography of abandonment and despair. Gauguin’s only other image of a male
figure in this pose is a portrait of Captain Jacob (1888; Private collection, W.
241). The same year, a hunched powerful torso viewed from the back appears in
Woman with Pigs (1888; Private collection, W. 301) and in Woman in the Waves
(1889; Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, W. 336)—the female figures are
part of Gauguin’s iconography of submission to desire as an unavoidable force
of nature.30 Considering that Gauguin linked art making to sex, his pose can
indicate submission to the process of creation.
Gauguin’s embodiment of a passive martyr-artist also challenges the
conventional norms of masculinity. One of the episodes in Noa Noa seems to
describe the setting of this self-portrait: Gauguin is resting “half-ill on the bed,
dressed only in a paréo.”31 The bed and his costume (elements of the self-portrait)
delimit his role as he takes on characteristics of emasculating vulnerability.
Princess Vaïtüa enters his chamber; he is weak and she is full of vitality. Gauguin
defines Vaïtüa by her similarities to her father, Tamatoa, “a gigantic brawler
in moments of wrath, and on evenings of feasting, a famous carouser. He was
Figure 2.1 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait of the Artist at His Drawing Table, Tahiti (Ja
Orana Ritou), 1891–4, watercolor and pencil on paper, 12⅝ × 8⅜ in. (32 × 21.4 cm).
dead. Vaïtüa … was very like him.”32 Vaïtüa is a powerful, masculine presence,
a worthy replacement for the dead king. When the princess picks up the bottle,
“her slight, transparent dress stretched taut over her loins—loins to bear a
world” and at this moment, Gauguin also notes her “jaws of a cannibal, the teeth
ready to rend, the lurking look of a cruel and cunning animal.”33 Praying that
Vaïtüa avoids sitting on his bed, Gauguin goes from dreading cannibalism to
being anxious about her sexual appetites.34 The bed becomes a space of sexual
danger, where a paréo-clad Gauguin is at the mercy of the predatory princess,
a threatening savage androgyne who manifests his fears about the fragility of a
masculine colonial identity.
Gauguin and the princess become each other’s objects of observation.35 His
gaze gradually transforms her into an object of desire as he begins to see her
as “a purring cat” and find her “delicious.”36 The cannibal becomes food, and
this unabashed establishment of the heterosexual dynamic reaffirms Gauguin’s
masculinity, until the narrative transforms him again and he begins to identify
with the princess.37 His text parallels his self-portrait, and in both Gauguin
demonstrates the mutability of gender. The self-portrait also challenges social
and racial identities. Gauguin wears a combination Maori-European costume,
which he adopted at the time.38 The skin-tight shirt emphasizes his muscles, while
the colorful skirt softly hugs his hips. The discordant outfit delimits his body as
a space of a negotiated hybrid identity, with Gauguin presented “in a state of
semi-transvestiture”—both feminine and masculine, colonial and colonized.39
Gauguin’s encounter in Noa Noa with a Tahitian neighbor, which resulted
in Woman with a Flower (1891; Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, W. 420)
reveals the same tension between the Tahitian-Western “vestimentary codes,”
but on a female body.40 In this portrait, Gauguin highlights the unrelenting
incongruence by contrasting the colonial missionary dress with the Tahitian
features and coloring. At the same time, Gauguin attempts to neutralize the
rift by inscribing the model’s body itself into the narrative of Western art as
“Raphaelesque.”41 His text transforms a savage into a Renaissance ideal: she
becomes a cultural hybrid that transcends the civilized/savage boundary
and ostensibly defeats colonial tension. Gauguin also writes his model into a
biblical narrative, seeing in her agreement to pose “the universal attraction of
the forbidden fruit.”42 With the woman’s surrender to his desire paralleling Eve’s
seduction, Gauguin reads into her the “fear and the desire for the unknown, the
melancholy of bitter experience which lies at the root of all pleasure.”43 Gauguin
generalizes a Tahitian model to all womankind as part of a universalizing genesis
narrative, which again allows her to transcend colonial limits as a cultural hybrid.
Like Vaïtüa, she becomes an object of both desire and identification for Gauguin,
a self-proclaimed “civilized savage.”44
By referencing stylistically connected images and related texts, Gauguin’s Self-
Portrait at His Drawing Table suggests the variability of his identity—feminine
and masculine, savage and civilized. Hybridity allows him to show the tensions
of divisive definitions of identity and to introduce a resolving discourse of
transcendence for the image of self.
Self-Portrait of the Artist with the Idol (1893), Self-Portrait (1893)

In 1893, Gauguin dons a costume of a Breton fisherman in Self-Portrait of the Artist
with the Idol and Self-Portrait. The two works are stylistically and thematically
linked to the earlier Self-Portrait at Lezaven of a similar half-figure format, where
he also wears a striped shirt.45 The painter Archibald Hartrick, who visited Pont-
Aven at the time, reported that Gauguin “dressed like a Breton fisherman in a blue
jersey, and wore a beret jauntily on the side of his head. His general appearance,
walk and all, was rather that of a well-to-do Biscayan skipper.”46 Gauguin’s
temporary adoption of working-class manners and costume in life and art
momentarily challenges the boundaries of class and the bourgeois conventions
that he otherwise affirms by his prosperous air.47 The feminine implications of his
participation in the process of dress-up and display probe normative masculinity.
The image of Idol with a Shell (1892–3; Paris: Musée d’Orsay, GRAY 99), an
insertion to the right of the contemplative Gauguin in Self-Portrait of the Artist
with the Idol (Figure 2.2), also complicates conventional gender identities. The
cylindrical wooden idol showcases a sharp-toothed deity with a seashell halo on
the front and two couples, one behind the other, on the back. The deity wearing
the Universe-Shell is Taaroa; the couples appearing in Gauguin’s Ancien Culte
Mahorie are Hina and Tefatou.48 In Noa Noa, Gauguin narrates a Maori myth,
where he introduces Hina, Tefatou and Taaroa. A female deity, Hina, pleads
with the male, Tefatou, for the possibility of humanity’s immortality, which he
denies.49 Gauguin, likely drawing on the Christian concept of salvation, concludes
that while “the moon and women” are blind to the necessity of death, Tefatou
accepts that sacrifice is a requirement for humanity’s evolution.50 In Gauguin’s
retelling of the myth, Taaroa and Hina, representing spirit and matter, become
unified and produce the new universe, “the shell of Taaroa.”51 To Gauguin, “the
two only and universal principles of life are designated and distinguished and
Figure 2.2 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait of the Artist with the Idol, 1893, oil on canvas,
18⅛ × 13 in. (46 × 33 cm).
ultimately resolved into a supreme unity. The one, soul and intelligence, Taaroa,
is the male; the other in a certain way matter and body of the same god, is the
female, that is Hina.”52 The result of this union is the androgyne, which is “the
twofold manifestation of a single and unique substance” of the new unity.53 The
addition of Taaroa, Hina and Tefatou situates Gauguin’s image of self within the
themes of rebirth and androgyny.54
Self-Portrait (1893) (Figure 2.3) includes an inset of Eugène Delacroix’s

Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (Dijon: Musée des Beaux-Arts;
Johnson, 538), an image of the Christian genesis of civilization. The copy after
Delacroix appears to the right of Gauguin’s image of self and focuses on Adam’s
despondence at the exile’s announcement. Tahiti, where no one knows vice,
Figure 2.3 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, 1893, oil on canvas, 18.2 × 15 in. (46.2 × 38.1 cm).
recovers this lost Eden for Gauguin.55 In Noa Noa, the queen of Tahiti, Maraü,
emerges as the new Eve. Gauguin describes Maraü as the originative power and
a mystical source of life, whose passionate eyes make islands rise from the sea
and help flowers bloom.56 She is also an artist, capable of transforming everyday
objects into works of art.57 A benevolent maternal divinity, Maraü recalls the
idea of a mère-messie, and as was the case with Tristan, Gauguin identifies
with Maraü as Eve-Christ in her role of a gender-transcending creator.58
Gauguin describes Maraü as regal, permanent and immutable as a monumental
sculpture. He presents her body as a sacred space by comparing her arms to
pillars of a temple, and by seeing the Trinity Triangle in the shape made by her
wide shoulders and the head that crowns her tall body.59 Maraü’s head occupying
the position of God-the-Father, the savage artist-Eve exceeds the boundaries of
culture, religion, and gender.
The image of Gauguin’s costumed self exceeds the norms of bourgeois
masculinity, and the inset image shows the universal suffering at the paradise
lost. The recovered utopia is a hybrid Tahitian Eden whose Eve is a transcendent
androgyne. Both self-portraits showcase Gauguin in drag, reference a culturally
transcending interpretation of a sacred narrative, and introduce mutability and
hybridity into his presentation of self.
Self-Portrait with a Hat (1893–4)

In Self-Portrait with a Hat, Gauguin explores themes of androgyny and sexual
victimization (Figure 2.4). Hat perched on the top of his head, Gauguin slightly
turns his face to the right, looking out from the corner of his eyes. Behind him is
Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892; see Figure 10.1) with his child-bride, Tehura,
lying nude on the bed, flowers floating in the background, and a foreboding
tupapau (spirit of the dead) sitting at the footboard. A combination of a nude,
glowing flowers, and a tupapau also appears in the temptation-themed Words
of the Devil (1892; Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, W. 458) and in
various woodcut versions of Spirit of the Dead Watching, such as the one dated
1894 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Guérin 36).60 All three works connect
vulnerability, sex and destruction.
One of Gauguin’s sources for the figure of Tehura was the Allegory of Onanism
(1801) by Humbert de Superville, which shows a prone nude boy, who is sucking
on his thumb.61 The flowers appear in Gauguin’s self-portrait as a martyr-artist,
Les Misérables (1888; Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, W. 239), where they
Figure 2.4 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with a Hat, 1893–4, oil on canvas, 17.7 × 15
in. (45 × 38 cm).
symbolize his purity as an artist.62 Similar background organic motifs appear in

The Little Dreamer, 1881 (see Figure 4.4), a portrait of Gauguin’s daughter, who
has a thumb in her mouth just like the boy by de Superville, and in Clovis Asleep,
1884 (Private collection, W. 81), a portrait of Gauguin’s son.63 The innocent nude
of Spirit of the Dead Watching is part of a series of adolescent sleepers among the
flowers.
Gauguin’s portrait of William Molard (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, W. 506)

occupies the reverse side of Self-Portrait with a Hat. The Molard family
and Gauguin were neighbors in Paris and Gauguin’s status as a father of a
teenage daughter, who was close in age to William’s daughter, Judith, is a
possible connection between the two sides of the canvas. According to Judith’s
memoirs, Gauguin attempted to seduce her.64 This suggestion of adolescent
sexuality connects to the portraits of his children and to Spirit of the Dead
Watching on the front.
The appearance of adolescent androgynous bodies can challenge the
heteronormativity of desire by their physical indeterminacy. Similarly
ambiguous, Tehura’s body in Spirit of the Dead Watching introduces the
possibility of homosexuality.65 Gauguin suggests homoeroticism by posing
Tehura on her stomach, concealing her sex and mimicking de Superville but
visually deflecting homosexual desire onto the perpetrator of her night terrors,
the tupapau.66 The specter’s stare destabilizes the male gaze directed at the nude,
but once again traps the voyeur in the scene of a sodomitic presentation.67 The
resulting dynamic of the new viewing paradigm transcends the duality of the
male subject and female object, allowing the artist to accept and eschew the
threat of homosexual identification.68 The scene suggests the ambivalence of
gender and desire.
Gauguin’s written genesis of Spirit of the Dead Watching recounts his
alternations between perpetrator and the victim. His identification with the
adolescent nude and the tupapau at different points of the narrative establishes the
fluidity of his self. His story builds on a continuous switching between feminine
and masculine identities. Gauguin returns home late and sees “Tehura, immobile,
naked, lying face downward flat on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with
fear.”69 She does not acknowledge him, and he becomes anxious at seeing that “a
contagion emanated from the terror of Tehura.”70 Gauguin imagines it as a visible
glow, as though “a phosphorescent light was streaming from her staring eyes.”71
Within his narrative, Tehura starts out as prey but turns into a menace; yet, the
following moment, she again becomes a frightened child—Gauguin has to stop
moving in order not to intensify her panic attack.72 Gauguin now appears to be
a predator in the story as she mistakes him for the spirit of the dead.73 Switching
roles again, he appropriates her fears, since her terror “had transformed her into
a strange being,” a creature he had never seen before.74 Gauguin as an anxious
child confronts the impenetrable and omnipotent female presence, concluding
by shifting responsibility for his identity’s troubling fluidity to Tehura. To him,
at any given moment “two opposite beings, leaving out of account many others,
infinitely varied, were mingled in one. They gave the lie, the one to the other;
they succeeded one another suddenly with astonishing rapidity. She was not
changeable; she was double, triple, multiple—the child of an ancient race.”75
Tehura appears as both the catalyst and the carrier of a contagious variability,
and Gauguin is a receptacle passively following her change with his own. He
makes a distinction between the variability and immutability of Tehura’s
hybrid identity: as an ideal harmonious androgyne, she retains a permanence
and eternal stability of self, as well as the ability to contain multiple aspects
within her soul without ambivalent fluctuations to and fro. Gauguin’s switching
between the colonial and the colonized, the predator and the adolescent victim,
and between heterosexual and homosexual desire, transforms this self-portrait
into a contested space for negotiating his multiple identities. Hybridity and
ambivalence define his concept of self.
Self-Portrait with Palette (1894)

In Self-Portrait with Palette, Gauguin wears the most extravagant and
idiosyncratic of his costumes (Plate 5). Clad in a cape and a tall hat, he stands
against a bright red background and holds a palette and a brush. At the time he
was painting this work, Gauguin had adopted an eccentric persona in real life.
As his friend Armand Séguin described him, he “slowly and solemnly walked,
with his white-gloved hand encircled with silver leaning on the cane he had
decorated.”76 The photograph of Gauguin of 1903, which is the source for this
self-portrait, showcases this flamboyant finery.77 Gauguin’s contemporaries
found “his astrakhan hat and his huge dark blue overcoat buttoned with a
precious buckle” shocking.78 Gauguin appeared to them “like a sumptuous,
gigantic Magyar, or like Rembrandt in 1635.”79 This persona approximated the
contemporaneous dandy, whose “stylistic closeness to feminine or homosexual
self-presentational modes” seemed “dangerous to the eyes of those accustomed
to reading the codes of patriarchally defined masculinity.”80 The adoption of
an outlandish persona enabled Gauguin to introduce a discourse of femininity
into his self-portraiture. By dressing up as an exotic outsider both in life and
in the self-portrait, Gauguin points to the fluidity of his gender and social
identity. While his costumed body creates the framework of androgyny for
the self-portrait, the embodiment of gender hybridity of self remains safely
temporary.
Self-Portrait, Oviri (1894–5)

A bronze relief with Gauguin’s face in profile, Self-Portrait, Oviri (Figure 2.5),
presents him in the role of a martyr-artist. His signature “PGO” appears in the
upper left corner of the square plaque and a familiar flower floats above his head.
The inscription behind Gauguin’s profile reads “Oviri,” which translates from
Tahitian as “savage.”81 A stylistic source for the relief, a profile sketch from 1889,
connects to Gauguin’s self-identification as a savage-Savior.82 Taken together,
the inscription and the flower—a symbol of purity—cast Gauguin as a “noble
savage.”
Figure 2.5 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, Oviri, 1894–5, bronze relief.

However, the reference to Oviri of 1894 (Figure 2.6), with its iconography of
androgyny and incest, complicates this reading. Oviri is Gauguin’s sculpture of a
female monster clutching a wolf cub, while an adult wolf dies at her feet. In 1900,
Figure 2.6 Paul Gauguin, Oviri, 1894, partially enameled stoneware, 29.5 × 7.5 ×
10.6 in. (75 × 19 × 27 cm).
Gauguin revealed the magnitude of Oviri’s personal importance by designating

it as his grave-marker.83 The contemporary writer Charles Morice described
Gauguin’s statue as “Hina of the woods,” which connects Oviri to the myth of
Hina, a champion of humanity’s immortality.84 Oviri-Hina signifies rebirth
through suffering, and probably relates to Gauguin’s difficulties during that year:
his marriage completely deteriorated; he lost a court case about the ownership of
his paintings, broke his leg, was robbed and suffered the reoccurrence of syphilis.85
In Gauguin’s writings, the character of Oviri emerges as an aggressor, a
personification of maternal violence. In 1895, Gauguin sent the poet Stéphane
Mallarmé two images of Oviri with the inscription: “this strange figure and
cruel enigma.”86 Gauguin described how the fearful androgyne, “the monster,
embracing its creation, filled her generous womb with seed and fathered
Seraphîtus-Seraphîta.”87 Oviri appears to be similar to another dangerous
desiring savage: Princess Vaïtüa, “a cruel and cunning animal with the jaws of
a cannibal, whose loins bear the world” but whose “teeth [are] ready to rend.”88
Visually, Oviri echoes Gauguin’s portrait of Tristan as Eve, and the artist’s account
of Oviri as a killer parrots a contemporary description of Tristan.89 Gauguin also
links Oviri to Balzac’s play L’Immorale, a narrative about an incestuous father-
daughter relationship.90 Through references to cruelty, monstrous fertility,
incest and the connection to Tristan, Oviri-Eve becomes a figure of maternal
androgynous perversity, the opposite of the benevolent androgyne, Maraü-Eve.
When Gauguin describes Oviri’s wolf cub as seraphîtus-seraphîta, he again
refers to Balzac, specifically, to the novel Séraphîta, which explored the notion
of the ideal androgyne. Séraphîta mystifyingly appeared as a woman to a
male suitor and as a man to a female admirer, and after its death ascended to
heaven.91 Gauguin seems to identify the wolf cub as such a transcendent, divine
androgyne.92 Gauguin’s Cahier pour Aline mentions Séraphîta together with
yet another of Balzac’s novels, Louis Lambert.93 Lambert is an androgynous,
celibate youth, whose terror of physical desire renders him catatonic. More than
Séraphîta’s images of harmonious androgyny, Louis Lambert’s explorations of
sexual phobia, castration and madness connect to Oviri.
The murdered canine at Oviri’s feet is Gauguin’s personal symbol, his totem
of savagery.94 In such works as Be in Love and You Will Be Happy (1889; Boston:
Museum of Fine Arts, GRAY 76) and in The Loss of Virginity (1890; Norfolk:
Chrysler Museum of Art, W. 412) the canine images symbolize perversity and
accompany the victims.95 Occasionally, Gauguin introduces an image of a nude
female victim to the pairing of a monstrous goddess with a canine. For example,
Reclining Tahitian (1894; Chicago: The Art Institute, recto GUERIN 48), a nude
from Spirit of the Dead Watching, appears on the reverse of the representation of
Oviri with a wolf, whereas The Idol (1898; St. Petersburg: The State Hermitage
Museum, W. 570) combines Oviri with a cowering woman.96 The wolf and the
female body seem interchangeable in the role of a sacrifice. Given this context,
Self-Portrait, Oviri presents Gauguin as a casualty of sexual violence.
In fact, Gauguin also describes his paintings as virginal victims of sexual
trespasses. He laments that he is always anxious about viewers manhandling
his art in “the way they would paw a girl’s body and that my work will bear
the traces of this ignoble deflowering forever after.”97 Oviri’s and Gauguin-wolf ’s
androgynous offspring personifies art, a “child of his imagination which his
intellect has begotten in a union of love with reality … in a more perfect form.”98
Gauguin again becomes a passive sacrifice who surrenders to the process of
creation.99 Self-Portrait, Oviri allows Gauguin to switch between identities of a
noble savage, a victimized maiden, and a wolf; Gauguin dies and is reborn in his
virginal and androgynous creations—another showcase of his race and gender
mutability and hybridity.
Self-Portrait near Golgotha (1896), Portrait Dedicated to Monfreid

(1896), Portrait of the Artist with Glasses (1902–3)
In his last self-portraits, Gauguin once more embodies a Christian martyr.
Gauguin created Self-Portrait near Golgotha after he learned of his daughter’s
death (Figure 2.7).100 In failing health, he attempted suicide.101 The title of
this self-portrait is explicit about the artist’s identification with Christ, which
Gauguin defined in terms of creation and suffering.102 Angling his head slightly
to the right, Gauguin glances sideways, while two figures emerge from the
mountain behind him. One of the shadowy apparitions is the harbinger of death,
the hooded tupapau.103
A related exploration of martyrdom defines Portrait Dedicated to Monfreid
and Portrait of the Artist with Glasses, where both self-portraits showcase doleful
Gauguin in a white funerary savan. Portrait Dedicated to Monfreid is visually
similar to the photograph of Gauguin that appears in Historiated Frame (1881–
3).104 The collage frame spells out Gauguin’s dilemma: on one side, his wife and a
petit-bourgeois and on the other, Gauguin’s photo from his marital portrait and
a starving artist—becoming a painter means social ostracism, personal isolation
Figure 2.7 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait near Golgotha, 1896, oil on canvas, 29.9 × 25.2
in. (76 × 64 cm).
and physical strife.105 The earlier self-portraits, Anthropomorphic Pot (1889; Paris:
Musée d’Orsay, GRAY 66) and Be in Love and You Will Be Happy, also focused
on loneliness and misery.106 Portrait of the Artist with Glasses is a continuation
of the sorrowful theme. Gauguin’s shaved head and glasses telegraph frailty and
resignation—he was losing his vision and could barely walk.107 Cognizant of his
declining strength and mortality, in these last self-portraits, Gauguin presents

himself as passively accepting suffering and solitude.
Conclusion
Gauguin’s turn to transcendence as a discourse for his self-portraits is part of a

contemporary search for utopia. His attempt to exceed conventional boundaries
within a divisive cultural framework originates in the nineteenth-century’s
ambivalent quests for a colonized Eden approached from a position of colonial
mastery. The expression of Gauguin’s dream of transcendence evident in his
self-portraits betrays the tensions of his time. His continuous switching between
identities defines the self-portrait spaces as hybrid, and, at the same time, the
vacillation reveals his ambivalence. Gauguin’s output, both his texts and art,
reflects colonial anxieties, both betraying and confronting his fears. His notion
of the “savage” includes the horror of contagion and simultaneously, challenges
colonial rhetoric by questioning the reality of its categories. If the labels “savage”
and “heterosexual” are arbitrary, Gauguin seems to suggest, so is the projection
of fears onto these labels. Gauguin’s nine self-portraits from 1891 to 1903 reveal
this dynamic.
Gauguin consistently turns to the concept of androgyny in his construction of
the image of self. He introduces indeterminacy and mutability into his self-portraits
through accompanying texts, secondary inset images and the contemporary
associations of the characters he embodies. A Christian martyr, a victim of sexual
violation and a social outsider are all aspects of Gauguin, and each of the self-
portraits is a presentation of hybridity that contains masculine and feminine,
heterosexual and homosexual, colonial and colonized. Gauguin’s Polynesian
self-portraits become spaces where he negotiates between multiple identities and
undermines the structures of colonialism by effacing its categories of gender,
desire and status, substituting fluidity for normativity in his presentation of self.
Notes
1997); Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003); Bradley Collins, Van Gogh and Gauguin:
Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004); Hal
Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (1985): 45–70;
Hal Foster, “‘Primitive’ Scenes,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 69–102; Hal Foster,
Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004).
2 Eisenman,Gauguin’s Skirt, 147; Stephen F. Eisenman, “Response: Stephen F.
Eisenman, (Anti) Imperial Primitivist: Paul Gauguin in Oceania,” Pacific Studies 23,
no. 1 (2000): 123.
3 Eisenman, “(Anti) Imperial Primitivist: Paul Gauguin in Oceania,” 115; Eisenman,
Gauguin’s Skirt, 92, 176.
4 Elizabeth C. Childs, “The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and Photography
in the fin-de-siècle,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the
Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup (Toronto and London: University of
Toronto Press, 2001): 51.
5 Foster, Prosthetic Gods, 4, 8.
6 Wallace, Sexual Encounters, 136, 124.
7 Claudia Breger, “Feminine Masculinities: Scientific and Literary Representations of
‘Female Inversion’ at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of the History of
Sexuality 14, nos. 1–2 (2005): 92.
8 Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, 116. “Androgyne sans sexe; je veux dire par là que l’âme,
le cœur, tout ce qui est divin enfin, ne doit pas être esclave de la matière, c’est-à-dire
du corps. Les vertus d’une femme sont semblables entièrementà celles de l’homme.”
Paul Gauguin, Lettres à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue (Paris:
Bernard Grasset, 2003), 69.
9 Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, 118.
10 Naomi J. Andrews, “Utopian Androgyny: Romantic Socialists Confront Individualism
in July Monarchy France,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 3 (2003): 442.
11 Margaret Talbot, “An Emancipated Voice: Flora Tristan and Utopian Allegory,”
Feminist Studies 17, no. 2 (1991): 234. “The Jewish people were dead and debased,
and Jesus raised them up. The Christian people are dead and debased today and
Flora Tristan, the first strong woman, will raise them up. Oh! I feel a new world
within me ….” Susan Grogan, Flora Tristan: Life Stories (London: Routledge,
2002), 200.
12 Grogan, Flora Tristan, 200.
13 Paul Gauguin, Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (New York:
Courier Dover Publications, 1997), 111 . “On monte en riant son calvaire; les
jambes flageolent sous le poids de la croix; arrivé on grince des dents et alors
redevenu souriant on se venge. Verse encore … Femme qu’y va-t-il de commun
entre nous: les enfants!!! ce sont mes disciples, ceux de la deuxième renaissance.”
Paul Gauguin, Avant et après (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1994), 237.
14 Wayne Andersen and Barbara Klein, Gauguin’s Paradise Lost (New York: Viking,
1971), 127.
15 Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, September 1890, Le Pouldu, in Letters to His Wife
and Friends, ed. Maurice Malingue, trans. Henry J. Stenning (Boston: Museum of
Fine Arts Publications, 2003), 151. “Je me suis mis au travail ces temps—ci et j’ai
accouché d’un bois sculpté.” Gauguin, Lettres à sa femme et à ses amis, 112.
16 Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, “Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portraits and the Oviri: The Image
of the Artist, Eve, and the Fatal Woman,” Art Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1979): 86.
17 Norma Broude, “Flora Tristan’s Grandson,” Chapter 3 of the present volume.
18 Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, “She Is Me: Tristan, Gauguin and the Dialectics of
Colonial Identity,” Romanic Review 98, no. 1 (2007): 23–50.
19 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, ed. John Miller, trans.
O. F. Theis (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005), 26. “Un objet d’observation …
Comme eux pour moi, j’étais pour eux le ‘Sauvage.’ Et c’est moi qui avais tort, peut-
être.” Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: Séjour a Tahiti (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1989), 40.
20 Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 43.
21 Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, 121; Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, ed. Nicholas
White, trans. Margaret Mauldon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Joanna Richardson (London:
Penguin, 1981).
23 Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage, ed. Daniel Guérin, trans. Eleanor Levieux
(New York: Da Capo, 1996), 86 . “Puis la lassitude du rôle du mâle qui doit toujours
etre fort … Être une minute l’être faible.” Gauguin, Noa Noa: Séjour a Tahiti, 52.
24 Gauguin, Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, 22.
Le grand tigre royal arrive seul dans la cage devenue vide; nonchalamment il
demande la caresse, me faisant signe de sa barbe et de ses crocs que les caresses
suffisent. Il m’aime je n’ose le battre; j’ai peur et il en abuse: je supporte malgré moi
son dédain … La nuit ma femme cherche mes caresses, elle sait que j’en ai peur
et elle en abuse.
Paul Gauguin, Oviri. Écrits d’un sauvage, ed. Daniel Guérin (Paris: Gallimard,
1974), 236.
25 Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, 98. Henry Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin:
Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 2007), 113.
26 Amelia Jones, “Clothes Make the Man: The Male Artist as a Performative Function,”
Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 18, 28.
28 Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., Paul Gauguin: Artist of Myth and Dream (Milan: Skira,
2007), 336.
29 Lee Wallace, “Tropical Rearwindow: Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau and Primitivist
Ambivalence,” Genders Online Journal 28 (1998): n. 38, http://archive.is/wQQl5.
30 Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 276.
32 Ibid., 9–10.
33 Ibid., 12. “Un gigantesque batteur d’hommes dans ses moments de colère et en
orgie terrible minotaure. Vaïtüa, disait-on, lui ressemblait beaucoup”; “Sa légère
robe transparente se tendit sur les reins, des reins à supporter un monde … Je ne
vis un instant que sa mâchoire d’anthropophage, ses dents prêtes à déchirer, son
regard fuyant de rusé animal.” Gauguin, Noa Noa: Séjour a Tahiti, 31, 32.
35 Ibid., 13.
36 Ibid.
37 The princess presents the hedonistic cricket of La Fontaine’s fable as the true hero.
Gauguin identifies with her desire “to always to sing!” Ibid., 14.
38 In 1894 photograph, Gauguin wears a jacket with a paréo. Eisenman, Paul Gauguin:
Artist of Myth and Dream, 336.
39 Ibid.
40 Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 27, 28; Wettlaufer, “She Is
Me,” 45.
42 Ibid., 28. “L’attrait du fruit défendu.” Gauguin, Noa Noa: Séjour a Tahiti, 41.
43 Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 29. “Et je lisais en elle la
peur de l’inconnu, la mélancolie de l’amertume mêlée au plaisir, et ce don de la
passivité qui cède apparemment et, somme toute, reste dominatrice.” Gauguin, Noa
Noa: Séjour a Tahiti, 42.
44 Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage, xi.
45 Daniel Wildenstein, ed., A Savage in the Making: Catalogue Raisonné of the
Paintings (1873–1888) (New York: Rizzoli, 2002), 147.
46 Ronald Pickvance, Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven (London: Apollo, 1994),
22.
47 Jones, “Clothes Make the Man,” 34.
48 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “Gauguin’s Early Tahitian Idols,” Art Bulletin 60, no. 2 (June
1978): 339; Paul Gauguin, Ancien Culte Mahorie (1892–93), ed. René Huyghe
(Paris: La Palme, 1951): 7.
50 Ibid., 110.
51 Ibid., 106.
52 Ibid. “C’est d’abord la netteté qui désigne les deux principes uniques et universels
de la vie pour ensuite les résoudre en une suprême unité. L’un, âme et intelligence,
Ta’aroa, est mâle; l’autre, purement matériel et constituant en quelque sorte le corps
du même dieu, est femelle: c’est Hina.” Gauguin, Noa Noa: Séjour a Tahiti, 95.
54 Jirat-Wasiutynski, “Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portraits and the Oviri,” 181.
56 Ibid., 6.
57 Ibid., 5.
60 Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin, 219; Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “Gauguin’s
‘Philosophical Eve,’” Burlington Magazine 115, no. 843 (1973): 381.
61 Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin, 218.
62 Paul Gauguin to Vincent van Gogh, Pont-Aven, October 1, 1888, in Vincent van
Gogh—The Letters, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let692/letter.html (accessed
August 4, 2017).
63 Dario Gamboni, “Paul Gauguin’s Genesis of a Picture: A Painter’s Manifesto
and Self-Analysis,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 2, no. 3 (2003), http://
www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn03/274-paul-gauguins-genesis-of-
a-picture-a-painters-manifesto-and-self-analysis.
64 Richard Brettell, Françoise Cachin, Claire Frèches-Thory, and Charles F.
Stuckey, eds. The Art of Paul Gauguin, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of
Chicago/Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1988), 311–12.
65 Wallace, Sexual Encounters, 136.
66 Ibid., 130.
67 Ibid., 131.
68 Ibid., 113.
69 Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 73. “Immobile, nue,
couchée à plat ventre sur le lit, les yeux démesurément agrandis par la peur, Téhura
me regardait et semblait ne pas me reconnaître. Moi-même, je restai quelques
instants dans une étrange incertitude. Une contagion émanait de la terreur de
Téhura. J’avais l’illusion qu’une lueur phosphorescente coulât de ses yeux au regard
fixe.” Gauguin, Noa Noa: Séjour à Tahiti, 70.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., 74.
74 Ibid. “L’intensité de l’effroi qui la possédait, sous l’empire physique et moral de ses
superstitions, faisait d’elle un être si étranger à moi, si différent de tout ce que j’avais
pu vu voir jusque-là!” Gauguin, Noa Noa. Séjour à Tahiti, 71.
75 Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 75. “Deux êtres contraires—
sans compter beaucoup d’autres, indéfiniment variés—en un, qui se démentaient
mutuellement et se succédaient à l’improviste avec la plus étourdissante rapidité.
Elle n’était pas changeante, elle était double, et triple, et multiple: l’enfant d’une race
vieille.” Gauguin, Noa Noa: Séjour à Tahiti, 72.
76 Marla Prather and Charles F. Stuckey, eds., Gauguin: A Retrospective (New York:
Park Lane, 1989), 101.
77 Eisenman, Artist of Myth and Dream, 316.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Jones, “Clothes Makes the Man,” 33–4.
81 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, 1969. New York: Garland, 1985), 163.
82 Eric M. Zafran, ed., Gauguin’s Nirvana: Painters at Le Pouldu 1889–1890 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 32, fig. 42; Eisenman, Artist of Myth and
Dream, 334. “I have cut some arrows and amuse myself on the sands by shooting
them just like Buffalo Bill. Behold your self- styled Jesus Christ.” Gauguin, Letters to
His Wife and Friends, 149.
83 Eisenman, Artist of Myth and Dream, 334.
84 Sue Taylor, “Oviri: Gauguin’s Savage Woman,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art
History 62, nos. 3–4 (1993): 211, 214.
85 Ibid., 203.
86 “Cette étrange figure, cruelle énigme.” Jirat-Wasiutynski, “Paul Gauguin’s Self-
Portraits and the Oviri,” 190, n. 69.
87 Naomi E. Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of
Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press/London: Associated University Presses/Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1998),
163. “Le monstre, étreignant sa créature, féconde de sa semence des flancs généreux
pour engendrer seraphîtus-seraphîta.” Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious
Themes, 278.
88 Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 12–13.
89 Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin, 231–2.
90 Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes, 278.
91 Merrill Horton, “Balzacian Evolution and the Origin of the Snopeses,” The Southern
Literary Journal 33, no. 1 (2000): 74.
92 Wettlaufer, “She Is Me,” 46.

93 Charles Morice, Paul Gauguin (Paris: H. Floury, 1920 [1919]), 42.
94 Taylor, “Oviri,” 199. Herschel Browning Chipp, Peter Howard Selz, and Joshua
Charles Taylor, eds., Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics
(London: University of California Press, 1968), 66.
95 “A fox (symbol of perversity among Indians).” Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh,
November 20, 1889, Brittany, in George T. M. Shackelford and Claire Frèches-
Thory, eds., Gauguin Tahiti: The Studio of the South Seas (Boston: Museum of Fine
Arts Publications, 2004), 10.
96 Richard S. Field, ed., Paul Gauguin, Monotypes, exh. cat. (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), 60–1; Jirat-Wasiutynski, “Paul Gauguin’s Self-
Portraits and the Oviri,” 185.
97 Gauguin, Writings of a Savage, 148. “En le voyant regarder, tourner, retourner
une de mes œuvres, j’ai toujours peur qu’ils la tripotent comme ils tâtonneraient
un corps de fille, et que l’œuvre ainsi déflorée n’en porte toujours l’ignoble trace.”
Gauguin, Oviri: Écrits d’un sauvage, 181.
99 Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom, 163.
100 Brettell et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin, 381.
101 Ibid., 382.
102 Gauguin, Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, 111.
103 Brettell et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin, 405.
104 Published in Anne Pingeot, “Paul Gauguin,” 48/14: La Revue du Musée d’Orsay 18
(Spring 2004): 56–7.
105 Richard R. Brettell and Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, eds., Gauguin and Impressionism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 248.
106 To Émile Bernard, November 1889, Le Pouldu, in Gauguin, Letters to His Wife and
Friends, 128. Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, November 20, 1889, Brittany, in
Shackelford and Frèches-Thory, eds., Gauguin Tahiti: The Studio of the South
Seas, 10.
107 To Pastor Vernier, April, 1903, Atuana, in Gauguin, Letters to His Wife and
Friends, 241.
3
Flora Tristan’s Grandson: Reconsidering

the Feminist Critique of Paul Gauguin
Norma Broude
American University
This essay proceeds from a fact commonly acknowledged in biographical accounts

of Paul Gauguin but not yet fully examined by art historians: Gauguin was the
grandson of Flora Tristan (1803–44), French feminist writer and socialist activist,
whose radical international vision for the emancipated worker preceded that of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and was predicated, unlike theirs, on a foundation
of equal rights for women (Figure 3.1). As scholarly interest in Tristan has grown
in recent decades, literary and political analyses of her work and identity as a
social thinker and reformer have proliferated. But few scholars have explored
analogies between the life experiences and writings of the grandson and those of
the grandmother he never met.1 As a result, the legacy of Flora Tristan’s work and
identity for her grandson remains to be fully interrogated for the light it can shed
not only on Gauguin’s art, but also on the vexed and contradictory assessments of
this still canonical figure that continue to circulate in the literature. Such re-thinking
may well have been delayed by the deep and lingering impact in the art-historical
world of the late-twentieth-century’s feminist critique of Gauguin’s life and work.
I therefore begin by revisiting and attempting to complicate some of those earlier
feminist responses, not as a renunciation of that critique, but as an extension and
nuancing of it that may offer pathways to further feminist engagement with Gauguin
in the twenty-first century.
***
The late-twentieth-century feminist critique of Gauguin was initiated in 1972
by Linda Nochlin, who memorably recast the artist’s Two Tahitian Women of
1899 (see below, Figure 3.7) as an exploitative and sexist image that pandered
Figure 3.1 Unknown artist, Portrait of Flora Tristan, in Le Charivari & Galérie de la
Presse, 1839.
to the male gaze; and it was brought to fruition in 1989 by Abigail Solomon-
Godeau, whose project of “demythifying what it meant for Gauguin to ‘go
native’” brilliantly exposed the intertwined power structures of colonialism and
patriarchy that created and sustained Gauguin’s exalted position in Western art
history as “the father of modernist primitivism.”2 In 1992, Griselda Pollock used
Flora Tristan’s Grandson: Reconsidering the Feminist Critique of Paul Gauguin 71
Gauguin as a case study to further explore the issues of “gender and the color
of art history.” Reframing artistic creativity for Gauguin as a purely materialist
agenda, she reduced his motives for going to Tahiti to an “avant-garde gambit,” a
calculated strategy of positioning and distinguishing himself in the marketplace
vis-à-vis his avant-garde competitors at home. Pollock also sought to reclaim
the voice and identity of one of Gauguin’s underage consorts in Tahiti, the
“historical” Teha’amana — a goal admirably stated, but given the paucity of
evidence, arguably not achieved.3
In these and other late-twentieth-century deconstructive projects, Gauguin’s
female nudes quickly took center stage, with one in particular, the purportedly
titillating Manao Tupapau (She Thinks of the Spirit of the Dead or the Spirit of
the Dead Thinks of Her), for which Teha’amana is said to have been the model,4
becoming the focus of attention in study after study that indicted Gauguin for
sexually and culturally exploiting his native subjects (see Figure 10.1). But the
emphasis in that literature on the sexual attractiveness of Gauguin’s female
nudes for the Western viewer may have been, I would suggest, excessive. For
Gauguin’s generally rather wooden and, by normative European standards of
his period, asexual female nudes, were surely intended, in large part, to question
and challenge the Western ideal. Nevertheless, in 1990, when Peter Brooks
attempted to re-contextualize the larger body of Gauguin’s figurative work in
other revisionist terms, as a self-conscious challenge to the prurient appeal
of the female nude in the Western tradition,5 he risked appearing to some as
a self-deluding and sexist apologist for an artist whom feminists were now
characterizing as a colonial exploiter of women and a child rapist.
In his pivotal book of 1997, Gauguin’s Skirt, Stephen Eisenman sought to
challenge and refute some of the excesses of these readings by providing a more
balanced and, at the same time, more complicated picture of Gauguin’s hybrid
position in Polynesia, with a revealing emphasis on the instability of his shifting
social and sexual identities and their reflections in the androgyny and sexual
dimorphism of his art. While respectful of the feminist agenda, Eisenman
pointed nevertheless to a tendency in the work of Solomon-Godeau and Pollock
to flatten and overgeneralize the cultural inheritance and colonial experience
of Tahitian women, “as if they were Pacific versions of Moroccan Harem
women or ‘Hottentot Venuses.’” And advocating for a more anthropological
approach, he further insisted that without such specificity, neither the culture
of these women nor Gauguin’s efforts to depict that culture could be properly
understood.6
In early feminist writing on Gauguin, one can point similarly to un-nuanced

characterizations of the artist, which may at times stack the decks against him
ahistorically and even crudely. In the opening to Avant-garde Gambits, for
example, Pollock deftly established Gauguin as a masculinist exploiter of women
with this quote: “I’m talking about wimmen! I like my women fat, vicious and
stupid with nothing spiritual. To say I love you would break my teeth.” Although
the words are characterized as “a direct quote from Gauguin’s journals,” the
journals were not Pollock’s source. Instead, she had turned self-consciously to
the words and their fictional context in Vincent Minnelli’s film Lust for Life, the
1956 Hollywood interpretation of Irving Stone’s popular biography of Vincent
van Gogh. In the film, Gauguin lustily makes his pronouncement (in words not
from Stone’s book but from Norman Corwin’s screenplay) while visiting van
Gogh in Arles and ogling women in a café prior to a boys’ night out on the town,
a scene that Pollock rightly interprets as illustrating “the dominating and primal
maleness ‘Gauguin’ signifies within the complex discourse on modern art and
the modern artist staged by Minnelli’s sophisticated movie.”7
But as Linnea Dietrich later pointed out, Gauguin is quoted here, both in the
screenplay for Minnelli’s film and by Pollock, incompletely, incorrectly and out
of context. The passage in question, severely truncated and mistranslated, had its
origins in Avant et après, the introspective journal written by Gauguin in 1903,
during the last year of his life, and had nothing to do with the Arles sojourn. Part
of a more expansive meditation on balancing the joys and sufferings of life, the
fuller portion of the relevant passage reads:
I like women even when they are vicious and fat: their mentality disturbs me,
it is too spiritual for me. I have always wanted a big woman and I have never
found one. To defy me they are always with child. This is not to say that I am
insensitive to beauty, but that it is my senses that refuse. As you can see I don’t
know anything about love and to make myself say “I love you” I would have to
break all my teeth. So you will understand I am not a poet. A poet without love!!!
For this reason women who are very clever guess it: and so do not like me.8
As Dietrich observed, Gauguin says nothing about despising or wanting to

exploit women. Rather, his tone of irony and introspection and the surprisingly
sad self-deprecation of these late-life musings have been misrepresented both by
the 1950s filmmaker and the later twentieth-century feminist art historian. Each
valued differently what they presumed to have been a display of the virile artist’s
stereotypical scorn for women — for Minnelli, operating in a still unabashedly
masculinist era, it was culturally “good”; for Pollock it was “bad.” But both seized
on it, ahistorically to advance their own agendas, and to create and support a
cultural myth.
While not denying the existence of self-serving sexual behaviors on Gauguin’s
part, Dietrich, in other writings, implicitly questioned their relevance for
understanding a body of work whose overarching and steadily evolving theme
she saw as “the attempt to reconcile opposites.” Gauguin, she wrote, “faced the
issue of difference in his written and visual work and tried to come to terms
with it,”9 and his work “offers us a vision of women freed from European gender-
stereotypes.”10 In the late 1980s and 1990s, Dietrich’s contrarian stance might
have appeared retardataire and apologetic in relation to the feminist critique of
that era; but today it can seem prescient in its rejection of a revisionist orthodoxy
that may have been producing, in some instances, a disinclination to probe
subtler distinctions.
Gauguin has continued to present challenges to feminists of more recent
generations because he does not quite fit any of the rigid molds that we have
created for him. How are we to reconcile the images of the brutal sexist pig and
colonial tourist that have become staples of the revisionist critique with the
remarkably liberal positions that Gauguin took in his writings about some of the
central issues confronting women in his era? These ranged from the prevalence
and social causes of prostitution to the punitive civil and religious laws that
governed marriage and divorce, to the cultural practices and prudish sexual
constraints that disempowered the “civilized” woman and restricted her rights
and capabilities.
Writing in October 1888 to Madeleine Bernard, the sixteen-year-old sister of
his artist-friend Emile Bernard in Pont-Aven, Gauguin proclaimed: “the virtues
of a woman are exactly the same as the virtues of a man”; and he offered the girl a
vision of the liberated and independent woman she might become. Encouraging
her to aspire to “be someone, to find happiness solely in your independence and
your conscience,” he advised her to think of herself “as Androgyne,” with a heart
and soul that “must not be the slave of matter, that is of the body.” “Do in a proud
spirit,” he continued, “all that would help you to win the right to be proud, and
do your best to earn your own living, which is the pathway to that right.”11 Later,
in 1893, in the set of commentaries, drawings and clippings that he assembled
and dedicated to his own daughter Aline, Gauguin condemned prostitution as a
degrading “act of venality”; alluded supportively to alternative sexualities (“Is it
really God who punished Sodom? … freedom of the flesh must exist, otherwise
it is a revolting slavery”); and pointed critically to the ways in which women are
defined and controlled by societally imposed notions of sexual morality.12 And in

a later text, L’Esprit modern et le catholicisme (1897–1902), Gauguin presented an
impassioned critical statement on the “barbaric and cruel” hypocrisy of modern
society, “which rules the fate of Woman in the name of Christian morality” and
denies her fundamental rights:
And we cry: woman, who is, after all, our mother, our daughter, our sister,
has the right to earn her bread.
Has the right to love whom she wishes.
Has the right to dispose of her own body, her own beauty.
Has the right to give birth with the possibility of raising her child and to do
so without passing through the hands of a priest and a notary.
Has the right to as much respect as the woman who sells herself exclusively in
marriage (commandment of the Church); and thus has the right to spitin the
face of he who oppresses her.13
Many of Gauguin’s positions on marriage, divorce, the societal scourge of

prostitution and the abridgment of women’s rights and capabilities in civilized
societies echo positions that had been advanced by his grandmother, Flora
Tristan, the social reformer and crusader for the rights of women and workers,
more than a half-century earlier. Already in 1891, the critic Octave Mirbeau had
ascribed to Tristan and her socialist politics a formative influence on Gauguin
and the household in which he had been brought up.14 And Gauguin’s abiding
awareness of Tristan is established on a primary level by the prominent position
he accorded her in the family history he set down toward the end of his life in
Avant et après, and which he began with these remarks:
My grandmother was an unusual sort of woman. Her name was Flora Tristan.
Proudhon said that she had genius. Knowing nothing about this, I must rely on
Proudhon.
She produced a great many socialist writings, among them The Workers’
Union. The grateful workers put up a monument to her in the cemetery of
Bordeaux.
It is probable that she did not know how to cook. A blue-stocking socialist,
anarchist. She is credited, along with Père Enfantin, with founding a certain
religion, the religion of Mapa, of which Enfantin would have been the God Ma
and she the Goddess Pa.
Between the Truth and the Fable I will never know how to distinguish, and
I give you all of this for what it is worth. She died in 1844; many delegations
followed her coffin.
What I can be sure of, however, is that Flora Tristan was a very pretty and
noble lady. She was an intimate friend of Mme Desbordes-Valmore.15 I also
know that she used her entire fortune in the workers’ cause, traveling ceaselessly.
In the meanwhile, she went to Peru to see her uncle, the citizen Don Pio de
Tristan de Moscoso (family from Aragon).
Her daughter, who was my mother, was brought up entirely in a boarding
school, the Pension Bascans, an essentially republican establishment.16
Tristan had died four years before Gauguin’s birth, and so much of what he
knew about her had come second-hand, from his mother, or from prominent
writers such as Proudhon who had acknowledged her work. His only professed
certainty is Tristan’s “very pretty and noble” appearance, which he would have
known from an image reportedly left to him by his mother and from others that
still circulated.17 Thus, the slightly distanced tone with which he describes her is
understandable. But at the same time, his carefully chosen and focused remarks
about her — comprising more than half of the family history with which he
prefaces his “souvenirs de jeunesse” — suggest the foundational significance that
Tristan held for her grandson’s image of himself and his lineage, as well as the
respect he accorded her for her reputation and impact as a social reformer. He
tells us that she wrote and traveled “ceaselessly” on behalf of the workers, who,
in gratitude, erected a monument to her after her death. And he chooses to note
her rejection of essentializing female roles — she probably could not cook and
she allowed her daughter to be brought up by others.
Less accurately, he conflates Tristan with the utopian socialism of the Saint-
Simonians and assigns her a central role in the early formation of that movement.
Tristan had indeed been influenced by the ideas of the Saint-Simonians, who
viewed bourgeois marriage as another form of prostitution and saw cooperation
among the classes as essential for economic progress; and especially by the ideas
of their female followers, who, among other things, had called for children to
be raised collectively and had argued for redefining the relations of the sexes in
a new social order.18 But Tristan had acted on her own and had never directly
joined or identified herself as a follower of that or any other group.19 Gauguin
is also mistaken in his identification of Tristan as the female half of the new
deity sought by Prosper Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians in the 1830s.20
Nevertheless, Gauguin’s inclusion of this presumed association is noteworthy,
suggesting his own interest in these earlier progressive efforts to inject fluidity
into the gendered hierarchies of traditional religion, an idea to which we will
later return.
In the writings and life experiences of Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristan,
analogies abound. The basic correspondences, as others have enumerated them,
include the precedent that Flora set for Paul as the hybrid insider and outsider,
who contested the boundaries of nationality and gender and promoted a self-
image as social outcast, “pariah” and “devil/angel.” Both challenged conventional
gender roles and distanced themselves from the upbringing of their children.
Both undertook journeys of quest and self-discovery — Paul to Polynesia;
Flora to Peru, where, as an “illegitimate” daughter, she sought unsuccessfully to
reclaim an inheritance and aristocratic family name denied her by her parents’
unrecognized marriage and her father’s premature death. And both recorded
the personal and political ramifications of these journeys in their writings: Paul
in Noa Noa (1893) and Flora in Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), the book that
brought her early attention and notoriety in the French literary world.21
But what specifically did Gauguin know of Flora Tristan’s literary legacy?22
Despite the loss of his mother’s library and family papers during the 1870 Franco-
Prussian War,23 mounting evidence confirms that Gauguin had continuing access
to Tristan’s writings and knew them far more intimately than the somewhat
distanced tone of his Avant et après comments about her might suggest.
In a letter from Paris, dated December 6, 1887, to his wife Mette in
Copenhagen, Gauguin asked what had happened to “grandmother’s book on
London … in the removal.”24 The book is Tristan’s Promenades dans Londres
(1840), a wide-ranging exposé and critique of the inequities of class and gender
relations amid other evils spawned by the industrial revolution and modern
day capitalism in London, a city Flora had visited on four occasions. Gauguin
at one time copied out several passages from Chapter VIII of that book, in
which Tristan had examined the abysmal social and economic conditions that
promoted the widespread practice of prostitution in London (Figure 3.2). He
later used the verso of that sheet of paper for a watercolor version (Figure 3.3)
of his 1889 Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan (see Figure 7.1). Both the trim of
the paper and the truncated text that at one time extended beyond its present
edges on all four sides make clear that Gauguin repurposed and cut down this
sheet of paper for the later watercolor. And while no others are presently known,
this may well have been one of several sheets of paper on which he transcribed
longer sections from Tristan’s Promenades chapter on prostitution.
When and where the transcription and watercolor were made, and whether
Gauguin had them with him in Polynesia, remain matters for speculation. He
may have had his transcription of Tristan’s text with him in Brittany in 1889
Figure 3.2 Paul Gauguin, transcription from Flora Tristan’s Promenade dans
Londres, ink on paper, 6⅜ × 4½ in. (16.2 × 11.4 cm).
and used the verso for what was likely a memento copy of his De Haan portrait,
which had originally been painted on a wooden door panel in the dining room
of the inn at Le Pouldu. Or he may have made the transcription from a copy of
Figure 3.3 Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan, 1889, watercolor and
pencil on paper, 6⅜ × 4½ in. (16.2 × 11.4 cm).
the book that became available to him there, as suggested by the letter he wrote
from Le Pouldu in 1889 to Émile Bernard, asking him to “be kind enough to
send me my grandmother’s book (Flora Tristan, the St. Simonian).”25 Or both
the transcription and watercolor might have been made just before he left France
in 1891, giving him an easily transportable record of a text and image that were
both to have continuing inspirational meaning for him.26
While Gauguin’s repurposing of this particular sheet of paper for the
watercolor version of the portrait may have been a matter of convenience
or necessity, the meanings embedded in the resulting juxtaposition strongly
suggest intentionality. In the portrait of his learned friend, a Dutch/Jewish
painter to whom Gauguin attributed a split personality and associations
with both the Judeo-Christian and the occult, De Haan is shown crouching
behind a table bearing two complementary books from different eras: John
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1668), the canonical view of the expulsion caused by
Eve, and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834), a philosophical critique of
the social and moral hypocrisy of contemporary English society, which would
not necessarily have rejected Milton’s premise. Since Sartor Resartus had
been written and published during the same decade as Tristan’s Promenades,
the De Haan portrait, which foregrounded Carlyle’s book, was appropriately
paired by Gauguin with Tristan’s scathing account of the social, economic and
political conditions of life in modern-day London. But while Tristan’s direct
and journalistic critique was deeply concerned with the subordination and
exploitation of women in that society, Carlyle’s more elliptical and veiled social
satire was presented from an essentially masculinist point of view. And, given
the nature of the text by Tristan that drew Gauguin’s attention here, its physical
juxtaposition with an image of Carlyle’s book may well reflect Gauguin’s
recognition of that difference.
The portion of Tristan’s chapter on prostitution in London that Gauguin
copied out appears near the beginning of Chapter VIII and, in translation, reads
as follows (brackets below indicate passages that immediately precede and follow
what survives of Gauguin’s copy of the French text):
[Prostitution is the ugliest of all the sores produced by the unequal distribution
of wealth. The human race is defiled by this abomination which, much more
damningly than crime, bears witness against the organization of society.
Prejudice, poverty, serfdom, all combine their pernicious effects to produce this
revolting degradation.
Yes, if you had not made of chastity a virtue and required it of women but not of
men, women would not be spurned by society for having yielded to their hearts,
and young girls who have been seduced, deceived and abandoned would not be
reduced to prostitution. Yes, if you permitted women to receive the same] education,
to practice the same trades and professions as men, poverty would be their lot no
more frequently than for men. Indeed, if you did not force women to submit to the
abuses of paternal despotism and the indissolubility of marriage, they would not be
confronted with the only alternative: to submit to oppression and infamy!
Virtue and vice imply the freedom to do good or evil. But what kind of ethical
notions can be expected of a woman who is not her own woman, who owns
nothing and whose life-long training has taught her to counter arbitrariness
with deceit and coercion with seduction? Brought up in the art of seduction, is
she not, when tormented by poverty and seeing all wealth in the hands of men,
inevitably driven to prostitution?
Put the blame therefore on the social order and let women be exonerated. As
long as she is under the yoke of men or of prejudice, as long as there is no
professional education for her, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there
can be no moral law for woman. As long as she can obtain wealth only through
the influence she exerts on men’s passions, as long as she can have no title to
anything, as long as she is divested by her husband of all the property she has
acquired through her work or that her father has given her, as long as she can
enjoy freedom and make use of her possessions only by remaining unmarried,
there can be no moral law for woman. [We can even say that until woman is
emancipated, prostitution will grow ever greater.]27
Tristan presents prostitution as an evil forced upon women and stemming from
the patriarchal organization of the family under capitalism. Later in this chapter,
she writes about the so-called fallen woman, shunned by society, “deceived and
seduced, and often … driven from under the paternal roof ” and ultimately forced
into prostitution.28 And elsewhere in the volume, likening legally indissoluble
marriage to a state of servitude for women, she asks: “Is not the young girl a
piece of merchandise offered for sale to anyone wishing to settle on a price,
thereby acquiring exclusive rights to the property?”29
Over all of these issues, Gauguin shared Tristan’s outrage; and his writings
often echo hers. He called the institution of marriage “nothing but a sale,”
as a result of which “woman falls into abjection, condemned to marry if her
fortune allows it, or to remain virgin.”30 For the unmarried woman, he declared
the right to give birth and raise her child with “as much respect as the woman
who sells herself exclusively in marriage.”31 His concern and empathy for (in
Tristan’s words) “young girls who have been seduced, deceived and abandoned,”
ostracized by family, State and Church in the name of a hypocritical moral order,
found expression in his imagery as well. In Human Misery, painted in Arles in
Figure 3.4 Paul Gauguin, Gathering Grapes at Arles—Human Misery, 1888, oil on
jute sackcloth, 29 × 36¼ in. (73.5 × 92 cm).
1888 (Figure 3.4), a young woman, presumably guilty of moral transgression

in an isolated rural community, sits shunned and demoralized, apart from the
other women in Breton costume who work together in the fields.32
Tristan’s Promenades dans Londres was an important book for Gauguin,
both before and after his departure for Tahiti. It inflected his thinking on social
concerns they shared and that bore fruit in some of Gauguin’s later efforts at
social protest and activism in Polynesia. Those protests were directed against the
hypocrisy and corruption of the colonial administration and its mistreatment
of the indigenous population in general and of women in particular. In Avant et
après, he rails against the ubiquitous practice of prostitution and the hypocrisy
of colonial police and judges who sexually exploit women instead of protecting
them from violation.33 And in a letter written from the Marquesas in January
1903 to the police magistrate of the region, he expresses outrage at the desultory
police investigation of an attack on a native woman who subsequently died of
wounds that included “a horrible wound in the vagina.”34 In another, directed
to the Inspector of the Colonies, he protests the absolute power wielded by
the gendarmes over intimidated natives, who are exorbitantly taxed and fined,
coerced into sending their children to missionary schools, falsely accused of
misdemeanors, and inadequately represented before magistrates who visit
infrequently and know nothing about the natives they are sent to judge.35
Earlier, in 1899–1900, Gauguin had made a brief foray into political journalism
with his satirical, and oftentimes defamatory and scatological contributions to
the journal Les Guêpes (The Wasps) and with his own independently produced
journal Le Sourire (The Smile).36 While these and other efforts to protest
colonial injustice toward the end of his life may have accomplished little for
the indigenous population, succeeding only in calling down upon his own
head retribution from the authorities and others whom he alienated,37 they
nevertheless reveal an activist impulse, engaged not with dreams of a lost
past but with life and politics in the present moment, an impulse for which
Tristan’s journalistic career and crusades as a social reformer would have been
inspirational.
How much did Gauguin know of Tristan’s other writings? Circumstantial
evidence suggests that he may have had more than a passing familiarity with
several of them. Certainly, Gauguin’s Noa Noa and Tristan’s Pérégrinations
d’une paria, both personal accounts of quest journeys that begin and end with
the narrators’ transitional voyages by sea, are books that present remarkable
structural similarities, which may or may not have been accidental. Alexandra
Wettlaufer has analyzed these and other correspondences between the two
in convincing detail.38 And both Wettlaufer and Irina Stotland have pointed
to echoes in Noa Noa of some of the themes of same-sex desire and gender
indeterminacy that appear in Pérégrinations.39
Additionally, I would suggest, Gauguin’s assumption of the voice and fictional
persona of a female theater critic in a piece that advocated for women’s rights, as
described by Linda Goddard in her essay for the present volume, mirrors Tristan’s
similar experiment with assuming a differently gendered voice, the male voice,
for a similar purpose in her 1838 novel Méphis. In her writing more generally,
as Leslie Rabine has pointed out, Tristan often displayed qualities associated
with masculine writing, including the making of exaggerated truth claims and
the “imitation of male romantic egotism, casting her autobiographical self in
grandiose roles.”40 Flora’s appropriation in her writing of masculine subjectivity
and agency, though undertaken in part to undermine and unmask those
positions, may have made her writings more accessible to her grandson. But
at the same time, as a writer, she cloaked herself in the guises of the romantic
heroine, thus developing for herself a split or hybrid persona, as Gauguin was
to do as well.
In Avant et après, Gauguin mentions that his grandmother had written
many socialist tracts in defense of workers’ rights and specifically names Union
Ouvrière (The Workers’ Union). That he was conversant with Tristan’s influential
book is suggested by an early vignette from Noa Noa, which offers an intriguing
demonstration of the ways in which Gauguin could sustain a purposeful
dialogue with Tristan. He tells of an evening visit to a meetinghouse where
natives gathered to pray, sing, tell stories or make “wise proposals.” There, an old
man rose to ask why houses in the village were being left to rot when there was
no lack of materials to repair them. Gauguin recounts the village elder’s words
and the response they received: “I ask that large houses be built afresh to replace
those; everyone in succession will lend a hand (Union makes strength).”41
By the 1890s, the phrase, l’union fait la force (union or unity makes strength)
had become a familiar political battle cry in several countries and languages. In
French, it had appeared on Haiti’s coat of arms in 1807; and it had been used
in Belgium as a national motto after the Revolution of 1830.42 But Gauguin’s
use of it, in the context of this vignette, suggests a more immediate allusion to
Tristan’s writings, and in particular to The Workers’ Union, where the phrase
often appears. He self-consciously echoes Tristan’s exhortations to the workers
to find strength in solidarity and the power to do good in collective action and
labor, in a context that also invokes Tristan’s socialist vision of communal living
and social support for workers in edifices she called “workers’ palaces,” which
they themselves would build.43
But the remainder of Gauguin’s tale carries a very different message. Everyone,
he continues, applauded the village elder’s proposal, which was “carried
unanimously”; and Gauguin “went to bed that evening full of admiration for
that wise people.” But the next day, expecting work to begin, he was surprised to
find that “nobody any longer gave it a thought. I questioned one or two people.
No answer, except a few significant grins on broad, dreamy faces ….” And
almost as a rite of passage and assimilation, Gauguin quickly comes to see their
wisdom, asking: “And why that work? Have not the Gods given us every day our
subsistence?”44
Even though Gauguin was as critical of capitalist excess in his era as Tristan
had been in hers, it appears that in his early days in Tahiti he self-consciously
resisted and distanced himself from some of the solutions to social problems
that she had advanced. In his village wise man vignette, he replaces romantic
socialism’s dream of a utopian future with another vision of an indigenous

utopian paradise, one untainted by the Western values infecting the words of the
village elder. Channeling more recent socialist thinkers such as Paul Lafargue,
who rejected the “right to work” as a self-serving invention of capitalism,45
Gauguin’s fable implicitly rejects the imposition on his lost paradise of any
Western notions about community and the sanctity of labor, even liberal ones
like Tristan’s. Unlike Flora who had excoriated the social evils of the present in
hopes of creating a more perfect and equitable future for workers and women
worldwide, Paul looked to recover a lost idyllic past; but he was reduced, as in
this fable, to searching for its echoes and intimations in an already despoiled
indigenous present.
What Gauguin had hoped to find in Polynesia, his writings suggest, were
social structures and cultural values, hierarchies of gender and the cultural
construction of identity that differed significantly from those of contemporary
Europe. Late in life, in Avant et après, still echoing some of the social concerns he
shared with Tristan, he claimed to have found among the indigenous population
in Polynesia, despite efforts by Church and State to change old patterns, a place
where marriage was not a sale and sexuality remained untainted by Western
notions of sin; a place where unmarried women could procreate and their
children not be branded as illegitimate pariahs; and a place where extended
families, following ancient patterns of familial association and descent, were
willing to share and adopt children who were biologically not their own. Perhaps
reflecting upon his own Polynesian-born children, brought up according to
matrilineal patterns in their mothers’ families, he wrote: “Here children are for
everyone the greatest gift of nature, and they belong to those who want to adopt
them. Such is the savagery of the Maoris: which I adopt.”46 Earlier, in Noa Noa, he
had pointed to androgynous similarities in body type among men and women in
Tahiti and observed the positive effects this had on their relationships with one
another. In contrast to the artificiality of the female body (“modeled on a bizarre
ideal of slenderness”) and of male/female interactions in the West, in Tahiti, he
wrote, “there is something virile in the women and something feminine in the
men. This similarity of the sexes makes their relations the easier.”47
Despite this apparently more egalitarian vision of gender relations, feminist
writers in the late twentieth century have nevertheless taken issue with the
paucity of men and the predominance of women in Gauguin’s imagery,
criticizing him for this creation of a world of women which they interpreted as a
colonialist stratagem to infantilize and sexualize the “other.”48 I propose, instead,
the possibility that Gauguin’s preoccupation with the female reflected not a
desire to infantilize the Tahitian world but to uncover alternative forms of social
organization that had privileged the female in pre-colonial myth and culture,
and to search out their survival or comment on their demise in the present.
These concerns are manifested in his art not only through the ubiquity of women
in scenes of daily life in Polynesia but also through his many representations of
a different Eve in a different Garden of Eden; his written, painted and carved
images of royal women such as Queen Maraü and the Princess Vaïtua,49 and
mythic female deities, among them: Hina, goddess of the moon; Vairaumati,
the mortal goddess of regeneration (see Figure 7.7);50 and Oviri, the “savage”
embodiment of maternal power and female dominance (see Figure 2.6), a figure
chosen by Gauguin to stand guard over his own final resting place.51
Feminist art historians have also derided Gauguin for professing to look for
memories of ancient Maori myths, traditions and cosmologies among young
Polynesian women, when that kind of traditional knowledge had long been
dissipated or obliterated by colonial rule. It is well known that the stories of
ancient Polynesian religious cosmologies and origin myths that Gauguin
professed to have learned from Teha’amana in Noa Noa were in fact transcribed
by him from Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout’s 1837 Voyages aux îles du grand
océan.52 But more interesting to me than the older literature’s emphasis on this
as a dual act of denial and plagiarism on Gauguin’s part is the question of why
he would have thought it appropriate that the past be transmitted through
Teha’amana and what might have been the advantages in his mind of pretending
that she was his source?
In ancient and traditional societies, it has long been customary to regard
women as the preservers and transmitters of authentic cultural memory and
knowledge.53 And Gauguin, in his 1893 painting known as The Ancestors of
Teha’amana, or Teha’amana Has Many Parents, has clearly assigned Teha’amana
this role (Plate 4). Seated primly, her body shrouded in a missionary-style
dress but with fragrant flowers in her hair and a knowing gleam in her eye, she
carries a fan, a traditional emblem of family rank and authority.54 Her sideward
glance clearly connects her to the painted image behind her of Hina, the mythic
goddess of the moon. In Māori origin myths, it was from Hina that all were
descended, because she had argued successfully against the earth god Tefatou
to secure the rebirth of human kind.55 Teha’amana, presented here as her
descendant, sits against two large red ovoid forms at the lower left, identified
as mangoes that allude to the bounty of the earth. But their bright red color,
repeated in the flower behind Teha’amana’s ear, makes of them also a powerful
allusion to female fecundity and to the menstrual blood that had been celebrated
in pre-colonial tribal rites and ceremonies in the Māori world as a primal link to
creation myths and to the gods.56
In Gauguin’s imagination, despite European interventions and present-
day realities, Teha’amana was the living embodiment of an unbroken link to
a female line and to an authentic traditional past in Oceania, in many areas of
which, anthropologists tell us, patterns of kinship, descent and status had been
matrilineal — reckoned through the female line.57 It was believed, Anne d’Alleva
writes, that “elite lineages inherited more mana [divine force] than others, and
women, who in giving birth ushered children from the spirit world to this world,
were conduits for it.”58
Although their roles may have been diminished under colonial rule, women
had held high positions in pre-contact Tahitian society and continued to do so
in Gauguin’s day. D’Alleva speaks of “the prominence of women ari’i, women
of authority” in 1890s Tahiti as a surviving “feature of older society.” “And the
inheritance of important ari’i titles,” she writes, “could pass through women as
well as men.”59 In her study of the ways in which material and visual culture
determined relations of power in eighteenth-century Tahiti and the Society
Islands, D’Alleva further identifies two traditional and complementary social
roles for high-ranking women, which may have resonated still in Gauguin’s
time: that of the “sacred maiden” and the authoritative “masculine woman.”
The former, sisters and daughters of high-ranking titleholders, were uniquely
empowered to perform ritual dances and ceremonies, with “sacred and
genealogical meanings embedded in their costumes.” The latter, older women
who had become politically active and were powerful titleholders in their own
right, were conceptualized in the culture as being or acting like men, and their
roles were not dependent on their marital or maternal status.60
The late work by Gauguin that most forcefully sums up and projects what he
may have internalized about these remnants of a matrilineal past, now modified
by the patriarchal realities of the colonial present, is Two Women (Figure 3.5).
Likely painted in 1901 or 1902, just before or after Gauguin’s move from Tahiti to
the Marquesas Islands,61 it is a much-transformed adaptation of a contemporary
photograph (Figure 3.6),62 which shows two Tahitian women, full length and
in missionary garb, seated together on the steps of a native house, a frail and
shrunken older woman at the left receding behind a more assertive younger
woman who grasps her arm protectively. Gauguin radically transmutes this
Figure 3.5 Paul Gauguin, Two Women, 1901 or 1902, oil on canvas, 29 × 36¼ in.
(73.7 × 92.1 cm).
scene into a close-up and iconic, half-length and over life-size double portrait
of the two women, now looming large against the flattened picture plane, their
heads unified by an expanse of dark green feathery foliage that seems to crown
them like a ceremonial headdress. In Gauguin’s image, the older woman is
now positioned higher in the picture space. No longer frail in appearance but
with strongly chiseled and mask-like facial features, she takes the lead, while
the younger woman rests her hand gently on her elder’s arm, as a signifier of
continuity and connection.
Like The Ancestors of Teha’amana (Plate 4), Two Women is a painting that
summons up ancestral relationships through the female line, and it is a powerful
tribute to the surviving echoes of an indigenous culture and its values. In his
portrayal of the two women, despite the restricted circumstances of their colonial
lives as signaled by their missionary dress, Gauguin succeeds in conveying
something of the power and authority with which ancient matrilineal societies
Figure 3.6 Henri Lemasson, Two Women from Tahiti, 1898, photograph from one of
the albums of governor Callet.
had endowed the female line. Although these two women have been described
in the literature as mother and daughter, or as grandmother and granddaughter,
reflecting our own culture’s understanding of the primary relationships between
older and younger women, it is suggestive and important to know that the
familial connection between the two women who may have inspired Gauguin’s
painting was in reality that of aunt and niece.63 This provides a compelling
reminder, intentional or otherwise, that the primary familial relationship and
closest alliance in matrilineal societies was not between parent and child or
husband and wife, but between sisters and brothers, who were bound by the
“covenant” of their clan to provide for one another and their children throughout
their lives.64
Two Women (Figure 3.5) is a painting in which Gauguin and his sitters pose
a clear challenge to Western male cultural authority, perhaps accounting for its
characterization by one mid-twentieth-century male critic as “unpleasant.”65 It is
instructive to juxtapose it with Gauguin’s slightly earlier Two Tahitian Women of
1899 (Figure 3.7). The contrast suggests the basis for that critic’s judgment as well
as some of the personal challenges that Gauguin faced and the dichotomies with
which he struggled in Polynesia. The tension foregrounded by these paintings,
whose female subjects relate very differently to their audiences — compliant
in the earlier canvas and powerfully centered in the later one — springs from
Gauguin’s practical need, on the one hand, to aestheticize and sexualize native
life in Polynesia for consumption in Paris and, on the other, his politically clear-
sighted response to the imposition of colonialism and its suppression of an
indigenous culture, a culture that had endowed women with social and spiritual
power and whose values still survived. It is a tension that mirrors Gauguin’s own
conflicted roots, identities and allegiances.
If, and as I believe Gauguin’s work attests, one of his goals in Polynesia was
to seek out the real and mythic roles played by powerful women in that culture,
he would have arrived from Europe well prepared to embrace and pursue such
thinking. From the 1860s on, European anthropologists had begun to question
the previously assumed universality of the patriarchal order and to debate the
existence of alternative, matriarchal and matrilineal forms of social organization.
The most influential of these was Jacob Johann Bachofen, a Swiss antiquarian and
anthropologist, who postulated a prehistoric matriarchy and an ancient “mother-
right” as the source of all human society. Bachofen’s path-breaking book, Mother
Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the
Ancient World, first appeared in Germany in 1861, and the impact of his thinking
among subsequent generations throughout Europe and America was widespread.66
In France, by the end of the nineteenth century, its influence may be measured
by critical changes to entries in that bellwether of generally held current thinking,
the Larousse Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. In 1871, the entry on
the “Family” began with this quote from the nineteenth-century French historian,
Hippolyte Taine: “What makes a family is the spirit of obedience with which a
woman and children behave under the direction of a father and husband.”67 And
the remainder of the entry offers little to dispute that judgment. But by 1890, a
conceptually much expanded entry explores alternative forms of marriage and
social organization around the globe and acknowledges recent theories such as
those of Bachofen and the Scottish ethnologist John Ferguson McLennan on a
Figure 3.7 Paul Gauguin, Two Tahitian Women, 1899, oil on canvas, 37 × 28½ in.
(94 × 72.4 cm).
matriarchal prehistory.68 Tastes in fiction as well, with the worldwide success of

H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 novel, She, are another indicator of the extent to which
theories about matriarchy in ancient and primitive societies, and debates over
their implications for female autonomy in the modern world, were gaining
currency and penetrating popular culture during these decades.69
Gauguin’s quest for an authentic Tahitian past that privileged the female
role may be partly understood in the context of these developing theories in
late-nineteenth-century European anthropology, which looked backwards
to lost origins as Gauguin himself was prone to do. But as historian Cynthia
Eller points out, these theories were the creations of male anthropologists, who
identified with other men and with what they imagined to have been those men’s
expanded sexual opportunities in the “promiscuous” matriarchal cultures they
hypothesized. Their interest in the women in such matriarchal and matrilineal
societies was focused on the ways in which they interacted with men. “For
British anthropologists,” Eller writes, “prehistoric women existed almost wholly
within the confines of sex, marriage and family: the same places that Victorian
men encountered the only women they understood to be truly women,” with the
result that “much of their attention was directed not toward changing forms of
government or social power, but toward shifts in sexual mores.”70
Should Gauguin be subject to similar criticism? His crude responses to the
easy availability of sex in Polynesia, much quoted in the literature that defines
him as sexist and racist, are quintessentially masculinist and central to the part of
his identity that constituted him as a privileged white European male of his era.71
But distinct from that cohort and identity, I would argue, other less normative
aspects of Gauguin’s life experience had prepared him to entertain and even
identify with the profoundly different roles that women might have played, and
the spiritual and communal powers they might have exercised, in the ancient
and traditional societies that were the focus of anthropological debates over
alternative modes of social organization.
Gauguin’s openness to such thinking would have grown in part from his
own experience, atypical in the West, of the role of strong women in the family
structure; and once again, the precedent, example and teachings of Flora
Tristan were formative. The early-nineteenth-century Saint-Simonian quest for
a female messiah and that group’s conception of a dual, bi-gendered god were
ideas that, as we have seen, Gauguin associated with his grandmother. In 1838,
Tristan introduced her own, more activist version of the Saint-Simonian woman
messiah in her novel Méphis. A work of feminist social criticism masquerading
as a romantic novel, the book takes as its central theses the moral and intellectual
superiority of woman and the power of art to expose and counter gender and class
oppression. It is in this spirit that the novel’s male protagonist, the working-class
artist Méphis, creates a painting entitled Woman, Guide to Humanity, an

inspirational figure who would lead humankind to a better and more egalitarian
future.72 In her 1844 journal, the Tour de France (published posthumously),
Tristan recorded the grueling journey she undertook at the end of her life to
promote the founding of the Workers’ Union and to rally the proletariat to
the causes of feminism and socialism. Here Tristan resurrected the idea of the
woman guide, grown into a spiritually powerful and messianic figure, with
whom she now fully identified.73
The history of Gauguin’s own mother and grandmother, who, for different
reasons, had had to raise children without the support of their husbands, may
also have led Gauguin to expect, or to take for granted, that Mette Gad, the strong
and well-educated modern woman from Denmark whom he had married, could
do the same.74 Writing to Mette in 1887, referring to their separation and his
inability to support the family, Gauguin wrote: “Whatever may be invented,
no one will hit on anything better than a united family, and for that a head
cannot be dispensed with: I want that head to be the wife, but she should have
all responsibility and the task of feeding the family.”75 This unconventional
pronouncement, whether self-serving and masculinist on Gauguin’s part or
liberating and feminist (a distinction sometimes difficult to make), could only
have fueled the ongoing struggles between them over traditional male and
female roles within marriage.
None of this is to deny inadequacies on Gauguin’s part—flaws of character
and personality, self-serving behaviors and self-justifying pronouncements
couched as social critique to which he was prone. Nor is it to condone Gauguin’s
role in what was clearly a bad marriage in European terms, nor to deny that
Mette, though competent, resourceful and successful in the end, was bitterly
resentful and rightfully considered herself and the children she struggled to raise
to have been misused and abandoned. My aim is not to take sides, as many have
done in the literature,76 but to draw attention to the complexity of their situations
in an era of shifting gender roles and social mores. Gauguin himself ruefully
acknowledged the volatility of these shifts, glimpsing at the end of his life the
new twentieth-century’s swiftly approaching liberation from the old orthodoxies
and “civilized” values that, at great price to himself and others, he had sought to
challenge. “It looks to me,” he wrote, “as if morality, like the sciences and all the
rest, were on its way to a quite new morality which will perhaps be the opposite
of that of today. Marriage, the family, and ever so many good things which they
din into my ears, seem to be dashing off at full speed in an automobile.”77
***
Gauguin’s challenge to feminist art historians in the twenty-first century,

it seems to me, is to resist holding that artist’s life and work to the standard
of a fictive “universal” feminism. In the present essay, that resistance has led
to a consideration of the ways in which Flora Tristan’s grandson was shaped
by his family history and by the evolving feminisms of his own era. As late-
twentieth-century feminists were the first to point out, the mythic legend of
Gauguin and the glorification of his modernist primitivism were inventions of a
colonial and patriarchal system, whose power was enhanced by that constructed
image. But to what extent, feminists might now want to ask, were Gauguin’s art
and life selectively appropriated by the patriarchy to serve its own purposes,
foregrounding what was compatible with its own ideology and burying the
oppositional and anti-patriarchal stands that the artist tried, however imperfectly,
to make? How, I would now encourage us to ask, did Flora Tristan’s grandson
threaten patriarchal thinking? What about him needed to be suppressed—
and was suppressed by the mythology constructed around him? If we ignore
those questions today, patriarchy will have won twice, with a double burial of
the artist’s oppositional intentions—subsumed once into the masculinist meta-
narrative of an earlier era and again into the feminist revisionist one of our
own. Instead, let us aim in the twenty-first century to build an expanded critical
framework for this artist, one that is multifaceted and not monolithic, and in
which contradictions play their part and are not flattened by us into the same
binary patterns for which we have rightly called patriarchal thinking to task.
Notes
1 An early exception among art historians is Elizabeth C. Childs, who, in two articles
on Gauguin as a writer, briefly but cogently presented several of the issues at
stake in the Tristan/Gauguin relationship. See Elizabeth C. Childs, “Gauguin as
Author: Writing the Studio of the South,” The Van Gogh Museum Journal (winter
2003): 76–8, 85–6; Elizabeth C. Childs, “‘Catholicism and the Modern Mind:’ The
Painter as Writer in Late Career,” in Gauguin Tahiti, eds. George T. M Schackelford,
Isabelle Cahn, Claire Frèches-Thory, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Galerie
nationale du Grand Palais, France (Boston: MFA publications, 2004), 235–6. More
recently, Irina Stotland has used Tristan’s legacy to frame an exploration of the role
of androgyny in Gauguin’s self-portraits (see Chapter 2 of this volume). Among
scholars in other disciplines, see, most notably, Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, “She is Me:
Tristan, Gauguin and the Dialectics of Colonial Identity,” Romanic Review (Special
Issue: “Soi-même come une autre: Flora Tristan Bicentenaire”) 98, no. 1 (January
2007): 23–50. Also of interest is the semi-fictional biography, The Way to Paradise,
by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, which juxtaposes the lives of Tristan
and Gauguin (London: Faber and Faber, 2004).
2 See Norma Broude, Introduction to the present volume, pp. 1–3.
3 Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Color of Art
History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). For more on this issue, see Elizabeth
Childs, Taking Back Teha’amana: Feminist Interventions in Gauguin’s Legacy,
Chapter 9 of the present volume.
4 On the uncertainty of identifying the model, see Linnea S. Dietrich, “Review of
Avant-Garde Gambits,” Woman’s Art Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1995): 57.
5 Peter Brooks, “Gauguin’s Tahitian Body,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 2 (Spring
1990): 51–90. Reprinted in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History,
eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper Collins/Icon Editions,
1992), 331–45.
6 Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London and New York: Thames & Hudson,
1997), 18–20.
7 Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 7.
8 The point and the translation are Linnea Dietrich’s, “Review of Avant-Garde Gambits”.
57. Gauguin’s text reads:
J’aime les femmes aussi quand elles sont vicieuses et qu’elles sont grasses:
leur esprit me gêne, cet esprit trop spirituel pour moi. J’ai toujours voulu une
maîtresse qui fût grosse et jamais je n’en ai trouvé. Pour me narguer elles sont
toujours avec des petits. Ce n’est pas à dire que je sois insensible à la beauté,
mais ce sont les sens qui n’en veulent pas. Comme on voit, je ne connais pas
l’amour et pour dire: je t’aime, il me faudrait casser toutes les dents. C’est vous
faire comprendre que je ne suis point poète. Un poète sans amour!!! Et en
cette raison, les femmes qui sont malignes le devinent: aussi je leur déplais.
Paul Gauguin, Avant et après, avec les vingt-sept dessins du manuscript original (Paris:
G. Crès et cie, 1923), 3.
9 Linnea S. Dietrich, “Paul Gauguin’s Notebook for Aline,” Art Criticism 7, no. 1
(1991): 60–80; 60.
10 Linnea S. Dietrich, “Gauguin: The Eve of My Choice,” Art Criticism 4, no. 2 (1988):
47–60; 47.
11 Maurice Malingue, ed. Paul Gauguin, Letters to his Wife and Friends (Boston:
Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2003), 103, letter 69.
12 Dietrich, “Paul Gauguin’s Notebook for Aline,” 70, 78.
13 Paul Gauguin, Oviri. Écrits d’un sauvage, ed. Daniel Guérin (Paris: Gallimard,
1974), 214, translation mine.
14 Octave Mirbeau, “Paul Gauguin,” L’Echo de Paris, February 16, 1891; as cited by
Karyn Esielonis, Gauguin’s Tahiti: The Politics of Exoticism (Ph.D. diss., Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA. Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1993), 34–5, n. 30.
15 Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859). Influential French Romantic poet;
like Flora, she had relatives in the new world whom she had visited in search
of financial help, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marceline_Desbordes-Valmore
(accessed June 2, 2016).
16 Gauguin, Avant et après, 133–4. Translation mine.
Ma grand’mère était une drôle de bonne femme. Elle se nommait Flora Tristan.
Proudhon disait qu’elle avait du génie. N’en sachant rien je me fie à Proudhon.
Elle inventa un tas d’histoires socialistes, entre autres l’Union ouvrière. Les
ouvriers reconnaissants lui firent dans le cimetière de Bordeaux un monument.
Il est probable qu’elle ne sut pas faire la cuisine. Un bas bleu socialiste, anarchiste.
On lui attribue d’accord avec le père Enfantin le Compagnonnage, la fondation
d’une certaine religion, la religion de Mapa dont Enfantin aurait été le Dieu
Ma et elle, la déesse Pa. Entre la Vérité et la Fable je ne saurai rien démêler et je
vous donne tout cela pour ce que cela vaut. Elle mourut en 1844: beaucoup de
délégations suivirent son cercueil. Ce que je peux assurer cependant c’est que
Flora Tristan était une fort jolie et noble dame. Elle était intime amie avec Mme
Desbordes-Valmore. Je sais aussi qu’elle employa toute sa fortune à la cause
ouvrière, voyageant sans cesse, entre temps elle alla au Pérou voir son oncle
le citoyen Don Pio de Tristan de Moscoso (famille d’Aragon). Sa fille qui était
ma mère fut élevée entièrement dans une pension, la pension Bascans, maison
essentiellement républicaine.
17 Wettlaufer, “She is Me,” 39, n. 17. Tristan’s portraits are discussed by Susan Grogan,
Flora Tristan, Life Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), 1–5.
18 Claire Goldberg Moses, “‘Difference’ in Historical Perspective: Saint-Simonian
Feminism,” in Feminism, Socialism and French Romanticism, eds. Claire Goldberg
Moses and Leslie Rabine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 17–84;
especially 32, 39, 44, 59.
19 Moses and Rabine, “Introduction,” Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism, 14.
20 Moses, “‘Difference’ in Historical Perspective”, 32–3.
21 Wettlaufer, “She is Me,” passim; also, Belinda Thomson, “Paul Gauguin: Navigating
the Myth,” in Gauguin, Maker of Myth, ed. Belinda Thomson (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 14–15.
22 For bibliographies of Tristan’s writings, see Máire Cross and Tim Gray, The Feminism
of Flora Tristan (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 172–3; Doris Beik and Paul Harold Beik, Flora
Tristan, Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 185–6. Introductions to Tristan’s complicated life
story are found in Cross and Gray, 7–13; Doris and Paul Beik, ix–xxi.
23 Gauguin, Avant et après, 175.
24 Malingue, ed., Paul Gauguin, Letters to his Wife and Friends, 89–91, letter 59; 90.
The “removal” probably refers to Mette’s trip to Paris in April 1887 to fetch their
son Clovis after Gauguin’s departure for Panama, when she also took away several
of her husband’s works (Malingue, letters 47, 48, and 59).
25 Lettres de Paul Gauguin à Émile Bernard, 1888–1891 (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1954),
88, no. 8.
26 On Gauguin’s several likenesses of De Haan, see June Hargrove, “Gauguin’s
Maverick Sage: Meyer de Haan,” in Visions: Gauguin and his Time, Van Gogh
Studies 3, ed. Belinda Thomson (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2010), 87–111.
27 Flora Tristan, London Journal, 1840. Translated from the French (Promenades dans
Londres) by Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl (Charlestown: Charles River Books,
1980), 71–94, this quote 72–3.
28 Ibid., 74.
29 Ibid., 190.
30 From L’Esprit modern et le catholicisme (1897–1902), in Gauguin, Oviri. Écrits d’un
sauvage, 211–12.
31 Gauguin, Oviri. Écrits d’un sauvage, 214.
32 See Thomson, Gauguin, Maker of Myth, 152–3, for connections between Gauguin’s
images of “sexual transgression” and the “abandoned woman theme” with Tristan’s
writings on prostitution.
33 Gauguin, Avant et après, 186.
34 Ibid., 141–5; 144.
35 Ibid., 146–54. See also, Gauguin, Letters to his Wife and Friends, 234–9, letter 179.
36 On these, see Bengt Danielsson and Peter O’Reilly, Gauguin: Journaliste à Tahiti
(Paris: Société des Océanistes, 1966).
37 He was sentenced to a fine and imprisonment in March 1893 after making
accusations against a local gendarme. See Gauguin’s letter to Morice, Letters to his
Wife and Friends, 240, letter 181, n. 1.
38 Wettlaufer, “She is Me,” 40–9.
39 Irina D. Stotland, Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portraiture and the Concept of Androgyny
(Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2012), 45–6, 65.
40 Leslie Wahl Rabine, “Flora Tristan: The Name of the Father and the Body of the
Mother,” in Moses and Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism,
123–42; 125.
41 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa (Gauguin’s Original Manuscript), ed./intro. Nicholas

Wadley, trans. Jonathan Griffin (London: Calmann and Cooper Ltd, 1985), 23–4.
The phrase l’union fait la force appears in Gauguin’s original draft manuscript
of 1893, the version used in Wadley’s book. It drops out in the later Louvre
manuscript, the version edited by Gauguin’s collaborator Charles Morice.
“Je demande à ce qu’on reconstruise de vastes maisons en remplacement de celles-
là; chacun y donnera successivement la main (l’union fait la force)” (Gauguin,
Oviri, écrits d’un sauvage, 111).
42 See Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_makes_strength; accessed July
14, 2016).
43 Flora Tristan, The Workers’ Union, trans. Beverly Livingston (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1983), 6, 53, 56, 113–17.
44 Gauguin, Noa Noa (Gauguin’s Original Manuscript), ed. Nicholas Wadley, 24.
45 “In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic
deformity. … Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the
traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma
of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.” Paul Lafargue, The
Right to be Lazy (1883), trans. Charles Kerr, online version: Lafargue Internet
Archive (marxists.org) 2000.
46 Gauguin, Avant et après, 229. “Ici l’enfant est pour tous le plus grand bienfait de la
nature, et c’est à qui l’adoptera. Voilà la sauvagerie des Maoris: celle-là je l’adopte.”
For Gauguin’s views on the tyranny of parenting in the west and the resulting
suppression of genius, see Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline (Paris: Les Éditions du
Sonneur, 2009), 24.
47 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, A Journal of the South Seas, trans. O. F. Theis (New York:
Noonday Press, 1957), 46–7. From the Louvre manuscript: “Quelque chose de
viril est en elles, et, en eux, quelque chose de féminin. Cette ressemblance des
sexes facilite leurs relations.” For Flora Tristan’s condemnation of the corseting of
women’s bodies in Europe, see her 1838 novel Méphis, in Doris Beik and Paul Beik,
Flora Tristan, 47.
48 See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of
eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992),
318–19, 322.
49 See “The Story of Princess Vaïtua,” in Noa Noa (Gauguin’s Original Manuscript),
49–52; on Queen Maraü, ibid., 12–13.
50 June Hargrove, “Woman with a Fan: Paul Gauguin’s Heavenly Vairaumati, A
Parable of Immortality,” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 3 (September 2006): 552–66.
51 Sue Taylor, “‘Oviri:’ Gauguin’s Savage Woman,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of

Art History 62, nos. 3–4 (1993): 197–220.
For another indication of these concerns, see the Noa Noa manuscript page (page
55 of the Louvre MS) in which Gauguin chose to juxtapose a photograph of two
contemporary Tahitian women holding ceremonial fans with his own stylized
watercolor rendering of two figures which are alternatively identified as Polynesian
Goddesses or as Hina and Tefalou (Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa (Gauguin’s Original
Manuscript), ed. Nicholas Wadley, 63, Figure 37).
52 Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” 326.
53 On women and oral traditions, see Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Matriarchal
Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe (New York: Peter Lang,
2012), 23ff.
54 See Marie-Noëlle Ottino-Garanger on the traditional meanings of tattoos, fans,
and other ornaments, in Gauguin/Polynesia, ed. Suzanne Greub, exh. cat. (Munich:
Hirmer Verlag, 2011), 124–37; esp. 133.
55 This tale, as told by Moerenhout, is repeated by Gauguin in Ancien culte mahorie
(1892–93), ed. René Huyghe (Paris: La Palme, 1951), 13.
56 See Ngāhuia Murphy, “Te Awa Atua, Te Awa Tapu, Te Awa Wahine: An
Examination of Stories, Ceremonies and Practices Regarding Menstruation in
the Pre-colonial Māori World” (MA diss., University of Waikato, New Zealand,
2011). The author uses her research to counter the false but “powerful discourses
of menstrual pollution and female inferiority” in colonialist narratives about
traditional Māori society (p. ii). Those narratives, from the late eighteenth century
on, are reviewed in close detail by anthropologist F. Allan Hanson, who questions
and refutes the long held anthropological theory that women and menstruation
were regarded as polluting in Polynesia, arguing instead that “women had a
special affinity with the gods and represented a conduit for the communication of
influences between the physical and spiritual realms.” See F. Allan Hanson, “Female
Pollution in Polynesia?” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 91, no. 3 (1982):
335–81; 363.
57 For recent thinking, see Per Hage and Jeff Marck, “Matrilineality and the
Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes,” Current Anthropology 44,
no. S5 (2003): S121–7; Jeff Marck, “Proto Oceanic Society was Matrilineal,” The
Journal of the Polynesian Society 117, no. 4 (December 2008): 345–82, esp. 350. For
anthropological thinking closer to Gauguin’s era on proto-Oceanic and present
day societies, see W. H. R. Rivers, who wrote in 1914 that “the existing matrilineal
descent is little more than the last surviving relic of a social state in which
matrilineal institutions were far more general and important” (Rivers, The History
of Melanesian Society, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914], 2:
319; as quoted by Marck, 345).
58 Anne D’Alleva, Shaping the Body Politic: Gender, Status, and Power in the Art of
Eighteenth-Century Tahiti and the Society Islands (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Columbia
University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1997), 1.
59 Anne D’Alleva, “On 1890s Tahiti,” in Gauguin/Polynesia, 174–87; 179. See also, Niel
Gunson, “Great Women and Friendship Contact Rites in Pre-Christian Tahiti,”
Journal of the Polynesian Society 73 (1964): 53–69.
60 D’Alleva, Shaping the Body Politic, 397–404.
61 For the painting’s history, see Richard Brettell, “Portraits of Women,” in The Art of
Paul Gauguin, exh. cat. (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1988), 426–7.
62 On the dating and attribution of this photograph to Henri Lemasson, see Elizabeth
C. Childs, Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti (Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2013), 267, n. 66.
63 Richard Brettell reports that “the younger woman has been identified as Teahu A
Raatairi, and the older woman is said to have been her aunt by marriage,” citing
information provided to him in Tahiti by the granddaughter of Teahu A Raatairi.
Brettell, “Portraits of Women,” 426, and 427 n. 1.
64 Goettner-Abendroth, Matriarchal Societies, 194, 196.
65 John Richardson, “Gauguin at Chicago and New York,” Burlington Magazine 101
(May 1959): 190; as cited by Brettell, “Portraits of Women,” 427.
66 On late-nineteenth-century debates over the theory of a matriarchal prehistory,
see Cynthia Eller, “Sons of the Mother: Victorian Anthropologists and the Myth of
Patriarchal Prehistory,” Gender & History 18, no. 2 (August 2006): 285–310.
67 Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 17 vols. (Paris: Larousse, 1871), 8:72–5;
72.
68 Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 17 vols., Deuxième supplément (Paris:
Larousse, 1890), 17:1232–3.
69 Rider Haggard’s novel is contextualized in these terms by Julia Reid, “Novels,”
in Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth-and
Twentieth-Century History, eds. Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann (London:
Routledge, 2009), 159–74; see especially 166–70.
70 Eller, “Sons of the Mother,” 286–7.
71 See, e.g. Gauguin’s letter to Armand Séguin, January 15, 1897, cited by Solomon-
Godeau, “Going Native,” 326.
72 Cross and Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan, 38–43.
73 Ibid., 125 ff.
74 On women’s rights and education in nineteenth-century Denmark, see Kirstine
Frederiksen, “Denmark,” in The Woman Question in Europe: A Series of Original
Essays, ed. Theodore Stanton (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1884), Chapter VII,
221–33.
75 Malingue, ed., Paul Gauguin, Letters to his Wife and Friends, 89–91, letter 59; 90.
76 For the older masculinist view of Mette as the cold, evil wife and Paul as the loving
husband who suffered the loss of his children and his wife’s lack of empathy and
understanding, see Maurice Malingue, preface to Paul Gauguin, Letters to his Wife
and Friends, ix–xi. For more recent and sympathetic views of Mette, her active
professional life in Copenhagen, her admiring circle of friends, and her long-term
involvement with the exhibition and marketing of her absent husband’s work,
see Merete Bodelsen, Gauguin and Van Gogh in Copenhagen in 1893, exh. cat.
(Copenhagen: Ordrupgaard, 1984), 24–8; Nancy Mowll Mathews, Paul Gauguin,
An Erotic Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), passim;
Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Gauguin and Impressionism, exh. cat. (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2005), 76–9 and passim.
77 “La morale m’a tout l’air d’aller comme les sciences et tout le reste vers une morale
toute nouvelle qui serait peut-être le contraire de celle d’aujourd’hui. Le mariage,
la famille, et un tas de bonnes choses dont on me corne les oreilles m’ont tout l’air
de voyager considérablement en locomobile à grande vitesse” (Gauguin, Avant et
après, 4). Paul Gauguin, Gauguin’s Intimate Journals, trans. Van Wyck Brooks (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 18.
Part Two
Symbolism, Science, and Spirituality

4
Gauguin and the Challenge of Ambiguity

Dario Gamboni
Université de Genève
Paul Gauguin is a notoriously puzzling artist. He was not only aware of this
reputation, but embraced and cultivated it. In 1888, he wrote to Émile Schuffenecker
that he knew the “symbolic path” he was taking meant he would be “less and less
understood,” and, one year later, he confided to Émile Bernard that he intended
“to become more and more incomprehensible.”1 In 1892, he provided his wife with
translations of the Tahitian titles of his paintings and an “explanation” of the one he
valued most, Manao Tupapau (1892, Figure 10.1), warning her: “Naturally many of
the pictures will be incomprehensible and you will have plenty to entertain yourself
with.”2 He even came to regard this “incomprehensibility” as essential to his art,
asserting that “there is no need to understand, any more than when listening
to music,” and justifying his position by reference to the Symbolist notion of
“suggestion” as well as to music when he advised Daniel de Monfreid in 1901: “In
short, you need to look for suggestion rather than description; this is what music
does. I am sometimes criticized for being incomprehensible precisely because
people look for an explanatory aspect in my pictures when there is no such thing.”3
Ambiguity, reception and research
Gauguin was indeed criticized for being incomprehensible. When his

“testament” picture of 1897–8, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where
Are We Going? was exhibited in Paris (see Figure 7.6), the critic André Fontainas
reproached him with failing to express visually the “meaning of the allegory”
indicated by its title, prompting him to respond that the “dream” materialized
in his painting implied no “allegory,” but was instead a “musical poem without
libretto,” and that “the essential part of a work is precisely located in what is not
expressed, resulting implicitly from the lines” but not “constituted by them.”4 The
ambiguity deplored by Fontainas seems to concern only what Erwin Panofsky
called the level of “secondary or conventional subject matter, constituting the
world of images, stories and allegories,” and by implication the level of “intrinsic
meaning or content,” but it is already present at the level of “primary or natural
subject matter,” that is of the identification of objects of representation.5 One
reason is that Gauguin believed in the expressivity of formal means, like
Humbert de Superville who had spoken of “unconditional signs in art” and
Albert Aurier who spoke of “directly significant characters (forms, lines, colors,
etc …. )” in his 1891 article hailing Gauguin as the representative of “Symbolism
in painting.”6 In a letter of 1885 to Schuffenecker, Gauguin had written: “There
are noble lines, fibbing lines etc. … There are noble colors and vulgar ones; there
are peaceful and consoling harmonies and others that are exciting because they
are so bold.”7 Another reason is that Gauguin consciously worked at delaying,
complicating and sometimes preventing an iconic reading of his works, to the
puzzlement of many and the enjoyment of a few like the critic Félix Fénéon,
who described one of his landscapes as a tentative process of decipherment:
“Glimpsed bricks indicate a nearby house; coats lying down, muzzles pushing
through the coppice,—cows.”8
Art historians have acknowledged the presence and importance of ambiguity
in Gauguin’s work, but the tendency has long been either to try and “make
sense of it,” to reduce it by proposing more or less univocal identifications
and interpretations, or to regard it as deriving from an autonomization of
form at the expense of “subject matter,” in a teleological perspective based on
the twentieth-century understanding of “abstraction” as aniconism. In recent
decades, however, the alternative of iconography or formalism has given way
to a growing readiness to accept ambiguity as a given and to recognize it as
resulting from an aesthetic strategy. This has been easier to do when dealing
with Gauguin’s works in other media than painting, less subject to expectations
of iconic, heuristic or historic univocity. In her study of Gauguin’s ceramics,
Merete Bodelsen thus observed in 1964 that he sometimes chose to give them
an “ambivalent meaning,” for example in the vase she called Double-vessel in
Unglazed Stoneware Decorated with Engraved Cats (Figure 4.1), of which she
noted that it transforms itself under a prolonged gaze: “At first glance it looks
simply like a kind of double vessel with an opening in either side … But after
a while, perhaps because the small cats direct one’s attention that way, one
perceives that the whole of the vessel is one cat, whose head with its ears and
Gauguin and the Challenge of Ambiguity 105
Figure 4.1 Paul Gauguin, Double-vessel in Unglazed Stoneware, Decorated with Cats
Painted with Black and Leaves Painted with Greenish Glaze, 1887–8, height 6½ in.
(16.5 cm).
mouth is formed by the left-hand opening, while its forepaws are indicated by
grooves in the square feet of the vase. And furthermore, what at one moment
is a tail becomes at another glance a head.”9 Comparable insights were later
prompted by Gauguin’s works on paper and especially by his prints and transfer
drawings, in which a comparison between the matrix and the impression,
the initial composition and the result of the transfer shows to what extent
the artist’s effort was directed toward obfuscation. Richard Brettell remarked
about the woodcuts of the “Noa Noa Suite” that Gauguin’s unorthodox printing
technique “heightened the feeling of the indeterminate that he sought” and
that many of his own impressions of the woodblocks “tremble on the brink of
incomprehensibility.”10 And Richard Field commented that “it is the nature of
Gauguin’s works to pressure the viewer to seek meaning,” and that the artist
“understood full well that what was withheld or obscured inevitably provoked
interpretation.”11
Bodelsen added to her discovery of an “ambivalent meaning” in Gauguin’s

ceramics that it “can also be found in some of his paintings, as for instance in
The Old Women of Arles (1888), where the green bush in the bottom left corner
changes into a face, possibly Gauguin’s own, or in the painting of the Harvesting
[Yellow Haystacks (The Golden Harvest) (Figure 4.2]), where the oversized head
of an ox raises itself from the field and the haystacks.”12 The ambivalence of
which she spoke can more accurately be named polyiconicity, since it designates
the fact that a given visual configuration lends itself to being perceived and
interpreted iconically in two or more ways. The bush/face in Arlésiennes (Mistral)
(1888, Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, W. 300) has been noted by many
commentators yet remained controversial.13 Other “double images” have met
with a greater consensus, especially the flower/eye present in several paintings
including The Painter of Sunflowers (1888, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, W.
296), Te nave nave fenua (1892, Plate 3), and Sunflowers in an Armchair (1901,
St. Petersburg: State Hermitage Museum, W. 603). Wayne Andersen, Douglas
Druick and Peter Zegers, and Henri Dorra, among others, all took note of this
Figure 4.2 Paul Gauguin, Les Meules jaunes ou La Moisson blonde/The Yellow
Haystacks or The Blonde Harvest, 1889, oil on canvas, 28¾ × 36¼ in. (73 × 92 cm).
motif and connected it with the work of Odilon Redon, in particular his 1883
lithograph There Was Perhaps a FIRST VISION Attempted in the Flower.14
Broader references to ambiguity were made by several authors. In 1985,
Nicholas Wadley commented about Gauguin’s “playful instincts for repetition
and for a symmetry that often involves paradox” in the manuscript Noa Noa/
Voyage de Tahiti (1894–1901, Paris: Musée d’Orsay), adding that they “are
paralleled by his eye for silhouette and for visual and verbal puns.”15 Ten years
later, Shigemi Inaga noted that in The Painter of Sunflowers, a portrait of Vincent
van Gogh at work, the position of the model’s brush “is impossible to locate,”
so that “the relation between reality and painting can be reversed” and Vincent
appears to be generating the sunflower, rather than imitating it.16 In 1997,
Stephen Eisenman proposed that the “jigsaw puzzle shapes of complementary
and adjacent hues” placed side by side in Gauguin’s depictions of the surface of
water, most strikingly in the lower third of Mahana no Atua (1894, Chicago: The
Art Institute of Chicago, W. 513), be considered as “a third term of representation
between material and spiritual realms” connected to “the abstract dialectic of
Polynesian spirituality”; in his posthumous book, Dorra compared these shapes
with Javanese shadow puppets and suggested to see them as “a cryptogram of
jealousy” in Aha oe feii? (1892, Moscow: Pushkin Museum, W. 461) and as “a
malevolent monster” in the woodcut Auti Te Pape (Figure 4.3).17 In an essay
entitled “Gauguin Inside Out,” Charles Stuckey interpreted the background
of many of the artist’s paintings as a depiction of the “internal mental states”
of their figures.18 He detected this “ambition to visualize the mental visions of
figures” in the 1881 The Little One is Dreaming (Figure 4.4), long before it became
explicit in the Vision of the Sermon of 1888 (Plate 1) and at a time when Gauguin
was supposed to be still following the Impressionist model.19 A revaluation of
Gauguin’s early work in all media has indeed highlighted aspects and processes
associated with Symbolism and even later movements such as Surrealism, Anne-
Birgitte Fonsmark speaking for example of objet trouvé in connection with his
appropriation of objects of popular or exotic origin.20 In the first two volumes
of the new catalog raisonné of Gauguin’s paintings, published in 2001, Sylvie
Crussard found expressions of his “search for an effect at once decorative and
suggestive” as early as 1879, and she attempted to specify the nature of this
suggestion, wondering for example whether a fern depicted in the lower-left
corner of Fisherman and Bathers on the Aven (1888, private collection, W. 264),
which she described as “almost alive” and possessing “something very like an
eye,” did not introduce “the anthropomorphic plants of the Arles period.”21
Figure 4.3 Paul Gauguin, Auti Te Pape, from the “Noa Noa Suite,” 1893/4, wood-
block print in pale orange and black, over transferred yellow, pink, orange, blue, and
green wax-based media, on cream wove Japanese paper, laid down on cream wove
Japanese paper, 8 × 13 in. (20.3 × 35.3 cm).
These observations, however, tended to treat their objects as marginal,

exceptional or humorous, and failed to provoke a theoretical reflection and a
systematic inquiry into Gauguin’s oeuvre. In a 1985 article, Bernard Demont
found in the artist’s paintings, from 1888 onwards, a “twofold register of
ambiguity: the register of the ambiguity of plastic space and that of symbolic
or allusive ambiguity,” asserting that “the most complete ambivalence is
realized where the two registers coincide” thanks to the “visual projection of
the spectator.”22 But this promising essay had no sequel and went unnoticed.
The reasons for this state of affairs can only be surmised. One is to do with the
enduring influence of the Modernist equation of “abstraction” with aniconism,
which led to considering any departure from naturalism as a contribution to the
disqualification of “subject matter” and the “emancipation of form.” Faced with
the alternative of iconography or formalism, ambiguity was either “resolved,”
that is folded back into a plausible perception and interpretation, or ignored,
treated as ineffable, or identified as a step on the path to “non-objectivity.”
A second reason is to do with the implicit character of polyiconicity and the
logocentrism of many art historians: ways of seeing and understanding visual
Figure 4.4 Paul Gauguin, La Petite rêve/The Little One is Dreaming, 1881, oil on
canvas, 23½ × 29 in. (59.5 × 73.5 cm).
configurations that are not part of an explicit iconography, mentioned in a title, or

“explained” in a verbal document tend to remain out of perceptive and cognitive reach.
A third reason is that addressing the ambiguous and the implicit requires a reliance
upon subjective observations and hypotheses that seems to undermine claims to
scientific objectivity and brings professionals too close to those Gary Schwartz called
“Sunday scholars” for comfort, so that an unreflected ethos of the discipline suggests
avoiding such dangerous waters and retreating to a safe positivism.23
Speaking in parables
My own research on Paul Gauguin’s art and thought began in the context of
a broader inquiry into the artistic uses of visual ambiguity around 1900, the
results of which were published in book form.24 My point of departure was
the art theory and practice of Odilon Redon, who wrote in 1902: “The sense
of mystery consists in being always in ambiguity, in the double, triple aspects,
hints of aspects (images within images), forms that are about to come into being
or will take their being from the onlooker’s state of mind.”25 I found out that
Redon was far from alone in pursuing ambiguity and that his way of appealing
to the beholder’s participation contributed to a general transformation of
aesthetic communication in which agency became more equally distributed
between artist and recipient, as acknowledged by Marcel Duchamp when he
spoke in the 1950s of “the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the
one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity,”
and asserted provocatively that “It is the onlooker who makes the pictures.”26
This development interacted with the other arts including music and literature,
a major role being played by Symbolist poetry which Stéphane Mallarmé
defined as follows in an 1891 interview: “To name a thing is to suppress three-
quarters of a poem’s enjoyment, which consists in the pleasure of gradually
guessing; to suggest it, that is the dream.”27 We saw that Gauguin advised us
to “look for suggestion rather than description,” and the medical connotation
of the term “suggestion” points to another interaction, with developments in
science and especially the new discipline of psychology.28 Widely circulated
studies of visual perception emphasized its active dimension and its links to
cognition and dream; as early as 1870, Hippolyte Taine had proposed to revise
dramatically the understanding of the relationship between perception and
imagination: “Thus our external perception is an inner dream, in harmony
with things outside us; and, instead of saying that hallucination is a false
external perception, we ought to think of external perception as an authentic
hallucination.”29 Such insights were used to study the way in which art is made
and perceived, and Paul Souriau, a French philosopher and aesthetician, wrote
in his 1893 La suggestion dans l’art that “to look at a drawing is to see chimeras
in clouds.”30
Gauguin turned out to be one of the artists who employed ambiguity most
systematically and I was astonished to discover in his work “aspects” — in Redon’s
sense of a way of seeing and interpreting — that had hitherto passed unnoticed
or at least unmentioned. A case in point is the 1888 painting Above the Abyss
(Plate 2), which intrigued me because of the way in which the negative shape of
the sea, defined by the outlines of the cliffs, tends to flip into a positive shape,
which a curator of the Van Gogh Museum showed me resembles closely a little-
known portrait of Gauguin (Figure 4.5) painted a few months later by van Gogh
Figure 4.5 Vincent van Gogh, Portrait de Gauguin/Portrait of Gauguin, 1888, oil on
burlap, 15 × 13⅓ in. (38.2 × 33.8 cm).
in Arles.31 Research confirmed that this resemblance was deliberate and that the
work was meant to oscillate between a landscape and a self-portrait, making an
art theoretical and epistemological point about the relationship between artist
and nature, subject and object, the self and the world. This conclusion and other
observations of this kind convinced me that understanding Gauguin’s oeuvre
in all media would benefit from an approach privileging ambiguity instead of
marginalizing it, and after many more years of research led to the book Paul
Gauguin: The Mysterious Centre of Thought.
The effigy of the artist in Above the Abyss is what I propose to call a
“potential image,” an image present in potentia in the work of art and
becoming actual through the active participation of the onlooker.32 One can
apply to potential images what the epistemologist Gaston Bachelard said of
the images of “aerial imagination,” that they “either evaporate or crystallize”
and must be grasped “between the two poles of this ever-active ambivalence.”33
Depending on the artist and on the work, the intention playing a part in their
creation may have been more generic or more specific, leaving more or less
latitude to the onlookers’ contribution. Redon cultivated both “evaporation”
and “crystallization,” and one of the words that he preferred to describe his
own art was “indeterminacy.”34 Gauguin’s intentions seem to have been more
specific — he claimed that everything in his work was “calculated, mulled
over at great length” — and ambiguity, for him, tended more generally toward
polyiconicity.35 The outline of the cliff/head, for example, was drawn without
any hesitation, as scientific examination of the canvas confirms, which
suggests that the double image did not result from the painting process but
informed it from the start. I found the absence of previous mentions of the
aspect “head” in this work both exciting and disquieting: had it never been
seen? Research into views of the Breton coast painted in subsequent years by
Gauguin’s followers demonstrated the impact of Above the Abyss and showed
that this was not the case.36 But there remained the question of Gauguin’s
silence, which recalls a metaphor used by him and his commentators, like
Jean Dolent who wrote: “The artist with sealed lips does not easily reveal his
secret!”37
With the exception of a text known as “The Genesis of a Painting,” which
is a manifesto of poetics inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of
Composition” and applied to Manao Tupapau rather than a straightforward
account, Gauguin rarely commented on his own works and was wary of
explanations.38 But he addressed more generic issues of semiotics and
communication, and his written work confirms the importance that he gave
to ambiguity and polyiconicity. He compared the “incomprehensibility” of his
art to Jesus’s use of parables, quoting the Gospel of St Luke in his manuscript
Diverses choses (“Miscellaneous Things,” 1896–8): “Jesus said to his disciples
‘to you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God but for
everyone else it is offered only in parables, so that, seeing, they do not see
and hearing, they do not understand.’”39 This intention to exclude as much
as to include, and to let properties of the message distinguish two circles
of addressees, the laity and the initiates, can be related to the sociological
condition of independent artists, whom Gauguin encouraged to “group
together like the disciples of a new religion.”40 The first reference to the parable
as a model of enciphered and indirect expression appears in the same letter
of 1885 to Schuffenecker in which he attributed moral qualities to lines and
colors; referring to Cézanne as a mystical Oriental, he described the “mystery”
of his works as follows: “Like Virgil who has several meanings and whom one
can interpret as one wishes, the literature of his pictures has a dual-purpose
parabolic meaning; his backgrounds are as imaginative as they are real.”41
Gauguin’s own painting The Little One is Dreaming (Figure 4.4) clarifies what
he meant with this: the forms in the background suggest the “imaginative”
images of the child’s dream at the same time as they depict the “real” motifs of
a wall decoration.
Decoration, for Gauguin, was not a mere embellishment of surfaces but an
“abstract” mode of representation freed from “the servile imitation of nature,” as
he wrote in a review of the 1889 Universal Exposition in which he introduced a
reference to the galleries of the Musée du Louvre displaying fragments from the
palace of Darius I excavated at Susa. Pointing to the Lion Frieze in enamel brick,
he asserted: “I maintain that enormous genius was required to imagine flowers
that are the muscles of animals or muscles that are flowers.”42 This interpretation
of the stylization of Achaemenid Persian art shows that Gauguin understood
“abstraction” as a multiplication, not an elimination, of iconic references, as a
way to achieve polyiconicity and express “dual-purpose parabolic meanings.”
It is a quality that he was apt at recognizing in the art of pre-Modern and
non-Western societies, and he later wrote perceptively about Marquesan art:
“In the Marquesan especially there is an unparalleled sense of decoration …
The basis is the human body or the face, especially the face. One is astonished
to find a face where one thought there was nothing but a strange geometric
figure.”43 His primitivism aimed at finding artistic means corresponding to the
equation between “external perception” and “inner dream,” and in Diverses
choses, he defined the goal and locus of his effort by opposing them implicitly
to those of the Impressionists, who “focused their efforts around the eye, not
in the mysterious centre of thought, and from there … slipped into scientific
reasons.”44
Gauguin’s “silence,” therefore, is relative and applies to his individual
works, not to his art. It is also logical, because the mode of expression,
communication, and reception that he favored is a maieutic process in which
the work of art rewards the prolonged and repeated observation of onlookers
by “initiating” them and revealing unsuspected “aspects.” He understood
Redon, for whom the “sense of mystery” consisted in dwelling in ambiguity,
and described accordingly one of the older artist’s drawings in 1889: “Amid a
black atmosphere, we finally make out one tree trunk, now two; one of them
is surmounted by something, probably a man’s head. With utmost logic he
leaves us in doubt as to that existence. Is it truly a man, or rather a vague
resemblance?”45 Another proof of his respecting the same “logic” lies in the
fact that he was often more explicit in graphic works, meant for a small circle of
fellow spirits, than in more public works such as his paintings. The suggestion
of an “oversized head,” which Bodelsen saw raising itself in the painting
Yellow Haystacks (The Golden Harvest) (Figure 4.2), is thus confirmed—albeit
in human rather than bovine form—in a contemporary drawing (Figure
4.6) which duplicates the stack and fully develops facial features on its new
iteration.
Figure 4.6 Paul Gauguin, Bretonnerie/Breton Matters, c. 1889, pencil on paper, 12½
× 19⅓ in. (31.6 × 49.1 cm).
Techniques of ambiguity
In addition to the impact of a favorable artistic and intellectual context, Gauguin’s

cultivation of ambiguity seems to have profited from a personal sensitivity
to the imaginative dimension of visual perception, perhaps nurtured by the
circumstances of his early childhood in Peru.46
The motifs that he privileged from the start in his studies from nature and
landscapes bear witness to a concern for “images made by chance” and to a sense
of animated nature; in the 1889 text quoted above, Gauguin defined nature as
possessing “an imaginative power,” the artist as “one of nature’s means,” and
Redon as “one of those she has elected for this continuation of creation.”47 In
Brittany, Martinique, and later in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, these motifs
were also informed by an interest in latent animism and in popular beliefs,
sometimes deposited in language as when pollarded willows (trees trimmed
to stimulate the production of withies for basket-making), which the artist
compared visually to horned cattle in graphic works, are called in French saules
têtards, from tête (“head”) and étêter (“to behead, to prune”).48
The first technique that Gauguin used to produce “suggestion” was based
upon these experiences of perception and aimed at putting the spectator in an
analogous situation. It consisted in including, reinforcing or creating the kind
of “vague resemblance” of which he spoke in relation to Redon. In Above the
Abyss (Plate 2), for example, the shape of the outlines and the application of
color and brushstrokes make it possible to see also the cliffs as two giant heads,
animal on the left and monstrous on the right.49 The reversibility between figure
and ground, used in the same painting to produce a perceptive bi-stability
between the central form as sea fragment and as human profile, is a technique
that reappears in later works, especially those inspired by pre-Columbian and
Oceanic patterns, and it bears witness to Gauguin’s interest in ornament and
caricature, two genres in which it is frequently employed.50 A more systematic
procedure is the one called by Gauguin “abstraction” or “synthesis,” and which
consists in reducing the number of properties of the depicted objects to be
included in their representation and thus making the latter additionally or
equally capable of calling to mind other objects. It is the technique referred to by
Gauguin when he spoke of “flowers that are the muscles of animals or muscles
that are flowers,” and it is especially evident in his graphic works (Figures 4.3 and
4.6) and his ceramics (Figure 4.1), media in which “simplification” was required
by their means and made legitimate by their association with the “decorative.”
For Gauguin, it was an artistic and epistemic imperative of general validity, and
he quoted in his manuscript Cahier pour Aline (“Notebook for Aline,” 1892–3) a
relevant aphorism from Poe’s Marginalia: “We can, at any time, double the true
beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked
Senses sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much.”51
The decorative status was also used by Gauguin to produce ambiguity. It could
be applied to an object or to a class of objects—like ceramics—to a style, to a
picture or to a portion thereof, such as the depictions of water reflections included
in many paintings and engravings like Mahana no Atua and Auti Te Pape (Figure
4.3). The horizontal band on top of La Petite rêve (Figure 4.4) is “decorative”
because it is part of the background, because it represents a wall decoration,
and because it does not contribute explicitly to a narration, all of which enables
it to suggest oneiric images without disrupting the ontological homogeneity of
pictorial representation. In sculpture and ceramics, Gauguin resorted to three-
dimensionality as a means to multiply aspects. Although he shunned the potter’s
wheel in favor of coiling and slab construction, his vases possess a basically
cylindrical form, and he generally avoided giving them clearly defined and
hierarchized “sides”: instead, one has to find out which viewpoint is relevant for
which understanding of the form and, as Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark observed, when
one revolves one of his pots in one’s hands, “new works appear, in an interminable
metamorphosis.”52 Some of these transformations provoke an “astonishment”
of the kind he attributed to Marquesan ornament: a Double-necked Vase Joined
by a Peruvian Stirrup-shaped Handle (1886–7, Paris: Musée du Petit Palais, inv.
PP003439) suggests a grotesque face with horns appearing four times as the
object is being rotated, while if one approaches from above the young woman
lying on the shoulder of the Vase with Motifs from Cézanne’s “Harvest” (1886–7,
Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, GRAY 26), the openings of the vase turn
it into a menacing open-mouthed animal—possibly the shepherdess’s dog ….53
Gauguin’s awareness of the importance of the multiple viewpoint for his
ceramics is demonstrated by a watercolor (Figure 4.7) showing three pots side
by side. A definite resemblance between the first and the second one points
to the fact that they are two views of one and the same pot, namely the Vase
in the Form of Leda and the Swan (1887–8, private collection, GRAY 63) in
which the Greek princess features as a peasant girl and Zeus is turned into a
gander rather than the mythical swan. Separated by an angle of some twenty
degrees, the two perspectives shift the girl’s face from full to lost profile, while
the long strap handle partly covered with a white slip yields at first no iconic
Figure 4.7 Paul Gauguin, Stoneware Pots, Chaplet, c. 1887–9, gouache, watercolor
and charcoal on paper, 12½ × 16½ in. (31.8 × 41.6 cm).
hint, then resembles a snake more than a bird. The relevance of this suggestion
is confirmed by the third—in reality second—pot, the Woman-vase with
Snake-belt (1887–8, Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, GRAY 49), which
is depicted with a frontal view of its ophidian attribute. A similar use of the
multiple viewpoint can be observed in Gauguin’s sculptures in wood, the basic
shape of which is also generally cylindrical and points to the natural origin of
the material, a tree trunk or branch, suggesting that the figures grew out of
nature’s “imaginative power.”54
Gauguin’s creative disregard of rules was as radical and proved as influential
in printmaking as in ceramics and sculpture.55 For the “Noa Noa Suite,” the series
of ten woodcuts meant to accompany the fictional account of his first stay in
Tahiti, he devised ways of carving the end-grain boxwood blocks that included
the finest incisions as well as large gouged areas in which he took an interest in
the small cavities and crests formed by his instruments. He inked these cavities
and pushed the paper into them when printing, creating patterns intimately
bound with the material and the process but more suggestive than descriptive
in terms of iconic representation, like the expanse of ground pierced with
luminous marks surrounding the seated woman in Auti Te Pape (Figure 4.3).
The mysterious effect of phosphorescence and nocturnal atmosphere are also
due to the unusual choice of a “white line” technique in which the untouched
surface of the block becomes the “ground” of the image, on which the figures
appear more or less distinctly—all the less, in fact, as Gauguin chose to leave
out much of the information carved into the block, like the subtle modeling of
the seated woman’s body. On the other hand, he added elements specific to each
impression by wiping parts of the block, coloring his papers, printing off-register
and courting chance in all sorts of ways: Brettell’s and Field’s comments on the
result, speaking of indetermination and incomprehensibility, have already been
quoted. Gauguin pushed even further his search for vagueness and confusion
in the transfer drawings and monotypes that he realized from 1898 on, as a
comparison between the preparatory drawings on the verso and the intended
result on the recto demonstrate. An additional factor of ambiguity was provided
by Gauguin’s reuse of the same inked surface for distinct consecutive monotype
drawings, which resulted in “ghost” white lines from the previous composition
“disturbing” the new one.56
The titles of Gauguin’s works can also be counted among the means he
employed to produce ambiguity, especially when, during and shortly after
his first stay in Polynesia, he opted for Tahitian, to the annoyance of many
commentators.57 Inscribed on the canvases and on the prints of the “Noa Noa
Suite,” these mysterious statements confronted European spectators with their
alterity and made sound precede and suggest meaning. Their orthographic,
syntactic and semantic correctness has been an object of controversy, but there
are good reasons to follow Hiriata Millaud when she argued that Gauguin
was consciously playing with words.58 He wrote to his wife that Tahitian “is
bizarre and gives many meanings,” and he used the language to warn against an
expectation of univocity, induce an attitude of open-ended reverie and point to
the presence of “parabolic meaning.” Auti Te Pape (Figure 4.3), for instance, is
composed of ha‘uti, which means “play and “move” as a verb, and “turbulent”
as an adjective, and of te pape, which means “the fresh water” or “the river.” As
Bengt Danielsson observed, the absence of a linking particle makes it impossible
to determine “which word is the subject and which the direct object,” so that the
title can be translated as “the fresh water is in motion” or as “playing in the fresh
water”: the ambiguous attribution of agency is essential for the print, in which
the strange reflections in the water close to the plunging bather prompted Dorra
to speak of “a malevolent monster.”59
Finally, intermediality and intericonicity play an important role in establishing
the network of associations that generate meanings and suggest interpretations.
The reversibility between figure and ground in Above the Abyss (Plate 2) may
thus derive from Gauguin’s giving shape to the void when he modelled clay, and
conversely it prepared his self-depiction as a vessel in the Cephalomorphic Self-
portrait Pot (1889, Copenhagen: Designmuseum Danmark, GRAY 65), which
in turn helps to recognize the artist’s effigy in the negative space outlined by
the cliffs. The watercolor bringing together the Vase in the Form of Leda and
the Swan and the Woman-vase with Snake-belt (Figure 4.7) shows the way in
which the explicit inclusion of a motif in a given work can help us to perceive
and understand its implicit presence in other works. This applies to Bretonnerie
(Figure 4.6) in relation to La Moisson blonde (Figure 4.2), and to the water
reflections of Auti te pape (Figure 4.3) in relation to those in earlier works such
as the painting Les Lavandières (Washerwomen, 1888, Bilbao: Museo de Bellas
Artes, W. 303) and its zincographic version in the “Volpini Suite” (1889, GRAY
6).60 Such connections and effects of mutual illumination can extend across many
works over long periods of time, as I have shown by describing a morphogenetic
sequence starting with Gauguin’s wax life-size sculpture of his new-born son
Jean’s head (1881, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen), evolving in images of seaside
rocks suggesting more or less explicitly human heads and bodies, and ending
with the cephalomorphic representation of the Polynesian creator God Ta‘aroa
included in the print Te atua (1898–9, GRAY 60, 61) and the drawing The Holy
Images (c. 1903, private collection).61
A challenge for art history
Dealing with ambiguity remains, however, a challenge for art history. It requires
sensitivity, imagination and even boldness, in order to mobilize one’s subjective
capacities, to perceive the “suggestions” implicit in a work of art and to formulate
hypotheses as to their meanings and relationships with its explicit elements; but it
also requires historic and historiographic erudition, rational thinking, logic and
caution, in order to separate relevant from irrelevant associations, to test heuristic
hypotheses and to integrate the successful observations and interpretations into
a comprehensive understanding of the work and the artist. The combination
of open-mindedness and rigor is not easy to obtain, and one must strive for
the greatest possible precision of language, so as to distinguish between what
is certain, what is probable and what is merely possible, and to do justice to
the degree of presence—between “evaporation” and “crystallization”—of a given
“aspect,” or to explore the mutual relations of elements united in a polyiconic
motif. This calls for avoiding automatisms of thought and expression, such as
the notion of “projection,” which suggests a purely individual, subject-driven
perception detached from all objective stimuli, or that of “anthropomorphism,”
often a misnomer for allusions to something either more specific or more generic
than a human being.62
This is a collective effort—at the very least by way of the historiographic
resources involved—in which the individual researcher’s subjective experience
is put at the service of inter-subjective communication. The fact that a colleague
familiar with van Gogh’s portrait of Gauguin (Figure 4.5) helped me understand
the iconic dimension of the bi-stability I had perceived in Above the Abyss
(Plate 2) is typical of this collaborative quality. It is not only the exploration of
intericonicity, within an artist’s oeuvre and beyond, that asks for exchange and
mutual aid, but even more the selection of relevant perceptions and the testing
of interpretative hypotheses. Not all art historians, however, are ready to accept
ambiguity as part of their domain and to enter into an argumentative debate
about its study. While specialists have welcomed my findings about Gauguin,
a less knowledgeable reviewer claimed that I proposed “credulity as method”
and declined to engage with my arguments on the grounds that “credulity
can be infectious.”63 Superficiality was needed to pass over the theoretical and
methodological discussions included in my book and in Potential Images, but
the attitude is typical of a refusal on principle to consider iconic—and more
generally semiotic—elements of a work of art beyond the explicit ones. In
Gauguin’s case, this means blinding oneself to the artist’s intention “to look for
suggestion rather than description,” and the problem is much more general. In
Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, James Elkins had reduced visual ambiguity to
what he called “cryptomorphs” and the perception of such “hidden” images to
the aberrant zeal of irrational amateurs, ignoring the possibility of distinguishing
between relevant and irrelevant observations.64
According to Elkins, “images hidden in paintings” are a recent phenomenon,
but polyiconicity is a universal mode of visual art, of which varied and more or
less extensive uses have been made in different historic situations and cultural
contexts.65 Although it has remained essential to modern and contemporary
art since the time of Symbolist “suggestion” and of Duchamp’s equalization of

the “two poles of the creation of art,” historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century art have been less prone to deal with it than specialists of the early
modern period.66 This may have to do with the lingering effect of the aniconic
understanding of “abstraction,” which I already mentioned, and with the
overabundance of written sources and commentaries, which tends to reinforce
the authority of verbalized and explicit “content.” I was alerted to the latter factor
by colleagues’ repeated requests for a written document spelling out the allusions
that I proposed to detect and, conversely, by the willingness to engage with my
arguments shown by specialists in non-Western art, for instance in the context
of the University Seminar on the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at
Columbia University.67 One cannot but use and trust one’s eyes when studying
art unaccompanied by a literary corpus, and it is telling that Gauguin, in his
search for “the primitive means of art,” was particularly inspired by artifacts
coming from societies generally considered to lack writing and in which they
played a crucial role in communication.68
Together with Gauguin’s high level of theoretical reflection, his unprejudiced
curiosity therefore makes his art and writing of particular interest at a time
when a new process of “globalization” transforms the discipline and opens
up new horizons of study, in which visual ambiguity plays an important role.
Gauguin was critical of the power exerted upon art and artists by critics, which
he denounced as “the regime of the man of letters” and mocked as “a typesetter’s
theocracy.”69 But he wrote that color constitutes a “language of the listening
eye,” adding that Orientals had printed “a complete dictionary of it,” and he
can now help us develop and refine a meta-language to describe, analyze and
interpret this language.70 Dealing with ambiguity raises at least as many new
questions as it answers, so that one need not fear that the interchange it requires
will ever come to a halt. Since I published my main conclusions, Haruko Hirota
has shown that polyiconicity is part of Gauguin’s contribution to Japonism, and
the growing collaboration between art historians, conservators and material
scientists is making it possible to study more closely and understand better than
before the genesis of his works, and the relationships between his imagination,
materials and process.71 A long list of desiderata focused on Gauguin’s use of
ambiguity could be made: it would include, for me, the extent of his knowledge
of antecedents from the early modern period; the role of his interactions with
artists both older (Degas, Cézanne, Redon) and younger (Sérusier, Bernard,
Seguin), as well as with poets and critics; the relation of verbal punning—which
he practiced and enjoyed—to his cultivation of perceptive multistability; the

logic and meaning of his uses of stylistic pluralism within a single work, such
as Mahana no Atua; and the implications for his work of an interest in religious
aniconism.72 But other researchers will have other priorities and my main wish
is that ambiguity become a normal part of what art historians study in Gauguin.
Notes
1 Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, October 16, 1888, in Victor Merlhès, ed.,

Correspondance de Paul Gauguin. Documents. Témoignages, 1873–88 (Paris:
Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1984), 1:255 (“cette voie symbolique … on me
comprendra de moins en moins”); Gauguin to Émile Bernard, September 1889,
in Maurice Malingue, ed., Paul Gauguin: Lettres à sa femme et à ses amis (Paris:
Grasset, 1946), 167 (“je compte même devenir de plus en plus incompréhensible”).
Translations from French sources, unless otherwise mentioned, are due to the
author or to Chris Miller.
2 Gauguin to Mette Gauguin, December 8, 1892, in Malingue, Paul Gauguin, 241
(“Naturellement beaucoup de tableaux seront incompréhensibles et tu auras de quoi
t’amuser.”).
3 Paul Gauguin, Diverses choses (“Miscellaneous Things,” 1896–8), text following
Noa Noa in the manuscript Noa Noa/Voyage de Tahiti (Paris: Musée du Louvre,
Département des Arts Graphiques, Fonds du Musée d’Orsay), 232, folio 119 verso
(“il n’y a pas à comprendre, tout comme dans une audition musicale”); Gauguin to
Daniel de Monfreid, August 1901, in Paul Gauguin, Lettres à Daniel de Monfreid,
ed. Joly-Segalen (Paris: Falaize, 1950), 182 (“Il y a en somme en peinture plus à
chercher la suggestion que la description, comme le fait d’ailleurs la musique. On
me reproche quelquefois d’être incompréhensible parce que justement on cherche
dans mes tableaux un côté explicatif tandis qu’il n’y en a pas.”).
4 André Fontainas, “Revue du mois. Art moderne,” Mercure de France 29 (January
1899), 235–42, quoted after P. Gauguin, Lettres à André Fontainas (Caen: L’Échoppe,
1994), 47; Gauguin to André Fontainas, March 1899, in ibid., 14–15 (“Mon rêve …
ne comporte aucune allégorie:—poème musical, il se passe de libretto … l’essentiel
dans une œuvre consiste précisément dans ce qui n’est pas exprimé; il en résulte
implicitement des lignes …, il n’en est pas matériellement constitué.”).
5 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance [1939] (New York: Icon, 1972), 14.
6 David Pierre Giottino Humbert de Superville, Essai sur les signes inconditionnels
dans l’art (Leyden: C. C. van der Hoek, 1827); G.-A. Aurier, “Le symbolisme en
peinture. Paul Gauguin,” Mercure de France (March 1891), 155–65, quoted after
Albert Aurier, Textes critiques 1889–1892. De l’impressionnisme au symbolisme
(Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1995), 35.
7 Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, January 14, 1885, in Merlhès, Correspondance de
Paul Gauguin, 88 (“Il y a des lignes nobles menteuses etc. … Il y a des tons nobles
d’autres communs des harmonies tranquilles consolantes d’autres qui vous excitent
par leur hardiesse.”)
8 Félix Fénéon, “Les impressionnistes,” La Vogue, no. 8 (June 13–20, 1886):
261–75; quoted after F. Fénéon, Oeuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan U. Halperin,
Chroniques d’art (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 1:33.
9 Merete Bodelsen, Gauguin’s Ceramics: A Study in the Development of his Art
(London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 104; Christopher Gray simply called this ceramic
Double-Mouthed Vase (Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 168, cat. 53). See also Haruko Hirota, “La sculpture en
céramique de Gauguin: sources et significations,” Histoire de l’art no. 15 (October
1991): 43–60.
10 Richard Brettell, Françoise Cachin, Claire Frèches-Thory, Charles F. Stuckey and
Peter Zegers, The Art of Paul Gauguin, exh. cat. (New York: New York Graphic
Society Books, 1988), 318.
11 Richard S. Field, “Gauguin,” Print Quarterly 6, no. 3 (June 1989): 197–204; 203.
12 Bodelsen, Gauguin’s Ceramics, 104.
13 See Dario Gamboni, Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious Centre of Thought [2013], trans.
Chris Miller (London: Reaktion, 2014), 172–4, with references.
14 Wayne V. Andersen, with the assistance of Barbara Klein, Gauguin’s Paradise
Lost (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971), 176–7; Douglas W. Druick and Peter
Kort Zegers in collaboration with Britt Salvesen, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The
Studio of the South, exh. cat. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 240–3; Henri
Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas
of Humanity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press,
2007), 99.
15 Nicholas Wadley, ed./intro., Noa Noa: Gauguin’s Tahiti, trans. Jonathan Griffin
(Oxford: Phaidon, 1985), 146.
16 Shigemi Inaga, “Van Gogh’s Japan and Gauguin’s Tahiti Reconsidered,” in Ideal
Places in History—East and West, ed. Haga Toru (Kyoto: International Research
Center for Japanese Studies, 1995), 153–78; 159.
17 Stephen F. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London and New York: Thames & Hudson,
1997), 130–3; Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin, 178–80.
18 Charles Stuckey, “Gauguin Inside Out,” in Gauguin’s Nirvana: Painters at Le Pouldu
1889–90, ed. Eric M. Zafran, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2001), 129–41.
19 Ibid., 137. See also Naomi E. Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought
and Art of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press/London: Associated University Presses/Minneapolis Institute of
Arts, 1998), 167.
20 Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, “Gauguin Makes Objects,” in Gauguin and Impressionism,
eds. Richard R. Brettell and A.-B. Fonsmark, exh. cat. (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort
Worth; Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen. New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2005), 96–107.
21 Daniel Wildenstein, Gauguin. Premier itinéraire d’un sauvage, Catalogue de
l’œuvre peint (1873–1888), text and research by Sylvie Crussard, documentation
and chronology by Martine Heudron (Milan and Paris: Skira/Seuil/Wildenstein
Institute, 2001), 433.
22 Bernard Demont, “L’ambiguïté dans la peinture de Paul Gauguin entre 1885
et 1894,” L’œil (March 1985), 32–9. See also Alan C. Birnholz, “Double Images
Reconsidered. A Fresh Look at Gauguin’s Yellow Christ,” Art International 21, no. 5
(October–November 1977): 26–34; Eric Alliez with Jean-Clet Martin, L’œil-cerveau.
Nouvelles histoires de la peinture moderne (Paris: Vrin, 2007), 295–367.
23 Gary Schwartz, “Zondagsgeleerden,” Financieele Dagblad (August 8–10, 1998): 23.
24 Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art
(London: Reaktion, 2002), 86–96.
25 Odilon Redon, À soi-même. Journal (1867–1915). Notes sur la vie, l’art et les artistes
(Paris: Corti, 1961), 100.
26 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act [1957],” in Salt Seller: The Essential Writings of
Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1975), 138; Jean Schuster, “Marcel Duchamp, vite,” Le Surréalisme, même
no. 2 (Spring 1957): 143–5, quoted after Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe.
Écrits, ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 24.
27 Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire [1891], ed. Daniel Grojnowski (Paris:
Corti, 1999), 103–4.
28 See Filiz Eda Burhan, Visions and Visionaries: Nineteenth Century Psychological
Theory, the Occult Sciences and the Formation of the Symbolist Aesthetic in France
(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, Princeton. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms
International, 1979), especially 321–2; Gamboni, Potential Images, 186–90.
29 Hippolyte Taine, De l’intelligence [1870] (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 1:13.
30 Paul Souriau, La suggestion dans l’art (Paris: F. Alcan, 1893), 95.
31 See Gamboni, Potential Images, 87–8; Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, 126–62. The curator
of the Van Gogh Museum was Andreas Blühm, now director of the Groninger
Museum, to whom I renew my thanks. Au-dessus du gouffre is the title given by
Gauguin to the picture for his public sale on February 23, 1891 at the Hôtel Drouot
(see Daniel Wildenstein, Gauguin. Premier itinéraire d’un sauvage, 486–8, cat. 310).
32 See Gamboni, Potential Images, 18–20 and passim.

33 Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes. Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement (Paris:
Corti, 1943), 20.
34 See for example Redon, À soi-même, 26–7.
35 Eugène Tardieu, “La peinture et les peintres,” L’écho de Paris (May 13, 1895), 2,
quoted after Paul Gauguin, Oviri. Écrits d’un sauvage, ed. Daniel Guérin (Paris:
Gallimard, 1974), 138 (“Tout dans mon oeuvre est calculé, médité longuement.”)
36 See Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, 159–62.
37 Jean Dolent [Charles-Antoine Fournier], “Chronique,” Le journal des artistes
(February 22, 1891), reprinted in J. Dolent, Monstres (Paris: Lemerre, 1896), 121.
38 See Dario Gamboni, “Paul Gauguin’s Genesis of a Picture: a Painter’s Manifesto and
Self-Analysis,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 2, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): http://
www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn03/73-autumn03/autumn03article/274-paul-
gauguins-genesis-of-a-picture-a-painters-manifesto-and-self-analysis.
39 Luke 8:10; Gauguin, Diverses choses, 6–7, folio 138.
40 Gauguin to Jens Ferdinand Willumsen, undated [end of 1890?] (Frederikssund,
Denmark: J. F. Willumsens Museum, Gamle Samling no. 585).
41 Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, January 14, 1885, in Merlhès, Correspondance de
Paul Gauguin, 88 (“Comme Virgile qui a plusieurs sens et que l’on peut interpréter
à volonté, la littérature de ses tableaux a un sens parabolique à deux fins; ses fonds
sont aussi imaginatifs que réels.”)
42 Paul Gauguin, “Notes sur l’Art à l’Exposition Universelle,” Le moderniste illustré
(July 4 and 13, 1889): 84–6, 90–91; 86 (“Je prétends qu’il a fallu un immense génie
pour imaginer des fleurs qui soient des muscles ou des muscles qui soient des
fleurs.”).
43 Paul Gauguin, Avant et après [1903] (Taravao: Avant et Après, 1989), 73 (“Chez le
Marquisien surtout il y a un sens inouï de la décoration. … La base en est le corps
humain ou le visage. Le visage surtout. On est étonné de trouver un visage là où l’on
croyait à une figure étrange géométrique”).
44 Gauguin, Diverses choses, 263, folio 136 recto (“les impressionnistes cherchèrent
autour de l’œil et non au centre mystérieux de la pensée, et de là tombèrent dans des
raisons scientifiques”).
45 Jean Loize, “Un inédit de Gauguin,” Nouvelles littéraires (May 7, 1953), partially
reprinted in Gauguin, Oviri, 59–61.
46 See Barbara Braun, “Paul Gauguin’s Indian Identity: How Ancient Peruvian Pottery
Inspired His Art,” Art History 9, no. 1 (March 1986): 36–53; Druick and Zegers, Van
Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, 23–9; Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, 59–63,
78–82, 89, 91, 148–50, 153, 181–2, 188, 191, 219–22, 232, 235, 257, 274, 355–6.
47 Loize, “Un inédit de Gauguin.” About “images made by chance,” see Gamboni,
Potential Images, 16–17, with references.
48 See Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, especially 97–8. In English also, to poll originally
means “to cut the hair” and comes from poll, “the part of the head on which the
hair grows” (OED).
50 Ibid., 68–9, 128–31, 230–1, 265, 308–9, 339.
51 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris,
Bibliothèque de l’INHA, collections Jacques Doucet, http://bibliotheque-
numerique.inha.fr/collection/5749-cahier-pour-aline/ (“Nous pouvons toujours
doubler la beauté d’un paysage en le regardant les yeux à demi-clos. Les sens
perçoivent quelquefois trop peu, ils perçoivent toujours trop.”).
52 Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Catalogue Gauguin Ceramics Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
(Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 1996), 21.
54 See ibid., 192–212; Elizabeth C. Childs, “Carving the ‘Ultra-sauvage’: Exoticism in
Gauguin’s Sculpture,” in A Fine Regard: Essays in Honor of Kirk Varnedoe, eds. P. G.
Berman and G. Utley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 41–57.
55 See Richard S. Field, “Gauguin’s Noa Noa Suite,” Burlington Magazine 110, no.
786 (September 1968): 500–11; Brettell, et al., The Art of Paul Gauguin, 317–21;
Alastair Wright and Calvin Brown, Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa
Prints (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum/New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2010); Starr Figura, “Gauguin’s Metamorphoses: Repetition,
Transformation, and the Catalyst of Printmaking,” in Gauguin: Metamorphoses, ed.
S. Figura (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 14–35; Gloria Groom and
Genevieve Westerby, eds., Gauguin Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphic Works at the
Art Institute of Chicago, exh. cat. (Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 2016). https://
publications.artic.edu/gauguin/reader/gauguinart/section/139805.
56 See Richard S. Field, ed., Paul Gauguin: Monotypes, exh. cat. (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973); Peter Kort Zegers, “In the Kitchen with Paul
Gauguin: Devising Recipes for a Symbolist Graphic Aesthetic,” in The Broad
Spectrum: Studies in the Material, Techniques, and Conservation of Works on Paper,
eds. Harriet K. Stratis and Britt Salvesen (London: Archetype, 2002), 138–44;
Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, 245–51; Mel Becker Solomon, “Gauguin_Cat. 65 Aha
oe feii?, 1894–2002, 236: Commentary,” in Groom and Westerby, eds., Gauguin
Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphic Works at the Art Institute of Chicago. Research by
Zegers and Stratis shows that the inked surface was probably not paper but glass,
so that the white lines did not result from incisions into the surface, but from the
corresponding ink having been deposited on the previous sheet.
57 See a Danish critic quoted in Suzanne Greub, ed., Gauguin Polynesia, exh. cat.
(Munich: Hirmer Verlag, for the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and Seattle Art Museum,
2011), 42.
58 See Hiriata Millaud, “Les titres tahitiens de Gauguin,” in Ia Orana Gauguin, exh.
cat. (Paris: Somogy, 2003), 381–9; Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, 108, 380, n. 15, with
references.
59 Bengt Danielsson, “Gauguin’s Tahitian Titles,” Burlington Magazine 109, no. 769
(April 1967): 228–33; 230, n. 7; Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin, 179;
Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, 139–40.
60 See Gamboni, Paul Gauguin, 14–16, 137–40.
61 Ibid., 84–5, 276–91.
62 See Dario Gamboni, “Notes from the Field: Anthropomorphism” (with Elizabeth
King, J. M. Bernstein, Carolyn Dean, Caroline van Eck, Finbarr Barry Flood, Jane
Garnett, Gervase Rosser, James Meyer, Miya Elise Mizuta and Alina Payne), Art
Bulletin 94, no. 1 (March 2012): 20–2.
63 Gavin Parkinson, “Gauguin’s Vision, or Credulity as Method,” Art History 38, no. 5
(November 2015): 970–5; 974. See Belinda Thomson, review of D. Gamboni, Paul
Gauguin au “centre mystérieux de la pensée,” Burlington Magazine 157, no. 1345
(April 2015); Linda Goddard, review of D. Gamboni, Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious
Centre of Thought, H-France Review 16, no. 59 (May 2016): 1–3.
64 James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial
Complexity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), especially 177–259.
65 Ibid., 183. See Gamboni, Potential Images, passim; Michel Weemans, D. Gamboni,
and Jean-Hubert Martin, eds., Voir double. Pièges et révélations du visible (Paris:
Hazan, 2016).
66 See for example Michel Weemans, “Herri met de Bles’s Sleeping Peddler: An
Exegetical and Anthropomorphic Landscape,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 3 (September
2006): 459–81; Felix Thürlemann, Dürers doppelter Blick (Konstanz: UVK
Universitätsverlag, 2008); Reindert Leonard Falkenburg, The Land of Unlikeness:
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (Zwolle: W Books, 2011).
67 My intervention in this Seminar took place on April 7, 2011; I thank for the
invitation its chair Francesco Pellizzi, editor of the journal Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics which is a constant source of inspiration.
68 Jules Huret, “Paul Gauguin devant ses tableaux,” L’Écho de Paris (February 23,
1891), 2, quoted after Gauguin, Oviri, 70 (“avec l’aide seulement des moyens d’art
primitifs, les seuls bons, les seuls vrais”).
69 See Paul Gauguin, Racontars de Rapin [1898/1902] (Paris: Falaize, 1951) (“la
théocratie du typographe … le régime de l’homme de lettres”); Dario Gamboni, The
Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature, trans. Mary Whittall, revised and
updated from the French edn [1989] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011),
315–19; Linda Goddard, Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926
(Oxford/New York: Peter Lang, 2012), especially 65–113 (“A Creative Conspiracy:
Gauguin’s Noa Noa”).
70 Gauguin, Diverses choses, 3, folio 138 (“Les Orientaux, Persans et autres ont avant
tous imprimé un dictionnaire complet de cette langue de l’œil qui écoute; ils ont
doté leurs tapis d’une merveilleuse éloquence.”).
71 Haruko Hirota, “On Japonisme in Gauguin and Symbolism,” Studies in Japonisme
no. 35 (2015): 38–51. See Groom and Westerby, eds., Gauguin Paintings, Sculpture,
and Graphic Works at the Art Institute of Chicago, especially the contributions
by Harriet K. Stratis. See also a recent article by Richard S. Field in which he
compares Gauguin to Agnolo Bronzino and pleads for accepting “indecisiveness
as a constituent of meaning” (“Gauguin and Bronzino: Influence or Confluence?,”
Spencer Museum of Art Register 8, 2015: 27–55).
72 See Dario Gamboni, “Cat. 57 Mahna no varua ino (The Devil Speaks), 1893/94:
Commentary,” in Groom and Westerby, eds., Gauguin Paintings, Sculpture, and
Graphic Works at the Art Institute of Chicago.
5
On Not Seeing Tahiti: Gauguin’s Noa Noa

and the Rhetoric of Blindness
Alastair Wright
University of Oxford
In the oft-repeated critique of Gauguin’s exploitative relationship to Tahiti and its

people, Noa Noa—the semi-fictionalized account of his first two-year stay on the
island—frequently features as the prosecution’s primary evidence. It is there that
the artist details his relationship with the 13-year-old Teha’amana and speaks of
wanting (though not daring) to take the local women by force. There, too, that
he traffics any number of European prejudices: natives with cannibal teeth and
animal grace, young men nobly savage in their primitive innocence, young girls
mysteriously alluring. To make matters worse, as has long been noted, sections of
the text might be seen as being plagiarized—as, for example, when Tahitian myths
concerning the birth of the stars are copied from an 1837 text by Jacques-Antoine
Moerenhout, an early European ethnographer of the Pacific islands, but recounted
as though the artist had learned them from Teha’amana. The implication that the
artist had penetrated the culture is, so the argument goes, all part of a carefully
planned deception, one that is pursued equally in the accompanying woodcuts,
which, like any number of Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings, draw on borrowed
elements including commercial photographs and art reproductions as much as on
the artist’s own first-hand experience. Both the text and the prints were designed,
it is held, to further the pretence that Gauguin had “gone native” and thus to
advantageously position himself within the Parisian art world.1
There is a great deal of truth to these charges. Certainly the artist’s behavior
was reprehensible in an all-too-typically male colonial way, and the text is not
a faithful recounting of events but a consciously crafted narrative that for the
most part presents Gauguin not as he was but as he wished his audience to see
him—as we might expect from an artist who took pleasure in constructing
both serious and humourous alter egos.2 I will argue here, however, that the Noa
Noa project is more complex than such critiques allow. If for the most part it
feigns intimacy with Tahiti, it is also characterized by a contradictory tendency
to acknowledge Gauguin’s distance from a culture that we are allowed to sense
remained inaccessible to him. This separation is most often figured in terms
of a failure to see. Though blindness could at times be invoked in self-serving
ways (as, for example, when Gauguin described Teha’amana as “inscrutable,”
a characterization that allowed him to accentuate his subsequent success in
deciphering her expression and thus apprehending her savage mind3), at other
times the sense of not seeing, of an inability to comprehend in visual terms
what lay before him, seems less a narrative device than the index of a deeper
incomprehension.
This, I will argue, is conveyed by the nature of Gauguin’s writing as much as by
its narrative content. Noa Noa is in some respects—particularly in the artist’s first
draft, which will be my primary focus—a text that undoes the straightforward
operation of language (this is less true of the text as it was amended for publication
by Gauguin’s colleague, Charles Morice).4 The first draft’s fragmentary and
allusive style allows description to falter at key moments, leaving the reader
with the sense that he or she (and by implication the artist himself) is unable
to grasp the Polynesian world that forms the text’s ostensive subject. In this, I
will be suggesting, Noa Noa aligns itself with Mallarmé’s Symbolism, in which
the divide between the poet’s consciousness and the world it seeks to grasp was
indicated via a foregrounding of language’s inability to fully seize its objects. The
woodcuts that Gauguin made to accompany the text, I will argue in the second
half of this essay, similarly bear witness to the artist’s inability to see. In each case,
blindness and the failure to seize Tahiti visually speak to Gauguin’s melancholy
awareness both that the Polynesian idyll he had dreamed of finding had largely
been destroyed and that as an outsider he was unable to understand what little
remained of its original culture.
***
That Gauguin’s text was an act of self-fashioning is clear from his careful editing
of its opening paragraph. He initially began by explaining how a letter from
the Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts had allowed him to travel in
the comfort of the officers’ quarters rather than with the ordinary seamen.5 He
then deleted this passage, presumably realizing that it made his travels sound
less heroically adventurous than he wished, and inserted in its place a more
On Not Seeing Tahiti: Gauguin’s Noa Noa and the Rhetoric of Blindness 131
conventionally romantic evocation of the voyage and of his initial impressions:

“For sixty-three days I am en route and I am burning to arrive at the desired
land. On 8 June we catch sight of odd lights moving in zig-zags: fishers. Against
a dark sky a black serrated cone stood out. We rounded Morea to reveal Tahiti.”6
This is a rather orthodox opening. Any number of nineteenth-century travel
narratives begin the same way: the anticipation (“je brûle”), the first encounter
with the strange sights of an alien culture (“des feux bizarres”), the moment
when the long-awaited destination finally swings into view (“Nous tournions
Moréa”).7 Equally conventional—even hackneyed—is the quick transition from
excitement to disappointment. Stepping off the boat Gauguin finds the capital,
Papeete, already thoroughly marked by French colonialism. The last Tahitian
ruler, King Pomaré V, would die shortly after the artist’s arrival, and in the draft
Gauguin observes despondently that “with him disappeared the last vestiges of
the customs … [sic] of the Maori. It was really finished: nothing but Civilized
men. I was sad, to come from so far for … [sic]”8 (the ellipses convey effectively
the artist’s sense that what he had hoped to find was now an absence). Predictably
enough, Gauguin pays particular attention to the effect of colonialism on Tahiti’s
women, complaining that those with whom he comes into contact no longer
exhibit what he imagined were the true characteristics of their race: the queen,
observed preparing the palace for the king’s funeral, seems merely “an ordinary
stout woman”;9 his first “vahine,” Titi, he finds too “polished [vernissée: literally
varnished] through contact with all these Europeans.”10
Such sentiments were entirely run-of-the-mill in the later nineteenth century.
The moment of disillusionment, when the traveler discovers that the tropical
paradise of which he (the writer is always male) had dreamed has already been
ruined by those who have arrived before him, was a standard literary device,
as was the claim that almost always followed: that the narrator subsequently
managed to get beneath the colonized surface to discover the “real” Tahiti. Pierre
Loti’s The Marriage of Loti, undoubtedly one of Gauguin’s sources, is typical.11
Like Gauguin, Loti passes from initial excitement to disenchantment. And like
Gauguin, he charts the traveler’s gradual immersion in Tahiti’s culture primarily
through his interactions with the island’s women: on the one hand, the overly-
Europeanized ladies of the royal court in Papeete; on the other, Loti’s young
lover from the countryside, Rarahu, who teaches him the arcane meanings of
her native tongue and thus affords him access to Tahiti’s mysterious customs and
beliefs. Gauguin’s claims about Teha’amana closely echo Loti’s about Rarahu (the
decision to rechristen Teha’amana as Tehura in Morice’s reworking of the text
perhaps deliberately evokes Loti). So too does his account of journeys away from
the colonial center in search of the “authentic” Tahiti.
Where Gauguin is very different from writers like Loti is that, while he mostly
presents himself as having become an insider, he at the same time acknowledges
that he cannot fully grasp what he encounters. He presents the queen’s mundane
appearance, for example, both as a fact of colonial Tahiti and as a failing of his own
sight: “nauseated by all this European triviality, I was in a way blind.”12 And he
suggests that the island itself was similarly difficult to see: “Everything blinded me,
everything in the landscape dazzled me.”13 Although the latter observation was
somewhat of a cliché, reiterating the idea that the bright light of the South was hard
for European artists to grasp (a commonplace since Eugène Delacroix’s visit to
Morocco in 1832, if not earlier), Gauguin’s text goes beyond such openly declared
professions of blindness to hint in more telling ways — in the very structure and
syntax of his account — that what he encountered in Tahiti could not be seized,
that he and its culture remained always at a distance from one another.
***
Consider, for example, a passage in which he recalls an evening shortly after he

moved away from Papeete:
J’allais ce soir fumer une cigarette sur le sable au bord de la mer. Le soleil arrivait
rapidement à l’horizon, commençant à se cacher derrière l’île Morea que j’avais
à ma droite. Par opposition de lumière les montagnes se dessinaient noires
puissament sur le ciel incendié. Toutes ces arêtes comme d’anciens châteaux
crénelés. Tandis que toutes ces terres croulent dans le déluge, il reste encore de
toute cette féodalité disparue pour toujours le cimier protecteur, celui-là plus
près des cieux regardant les eaux profondes, et majestueusement, l’ironie à la
fissure—compatissant peut-être à cette foule engloutie pour avoir touché à
l’arbre de la Science s’attaquant à la tête-sphinx.14
(This evening I went to smoke a cigarette on the sand by the sea. The sun was
quickly reaching the horizon, beginning to hide itself behind the isle of Morea
to my right. By the contrast of illumination the mountains loomed powerfully
black against the blazing sky. All these ridges like old crenellated castles. Whilst
all these lands crumble in the deluge, it remains still the protective crest of all
this feudalism forever disappeared, that one nearest to the heavens watching the
deep waters, and majestically, irony in its cleft—compassionate perhaps for this
multitude swallowed up for having meddled with the tree of Science grappling
with the sphinx-head.)
The opening sentences work effectively as visual description, allowing us to

picture both the artist’s own position and the view of a dark mountain against
a setting sun. Thereafter things become somewhat less clear. The compacted
grammar and uncertain pronouns are partly the cause. What “il reste” refers to
is at least momentarily unclear. It might refer back to the isle of Morea, though
two sentences with plural subjects have intervened since it was mentioned; if so,
we would translate as I have above. But as we continue reading an alternate (and
perhaps more plausible) meaning suggests itself: that “il reste” refers not back
to Morea but forward to the “cimier protecteur” not mentioned until the end
of the clause. If so, a better translation would be: “there still remains of all this
feudalism forever disappeared the protective crest.” The supplementary clause
beginning “and majestically” generates a similar delay in determining its sense,
at least on first reading. The “and” is the problem, leading the reader to suppose
that the adverb belongs to a verb that will arrive later in the sentence rather than
to “watching.” (When translating the passage it is hard to resist the urge to tidy
the writing up, to make the referents clear; I have tried to leave the idiosyncracy
and ambiguity in place.)
We should not overstate the case: it is not in the end so hard to understand
roughly what the passage means. But that we get there in the end and only
roughly is, I would suggest, precisely the point. The momentary delays, the split
second of uncertainty as we read, begin to suggest that language here cannot
quite grasp its object. And our sense of the word’s incapacity to seize the world
only increases as we read on. The end of the passage veers abruptly from visual
description to a purely imaginative and decidedly non-visual response to the
landscape. The comparison of the mountain to a crenellated crest might have
allowed us to hold on to a sense of the scene’s appearance, but I for one find it
hard to picture the ironic cleft. The reason, of course, is that within the space of a
few sentences we have moved from something like literary Naturalism (typified
both by the detailed evocation of light effects and by the mundane detail of
the cigarette) to something much more like Symbolism. The sphinx-head and
the notion that science poses a threat to traditional cultures are orthodox
Symbolist fare, as is the passage’s complex layering of references. Earlier in the
draft Gauguin had mentioned a mythic flood that left Tahiti isolated in a vast
ocean with a solitary inhabitant to repopulate it;15 his mention here of lands
crumbling into the ocean recalls this story and also echoes the Biblical narrative
of Noah (perhaps the rhyme of Noa and Noah appealed to Gauguin). At the
same time the idea of a now-lost feudalism resonates with the artist’s despair at
the disappearance of Tahitian customs: the flood as metaphor for the destructive
arrival of the Europeans.
That Gauguin aligned his text with Symbolism should, of course, come as
no surprise: his ties to Symbolist tendencies in Paris are well known. What I
wish to draw attention to, however, is how the twin aspects of the passage—
part Naturalist, part Symbolist—interfere with each other. Our sense of what the
scene might actually look like is interrupted by the introduction of the Symbolist
Idea (the sphinx, the flood). These concepts are in turn disrupted by the reader’s
efforts — encouraged by the descriptive opening of the passage — to imagine the
appearance of the scene as opposed to the ideas (of colonial loss and so forth)
that it seeks to convey. The net result is that we feel ourselves unable to grasp
either.
Here it will be useful to consider the account of Symbolism offered by Paul
de Man. Symbolism, he posits, was centrally concerned with the mind’s (and
consequently language’s) inability to seize the world. The Symbolist poet, he
suggests,
starts from the acute awareness of an essential separation between his own being
and the being of whatever is not himself: the world of natural objects, of other
human beings, society, or God. He lives in a world that has been split and in
which his consciousness is pitted, as it were, against its object in an attempt to
seize something which it is unable to reach …. The word, the logos, no longer
coincides with the universe but merely reaches out for it in a language which is
unable to be what it names—which, in other words, is merely a symbol.16
Writers responded in one of two ways, de Man argues, to the bleak realization
that language could not adequately represent the world. Charles Baudelaire
and the majority of the Symbolists dreamt that the gap between self and non-
self might be overcome by “us[ing] poetical language as a means to restore the
lost unity.”17 The key literary device for these writers was the correspondance, in
which the word was held to capture the essence of the object to which it referred.
Thought, as embodied in language, was brought into alignment with the world.
This, at least, was the hope.
Mallarmé exemplified a second, very different, response to the perceived
divide between consciousness and the world. Less optimistic that the gap
might be bridged, he instead kept it insistently in view by calling attention to
language’s inability to fully seize its objects. This he did partly by making his
writing difficult to comprehend: anyone who has tried to read Mallarmé will
know that it can be nigh on impossible to extract sense from his complex and
ambiguous sentence structures and repeated use of pronouns whose referent
is unclear. Another key device, as de Man notes, was metamorphosis. Where
Baudelairean symbols tend towards a “statement of identity” (e.g. “La Nature est
un temple”), in Mallarmé the
symbol is always that of some object in the process of metamorphosis into
another object or, more frequently still, in the process of dissolving into nothing:
the sea becoming a boat, a cloud becoming a wing, a finger becoming a candle,
the sun sinking behind the horizon, a boat sinking into the ocean, a curtain
vanishing like foam on the water.18
In place of the dream that words might fully capture the world, de Man argues,
Mallarmé allowed this instability to emphasize that language’s grip on what lies
outside the mind was always tenuous.
De Man’s text, unpublished in his lifetime, reflects the interests of the period
in which it was probably written: the mid-1950s, when he was grappling with,
amongst other things, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His claim
that for Mallarmé language served as the mediating third term between the
perceiving subject and the object world bears the mark of this influence even as
his argument for a fundamental instability at the heart of representation points
forward to a deconstruction yet to be named.19 But despite being very much of its
mid-twentieth-century moment, de Man’s account usefully gets hold of a key aspect
of Mallarmé’s writing, one to which, I am suggesting, Gauguin was responsive.
With Noa Noa, we are partly in a Baudelairean universe. To compare the
jagged mountain crests to crenellations is to invoke a pictorial correspondance
and thus to make sense of the blinding landscape via metaphor (such
correspondances occur at various points in the text: “the diseased coconut-tree
seemed like an immense parrot with its golden tail hanging down”;20 “[t]he reeds
of my hut, lined up and distanced, appeared from my bed with the filterings of
the moon like a musical instrument [i.e. a reed pipe]”21). Other aspects of the
text, however, are closer to the qualities in Mallarmé to which de Man draws our
attention. Gauguin’s compacted grammar and the shifting and somewhat opaque
references mean that it is not easy, as we have seen, to disentangle the various
meanings of his account of the mountain/helmet. The quick sketch (Figure 5.1)
that he penned to accompany the passage is similarly obscure. Certainly it does
little to help the reader picture the site’s actual appearance in any coherent way.
Its putative subject, the mountain, metamorphoses into something that loosely
Figure 5.1 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: draft manuscript, 1893, detail of sheet of paper
pasted in between page 6 and page 7.
resembles a crested helmet that itself transforms into something more suggestive
of an animal with gaping jaws.
A more intractably Mallarméan passage occurs in a note appended to Gauguin’s
account of the Tahitian queen. Having expressed his initial disappointment at her
mundane appearance, he asserts that upon seeing her for a second time his view
changed: “I understood her Maori charm; the Tahitian blood took once more the
upper hand …. In her eyes like a vague intuition of passions which spring forth
in an instant.”22 The claim that his vision had become more discerning is a typical
narrative device, suggesting that he has now penetrated the culture, that he sees
beneath the veneer of colonialism. But the further note that he added speaks once
more of an inability to see clearly (or, at least, refuses the reader a clear picture):
La forme sculpturale de là-bas -
Deux colonnes d’un temple, simples et droites -
Deux yeux de la poitrine
Et le haut se terminant en pointe
Le grand triangle de la Trinité -
Le pouvoir d’en haut23
(The sculptural form of that region -

Two columns of a temple, simple and straight -
Two eyes of the chest
And the upper part terminating in a point
The great triangle of the Trinity -
The power from above)
What begins as a straightforward equation—the body as temple—is undone both

by the oddity of the description (how, for example, does the idea of culminating
in a point help to picture the queen?) and by the jarring introduction of the
disconnected idea of the Trinity. The equation of the breasts with eyes is equally
baffling, equally lacking in logical relation to the rest of the brief verse. The queen
is reduced to a series of image fragments—architectural and theological—that
fail to cohere either as a visual account or as a metaphor. And again, the sketch
that accompanies the cryptic verse (Figure 5.2) does little to clarify the proposed
relation between Tahitian body and temple architecture.
It is significant that this verse, with its mention of temple and eyes, loosely
echoes the first stanza of a key Symbolist text, Baudelaire’s “Correspondances”:
Nature is a temple where the living pillars
Permit, from time to time, confused words to escape;
Figure 5.2 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: draft manuscript, 1893, detail of page 39.
Here mankind passes through forests of symbols

Which observe him with understanding eyes.24
Baudelaire’s invocation of confused words might seem an apt characterization

of Gauguin’s own perplexing text. But whereas for Baudelaire the hope was
that those confused words would generate “une ténébreuse et profonde
unite” (an obscure and profound unity), as he wrote in the second stanza of
“Correspondances,” for Gauguin the equation of nature and temple cedes to a
Mallarméan series of disarticulated metamorphoses. The “de longs échos qui
de loin se confondent” (reverberating echoes that mingle from afar) invoked in
Baudelaire’s second stanza are displaced by a set of radically disjunct concepts
that stand in no obvious relationship to each other.
That certain passages in Noa Noa are more Mallarméan than Baudelairean is
perhaps to be expected, for Gauguin and Mallarmé had befriended each other in
the early 1890s.25 In January 1891 the artist etched Mallarmé’s likeness against a
mysteriously impenetrable darkness, giving the poet a beaked nose that resembles
Gauguin’s own (compare Self-Portrait with Portrait of Bernard, Les Misérables,
1888, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, W. 239). The portrait of Mallarmé is thus
also a self-portrait, an indication of the artist’s affectionate identification with
the sitter. The poet was equally keen to honor Gauguin, presiding at the farewell
banquet given in the painter’s honor on the eve of his departure for Polynesia in
the spring of 1891. When Gauguin returned from Tahiti he presented Mallarmé
with one of his Tahitian sculptures, to which he gave the new title L’Après-midi
d’un faune in homage to Mallarmé’s poem of the same title (1892, Vulaines-
sur-Seine: Musée Départmental Stéphane Mallarmé, Inv. 995.5.1). The gift was
apposite: in Mallarmé’s poem the faun mistakes a group of swans for the nymphs
after which he lusts; in the sculpture a parallel metamorphosis takes place as
the Tahitian earth and moon gods, Fatou and Hina, are transformed by the
sculpture’s new title into Mallarmé’s faun and nymph.26
If Gauguin had Mallarmé in mind when he picked up his pen to write Noa
Noa, however, it was not merely because they were friends. The textual devices
that the artist adapted from the poet provided the means by which to express
the sense that he was unable fully to grasp the island and its culture. Mallarmé’s
influence, that is to say, is not iconographic or thematic. Rather the poet’s interest
in foregrounding the gap between writer and the world was used by Gauguin to
convey his experience both of Tahiti’s absence—the sense that this paradise had
been destroyed before he ever set foot on the island—and of his own distance
from what remained of its culture.
That Tahiti was a paradise lost was a story told from the moment Europeans
first made landfall there in the late 1760s. Meditations on the doomed future of
the island had been the norm ever since Denis Diderot had written in his 1772
“Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage” that the Tahitians and their culture were
fated to die because of the arrival of his countrymen—in part because of the
diseases they brought with them, in part because of the seeds of envy and distrust
sown by the European dogmas of private property and sexual monogamy (both
unknown, according to Diderot’s rose-tinted vision, in precontact Polynesia).27
Subsequently, an elegiac tone became virtually de rigueur in any Western
account of Tahiti. Moerenhout—as noted, one of Gauguin’s sources for Noa
Noa—claimed to have learned what he knew of Polynesian myth from the last
Tahitian priest with knowledge of the traditional beliefs, an old man who would
soon take that learning with him to the grave.28 Loti had his eponymous hero
echo this lament for the disappearance of traditional Tahitian culture. There were
few on the island, he suggested, who remembered their own culture: “Queen
Pomaré alone, out of respect for the traditions of her country, had learnt the
names of those old-world deities.”29 And not only Tahiti’s cultural practices but
its indigenous population were fated to die: “The children of [Queen Pomaré],”
Loti declared, “were a race of giants, who all died of the same incurable disease
…. [Her one grandchild] already betrayed signs of the hereditary malady
.… This anticipated doom to certain death lent an added charm to this little
creature, the last of the race of Pomaré, the last of the queens of the Tahitian
archipelago.”30
Gauguin, as we have seen, shared in this elegiac tone: from the moment
of his arrival in Papeete he bemoaned the destruction of an earlier Tahiti. We
might note that he acknowledged—as Loti for the most part did not—that this
demise had to do with colonialism. In an observation that repeats similar claims
in Diderot, he reported in the draft of Noa Noa that he had heard many of the
young women in one of the districts he visited “were sick—of this sickness [i.e.
venereal disease] that civilized Europeans brought them in exchange for their
so generous hospitality.”31 And where Loti saw Tahitian decline as a genetic
problem, Gauguin allowed that it was due to French interventions, noting that
the passing of King Pomaré V (the son of Queen Pomaré, mentioned by Loti)
delivered the island not to a preordained extinction but, more mundanely, into
the grasping hands of the French.32 The dominant thrust of Noa Noa, of course,
was to deny this truth, suggesting instead that the artist had discovered the
remaining pockets of “authentic” Tahiti. But the most telling sections of the text,
as I have been arguing, are those that echo Mallarmé’s insistence on the inability
of language to seize the world and that thus allow us to sense that the island—
both because it was irrevocably altered and because Gauguin himself remained
an outsider—lay beyond the artist’s grasp.
***
What, then, of the accompanying woodcuts? In some respects they are very
different. Unlike the text—but like the great majority of Gauguin’s Tahitian
paintings—they make no explicit reference to the French colonial presence in
Polynesia. But like the text they acknowledge that the tropical idyll remained
always out of reach. They do this in part by directly evoking the idea of paradise
lost, most immediately in the woodcut titled Noa Noa (Figure 5.3), an image
presumably intended to function as a frontispiece of sorts for the text.33 To either
side of the central tree stand a dejected-looking woman with lowered gaze and
what is probably a man (the gender is not entirely clear) who bears the weight
of a fruit-laden stick: we are looking at a Tahitian Adam and Eve who, having
tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge (“this multitude swallowed up for having
meddled with the tree of Science,” as Gauguin put it), are condemned to a life
of shame and toil. The two figures at ease in a roughly-drawn cartouche above
perhaps represent the moment before the Fall, a prelapsarian paradise before sin
was introduced to Polynesia by the Europeans.
Another of the woodcuts suggests both that the old Tahiti was lost and that
Gauguin himself was separated by an irrecoverable distance from whatever
might remain. Maruru (Offerings of Gratitude) (Figure 5.4) is loosely tied to
Gauguin’s description of a trip to an inland valley where he encountered “a few
inhabitants who want still to live as of old.”34 Even there, however, he found that
their traditions had fallen into disuse. All that was left for him to do was to
reconstruct the past in his imagination, to claim to witness the spectres of earlier
religious practices. In the reworked draft (i.e. after Morice’s intervention) the
experience is recounted as follows:
I see distinctly, although they are not there, the statues of their female deities.
Statues of Hina and festivals in honor of the moon goddess. The idol made of a
single block, ten feet from one shoulder to the other and forty tall. On her head,
she wears an enormous rock of reddish color in the form of a bonnet. Around
her they dance according to the rites of yore—matamua—and the vivo alternates
its note, clear and gay, melancholy and fading away, with the hours that follow
one after the other.35
Figure 5.3 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, 1893/4, woodcut.

Figure 5.4 Paul Gauguin, Maruru, 1893/4, woodcut, 9¼ × 15½ in. (23.5 × 39.1 cm).
Mata Mua (Olden Times) (Figure 5.5) and Hina Maruru (private collection,
W. 500), the two paintings mentioned by Gauguin alongside his account of the
trip, are the prototypes for the woodcut: both show figures around an idol set
against a mountainous background. The saturated color and clear forms of the
paintings, however, lend an air of concrete reality to what no longer existed.
The print is better suited to capturing the paradoxical sense of presence and
absence Gauguin experienced—“I see” (and note the precision of the description
in Morice’s gloss: “ten feet” across, “an enormous rock of reddish colour”), yet
“they are not there.”
The imagined scene of worshippers engaged in a shadowy ritual around a
monumental idol evokes what Gauguin had hoped to find, but at the same time
allows us to intuit its evanescence. The ground upon which the figures stand
is deeply gouged and insistently present. The idol, in contrast, is scratched
indistinctly into the woodblock, its contours registering only falteringly on
the paper. The lack of internal modeling means that the statue seems to fade
before our eyes, sinking back into the surrounding space. The nebulous white
area around its head (in Hina Maruru the color of this area identifies it more
unambiguously as a tree) leaves it indistinctly located: is it in real space or in
the imagination; is it in the here-and-now of Gauguin’s visit or is it merely the
Figure 5.5 Paul Gauguin, Mata Mua, 1892, oil on canvas, 35¾ × 27¼ in. (91 × 69 cm).
dim intimation of a long-vanished sight? Geared to conveying the feeling of an

absence pervading the landscape, the woodcut is thus both in theme and in form
as much about absence—about the disappearance of Tahitian practices—as it is
about presence.
As with our reading of the text, we should not overstate the case. If Maruru
hints at loss, at the artist’s recognition of the fact that what he had hoped to
find in Polynesia had long since vanished, it and the other woodcuts also work
hard—like the text—to suggest precisely the opposite. Often the prints imply
that Gauguin had gained insight into the life and beliefs of the indigenous
community. The densely clustered figures set against the glow of a Polynesian
bonfire in Mahna no varua ino (The Day of the Evil Spirit) and the sleeping
figure and watchful audience in Te po (Eternal Night) are viewed from close in,
positioning the artist as a participant-observer. The tightly-entwined couple
emerging from the shadows in Te Faruru (Here They Make Love) (Figure 5.6)
present an even more intimate moment, strengthening the impression that the
artist has come to know the innermost secrets of the island (just as, in the text,
Gauguin claimed to have shared whispered conversations with Teha’amana, his
native informant).
The look of the prints plays an equally important role in the pretense that
Gauguin had “gone native.” The powerfully suggestive darkness of the images
and their deliberately unpolished appearance imply that the artist has shed his
civilized European nature for a less rational, more unrestrainedly instinctual
approach. The medium itself is important in this regard: one of the most striking
episodes in the draft revolves around the artist’s claim to have become a “savage”
in the act of cutting violently into wood. Taken by a young male friend into the
interior of the island in search of rosewood for one of his sculptures, Gauguin
describes how “Both of us, savages, attacked a magnificent tree with the axe ….
I struck with rage and with bloodied hands I chopped with the pleasure of a
satiated brutality …. Fully destroyed, indeed, all my old reserves of civilisation.
I returned calm, feeling myself henceforth an other man, a Maori.”36 By leaving
the working of the block, the marks of the gouge and the chisel, plainly in sight,
the woodcuts recall this episode, allowing the viewer a visceral sense of the
physicality (if not quite the brutality) of the technique and thus of the artist’s
putatively savage nature.37
And yet, Gauguin’s use of the woodcut brings other, contradictory, meanings
into play. His treatment of the block was highly unconventional, laboriously
cutting the images into the end-grain of boxwood blocks—the conventional
Figure 5.6 Paul Gauguin, Te Faruru, 1893/4, woodcut, 14 × 8 in. (35.7 × 20.5 cm).
medium not of the woodcut but of wood engraving—yet doing so, at least as he
began working, with tools more commonly found in the lithographic workshop:
the needle, the knife and sandpaper.38 The early impressions that Gauguin pulled
from the blocks thus hover as often as not at the edge of illegibility, their figures
and settings indistinctly separated from the surrounding ground. Working in the
hard end-grain of boxwood without specialist wood-engraving tools, Gauguin
discovered that it was next to impossible to incise lines deeply enough to register
clearly when printed.39 The beholder is thus frequently presented with an almost
impenetrable darkness: a blindness of a rather literal sort. And there is another
form of blindness that comes hand in hand with the foregrounding of technique.
As de Man and others have noted, Mallarmé often presented language itself
“as if it were an object, with considerable attention given to its objective qualities
of sound, visual appearance, and form.”40 And rather than being driven by an
interest in form per se, de Man argues, this attention to language’s materiality
was a further device by which Mallarmé signaled the unbridgeable gap between
the subject and the world. Language is presented not as a transparent channel
of communication but as a material obstruction that intervenes between
consciousness and that which lies outside it. So, too, we might suggest, with
Gauguin. The emphatic visibility of the working of the block gestures in part
towards the artist’s putatively primitive nature. But it also in effect blocks our
vision. And as with Mallarmé, the foregrounding both of technique and of
the materiality of the print itself—its inkiness, its constitution from lines and
planes cut roughly into the wooden block and transferred imperfectly to the
paper—interrupts the production of meaning. The marks on the surface, even as
they make visible the content of Gauguin’s images—Tahiti, its gods, its people—
paradoxically appear as an opaque and impenetrable screen, as though they at
one and the same time withhold from view that which they present to our eye.
Once again the resulting sense that we cannot see clearly speaks of Gauguin’s
own separation from the Tahitian world he wished to depict.
These qualities are perhaps best exemplified by another of the Noa Noa
woodcuts, Nave nave fenua (Figure 5.7). Like the great painting from Gauguin’s
first Tahitian trip on which it is based, Te nave nave fenua (Plate 3), the print
shows a nude woman in a verdant landscape reaching out towards a flower.
The luxuriant vegetation and the voluptuous form of the woman evoke the
European dream of the tropical paradise, but the strange winged lizard that
hovers close by hints more darkly that this is already a paradise lost. Because
there were no snakes on Tahiti, Christian missionaries recounting the story
Figure 5.7 Paul Gauguin, Nave nave fenua, 1893/4, woodcut, 15⅓ × 10 in. (39.0 ×
24.9 cm).
of Eve’s temptation had replaced the Biblical serpent with a lizard.41 It is the
devil, that is to say, who whispers in the ear of Gauguin’s Polynesian Eve, and
she has perhaps already succumbed to his enticement: her sly look to the right
as she suggestively fingers the flower seems far from innocent. That the image
evokes the Fall is confirmed by the fact that Gauguin largely borrowed the main
elements of the composition—figure and tropical setting—from his 1890 canvas
Eve exotique (Exotic Eve) (private collection, W. 389).42
Echoing the story of Eve’s fall from innocence, the painting and associated
woodcut rhyme with Gauguin’s nostalgia for a never-to-be-found Polynesian
idyll, a secular Eden besmirched by colonialism. But here again, as with
Maruru, the print is on some levels better equipped than the painting to convey
both the idea of a now-lost Tahiti and Gauguin’s own distanced position. In
the painting more emphasis is placed on the idea of paradise: the golden tones
of Teha’amana’s body and the richly saturated colors of the patterned ground
operate as visual equivalents—Baudelairean correspondances—for the artist’s
feelings of satiated joy in Tahiti. In the print’s muted and near monochrome
darkness it is the Fall that becomes the dominant note. Despite the power of
the image, the underlying feeling is of an original evanescing. The figure’s over-
inked face and the off-register printing of the red of the lizard’s wings generate
a sense that we cannot fully grasp what lies before us. A scene that on one
level feels powerfully present at the same time remains distant, submerged in
an enveloping blackness. The strip of decoration down the left side, based on
tapa (bark-cloth) designs Gauguin had seen in Polynesia, augments this feeling.
Appearing to sit flatly on the surface, the border pushes the rest of the scene
behind the surface, forcing it into a shadowy, intangible realm that seems to
withdraw from our gaze.
The sense that Tahiti remains inaccessible is further emphasized by the
multiple impressions Gauguin pulled from the block.43 Some are even more
heavily inked, becoming almost impenetrably dark (see below, Figure 6.5).
Others fade into immaterial ghostliness. In some, Gauguin left the impression
untouched after its initial printing, while to others—as here—he added patches
of color, either by hand or by a further process of imprinting. (He seems to have
experimented with applying pigment to sections of the wood block and pressing
it down onto the paper to transfer the color.) The net effect of all these versions
is of a perpetual slight variation, a constant oscillation that never quite settles,
never arrives at a final form: as though the artist might rehearse the image
endlessly but get no closer to the scene he sought to depict.
We know that Gauguin was aware of the tendency of repetition to create

distance from the model and thus to undermine any sense of access to the real.
He acknowledged this in self-mocking terms in Avant et après, a manuscript
written toward the end of his life: “Concerning this seeker [Gauguin], a lover
of art has said: ‘He traces a drawing, then he traces this tracing, and so on till
the moment when, like the ostrich, with his head in the sand, he decides that it
does not resemble the original any longer. Then!! he signs.’”44 But if he could joke
at times about the loss of the original, in the Noa Noa woodcuts the same loss
sounds a melancholy note.45 For even as Nave nave fenua propagates the myth of
penetrating the culture, its brooding power suggesting that Gauguin has become
an insider, the endless repetition of the print in image after ghostly after-image
begins to suggest the contrary: that reproduction, and not the origin, is all we
see here and that Tahiti therefore remains inaccessible. The impressions appear
as so many partial images, not fully present in themselves. With each iteration,
the idyll recedes further from view.46 Once more paradise has eluded Gauguin’s
grasp, and ours.
***
What is mourned most consistently in Gauguin’s work of the 1890s is the

Tahitian idyll of his imagination. The draft of Noa Noa, in which he spoke of
Tahiti as a lost paradise despoiled by modernity and by the presence of the
French, oscillates between the well-known claim that he had penetrated the
culture and the oblique acknowledgement, signaled in its faltering Mallarméan
prose, that an irrecoverable distance separated the artist from the desired land.
As we have seen, that distance is expressed primarily in terms of an inability
to see, and the accompanying woodcuts are equally attuned to signaling this
loss. Like the draft they offer a paradoxical vision. Darkly mysterious, replete
with allusions to Polynesian myth and to Gauguin’s Tahitian encounters, and
presented in a properly Symbolist vocabulary of dimly sensed forms and half-
understood narrative fragments, they bespeak the artist’s alleged intimacy
with the island and its inhabitants. Yet the foregrounding of technique and
the variously inked impressions that appear as so many partial aspects allow
the depicted scenes to appear as intimations of a presence that is never fully
brought before the viewer. Combining presence and fading distance, the
Noa Noa woodcuts speak both of a mysterious Tahiti and of its evanescence.
Together with the text, they became the primary vehicles by which Gauguin
meditated on this melancholy truth.
Notes
1 These criticisms were voiced most powerfully in Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going

Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Modernist Primitivism,” Art in America
77, no. 7 (July 1989): 118–29; and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888–93:
Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). The
title of my essay nods to another of Pollock’s texts (“On Not Seeing Provence:
Van Gogh and the Landscape of Consolation, 1888–1889,” in Framing France:
The Representation of Landscape in France, 1870–1914, ed. Richard Thomson
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 81–118), an echo that signals my
admiration for her account of Gauguin, though the view I present here differs in
important respects from hers.
Since the publication of Solomon-Godeau’s and Pollock’s articles a number
of scholars have argued for a more nuanced view of Gauguin’s writings, in
particular seeing his borrowings from earlier texts not as plagiarism but as a self-
conscious literary strategy that allowed him to construct a more complex artist/
author identity for himself and at the same time to offer a more complex account
of colonial identity. Here the recent work of Linda Goddard is exemplary: see
Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926 (Oxford and New York:
Peter Lang, 2012), 17–112; and “‘Scattered Notes’: Authorship and Originality in
Paul Gauguin’s Diverses Choses,” Art History 34, no. 2 (April 2011): 352–69. My own
work has developed similar but distinct lines of inquiry into the ways in which both
Gauguin’s writing and his art foregrounded repetition vis-à-vis his own and others’
work. See “Paradise Lost: Gauguin and the Melancholy Logic of Reproduction,”
in Gauguin's Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, eds. Calvin Brown and
Alastair Wright, exh. cat. (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum/New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 49–99.
2 On Gauguin’s play with alter egos, see my “Paradise Lost,” esp. 66–75.
3 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Jean Loize (Paris: A. Balland, 1966 [1893]), 35:
“inscrutable”. Gauguin contrasted Teha’amana’s initial inscrutability with her ability
to read him: “in a short time I was for her an open book” (Ibid.: “je fus en peu de
temps pour elle un livre ouvert”). He then played on the double meaning of “livre”
when describing how he came to know her: “she surrenders herself more and more”
(Ibid.: “se livre de plus en plus”).
4 The Noa Noa project originated in September 1893, a month or so after Gauguin
returned to Paris from his first Tahitian sojourn. He intended that the text would
accompany an ambitious one-man exhibition planned for November 1893 at the
Durand-Ruel gallery, the idea being to help his French audience comprehend the
densely layered Polynesian symbolism of his new work and its relationship to his
life in Tahiti. In the two months before the exhibition he produced a draft but was
unable to complete it in time for the opening. Having missed the deadline he asked
an old acquaintance, the Symbolist poet and critic Charles Morice, to amend and
add to the draft. To the artist’s lasting annoyance the project remained incomplete
when he departed once more for the South Seas in 1895, and Noa Noa first saw
the light of day in 1901 when Morice published his rewritten version in defiance of
the artist’s express wishes (Paul Gauguin and Charles Morice, Noa Noa, Paris: La
Plume, 1901). In what follows I will be attending primarily to Gauguin’s first draft
(prior to Morice’s intervention), which was rediscovered in 1951 and published in
1966 with notes by Jean Loize. I will also make occasional reference to Gauguin’s
manuscript copy of Morice’s revised version, taken to Tahiti by the artist in 1895
and further augmented in the succeeding years (Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa (1895–9),
Paris: Département des Arts Graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Fonds du Musée
d’Orsay, RF 7259). My attention to the first draft is not intended to privilege it over
and against the Morice-amended version. As Linda Goddard has persuasively
argued, the tendency for scholars to see Gauguin’s draft as the “authentic” version
risks underestimating the degree to which Morice’s amendments aligned with the
artist’s wishes (Goddard, Aesthetic Rivalries, 74). It is nevertheless true that what
I will be arguing were important aspects of the first draft were lost in Morice’s
reworking of Gauguin’s fragmentary prose.
5 Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize, 114.
6 Ibid., 17: “Depuis soixante-trois jours je suis en route et je brûle d’aborder la
terre désirée. Le 8 juin nous apercevions des feux bizarres se promenant en
zigzag: pêcheurs. Sur un ciel sombre se détachait un cône noir à dentelures. Nous
tournions Moréa pour découvrir Tahiti.”
7 On Gauguin’s relation to such narratives, see Elizabeth C. Childs, “Gauguin as
Author: Writing the Studio of the Tropics,” Van Gogh Museum Journal (winter
2003): 76–7; and Linda Goddard, “Gauguin’s Guidebooks: Noa Noa in the Context
of Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing,” in Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics
in the Nineteenth Century, eds Francesca Orestano and Francesca Frigerio (Oxford
and New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 233–54.
8 Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize, 19: “avec lui disparaissaient les derniers vestiges
d’habitudes … [sic] maories. C’était bien fini: rien que des Civilisés. J’étais triste,
venir de si loin pour … [sic].”
9 Ibid., 18: “une épaisse femme ordinaire.”
10 Ibid., 21: “vernissée au contact de tous ces Européens.”
11 Originally published as Rarahu: Idylle Polynésienne in 1879, the text was
republished the following year as Le Mariage de Loti: Rarahu, the title by which
it became so famous that its author Julien Viaud, who had published the book
anonymously, thereafter took Loti as his nom de plume. For an extended analysis
of Loti’s and Gauguin’s texts, see Edward J. Hughes, Writing Marginality in Modern
French Literature: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 9–40. Childs is one of several who have noted Gauguin’s debt to Loti (Childs,
“Gauguin as Author,” 75); see also Goddard, “Gauguin's Guidebooks,” passim; and
Wright, “Paradise Lost,” 55, 68.
12 Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize, 18: “écoeuré par toute cette trivialité Européenne,
j’étais en quelque sorte aveugle.”
13 Ibid., 24: “Tout m’aveuglait, m’éblouissait dans le paysage.”
14 Ibid., 22.
15 “A few mountain peaks where, well after the deluge, a family has climbed on high,
has put down its roots” (Ibid., 17: “Quelques pointes de montagne où, bien après le
déluge, une famille a grimpé là-haut, a fait souche”).
16 Paul de Man, “The Double Aspect of Symbolism,” Yale French Studies no. 74
(1988): 6. My thanks to Jennifer Johnson for bringing de Man’s text to my
attention.
17 Ibid., 7.
18 Ibid., 13.
19 Ibid., 12–13.
20 Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize 21: “le cocotier malade semblait un immense
perroquet laissant tomber sa queue dorée.”
21 Ibid., 22–3: “Les roseaux alignés et distancés de ma case s’apercevaient de mon lit
avec les filtrations de la lune tel un instrument de musique.”
22 Ibid., 18: “je compris son charme Maorie; le sang tahitien reprenait le dessus ….
Dans ses yeux comme un vague pressentiment des passions qui poussent en un
instant.”
23 An (A) in the margin of Gauguin’s draft refers the reader to the note, which is
written in the end-papers of the manuscript. Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize, 114.
24 Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances,” in The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen:
Poems by Charles Baudelaire, trans. William H. Crosby (Brockport: BOA Editions,
1991), 29 (translation amended): “La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers/
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;/L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de
symbols/Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.”
25 On Gauguin’s friendship with Mallarmé, see Richard Brettell, Françoise Cachin,
Claire Frèches-Thory, Charles F. Stuckey and Peter Zegers, The Art of Paul Gauguin,
exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/Washington, DC: National Gallery of
Art, 1988), 200–1.
26 As Dario Gamboni has observed, the sculpture also plays with visual
metamorphoses, for example, where the faun’s tail transforms into foliage (Dario
Gamboni, Paul Gauguin au “centre mystérieux de la pensée” (Dijon: Les Presses du
réel, 2013), 207–10).
27 Diderot articulated this view most directly through the invented oration of an
old Tahitian, spoken as Bougainville prepared to leave Tahiti: “Weep, wretched
Tahitians, weep—but rather for the arrival than for the departure of these wicked
and desperate men! … Someday you will be their slaves, as corrupt, as vile, and as
wretched as they are …. We used to know but one disease … old age. But you have
brought us a new one: you have infected our blood …. [O]ur children, condemned
to die, will nourish and perpetuate the evil that you have given their fathers and
mothers, transmitting it forever to their descendants.” (Denis Diderot, “Supplement
to Bougainville’s Voyage,” trans. Jacques Barzun and Ralph Bowen, in The Libertine
Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Michael
Feher (New York: Zone, 1997), 82, 84).
28 Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout, Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan, 2 vols. (Paris: A.
Bertrand, 1837), 1:383–94.
29 Pierre Loti, The Marriage of Loti, trans. Clara Bell (New York: Frederick A. Stokes,
1925), 64.
30 Ibid., 28–9.
31 Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize, 21: “étaient malades—de ce mal que les Européens
civilisés leur ont apporté en échange de leur si large hospitalité.”
32 Shortly after his arrival in Papeete, Gauguin noted the large number of boats sailing
toward the capital: “The inhabitants of the neighboring islands were arriving to
be present at the last moment of their king, at the definitive taking possession of
their islands by the French” (Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize, 18: “Les habitants des
îles voisines arrivaient pour assister au dernier moment de leur roi, à la prise de
possession définitive de leurs îles par les Français.”)
33 We cannot be sure how Gauguin would have arranged the woodcuts in relation
to the text had he successed in publishing Noa Noa (they might have been
interleaved with the text at appropriate places but they might as easily have been
issued as an accompanying portfolio). See Calvin Brown, “Paradise Remembered:
The Noa Noa Woodcuts,” in Brown and Wright, eds., Paradise Remembered,
109–10.
34 Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize, 32: “quelques habitants qui veulent vivre encore
comme autrefois.”
35 Gauguin, Noa Noa, Louvre manuscript, 98–9:
[J]e vois distinctement, bien qu’elles ne soient pas là, les statues de leurs divinités
féminines. Statues de Hina et fêtes en l’honneur de la déesse lunaire. L’idole d’un
seul bloc a [sic] dix pieds d’une épaule à l’autre et quarante de hauteur. Sur la tête,
elle porte, en forme de bonnet une pierre énorme, de couleur rougéatre. Autour
d’elle on danse selon les rites d’autrefois—matamua.—et le vivo varie sa note
claire et gaie, mélancolique et sombrée, avec les heures qui se succèdent.
36 Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. Loize, 29: “Tous deux, sauvages, nous attaquâmes à la hache
un magnifique arbre …. Je frappai avec rage et les mains ensanglantées je coupais
avec le plaisir d’une brutalité assouvie …. Bien détruit en effet tout mon vieux stock
de civilisé. Je revins tranquille, me sentant désormais un autre homme, un Maorie.”
The trip in search of rosewood is one of the best-known episodes in Noa Noa, in
part because of his momentary sexual attraction to his young male friend; this
lust, Gauguin suggests, arises because of his own degenerate French background,
and freeing himself from it is—as with the act of cutting into the tree—a sign
of his having shed the trappings of civilization. On this passage, see Hal Foster,
“‘Primitive’ Scenes,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 86–90.
37 See Brown, “Paradise Remembered,” 106. That the woodcut was a medium tied to
a kind of unpolished authenticity was an increasingly common view in the later
nineteenth century, leading to a resurgence of interest in the technique. See Wright,
“Paradise Lost,” 60–5; and Jacquelynn Baas and Richard S. Field, The Artistic
Revival of the Woodcut in France, 1850–1900, exh. cat. (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Museum of Art, 1984).
38 Richard S. Field, “Gauguin’s Noa Noa Suite,” Burlington Magazine 110, no. 786
(September 1968): 504.
39 It was presumably for this reason that as he worked further on the blocks Gauguin
employed different tools—chisel and gouge—more suited to woodcuts as
traditionally practiced (cutting into the long grain rather than the end grain). The
images as finally printed are a mixture of intaglio and relief printing techniques that
further confuse the eye of the viewer.
40 De Man, “Double Aspect,” 13.
41 Gauguin probably recalled Loti’s account of how Rarahu, jealous of the time he spent
with other women, called him “a long lizard without feet.” This was an epithet, Loti
explained, that came from Rarahu’s Christian teacher, who used it to characterize
the form the devil took when he tempted Eve (Loti, Marriage of Loti, 64).
42 The face of the figure in Eve exotique had in turn been borrowed from Gauguin’s
portrait of his dead mother (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, W. 385), itself based on a
photograph (she had died more than two decades earlier). The genealogy of Te
nave nave fenua thus twins the loss of paradise with the loss of his own mother,
underlining the theme of a fall from idyllic plenitude. See Wright, “Paradise Lost,” 68,
86–8; and Elizabeth C. Childs, “Paradise Redux: Gauguin, Photography, and Fin-de-
Siècle France,” in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed. Dorothy Kosinski
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 123. For an extended discussion of Te nave
nave fenua in relation to a postlapsarian gaze, see my “Fallen Vision: Gauguin in
Polynesia,” in Paul Gauguin, exh. cat. (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2015), 167–79.
43 For illustrations, see Brettell et al., Art of Paul Gauguin, cat. nos. 172a–n.
44 Paul Gauguin, Avant et après (1902–3), MS, private collection. See Richard S. Field,
ed., Paul Gauguin: Monotypes, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art,
1973), 40.
45 Another iteration of Te nave nave fenua, a watercolor and gouache version that
adopts a pointillist facture (Musée de Grenoble), merits mention here. The
borrowed style raises important questions about artistic identity and Gauguin’s
willingness to play with alter egos. It also, like the Noa Noa woodcuts, speaks of
Gauguin’s inability to grasp Polynesia. Spoken by Gauguin in the voice of Seurat,
the Grenoble watercolor cannot read as an unmediated record of his Tahitian
experience. It is too visibly filtered through a self-conscious set of pictorial
decisions, too visibly the product of the artistic imagination of another (European)
artist. See Wright, “Paradise Lost,” 71–2.
46 The figure in Nave nave fenua is based on a photograph of a relief at the Buddhist
temple complex in Borobudur, Java. Rather than seeing this as evidence of the
artist’s deceit (though it is perhaps that also), it can be argued that the repeated
citations and ever-multiplying borrowings in his images, of which the figure in
Nave nave fenua is just one of innumerable examples, speaks also of loss, of the
artist’s distance from the Tahitian idyll of his imagination, no longer extant in
reality and knowable only through representations both visual (popular prints,
guidebooks, photographs) and textual (earlier writings, received wisdom, clichés).
For an extended discussion of reproduction and loss in Gauguin’s work, see Wright,
“Paradise Lost,” esp. 77–93.
6
Evolution and Desire in Gauguin’s

Tahitian Eve
Martha Lucy
The Barnes Foundation
Gauguin’s primitivism is regularly described as a “search for origins.” The theme

of beginnings is ever-present in the artist’s Tahitian canvases, expressed through
untouched landscapes, thumb-sucking figures, ancient ruins and female bodies
with an artless, natural presence. In Te nave nave Fenua (Tahitian Eve), painted
in 1892 during his first trip to Tahiti, the theme emerges in full force as Gauguin
takes on the archetypal origins story: the first woman in the Garden of Eden
(Plate 3). Gauguin reshapes the traditional iconography according to his own
tropical fantasy, replacing the biblical apple with a tall, gangly flower, the serpent
with a red lizard, and the figure of Eve with the body of his beautiful Tahitian
model and mistress, Teha’amana. “How good it was,” Gauguin wrote in his
journal, “to seek refreshment in the nearest brook, as did, I imagine, the first
man and the first woman in Paradise. Tahitian paradise, navé navé fénua — land
of delights!”1
Gauguin fixated on the Tahitian Eve theme, returning to it more than any
other in his whole oeuvre, producing versions in oil, watercolor and woodblock
print. But what did this motif mean for Gauguin? Certainly, as many have
suggested, the search for origins and its articulation in the form of the female
body signified a longing for an untainted, pre-modern existence. “Eve stands
primarily for the artist’s quest for the primitive,” writes Henri Dorra. “Gauguin
… frequently juxtaposes in his writings the corrupt civilization of the west with
man’s primeval bliss … what better for this dream of a golden age than the
robust and fertile mother of all ages?”2 Kirk Varnedoe likewise sees the artist’s
origins imagery as part of a utopian vision that celebrated primal innocence as
a nostalgic alternative to modernizing Europe. In these readings, origins and

primitive become interchangeable as signifiers of remoteness.3 For Solomon-
Godeau, Gauguin’s quest for origins is part and parcel of the masculinist fantasy
of the Tahitian body as carnal, purely sensual and closer to nature—a body
unbounded by artificial European mores.4
It is true that the Tahitian Eve canvas buzzes with a complex circuitry
of desire. Teha’amana stands naked in the foreground, the long curve of
her body stretching from the very top to the very bottom of the canvas. A
soft light falls across her skin, bringing forth the fullness of her thighs and
lending a sense of rounded volume that separates her body from the flatter
forms of the surrounding landscape, as if she is the projecting part of a relief
sculpture. Compositionally, her tall frame and extended hand form a triangle
that keeps our eye fixed on this plane in the foreground—a triangle that
mirrors the shape of her crotch, placed at the exact mid-point. Her other
hand hovers just beneath her breast, almost cuing a desire to touch. The
artist’s sexual longing is cleverly entwined with that of the girl: poised to pick
a flower, she aches for what is not allowed, and her sidelong glance betrays
the illicitness of her act.
And yet I think to approach this painting as a colonialist fantasy of
pure corporeal sexuality—or even more broadly as a search for an original
“purity”—is to miss some of the ways that the Tahitian body (and more
generally, peoples from the French colonies) signified during the late
nineteenth century. While Gauguin’s search for origins has been connected
to the racist and sexist ideologies of colonialism, little has been said about
its intersection with the discourses of science and the anxieties of the
evolutionary era.5 Gauguin’s primitivist project overlapped with some of the
most staggering scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century—discoveries
that upended long-held notions of human origins and drastically expanded the
scale of human history. Tahitian Eve, I will argue, is an historically-grounded
engagement with the discourses of evolution and prehistory. Moreover, I
want to expand the way we look at desire in this picture. The longing that
is so clearly written onto the painting’s surface, typically understood as a
masculinist fantasy of sexual possession, might also articulate the longing
that drives scientific inquiry—the longing to know and possess an original
body that was just out of reach.
Evolution and Desire in Gauguin’s Tahitian Eve 159
Peering into the past
With the rise of paleontology and evolutionary sciences, a startling picture of

man’s ancient past started to emerge in late-nineteenth-century Europe. These
were the decades when the fossilized remains of man’s prehistoric ancestors—
skulls and bone fragments from the stone age, primitive tools and weapons—were
unearthed and displayed for the first time to Parisian audiences: at the Expositions
Universelles in 1867 and 1878, at the Musée d’Anthropologie, and at the newly
established Musée des Antiquités Nationales.6 Such objects provoked a sense
of wonder and dread, as audiences grappled with the possibility of prehistoric
selves that were animalistic, and brutish, and maybe even physically different. In
1880 the Salon painter Fernand Cormon gave pictorial form to these imaginings,
recasting traditional biblical figures as a tribe of prehistoric cavemen trudging
across the desert in his monumental Cain (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, RF 280). Salon
audiences were shocked by Cormon’s canvas, with its slouching Darwinian bodies
that seemed to slip too easily between man and animal, but they were dazzled by
it too: our ancient past was brought to life in a thrilling panorama complete with
gore, bloody carcasses, and theatrical characters.7
For those in the science disciplines, the study of the past was often rooted
in a melancholic awareness of the fleetingness of history. Paleontologists in
particular, working to piece together a picture of ancient existence from shreds
of evidence in the fossil record, frequently expressed feelings of despair. Writing
in the 1870s, Armand de Quatrefages described the irrecoverability of the past
as producing “a galling feeling of impotence,” and on the mysteries of origins
he wrote, “To avow that human knowledge cannot even yet approach these
problems is as painful to me as to any other person.”8 In 1883 the botanist L. Crié
wrote, “La paléontologie, comme toute vraie science, ne se livre pas d’un seul
coup; elle est toujours incomplete, toujours perfectible.”9 The prehistoric past was
hopelessly unavailable: it existed only in bits and pieces, in bones and fragments.
Lingering despair among the scientific community did not slow the
attempts to recreate prehistoric times in the larger visual culture, however.
Man’s ancient past was imagined constantly—in illustrations, in literature,
and in popular science exhibits. The 1889 Exposition Universelle featured
simulacra of prehistoric dwellings as part of an exhibition called the “Histoire
d’Habitation Humaine.” This illustration from a souvenir book (Figure 6.1)
shows fair-goers with top hats strolling through one of the recreations,
Figure 6.1 “Habitation Lacustre,” from L’Exposition Universelle de 1889 (recueil de

couverture de cahiers scolaires, avec vues coloriées des curiosités de l’Exposition), 1889,
p. 13.
chatting with an actor dressed as a Bronze-Age man; audiences are not merely
gazing upon a two-dimensional panorama of prehistoric life, but have actually
entered “prehistoric space.” This increasing verisimilitude in the presentation
of ancient times—we have gone from isolated relics in vitrines, to a large
painted prehistoric scenario, to a space into which the spectator’s body could
physically enter—suggests a sort of unquenchable thirst driving nineteenth-
century science and the popular imagination.10 The goal was not just to study
the fragments of prehistory but to somehow retrieve prehistory itself, to know
it and wholly possess it.
The recuperation of prehistoric times is often expressed as something coming
into view. Critical writing about Cormon’s later paintings frequently uses
these terms, their success equal to their capacity to render remote ages visible.
One critic described the artist’s 1898 evolution of man cycle at the Museum
d’Histoire Naturelle as bringing to life “before our eyes the most remote ages
of primitive humanity.”11 In Pierre Boitard’s popular Paris Avant Les Hommes, a
science-fantasy novel from 1861, the narrator exclaims upon seeing a plesiosaur,
“It’s a strange monster, the form of which is so fantastic that, if I hadn’t seen it
with my own two eyes, it would seem the product of the delirious imagination
of the poet, rather than of the hand of nature.”12 The fantasy is one of temporal
penetration and unhindered vision—the ability to see and know with one’s “own
two eyes.”
Writers lamenting the inaccessibility of prehistoric times frequently use this
same metaphor of vision to describe their relationship to the past, referring to
it as “shrouded” or “veiled.” For example, in his 1877 L’homme fossile en Europe,
the naturalist Henri Le Hon writes that “In spite of the most active, most ardent
research …. primordial man still remains shrouded by a mysterious veil.”13
The goal of science then becomes lifting the veil, a metaphor whose erotic
connotations were made unequivocal in Louis Barrias’s allegorical sculpture
Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science from 1899 (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, RF
1409). Here, knowledge, eroticism and vision converge: the triumph of scientific
discovery is expressed as the undressing of the female body.
One of the most popular notions to arise in this quest to retrieve our prehistoric
past was the idea that the colonial body provided direct access to it. Owing to
the work of social evolutionists like John Lubbock, John McLennan and Edward
B. Tylor, technologically primitive peoples were believed to represent more or
less exact equivalents of earlier phases of humanity.14 By the end of the century
the idea that certain non-Western cultures were fossilized relics of a “lost”
prehistoric stone age was widespread, encouraged by anthropological studies
such as Armand de Quatrefages’ Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages (Figure
6.2) and by popular travel literature.15 In his 1877 Voyage autour de monde:
Océanie, Jules Garnier describes his encounter with a cave-dwelling family in
Figure 6.2 Armand de Quatrefages, cover, Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages,

1884.
Tahiti during a long trek around the island. “These people lived only on fish and
shellfish; numerous nets and sharp arrows covered the walls of this veritable
animal lair. It seemed to me like being taken back thousands of years; I had
before me the prehistoric man that is constantly being uncovered in the form of
bone fragments buried in the ground.”16
Gauguin would have had direct exposure to this kind of thinking at the
1889 Exposition Universelle. There, in exhibits of the Colonies Françaises,
enthralled visitors could observe natives going about their daily life,
performing strange and barbaric behaviors that confirmed already-existing
notions of colonized peoples as primitive and close to nature—notions that
only stirred Gauguin’s fantasy of a distant exotic paradise. “Gauguin’s dream
of flight seems to have become concretized through these colonial exhibits,”
writes Peter Brooks.17 Throughout the Exposition, the colonial body was
presented as savage, exotic and in need of enlightenment, but also as a valuable
research tool in the scientific task of unveiling the past—in other words, as
a living relic. In the anthropology pavilion, prehistoric tools were presented
next to examples from colonial villages. Large-scale displays encouraged an
equivalence between prehistoric times and modern primitive cultures through
their physical layout.
At the “Histoire d’Habitation” exhibit, for example, which Gauguin is
known to have visited, recreations of Stone-Age dwellings stood right next
to the displays of peoples from the colonies. This juxtaposition made perfect
sense to the reviewer for the Journal des Voyages, who wrote, “It is logical that
directly following the habitation préhistorique are the domiciles of present-
day people who are no more civilized. Savage life, in effect, represents the state
of prehistoric humanity.”18 Eight years earlier, when Tierra del Fuegans were
showcased at the Jardin d’acclimation for the amusement of Parisian spectators,
audiences came to regard the natives not just as exotic and uncivilized, but
as relics from the earliest stages of humanity. That display was reported in
the press as an exhibition of “savages who bring us back to the first ages of
mankind.”19
These meanings attached to the colonial body, especially its role in the
possibility of retrieval, seem important for understanding a work like Tahitian
Eve. Rather than standing as a generalized symbol for purity and innocence, the
painting represents Gauguin’s attempt to grapple with the discourses of science
and evolution, in particular the idea that the Tahitian body represented some
“fossilized” prehistoric form.
Evolutionary themes
Though Gauguin did not follow science as rigorously some of his fellow
artists—Redon, for example, had studied with the botanist Armand Clavaud in
Bordeaux—he was certainly fluent in the current debates. He refers to “science”
occasionally in his letters and writes of wanting to share with Teha’amana his
understanding of the physical world. “I have tried to explain to her some of
the phenomena of nature in accordance with European knowledge.”20 Science
was certainly not at odds with Gauguin’s much-discussed spirituality. On the
contrary, he was part of a generation of symbolist artists and writers who
wanted to embrace science as part of a religious understanding of the universe.
The expectation, shared with many others of the day, was that “science would
provide not just solutions to empirical problems but a life-enhancing framework
of meaning and belief.”21 There are passages in Noa Noa where Gauguin strives to
reconcile science and spirituality; discussing Maori mythology, he wonders how
“poetic imaginings” might “impede the progress of the most positive science,
nor do I know to what point the highest science would condemn them.”22
Several Tahitian-themed works offer clues to the artist’s absorption of the
discourses of evolution and prehistory. In Day of the God, for example, one
can almost see an evolutionary narrative take shape: the painting suggests the
origins of life in the ocean, with evolution proceeding from foreground to
background (Figure 6.3). Shapes resembling unformed bodies swirl in the water
closest to us, anticipating the figures on the land; fully-formed bodies lie in the
middle ground, naked and curled up like fetuses, as if just having emerged from
that water (note how two figures still have their feet in it); behind them, these
transitionary figures are now upright, bipedal and fully clothed, suggesting an
evolution both biological and cultural. Stylistically, the articulation of forms
gets more naturalistic—more “evolved”—as the eye moves from foreground
to background: puzzle-like water is exchanged for real-looking waves in the
distance; compressed foreground space opens up into traditional perspective;
and colors become more naturalistic, too, with a light brown beach instead of
pink sand. At the center, as if presiding over the whole evolutionary process,
is a figure that seems to represent desire. Touching her hair and looking out
coquettishly at the viewer, she is more actively seductive than any of Gauguin’s
other Tahitian bodies.
Gauguin’s 1893 woodcut The Universe is Created presents an even more
explicit suggestion of forms mutating from one to the next (Figure 6.4). Created
Figure 6.3 Paul Gauguin, Mahana no Atua (Day of the God), 1894, oil on canvas,
27 × 36 in. (68.3 × 91.5 cm).
as part of the Noa Noa series, the woodcut evokes Darwinian notions of change
and flux even as it incorporates symbolism from Maori mythology. Moving
from left to right, the ocean becomes a haze of uncategorizable creatures
arranged on one shallow plane—fish with atavistic jaws, a monstrous human
face, and plant life all churning together. A leaf poking down directs us to the
foreground, where we see the next stage represented by a stumbling human
form overlapped with a fish, so that the fish appears to have legs, surely a
reference to the Darwinian notion of human life originating in sea-dwelling
creatures. Set apart from the swirl of creatures, a female figure seems to indicate
a still more advanced state. Her faintly indicated body is pressed flat against the
picture plane so that it looks almost squished, especially when compared to the
slight perspective in the ocean behind her, calling to mind a fossilized organism
imprinted into rock.
Contemporary critics clearly saw in Gauguin’s works some hint of
contemporary evolutionary thinking. “Why has the artist so forgotten himself
as to see in both the Tahitian woman of today and the Tahitian woman
Figure 6.4 Paul Gauguin, L’Univers est crée (The Universe is Created), 1893–4,
woodcut printed on Japanese paper, pasted onto light blue-gray mount, 10½ × 17 in.
(26.8 × 43.2 cm).
of prehistoric times only a female quadrumane?” Thièbault-Sisson wrote,

complaining of Teha’amana’s animalized body in several works.23 In 1891,
Belgian critics reacting to Gauguin’s woodcuts drew parallels between his work
and that of the recently lambasted George Minne, which they complained “could
illustrate Darwin.”24 Another outraged critic reviewing the same exhibition took
Gauguin directly to task: “le gauguinisme … displays repulsive beings, barely
human, whose dislocated and monstrous forms recall … the fumbling efforts
of artists barely out of their caves.”25 And Auguste Strindberg, in an 1895 letter
to Gauguin, references the famous paleontologist Georges Cuvier and describes
Gauguin’s Tahitian works as a godless world crawling with unclassifiable species:
I studied the sun-drenched pictures on the walls of your studio, and the memory
of them pursued me all night in my sleep. I saw trees no botanists would ever
find, beasts Cuvier would never have dreamt of, and people you alone could
have created. I saw a sea which appeared to flow out of a volcano, and a sky
inhabitable by no God.26
In Tahitian Eve, Gauguin presents his fantasy of an original body in a newly

conceived evolutionary universe. The setting, first of all, abounds with the theme
of mutation. Teha’amana is surrounded by strange, uncategorizable creatures:
a lizard with red wings and tall, lanky flowers not known to science, perhaps
the progenitors of long-since mutated species, and that are likely a quotation of
the primordial eye/flower from Odilon Redon’s 1883 album of lithographs, Les
Origines.27 Before his departure for Tahiti, Gauguin wrote in a letter to Redon:
“In photographs and drawings I shall take along a small world of friends who
will speak to me every day. Of you I have in my head the recollection of almost
everything you have created.”28 The fact that Teha’amana’s left foot sprouts two
extra toes seems to reinforce this theme (rather than reflecting some actual
physical deformation that the girl might have had, as has been suggested).29
For Gauguin’s audiences, a work like Tahitian Eve must have seemed to deliver
the prehistoric past in stunning clarity. The painting lifts the veil shrouding
prehistoric times, combining vision, knowledge, and eroticism in a manner not
unlike the Nature Unveiling sculpture.
Stylistically, it seems possible that Gauguin was intending to evoke the
popular idea of the “modern savage” as a living relic. Teha’amana’s body appears
rigid and immovable—as if fossilized. Gauguin positions her right up against the
picture plane in an insistently frontal pose, with all parts of her body in parallel,
outlined in thick contours, as if she is an organism that had cut its impression
into a rock. Though gesturing, she appears locked into position. Feet are planted
firmly on the ground, and the sideways glance suggests that this is a body that
cannot turn. We might also imagine Gauguin’s woodcuts on the Tahitian Eve
theme, made in 1893 as part of the Noa Noa series, to be a further exploration
of the fossil idea in which technique adds another dimension to the metaphor
(Figure 6.5). Carving Teha’amana’s form into the woodblock was like a literal
fossilization of her body—an engraving of an organism’s structure onto a more
permanent host material.
Of course, those elements that I want to identify in Tahitian Eve (and indeed
in many of Gauguin’s figures) as constituting a “fossilized” body have often been
pointed out and discussed in other terms. His figures’ rigid appearances can
be explained by the fact that he was looking at sculpture; here, Teha’amana’s
pose echoes that of a Buddha figure from a Javanese temple, of which the artist
owned a photograph.30 For Gauguin, there was something sculptural about the
Tahitian physique: he described the natives as “animal figures rigid as statues”
with an “extraordinary immobility.”31 Still, it seems possible that Gauguin would
have wanted this aesthetics of immobility to signify as fossilization, embodying
his own hopes for the preservation of a culture and referencing contemporary
notions of non-Western peoples as “l’hommes fossiles” (and here it is worth
Figure 6.5 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: Nave Nave Fenua (Fragrant Isle), 1893–4, color
woodcut, 15 × 9 in. (38.5 × 22.8 cm).
noting that the arrangement of Teha’amana’s body, and her placement in the
composition, recalls that of the “fossil man” on Quatrefages’s cover; Figure 6.2)32
But perhaps more importantly, the fossil would have offered Gauguin the perfect
metaphor for expressing a certain grief about the irretrievability of the past.
Evolution and loss
Several scholars have noted the sense of despair that haunts Gauguin’s Tahitian
works. Alastair Wright sees it in the “darkly brooding atmosphere” of the Universe
is Created series, and in the feeling of absence that pervades paintings like The
Sacred Mountain of 1892 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1980-1-
1. W. 483). For Wright, Gauguin’s melancholia arises from his realization that
the paradise he hoped to find and to represent no longer existed. “His Tahitian
venture was marked by loss from the beginning,” Wright says, “a dreamed-of
culture giving way under the pressure of colonialism, remote valleys emptied of
their idols.”33 And of course Gauguin states this feeling repeatedly in Noa Noa.
“A profound sadness took possession of me. The dream which had brought by to
Tahiti was brutally disappointed by the actuality.”34 Focusing on his woodblock
prints, Wright argues that Gauguin expressed this idea of loss most potently
through his very technique. With every plate that he pulled in the Noa Noa
series, Gauguin made sure to show visible changes to it—either altering the
colors, or adding more scratches to the surface, so that each reproduction gets
further and further away from the original in a kind of metaphor for the artist’s
own inability to access the Tahiti of his dreams (see Figures 6.5 and 5.7).
I want to extend Wright’s reading to suggest that Gauguin’s despair is more
philosophical in nature, bound up in new questions raised by science; and that
the technique Gauguin uses in the Noa Noa suite might also be understood as a
metaphor for the melancholy process of evolution. It is important to remember
that Gauguin’s lifetime coincided with scientific discoveries that shifted the
understanding of human history in a cataclysmic way. These were the decades
of continual fossil findings, the discovery of prehistoric cave paintings and the
publication of Darwin’s groundbreaking Origin of Species; and the significance
of these new findings was hotly debated among academics and lay people
alike. Rewritten by science, time now stretched back almost infinitely, casting
humanity into a cycle whose beginnings could no longer be envisioned. And
if man’s ancient history was lost, then evolution—not just vast expanses of
time—was largely to blame, for the past would not be so mysterious if things
had stayed in their original forms. As much as Gauguin’s melancholy was about
the vanishing paradise of Tahiti, it was also rooted in the most basic existential
questions concerning the self ’s place in the universe.
Gauguin’s writings are shot through with anxiety about both the vastness of
time and the idea of forms changing and transforming. His journal, Noa Noa,
reveals a fixation with the physical appearance of the “pure” Tahitian body.
He describes the natives obsessively, almost scientifically, making detailed
observations about facial features, bone structure, hair and eye color on almost
every page, and expresses sorrow whenever he sees a sign of modification.
Describing one native girl, he notes “her half-white blood. In spite of traces of
profoundly native and truly Maori characteristics, the many contacts had caused
her to lose many of her distinctive racial ‘differences.’”35 An expression of colonial
guilt, such statements also display an awareness of evolutionary theory and the
gradual mutation of forms.
Gauguin often grapples with the question of his own origins, as if he is
trying to locate himself in the overwhelming scale of history and time. Waxing
philosophical, he often laments the immensity of it all, referring repeatedly to
“the infinite” as well as to the “mystère de nos origines”—a mystery, he says, that
leads to suffering.36 In Cahier pour Aline, he begins one passage by reassuring
himself that he is “the point of beginning” before acknowledging that this can
no longer be certain.
If I look before me into space, I have a vague consciousness of the infinite, and
yet I am the point of beginning. I would then understand that there would
have been a beginning and that there would be no end …. And this sensation
is intimately linked to the belief in an eternal life promised by god. But if we are
not the beginning in coming into the world, one has to believe like the Buddhists
that we have always existed.37
That last sentence suggests that Gauguin’s sense of self—the idea of his own body
as a point of origin—has become destabilized. By the end of his Tahitian sojourn,
the confident “I am the point of beginning” is exchanged for the anxious “Where
do we come from?”
The unfathomability of the past was a major theme in the works of Balzac,
whom we know Gauguin greatly admired and referenced in his writings and
perhaps in his work.38 In his 1831 novel La Peau de Chagrin, Balzac explores the
relationship between history, despair and desire through the cogitations of his
suicidal main character, Raphael. In one pivotal scene, Raphael wanders through
a curiosity shop in Paris, seeing rooms full of objects that the author says reflect
“the fossilized remains of the past that attest to the inevitable and indifferent
rise and fall of civilizations.” The objects are endless: an Egyptian mummy, old
master paintings, a fossilized mammoth’s foot, the “virginal sari of some girl
from Tahiti.” Staring at them in wonder, Raphael finds himself overcome with
despair, “choking beneath the debris of fifty past centuries now vanished ….
he was oppressed by these recurring forms which, like monsters springing up
beneath his feet, engendered by some evil spirit, were delivering him up to an
endless struggle.”39
Significantly, Balzac connects his character’s melancholia to the recent
discoveries of science, referring specifically to paleontologist Georges Cuvier:
Have you ever plunged into the immensity of time and space by reading the
geological tracts of Cuvier? Transported by his genius, have you hovered over the
limitless abyss of the past, as if held aloft by a magician’s hand? As they discover,
from strata to strata and from layer to layer, deep in the quarries of Montmartre
or the schists of the Urals, these creatures whose fossilized remains belong to
antediluvian civilizations, it will strike terror into your soul to see many millions
of years, many thousands of races forgotten by the feeble memory of mankind.40
For Balzac’s protagonist, there is a certain anguish caused by scientific

knowledge. Gauguin suffers a similar affliction, even despite his aspiration to
embrace science as part of his spiritual quest. (The extent to which Gauguin’s
philosophical musings about science and knowledge mirror those of Balzac is
striking, to the point that it is tempting to connect Teha’amana’s extra toes to the
minor character in La Peau de Chagrin with six toes on her left foot). Explaining
the imagery in his painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are
We Going? (see Figure 7.6), Gauguin writes in a 1901 letter to Charles Morice,
“Behind a tree are two sinister figures, shrouded in garments of somber color,
recording near the tree of science their note of anguish caused by this science itself,
in comparison with the simple beings in a virgin nature, which might be the
human idea of paradise, allowing everyone the happiness of living.”41 The “simple
beings,” unconcerned with their own beginnings or endings, are the fortunate
ones. Paradise is thinking that the world begins and ends with you.
The Universe is Created not only pictures evolution but articulates Gauguin’s
melancholia about the mystery of our origins in an ever-changing universe. The
darkness, first of all, suggests the unknowability of our beginnings, as does the
faintness of some of the impressions. Forms are barely decipherable, difficult to

locate in space, as if to refuse the fantasy of peering with clarity into the past. The
murky illegibility is similar to that pervading Redon’s 1883 album of lithographs,
Les Origines, which offered the nineteenth century’s most devastating visual
interpretation of human origins (Figure 6.6). Redon pictures man’s beginnings
in a swirl of dark chaos, a parade of hybrid bodies in which no form is stable
and parts are constantly being exchanged. In Redon’s work, the originary
condition is an inherently melancholic state: forms are merely potential forms,
always incomplete.42 Both thematically and structurally, Gauguin seems here to
be making a direct reference to Redon’s cover: the composition flows from left
background to right foreground, and he populates his print with half-formed
creatures struggling to exist.
Let us return, then, to Wright’s discussion of this image as part of the Noa
Noa series. The print-pulling process that takes us further and further away from
the original—that central metaphor for the disappearance of a culture—also
perfectly summarizes the melancholy process behind the evolution of species
and of the human body. For this is what evolution does: it changes the original,
little by little. Each print in the series, the same but slightly different, is like a
mutating organism. And of course Gauguin would have recognized that the
processes of colonialization and evolution go hand and hand—that the “evolving”
Tahitian body, changed by the presence of white-skinned European settlers, was a
horrifying and all too visible index for the way the culture was eroding.
Evolution and desire
Tahitian Eve occupies a singular place in Gauguin’s evolutionary imagery. While

The Universe is Created imagines human origins as a state of incompleteness
and lack, Tahitian Eve delivers an original body that is blissfully whole. There is
no murky darkness but instead a clear tropical light. Forms are not becoming
but instead seem frozen, immutable, positioned decisively in the field of vision;
even despite the painting’s allusions to mutation, time is arrested and still. In
an overwhelming universe in which the beginning or end could no longer be
firmly grasped, in which “all things transform,”43 and in the midst of a culture
that with its rapid and visible change effectively demonstrated this continual flux,
Teha’amana became a kind of dock for Gauguin’s own mooring. “She was not
changeable,” he writes. “She was double, triple, multiple, the child of an ancient
Figure 6.6 Odilon Redon, cover-frontispiece for Les Origines, 1883, lithograph in
black on dark gray wove paper, 12 × 9 in. (30.7 × 22.5 cm).
race.”44 More than simply a masculinist fantasy of sexual availability, Teha’amana

marked a point of beginning for Gauguin—they were “the first man and the
first woman”—thus allowing him to secure for himself a firm coordinate in the
infinite expanse of time. This was Gauguin’s primitivist fantasy.
And yet for all its plenitude and wholeness, Tahitian Eve is as melancholic
as any of the other Tahitian paintings. Like a fossil, Teha’amana is both present
and absent—a mere stand-in for the real object that can never be recovered.
Moreover—and this is why the canvas sums up his anxiety about the evolutionary
process—Gauguin links this sense of loss to sexual desire. For Gauguin knew
that while desire is productive, an urge that inseminates and creates, it also
transforms and destroys. Pondering the inevitability of man’s death in Noa Noa,
he names sexual desire as the force that urges along the evolutionary cycle:
“They (matter and spirit) will be urged on with a mutual desire for a new union
from which will arise a new ‘state’ in the infinite evolution of life.”45 Remember
the figure of desire in Day of the Gods.
The lust that courses through Tahitian Eve, placing it so squarely in that
tradition of the European fetishization of the colonial body, is also Gauguin’s
self-conscious confession of his own role in the disappearance of a culture.
Desire’s destructive power is ultimately metaphorized through the tense
moment depicted: Teha’amana is on the brink, and her taking of the flower
will set the whole cycle of desire, and evolution, in motion. If sexuality propels
evolution, then the original body of Gauguin’s fantasy cannot stand. Like a fossil,
Teha’amana is at once a promise of plenitude and a representation of loss, a
simulacrum as false as the actor dressed up in prehistoric garb.
Notes
1 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal, trans. O. F. Theis (New York: Dover
Publications, 1985), 32.
2 Henri Dorra, “The First Eves in Gauguin’s Eden,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 41 (March
1953): 197.
3 Kirk Varnedoe, “Gauguin,” in Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the
Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1984). Others have argued that Gauguin’s quest for origins symbolizes his desire
to return to his own infancy. See Henri Dorra, “The First Eves,” 197. He writes,
“subconsciously at least, his dreams of escape to the tropics went further back still,
beyond his memories of childhood, to the comfort and warmth of prenatal bliss.”
See also Wayne Andersen and Barbara Klein, Gauguin’s Paradise Lost (New York:
Viking Press, 1971).
4 On the long-held European fantasy of Tahiti as a land of sexual delight, see
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” Art in America 77 (July 1989); a more
extended discussion can be found in Elizabeth C. Childs, Vanishing Paradise: Art

and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University
of California Press, 2013). For Solomon-Godeau, Gauguin’s search for utopia
is motivated largely by his own sexual desire, which derives its energy from the
“otherness” of the female body. See also Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits,
1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson,
1992), in which Gauguin’s Tahitian stays are understood as a journey of masculinist
and imperialist sexual violence.
5 It is curious that while scholars often speak of a primordial quality in Gauguin’s
paintings this quality is never considered in connection with evolutionary theory
and paleontology. Indeed, for Kirk Varnedoe, Gauguin’s conception of origins is
entirely disconnected from the evolutionist discourse—almost set in opposition
to it. Gauguin’s project, Varnedoe argues, is part of a pre-Darwinian, utopian
vision that imagines an optimistic original state of nature as opposed to Darwin’s
portrayal of man’s original state as barbaric, animalistic, and hopelessly tied to
nature. See Varnedoe, “Gauguin.”
6 The Musée des Antiquités Nationales at Saint-Germaine-en-Laye opened in
1867 and reflects the growing interest in prehistoric archaeology. In addition
to encountering prehistoric weapons and bones at science exhibits, nineteenth-
century audiences would have also seen these items illustrated in popular and
academic journals like La Nature and La Revue Scientifique.
7 See Martha Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain and the Problem of the Prehistoric Body,” Oxford
Art Journal 25, no. 2 (2002): 107–26.
8 Cited in Robert E. Stebbins, “France,” in ed. Thomas F. Glick, The Comparative
Reception of Darwinism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 131. Gillian
Beer has discussed how the search for origins in paleontology became figured as
loss, and notes the anxiety arising from its irrecoverability. Gillian Beer, “Origins
and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative,” in her Arguing with the Past: Essays in
Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
9 L. Crié, Les Origines de la Vie: Essai sur la Flore Primordial (Paris: O. Doin, 1883), 17.
10 On the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for recovering the past, see Stephen Bann,
The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century
Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Bann writes,
“the promise of reconstituting the absent historical object ‘as it really was’ seemed
to seize the nineteenth-century imagination … the past could be recreated if only it
could be realistically represented.”
11 Émile Michel, “Les peintures décoratives de M. Cormon au Muséum,” Revue de l’art
ancient et moderne (January 1898), 2.
12 Pierre Boitard, Études antediluviennes. Paris avant les hommes, l’homme fossile
(Paris: Passat, 1861).
13 Henri Le Hon, L’homme Fossile en l’Europe: son industrie, ses moeurs, ses oeuvres
d’art (Paris: Schulz & Fils, 1877), 27.
14 John Lubbock’s book, for example, was called The Origin of Civilization and the
Primitive Condition of Man. Mental and Social Conditions of Savages (London:
Longmans Green, 1870). For more on the perceived equivalence between modern
primitive cultures and prehistoric man, See Peter Bowler, The Invention of Progress:
The Victorians and the Past (Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 39.
15 Armand de Quatrefages, Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages, études
d’anthropologie (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1884). Another example is Le Hon,
L’homme Fossile en l’Europe.
16 Jules Garnier, Voyage autour du monde: Oceanie (Paris: Plon, 1871), 365–6.
17 Peter Brooks, “Gauguin’s Tahitian Body,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 2 (Spring
1990): 51–90, 51.
18 P. Legrand, “L’habitation humaine: Histoire de la Maison à Travers les Siècles,”
Journal des Voyages 24 (1889): 279–81. Another reviewer describing this
exhibition for the same journal draws a similar parallel, describing Neolithic man
as “pauvrement armés de haches de silex et de flèches d’arêtes de poisson, tout
comme le sont encore, en notre XIXe siècle, les naturels des iles Andaman ou de
la Terre-de-Feu” (G. de Wailly, “Une Cité Lacustre,” Journal des Voyages 24 (1889):
306–8).
19 Cited in Douglas Druick, Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams (Chicago, Amsterdam
and London: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994), 139.
20 Gauguin, Noa Noa, 41.
21 Patrick Coleman, introduction to Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. Helen
Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xiv. For a discussion of the
negotiation between science and spiritualism during the 1880s, and the absorption
of these ideas in the avant-garde, see Deborah Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin:
The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); Naomi
Maurer, The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent Van
Gogh and Paul Gauguin (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/London:
Associated University Presses/Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1998).
22 Gauguin, Noa Noa, 49–50.
23 François Thièbault-Sisson, “Les Petits Salons,” Le Temps (December 2, 1893).
24 Anonymous, “Une exposition annuelle des XX,” Le Journal de Charleroi (January
30, 1890), cited in Albert Aldaheff, “Minne and Gauguin in Brussels: An
Unexplored Encounter,” in La Scultura nel XIXe Secolo, ed. H. W. Janson (Bologna:
CLUEB, 1979), 181.
25 Anonymous, “Le Vingtisme,” La Chronique (February 23, 1891), cited in Albert
Aldaheff, “Minne and Gauguin in Brussels: An Unexplored Encounter,” in La
Scultura nel XIXe Secolo, ed. H. W. Janson (Bologna: CLUEB, 1979), 179.
26 Cited in Bengt Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, trans. Reginald Spink (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1965; New York: Viking Press, 1966). Gauguin included the
letter, along with his reply to it, in the preface to his sales catalog of February 18, 1895.
27 I am referring to the second plate in the album, called There Was First a Vision
Attempted in the Flower. Henri Dorra suggests that Gauguin’s 1890 Exotic Eve also
borrows some imagery from Redon: “The egg-like objects placed under the cock and
hen in the lower right-hand corner recall the strange shapes dear to Odilon Redon, and
it is likely that they were placed here as a tribute to that artist.” Dorra, “The First Eves.”
28 Cited in John Rewald, Post-Impressionism: Van Gogh to Gauguin (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1956), 450.
29 David Sweetman, for example, concludes that Teha’amana must have had a small
physical defect; the toes are “a detail which seems just too realistic to be invented.”
See Gauguin: A Complete Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton and New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1995), 335.
30 On Gauguin’s sculptural sources, see, for example, George T. M. Shackelford’s essay
on Where do We Come From? What Are We? Where are We Going? in Gauguin;
Tahiti, eds., George T. M. Shackelford and Claire Frèches-Thory, exh. cat. (Boston:
Museum of Fine Arts, 2004), 193–4.
32 Fossil imagery was abundant in late-nineteenth-century visual culture and, not
surprisingly, the fossil metaphor was often employed in French literature, in the
work of Balzac and others.
33 Alastair Wright, “Paradise Lost: Gauguin and the Melancholy Logic of
Reproduction,” in Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints, eds.
Calvin Brown and Alastair Wright, exh. cat. (Princeton: Princeton University Art
Museum/New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 56. Elizabeth
Childs also writes about Gauguin’s struggles with the elusiveness of his Tahitian
fantasy. See her “Vanishing Paradise.”
35 Ibid., 8.
36 Letter to Fontainas, March 1899; cited in Henri Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories: A
Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 209.
37 Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline. Préface de Philippe Dagen (Paris: Éditions du
Sonneur, 2009), 34.
Si je regarde devant moi dans l’espace, j’ai comme une vague conscience de
l’infini et cependent je suis le point du commencement. Je comprendrais alors
qu’il y aurait eu un commencement et qu’il n’y aurait pas de fin. En cela, je n’ai
pas l’explication d’un mystère, mais simplement le mystérieuse sensation de ce
mystère. Si nous ne sommes pas le commencement en venant au monde, il faut
croire comme les bouddhistes que nous avons toujours existé.
38 Gauguin mentions Balzac in Cahier pour Aline, 42. Stephen Eisenman has
convincingly linked Spirit of the Dead Watching to the theme of androgyny in
Balzac’s Seraphita. See Gauguin’s Skirt, 121–2.
39 Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. Helen Constantine (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 18.
40 Ibid., 19.
41 Cited in Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, 143.
42 For more on Redon’s articulation of an evolving body figured by loss, see Martha
Lucy, “Into the Primeval Slime: Body and Self in Redon’s Evolutionary Universe,”
Revue d’Art Canadienne (RACAR) 34, no. 1 (2009): 18–29.
43 “All things transform but nothing perishes,” Gauguin writes in Noa Noa, 49. It
is an uncharacteristically optimistic statement about the cycle of life: with every
generation that dies, there is an essential matter—not just a soul—that will live on.
This matter is distinctly female, he insists—another example of Gauguin regarding
the female body as a kind of repository for human history and memory.
44 Gauguin, Noa Noa, 34. Several metaphors are used throughout the journal to evoke
the Tahitian body’s permanence, or solidity.
7
Gauguin: Vitalist, Hypnotist

Barbara Larson
University of West Florida
In 1897 Gauguin wrote a lengthy philosophical document entitled “The Catholic

Church and Modern Times” in which he detailed his thoughts on science and
the soul, the potential for a harmonious relationship between humanity and
the natural world, and the current moment as ripe for social regeneration.1
In his treatise the artist rejected the doctrines of institutional Catholicism,
discussed comparative religion, followed a broadly Buddhist-based theosophical
program in which the soul reincarnates and argued for the compatibility of the
organization of the physical body with spiritual life through neurology. This essay
will examine Gauguin’s interest in neo-vitalism as a way to combat pervasive
materialism through science itself and how his philosophy of life, imbued
with a spiritual and communal message (of which vitalism was an important
part), was to be projected to his audience through art. In particular, the two
bookend “manifesto” paintings of his mature career, Vision of the Sermon (1888,
Plate 1), and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
(1897, Figure 7.6), his imagined final painting and “spiritual testament,” will be
discussed in light of a desire to inspire through mesmeric means.
Gauguin located the seat of the soul in the brain, but did not reference
Descartes, who had famously posited that the soul resides in the pineal gland.
Instead of the mechanistic approach of Descartes, in which the soul and body
are ultimately divided, Gauguin invoked contemporary brain science to uphold
his view that they are connected. He cited the work of physiologist and vitalist
Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens (1794–1867), who had demonstrated that a single
area within the medulla oblongata at the base of the brain, where nerves were
connected, controlled respiration. Building on past research, Flourens posited
that the nervous system, spinal cord and the brain, indeed life itself, were all
subordinate to this control center.2 This was Gauguin’s inspiration to speculate

that Flourens’ “noeud vital” was the veritable locus of the soul. He argued that
materialists who believe life originates in matter, including the sense organs
themselves—the skin, the ear, the eye or even the brain—are wrong. Rather,
life force courses through the nerves which carry sensory information to the
soul, but it is ultimately the soul which coordinates, directs, and animates the
organism. Gauguin continued, “… this appears to confirm the doctrine of the
animists, who consider the soul as the generating principle of the organism.
The soul, recognized as residing ordinarily in the vivifying ovarian-like cell
of the vital knot [the noeud vital], may be considered as the creative agent
of the embryonic instinct of this organism, as the agent of adaptation ….”3
He argued further, “Even the heart, from which the circulation of blood
proceeds, as well as the other internal organs of diverse functions, only act
in their special office under the neuro-muscular influence converging at the
vital knot, at the soul which is the central principle of animation and the
vivification of it.”4
Animism had been the biophilosophy of the medical school of Montpellier
(where Flourens had been a student) under François Boissier de Sauvages
(1706–67). Animism was a form of vitalism that foregrounded the importance
of the supernatural. By the early nineteenth century the mysterious life force
that directed the body and accounted for the developed coherence of the entire
organism was now generally argued as being within the context of organic
sensibility among the vitalists rather than the eternal soul, but the energy that
propelled the organism and even creation forward remained compatible with
religious interpretations.5
Vitalism remained an underpinning of biological theory in the nineteenth
century under the influence of students of Flourens and physiologist Marie
François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802). Many mid-century luminaries such as
Louis Pasteur and Alfred Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of the principle
of natural selection, remained devoted to vitalist principles. Even physiologist
Claude Bernard, generally hailed a sober positivist, was persuaded by Bichat’s
concept of the “milieu intérieur” and defended Flourens at his address when
he was elected to the Academy of France. Vitalism emerged as one of the
anti-positivist reactions at the fin de siècle reinforced through the influence
of German scientists working under the legacy of Nature Philosophy such as
Johannes Müller, who claimed the soul as that which makes each organism a
living whole, or Ernst Haeckel’s monist principles.6
Gauguin: Vitalist, Hypnotist 181
Neo-vitalism became a tenet of philosophy in the late nineteenth century,

influencing Bergson and many of his followers. One of the authors Gauguin
referred to directly in his painting, Thomas Carlyle, whose reputation was enjoying
a renewal, had been a celebrated vitalist in the early part of the century. In his book
Sartor Resartus, which appeared in an 1889 portrait painting by Gauguin of his
contemplative friend Jacob Meyer de Haan (partly obscuring Milton’s imagined
biblical account of original sin, Lost Paradise), the central character Teufelsdröckh
refers to man as a “soul [clothed in] a garment of Flesh (or the Senses)” (Figure
7.1). As opposed to a poetic account of human tragedy based on the Bible by
Milton, the Carlyle is a philosophical meditation on the limits of science and
the possibility of sensing spirituality in nature. At the time, the book had yet
to be translated into French, but was familiar to artists through the writings of
Hippolyte Taine, and de Haan would have known it in his native Dutch.7 Though
ostensibly a book about clothing, costume is a metaphor for nature as a dress or
symbol of the spiritual (thus, the true title of Sartor Resartus in translation: The
Retailored Tailor). That Meyer de Haan, Gauguin’s alter ego and repeated subject,
has achieved the level of insight of Gauguin himself, grasping the importance of
the vitalist message, is suggested by the bulging brain and eyes of the genius and
seer that gazes intensely past the symbolic but unobserved apples.
From the vitalist perspective, energy or “Force” was enmeshed with the
nervous system on a purely biological basis among living beings, but on a more
general level, vitalists were concerned with questions concerning destiny and
universal principles. Carlyle’s most frequently quoted verse on vitalism is “Force,
Force, everywhere Force. We ourselves a mysterious Force in the center of that.
There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it. How else could it
rot? … this huge illimitable whirlwind of Force, which envelops us here; never
resting whirlwind, high as Immensity, old as Eternity.”8 For Gauguin the sensory
information brought to the organizing soul via the nerves was part of grander
systems of universal, natural energy. He maintained in “The Catholic Church
and Modern Times” that from the beginning of time matter in the form of
aggregates of atoms was fused with and animated by the soul, originally existing
in an energized, but as yet unformed universe. Several years earlier in Ancien
culte mahori (1892–3) Gauguin had described the very origins of Polynesian
cosmogony along vitalist lines: though the soul and body formed a duality the
soul animated matter.9
In his attempt to find a perfect resolution between science and spiritual life,
Gauguin also felt compelled to discuss evolutionism. While everything within
Figure 7.1 Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan, 1889, oil on wood, 31⅜ ×
20⅜ in (79.6 × 51.7 cm).
the body proceeds from the soul, so too does the soul survive the individual
physical body (and this could be anything organic from “monads to man”),
propelled onwards to a more complex organism through metempsychosis. It
is the gradually perfecting soul that dictates scientific evolutionism. Gauguin’s
perspective on transformism as progress is closer to Lamarck than Darwin.
In the Meyer de Haan portrait (Figure 7.1), the painter’s paw-like hand is a
reminder of a more primitive past life. Gauguin also sculpted a vitalist portrait
of Meyer de Haan in 1889 out of a rough-hewn tree trunk in which a green
branch sprouts from the side of his head, symbolic of the plant life attached to
human existence (Figure 7.2). On his other side a reddened visible ear suggests
the living human being and sensory attunement with the natural world. Behind
the apparent complexity of organized life were common origins and, in effect,
general overall unity throughout nature.
Gauguin felt evolutionism worked well with the Buddhist idea of improvement
of the soul to the point of nirvana. Indeed, another 1889 portrait of Meyer de
Haan, in which the Dutch artist’s brain appears to beat like a heart outside of
his skull, is entitled Nirvana (Figure 7.3). Here de Haan has renounced and
turned away from eroticism and materiality of the flesh true to the tenets of
Buddhism. His back is set resolutely against two nude females symbolic of lust
and the round of life and death. His syncretism is suggested in his relationship
to his Jewish beliefs—he wears a Jewish cap and holds a strap that June Hargrove
likens to that used in Jewish rituals.10 The vitalist inflection comes from de
Haan’s emergence from greenery. Sprouting from the same hillock is a third
nude female that is reductive and akin to a seed or an amoeba. She faces a liminal
space of evolution—the shore. In “The Catholic Church and Modern Times”
Gauguin had written that “the soul is like a seed that progresses.”11 She is a more
rudimentary being in the soul’s journey towards nirvana, whereas de Haan is
arriving.
Taking his cue from theosophy, a recent arrival on the spiritual scene in
France, religious texts such as the bible (which Gauguin quoted from often
in “The Catholic Church and Modern Times”) were books of wisdom with
recurring figure types in various religions representing right action, the moral
goal of fraternity, and harmony with universal principles and energies.12 The
specific stories within religious texts were best understood as parables, guides
to behavior, and not as true episodes. To further illuminate his syncretism,
Gauguin turned to the writings of evolutionist and historian of religion Gerald
Massey, whose interests extended even to the Maori with whom Gauguin lived.
Figure 7.2 Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Meyer de Haan, c. 1889–90, polychromed wood,
23 × 11¾ × 9 in. (58.4 × 29.8 × 22.8 cm).
Figure 7.3 Paul Gauguin, French, 1848–1903, Nirvana: Portrait of Meyer de Haan,
c. 1889–90, gouache and bronze paint on cotton, 8 × 11½ in (20.4 × 29.3 cm).
For Massey all religions were based on cosmological myths from the days
following the evolution of humans from “blue apes” in Africa and before they
eventually populated the planet.13 Though there is no evidence that Gauguin
knew Massey’s work before his second trip to Tahiti, Massey’s Natural Genesis
had been translated into French by 1888.
In his book Natural Genesis Massey wrote these words in a section on
“Equinoctial Christolatry,” which interested Gauguin the most: “Equinoctial
Christolatry has fanatically fought for its false theory, and waged incessant
warfare against nature and evolution …. The lie is sure to be found out or fall at
last.”14 Though Gauguin’s interest in religious stories as ultimately mythic were
aligned with Massey’s ideas and the artist was influenced by Natural Genesis
in its insistence on human embeddedness within the natural world and a
foregrounding of the primitive, evolving mind, he diverged from the author in
his vitalist and theosophical belief in a developing soul.
Theosophists attempted to address biological evolutionism to uphold the
idea that their version of the spiritual was a natural one and that the truth of
nature reached into psychic life. Madame Blavatsky, one of the best known of
the theosophists, believed that god entered all of material nature like so many
divine sparks, from which point evolution involved a series of emanations in
which the spiritual devolved into coarse nature, then reversed itself and evolved
towards the spiritual. God used natural processes which in the present moment,
as beings evolved from a material realm, included biological evolution. Her
book The Secret Doctrine of 1888 was subtitled The Synthesis of Science, Religion
and Philosophy.
Edouard Schuré, whose theosophical The Great Initiates was especially
influential upon French Symbolists, invoked science from the outset in his popular
syncretic work. He introduced his book with a quote from Claude Bernard on the
hope that one day physiologists, philosophers and poets will all speak the same
language.15 In the spirit of reconciliation between science and spiritual life that
was so much a part of the late nineteenth century, Schuré noted that though it
might seem that zoologists and anthropologists have done the greatest damage in
compromising the spiritual, in fact they have shown how intelligible the animal
world is. Evolutionism, for example, revealed the true divine plan.16
Gauguin’s concern with the interconnection of the spiritual with corporeal
science was also of interest to the Idéistes (some of whom were pantheists). They
shared with Gauguin a belief in the existence of an overarching cosmological
schema, “harmony” as an operative word, a dedication to social politics in
developing an art that could demonstrate unity, and the vehicle of color as key
to translating nature.17 The Idéistes along with Gauguin and other Symbolists
such as the “Wagnerian” circle with which Gauguin had been engaged believed
in the unique ability of the artist to penetrate and translate nature. The idea
that the artist was a neurologically superior being was, paradoxically, held by
materialist scientists like Herbert Spencer, Théodule Ribot, Pierre Janet and
Hippolyte Taine. Their interest in advanced states and abilities was grounded
in Lamarckian theory. The gifted artist had a higher ability to synthesize and
structure sensory experience. And, according to the Wagnerian Symbolist critic
Théodor de Wyzewa, the gifted painter of today is highly responsive to the life
of the soul (which absorbs sensations, organizes them into conceptions, then
swells with emotions as sensations and conceptions intertwine and multiply) by
selecting color and line to create “symphonic,” suggestive paintings.18 Gauguin
referred to himself as a “sensitive” and claimed for great artists an intellectual
capacity that provided “the vehicle of the most delicate and the most invisible
emotions in the brain.” He stated that his artistic center was “in his brain,” and
this is tied to a sense of the supernatural.
In “The Catholic Church and Modern Times” Gauguin felt optimistic that
humanity had progressed to the point that it was poised at the right moment to
embrace social renewal. His concern with social politics (fraternity, equality and
mutual aid) and social regeneration was part of the order of the day and taken up
in the 1890s by anarchists, socialists, emerging sociologists like Emile Durkheim,
Third Republic solidarists and Catholic socialists. His frequent foregrounding
of the importance of the term “harmony,” which he stated could be found in
democratic beliefs, as well as color, and his belief in the role of art as socially
galvanizing is close to anarchist rhetoric in particular. Leading anarchists like
Elisée Reclus believed artists had an important role to play in social politics.
For Gauguin social regeneration included an embrace of a developing spiritual
sensibility and awareness of the possibility of spiritual improvement or progress
within the phenomena of a natural world.
“The Catholic Church and Modern Times” hints at the true meaning of
Gauguin’s ground-breaking anti-naturalist painting Vision of the Sermon (Plate
1). In his text Gauguin refers to the account of Jacob wrestling with the angel, the
subject of the seemingly pious vision of the Breton women. That his perspective
on this biblical story was significant for the artist is underscored by the fact that
it was moved from the middle of his treatise to the opening parable when he
revised the text five years later. For Gauguin, the story is a metaphor of being
blind to the validity of spiritual life by believing the institutionalized Church was
religion, making the spiritual the enemy. Thus, as in the biblical scene, humanity
does not recognize what it is wrestling with (Jacob does not see the true value
and identity of the angel) and is not yet aware of what it needs to embrace (the
spiritual without organized religion).
In Vision of the Sermon Gauguin appears as a curé at lower right; beneath his
direction the entire Breton congregation has fallen into a trance. Together with
eyes closed they experience the collective vision of Jacob and the Angel in its
traditional biblical guise, but only one of these women appears to open her eyes,
and she stiffens and leans forward as if, in the current language of hypnosis, she
has gone from lethargy to catalepsy. This woman, who is near center, has been
identified as Gauguin’s young protégé Madeleine Bernard. Perhaps it is only
Madeleine who moves into the next state of awareness and sees the truth of the
vision through Gauguin. Invisible to all but her, a powerful tree branch filled
with vital energy courses through the scene, directly before the congregation.
At upper left the green shoots of the branch are intermingled with the torso and
arms of one of the figures and the cow, the only animal in the scene, is conjoined
with the tree. In later years, in the context of viewing Breton subjects by his
friend Armand Seguin, Gauguin recalled of Brittany, “This beautiful Brittany, I
too once painted it. I have gazed at its horizons, seeking the harmony between
human life and plant and animal life ….”19
The communal scene and collective vision of Vision of the Sermon suggests
flourishing mesmeric practices among France’s neurologists and psychiatrists in
the 1880s such as that found in the practice of Jules Bernard Luys and captured
in contemporaneous paintings like Les Fascinés de la Charité by Georges Moreau
de Tours (Reims: Le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims, 1889). In it Luys himself
surveys a community of hypnotized women. While certain neurologists believed
that hypnosis in general, though a valid medical practice, was only possible
among those with damaged neurological systems, others such as the eminent
psychiatrist Hippolyte Bernheim believed anyone was subject to hypnosis, just
as they were to a lesser but kindred practice, the power of suggestion. Thus,
Madeleine’s mesmeric awakening through Gauguin’s suggestive control might
be something that could be remembered.
Filiz Burhan has demonstrated that Gauguin’s friends Maurice Denis and
Emile Bernard went to psychiatric hospitals to study hypnotized women in
attitudes of prayer.20 And she has suggested that Gauguin’s important painting
is not just about observing a scene of group hypnosis; its very effect was meant
to mesmerize its audience. Several months after painting Vision of the Sermon
Gauguin wrote to a friend, “If I awaken in you a sense of the beyond it is perhaps
through a magnetic current of thought.”21 Although he never mentioned any
of the scientists then experimenting with hypnosis, earlier authors of interest
to Gauguin like Balzac and Baudelaire had brought up hypnotic states, and his
friend van Gogh was interested in mesmeric theory. The language of hypnotism
found its way into the work of many whom Gauguin knew such as his friend
Charles Morice (with whom the artist later collaborated), a writer who spoke of
the “revelatory” capacity of modern art—it could put the senses to sleep, opening
one up to the power of suggestion.22 In 1893 in the preface to the exhibition
catalog of Tahitian art work by Gauguin, Morice referred to the artist as a
“révélateur.” In his important article on Gauguin and Symbolism in 1891, which
elevated Gauguin’s status, the critic Aurier focused on Vision of the Sermon and
the “luminous” qualities of the artist’s work along with a “sense of the beyond,”
touching on hypnotic language. For example, Aurier claimed that the droning
voice of a priest is what has become visible as if through repetition of sound (one
means of inducing hypnosis) a collective vision has come about.23 Turning to the
“ideist’s” artist’s style (Gauguin included) Aurier remarked upon the need for an
exaggeration and distortion of form, line and color to express an idea.
As critics, poets and painters became generally familiar with the research
of hypnosis the idea that art could replace other means of “suggestion” was of
growing interest. Bergson, among others, had written of the potential of art to
attract attention, absorb through heightened response and put the active self to
sleep, leaving the viewer open to sympathy and suggestion. More directly on
this subject, Paul Souriau’s 1893 La Suggestion dans l’art was preceded by his
own writings dating back to the early 1880s. A colleague of Bernheim, Souriau
believed anyone could be open to suggestion through painting. Certainly
relevant to a painting like Vision of the Sermon, Souriau maintained that looking
at a scene of hypnosis in art creates a sympathetic response in the viewer. He
felt that effective art in general induced a state akin to daydreaming where
figures blurred and the mind drifted into an altered state where connections
could be made.24 For Gauguin, the message of vitalism and progressive rebirth
and humanity’s place within nature’s ongoing generative forces was one to be
delivered through a suggestive non-narrative art. In his 1891 article on Gauguin,
Aurier implied Gauguin’s communal message by claiming his was an art that
demanded walls (thus entering the public domain). A year later Aurier wrote
that art could be a synthesis of the soul of the artist and the soul of nature as a
divine new being capable of inspiring the communal.25
If we revisit Gauguin’s claims to “magnetic” control through art we might
consider his use of the intense red field of color in Vision of the Sermon. In
addition to hypnotic control through monotone commands, bright light and
color were typical means of inducing a mesmeric state among psychiatrists.
Luys himself used red, yellow, green and blue globes of glowing color to induce
both hypnosis and a given mood dependent upon the color used.26 The use
of a solar lamp to induce hypnosis used by Jean-Martin Charcot is remarked
upon in Alfred Binet and Charles Féré’s Animal Magnetism.27 (Note Meyer de
Haan’s unbreakable attraction to the yellow globe of the lamp in Figure 7.1.)
Both Charcot and Bernheim used colored wheels as well. Lt.-Colonel Albert
de Rochas d’Aiglun, who also experimented with hypnotic states, believed
that externalized sensibilities as one submitted to the power of suggestion
produced red or blue fields of color.28 Souriau confirmed the intense effect of
red in producing hypnosis and cited an article published in 1888 in the Revue
Scientifique in which the author claimed that red was referred to more than any
other color in popular literature regarding objects that attract the eye.29
Gauguin was well aware of the stir caused by his vermilion backdrop in
Vision of the Sermon and two important self-portraits in these early mature
years build on the brilliance of this color along with the equally compelling use
of saturated yellow. One is a Self-Portrait that was placed on the south wall of
the dining room opposite that of the portrait of Meyer de Haan (Figure 7.1) in
the Inn at le Pouldu where the artists stayed in 1889 (Figure 7.4). As is the case
with the de Haan, apples appear but are unobserved despite Gauguin’s biblically
inspired halo. And it is nature’s power that ultimately holds his attention. A (His)
disembodied hand holds a small snake whose thin tail curls upwards behind
the thumb alluding to the sin central to Milton; however, Gauguin’s attention
is drawn not here, but to the abstract blossoms and buoyant stems at lower left,
which are in fact found throughout the decorative scheme of the room. As in
Vision of the Sermon the ground of the self-portrait is once again brilliant red
as well as yellow. As a gift to Morice, who had helped organize a dinner and an
auction of Gauguin’s work just before his departure to Tahiti in 1891 and with
whom he would collaborate two years later, the artist appears in an unusual
costume in an 1894 self-portrait—part priest, part magus—against a brilliant
orange-red ground (Plate 5). His palette, which is revealed to his audience,
features abstract passages of the striking background color along with yellow.
Theories of color and hypnosis drew on new experiments in psychophysiology
in the late nineteenth century, particularly that of inhibition and dynamogeny
(corresponding to states of pain and pleasure), explored notably by Charles Henry
and Charles Féré. These kinds of experiments were known to have influenced
contemporary Neo-Impressionists.30 Maurice Denis, a Gauguin follower, cited
the importance of the work of Henry where aesthetics was concerned to the
Nabis as early as 1890.31
Psychophysiology was a relatively new science that was concerned with
neurological effects of sensory stimuli on the brain. Henry’s open lectures
and publications on the subject became well known to artists in Paris by the
mid-1880s. His most widely read publication Introduction à une esthétique
scientifique, was published in 1885. Dynamogenous effects of color excited
the nervous system (producing pleasure), while inhibitory effects caused
enervation (or pain). To measure the effects of color, not just on the eyes,
but the entire body, Charles Féré conducted experiments in which the
subject held a dynamometer with a hand grip. Red and orange were found
to create a heightened response, while blue and violet were inhibitory,
bringing a weakened response to muscles.32 These responses were deemed
Figure 7.4 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, 1889, oil on wood, overall: 31⅜316/1 × 20 ⅜16 in
3/16
(79.2 × 51.3 cm).

universal. Bernheim, Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard and Pierre Janet cited

dynamogenous or inhibitory effects as a key path to hypnotism.33 Thus a large
field of red or yellow or by contrast blue or violet, for example, could cause the
body to pass into a hypnotic state.
Psychophysiologists used the popular term “vibration” in describing how the
nerves respond to stimuli. Sensations move through the nerves as vibrations,
communicating with the brain. “Vibrations” referred to energy fields, such
as electromagnetism as well as light and color waves. Recently, scholars have
explored the intersection of scientifically understood waves of energy operating
within a matrix of “ether” with invisible occult fields of energy around 1900
under the umbrella of the vibratory.34 Such waves of energy included thought
waves or brain waves. This, along with the effect of color waves, added credibility
to the idea that the artist could “magnetize” through paintings. The multiple
waves of energy also reinforced the kind of synesthetic references common to
Gauguin’s language (“color alone is the language of the eye that listens, with
its suggestive qualities,” “the music of painting”). Gauguin approved of this
statement about his work by Achille Delaroche: “Treated in this way color
is, like music, a vibration and, like music, attains what is most general and
consequently what is vaguest in nature—its inner force.”35 Through color the
artist could communicate the vitalist Force of the natural world in a way that
was emotive (like music) rather than deadened and descriptive. Moreover, the
growing literature on vibratory waves including thought waves entered the
arena of the communal. Not only was Henry interested in universal laws of
harmony, but he and Féré had political concerns as well. They were interested
in social order, promoting solidarism.36 They agreed that art itself could convey
the message of communal life and advocated the writings of Jean-Marie Guyau.
Guyau opened his book L’Art au point de vue sociologique (1887) with these
words: “The transmission of nervous vibrations and related mental states
is constant among all living beings, but especially those that are grouped in
societies or families ….”37 Sympathetic vibrations took place among members
of society like the vibrating strings of a musical instrument. Guyau stated that
the “artist-genius” could come up with an entirely novel response to nature’s
forces—an art newly born (as he put it) and divinely formed that could direct
society by vibratory means. The aesthetic phenomena of painting would expand
from one person to the next like a “vibrating, magnetized wire.” Even tribal
populations could be included according to Guyau. The artist should use the
hypnotic potential of art to form a new and communal sacred art. Guyau cited
the psychological research of some of France’s leading scientists such as Pierre

Janet and Charles Richet to support his thesis.
The scientific and the occult were on equal footing at the First International
Congress on Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism, which took place in
August of 1889 in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle in Paris. This
overlapped with a Congress of Physiological Aesthetics. At the congress on
hypnotism Bernheim promoted the importance of understanding the concept
of “suggestion” without sleep-like hypnosis. The role of the “hypnotizer” here
would be to prepare the patient by creating conditions that would be amenable to
a state of suggestion. Bernheim and his followers were open to lay practitioners
and it is presumably his school of Nancy that encouraged the Symbolist interest
in the scientific possibility of art as a conveyer of the idea.38
When Gauguin departed for Tahiti in 1891 he was already familiar with
the tropics through early years as a sailor and time spent in Martinique. He
would have been well aware of the richness and fecundity of tropical nature and
from a vitalist perspective might have known of that great mid-century vitalist
Alexander von Humboldt’s advice that the future for artists was in the tropics.
Humboldt’s enormously popular five-volume Kosmos (1845–62), published
when Gauguin was a child, was largely based on his travels though South
America (where Gauguin had family and himself had lived). Humboldt’s aim was
to present the unity of nature “animated by internal forces”; he was dedicated to
understanding the interdependencies of nature from the perspective of universal
laws of harmony.
The composition of Vision of the Sermon was reprised in 1891 in Upa Upa
(Fire Dance) (Figure 7.5). Here a powerful phallic tree again courses diagonally
through the composition and a brilliant field of red now corresponds to a leaping
fire. Tahitians dance erotically or give themselves to lovemaking. From 1891
forward trees, branches, plants, and seeds often intermix with scenes of Tahitian
eroticism, thus exploring the intersection of vitalism in plant and human life, the
interior life of humanity and the internal reality of nature.
Sartor Resartus was translated into French between 1895 and 1897 and
published in the pages of Mercure de France, a periodical that Gauguin read
in Tahiti. He must have begun to think again about his conversations with his
friend Meyer de Haan (now deceased) for he created a woodcut in 1897 entitled
Memory of Meyer de Haan (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago), and it is now
that he began to write the vitalist “The Catholic Church and Modern Times.”
When he revised his treatise in 1902 he created a final grand oil painting of
Figure 7.5 Paul Gauguin, Upa Upa (Fire Dance), 1891, oil on canvas, 28¾ × 36¼ in.
(73 × 92 cm).
his old companion filled with syncretic references to evolution and Buddhism
(Contes Barbares, Essen: Museum Folkwang, W. 625). Both portraits suggest
that when Gauguin wrote his treatise and created his magnificent mural-sized
painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
of 1897 (Figure 7.6), then introduced his 1902 manuscript variation with
these very questions (followed by the account of Jacob and the Angel), his
philosophical discussions on vitalism with Meyer de Haan were constantly
on his mind.
Gauguin claimed that he did not expect to live beyond painting Where Do
We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? although he survived for
another six years. Regardless, he considered it his greatest work of art and is
worth considering alongside his treatise “The Catholic Church and Modern
Times.” The artist specified that the keynote color of the painting was a “constant
blue” or veronese green, the latter of which Henry had identified as especially
painful to the body.39 Hypnotist and medical practioner Dr. L.-R. Regnier and
Luys identified blue globes of color used in hypnosis as inspiring a dark mood,
even terror.40 Despite the artist’s writings about brotherhood, the figures in his
painting appear to exist in their own world, barely acknowledging one another,
if at all. In this way, Gauguin’s painting appears dystopian not unlike Seurat’s
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte. However, here the figures exist
in the past or present or may be spiritual or mythical, thus operate at different
levels of the worldly and otherworldly. Above all, the painting demonstrates
Gauguin’s philosophy of humanity’s place within nature and the ultimate hope
of escape from the difficulty of here and now (in the Buddhist sense) and release
through nirvana.
Gauguin owned photographs of the Buddhist temple Borobudur from which
two of the seated female figures at right in the foreground appear to derive.41
Borobudur was a mandala in which the visitor makes his or her way from level to
level as if one symbolically hopes to reach the state of liberation from rebirth. In
1885 the hidden lower level had been unearthed and here were found low relief
carvings symbolizing the desires of the worldly. I argue that the lower level of
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? generally recalls
this idea of the carved reliefs from the lower sections of Borobudur. Gauguin’s
figures are bound to the earth and recline or sit upon it. The relentless cycle from
birth to death is here as are the creatures of the world. Desire is here in the form
of a lovely woman at left closely related to a painting done around the same time
named Vairumati (Figure 7.7). This mortal, according to Polynesian mythology,
was beloved of the war god Oro (god of art during times of peace) and through
him gave birth to a son, after which she became immortalized. Gauguin may have
been drawn to this myth based on its similarity to Christianity and he recounts
it in Noa Noa.42 The growing importance of Oro in Tahiti among the Polynesian
pantheon of gods, promoted through the elitist Arioi society in the eighteenth
century, was considered a precursor to monotheism by some. Gauguin may
have been drawn to the extremes of the Arioi society in which infanticide had
been practiced to a great degree and sexuality was a central part of their rituals.
Vairumati may also have functioned for Gauguin at another level. According to
Gauguin, she had dwelled on the island of Bora Bora, Gauguin’s “cythera,” which
he had personally witnessed being annexed by the French in 1895. Of the two
“Borobudur” women facing the viewer, one is dressed in a chemise and skirt
according to the ways of the West, but she is contrasted with another female (or
perhaps her subjective twin) who lifts her loincloth and casts a sly glance towards
the audience. The latter figure enters into a dialogue with Western modernist art
Figure 7.6 Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We
Going?, 1897–8, oil on canvas, 54¾ × 147½ in. (139.1 × 374.6 cm).
for her pose is closer to that of the foreground female figure in Manet’s Dejeuner
sur l’herbe than to the figure at Borobudur. The concerns of the figures in the
lower half of the painting are earthly ones.
The figure who reaches for fruit and the child who takes a bite reference
Christian paradise and the Fall. The central figure for Gauguin is also treated as
an ordinary human engaged in “daily existence” or a “man of instinct wondering
what all this [life] means.”43 Evolutionism is here as well, most notably in the
heavy bodied transitional figure looking back in space. She scratches her head
as if to draw from it the dawn of human thought, watching two clothed figures
representing knowledge with “astonishment.”44 With the exception of the
diminutive nude in a shell or flower (also part of evolution or the transition of
the soul from the botanical world to that of flesh) on the bank of the river, the
figures at the top of the painting stand or stroll and form a similar “mudra” with
their hands. This gesture, in which the thumb and the index finger nearly touch
was identified by Gauguin in the context of the “idol” (a combination of Tahitian
goddess Hina and a Hindu goddess on a lotus base) as a gesture towards “the
Beyond.”45 A woman dressed in blue casually replicates this gesture as she rests
her hand against her breast and casts a glance back at the statue. The “two figures
dressed in purple [who] confide their thought to one another,”46 including “their
note of anguish caused by … science”47 and “dare to think of their destiny”48
appear to be an initiate and a novice. The novice carefully observes the gesture
of the older capped initiate and attempts to imitate it. It is that of the idol. These
figures seek nirvana.
Despite her hopeful gesture, the very fact that an idol exists represents for
Gauguin a “misunderstanding” of spiritual life, as was the case with Joseph
misunderstanding the angel. As Gauguin wrote to his friend Fontainas in
reference to this painting, … [the idol represents an] “imaginary consolation for
Figure 7.7 Paul Gauguin, Vairumati, 1897, oil on canvas, 28¾ × 37 in. (73 × 94 cm).
our sufferings in what [it] suggests of the hazy and incomprehensible before the
mystery of our origin and our future.”49 In the same letter Gauguin underscored
the musical role of color writing, “Color which is a vibration the same as music
is, reaches to what is most general and therefore vaguest in nature: its interior
force,” echoing the words of Delaroche.50
The symbolic early journey of the soul can be found at upper left and
right. At upper left is a bud and open blossom with the ovary or style visible
and at upper right is a mammal joined to a branch. Throughout the painting
purau branches interweave like tentacles or like the elongated stems and
vines that wind through the de Haan and Gauguin murals of the Pouldu
Inn. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle asks “Oh Whence—Oh Heaven, Whither?”
and responds: “The answer lies around, written in all colors and motions,
uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-
voiced harmonious Nature … we sit in a boundless Phantasmagoria and
Dream-grotto ….”51
Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
responds to Aurier’s advice that the artist use walls [create murals]. He employs
an enervating color field that compels the viewer(s) to take note of the message
regarding the sorrows of life and then to take heed of the pervasive Force of
vital nature that sweeps nature and humanity along as potentially regenerative,
and which can be used to elevate oneself to a state of nirvana, if not in this life
perhaps in the next. Gauguin reiterated throughout his treatise that natural or
scientific laws and the spiritual were completely compatible. Though science and
religious institutions on their own were sterile, he expressed hope that science
could find the right path and accept the truth of the soul.
Notes
1 Gauguin, “The Catholic Church and Modern Times” is unpublished, but can be
read in the original script on CD-ROM in Gauguin’s text “Miscellaneous Things,”
of which “The Catholic Church and Modern Times” forms one part, in “Gauguin
écrivain: Ancien culte mahorie, Noa Noa, Divers choses” (Paris: Musée d’Orsay,
Réunion des musées nationaux, 2003), 141–59, 168. CD-ROM.
2 The book that made Flourens one of the most revered scientists in France was
Recherches Expérimentales sur les propriétés et les fonctions du système nerveux
(Paris: Chez Crevot, 1824). Among his subsequent posts was Perpetual Secretary of
the Academy of Sciences.
3 Gauguin, “The Catholic Church and Modern Times,” 152v. “… la science
anatomique et physiologique, semble confirmer la doctrine des animistes qui
considèrent l’âme comme le principe générateur de l’organisme. L’âme en effet
admise comme résidant originairement dans cette cellule ovulaire et vivifiante
du noeud vital, peut être considérée comme l’agent formateur d’instinct
embryonnaire de cet organisme, comme l’agent d’adaptation …” [italics Gauguin].
4 Ibid., 153r, “… le coeur lui-même d’où procède la circulation sanguine aussi bien
que les autres organes intérieurs à fonction diverse, n’agissant en leur fonction
spéciale que sous l’influence nerveuse musculaire convergeant au noeud vital, à
l’âme qui eu est le principe central d’animation, de vivification.”
5 For histories on vitalism and the legacy of Montpellier see Elizabeth Williams,
A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Burlington:
Ashgate Publishing, 2003); Pascal Nouvel, ed., Repenser le Vitalisme: Historire et
philosophie du vitalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011); Roselyne
Rey, Naissance et développement du vitalisme en France de la deuxième moitiè
du 18e siècle à la fin du Premier Empire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000); C.

Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1965); J. E. Lesch, Science
and Medicine in France, the Emergence of Experimental Physiology, 1790–1855
(Cambridge: Harvard, 1984).
6 On Neo-Vitalism at the end of the nineteenth century see Frederick Burwick and
Paul Douglass, eds., The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Oliver Botar and Isabel Wünsche,
Biocentrism and Modernism (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2011).
7 In the year he was appointed professor of aesthetics and art history at the École des
Beaux-Arts Taine published L’Idéalisme anglais: Etude sur Carlyle (Paris: Germer
Baillère, 1864). Jan Zürcher, translator of Sartor Resartus into Dutch, had been
instrumental in promoting de Haan’s most important painting before he met
Gauguin, Uriёl Acosta (1888). See June Hargrove, “Gauguin’s Maverick Sage,” in
Visions: Gauguin and His Time, Van Gogh Studies 3, ed. Chris Stolwijk (Amsterdam:
Van Gogh Museum, 2010), 95.
8 Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero of Divinity,” in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic
in History [1841], eds. Michael Goldberg (Los Angeles: Uninversity of California
Press, 1993), 9.
9 Gauguin, Ancien Culte Mahorie, [1893], ed. René Huyghe, facs. edn. (Paris: P. Bérès,
1951), 32.
10 Hargrove, “Gauguin’s Maverick Sage,” in Visions: Gauguin and His Time, 100.
11 Gauguin, “The Catholic Church and Modern Times,” 149v.
12 Knowledge of theosophy was pervasive among the French avant-garde. Among
Gauguin’s friends, Émile Schuffenecker and Paul Sérusier were particularly interested
in theosophy. On the popularization of theosophy in France see Jocelyn Godwin,
Beginnings of Theosophy in France (London: Theosophical History Center, 1989).
13 Gauguin owned a pamphlet with a French translation of extracts from the final
chapter “Natural Genesis and Typology of Equinoctial Christolatry” from volume
two, section 13 of Massey’s book The Natural Genesis: or, a Second Part of a Book of
the Beginnings, Containing an Attempt to Recover and Reconstitute the Lost Origines
of the Myths and Mysteries, Types and Symbols, Religion and Language, with Egypt for
the Mouthpiece and Africa as the Birthplace (London: Williams and Norgate, 1883).
Gauguin may have known that the second volume of Massey’s earlier text on religion
and evolution, A Book of the Beginnings (London: Williams and Norgate, 1881), had
as a subtitle Egyptian Origines in the Hebrew, Akkado-Assyrian and Maori.
14 Gerald Massey, Natural Genesis [1883] (New York: Cosimo, 2007), II:503.
15 Edouard Shuré, Les Grands Initiés [1889] (Paris: Perrin, 1923), VII.
16 Ibid., XXII.
17 See Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 177–9.
18 Téodor de Wyzewa, “Notes sur la peinture wagnérienne et le salon de 1886,” La

Revue wagnérienne 2, no. 4 (May 8, 1886): 108.
19 Paul Gauguin, “Armand Seguin,” Mercure de France XII (February 1895): 222–4,
223. “Cette belle Bretagne, je l’ai peinte autrefois, j’en ai scruté les horizons
cherchant l’accord de la vie humaine avec la vie animale et végétale ….”
20 Filiz Burhan, Vision and Visionaries: Nineteenth Century Psychological Theory,
the Occult Sciences, and the Formation of the Symbolist Aesthetic in France (Ph.D.
diss., Princeton: Princeton University, 1979. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms
International, 1979), 319.
21 “… si je suscité chez vous le sentiment du au-delà, c’est peut-être par ce courant
magnétique de la pensée …,” quoted in Arsène Alexandre, Paul Gauguin: Sa Vie et
le sens de son oeuvre (Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1930), 50. And see Burhan, 346, n. 38,
which notes the date of 1888.
22 Charles Morice, La littérature de tout à l’heure (Paris: Perrin, 1889), 33–4.
23 Albert Aurier, “Le Symbolisme en peinture—Paul Gauguin,” [1891] in Les Oeuvres
Posthumes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1893), 206.
24 Paul Souriau, La Suggestion dans l’art (Paris: F. Alcon, 1893), 202.
25 Aurier, “Les Peintures symbolistes,” [1892] in Les Oeuvres Posthumes (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1893), 303.
26 Jerome Schneck, “The School of the Hospital de la Charité in the History of
Hypnosis,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 7, no. 3 (1952):
277.
27 Alfred Binet and Charles Féré, Animal Magnetism (New York: D. Appleton and Co.,
1888), 88.
28 Sophie Lachapelle, Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism
to Psychical Research and Metaphysics in France, 1853–1931 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2011), 57.
29 Souriau, La Suggestion dans l’art, 25.
30 Martha Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 124–46.
31 “[Esthetics] se precise et s’assied, grâce aux recherches pratique de Charles Henry
…” Maurice Denis, Théories 1890–1910: du symbolism et de Gauguin vers un nouvel
ordre classique (Paris: Rouart et Wertelin, 1920), 8.
32 Charles Féré, Sensation et mouvement (Paris: F. Alcan, 1887).
33 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 239.
34 This growing area of research includes Robert Brain’s, The Pulse of Modernism:
Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2015); Linda Henderson’s “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and
the Ether of Space,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science
and Technology, Art, and Literature, eds. Linda Henderson and Bruce Clarke
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 126–50; Anthony Enns and Shelley
Trower’s, Vibratory Modernism (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013); Shelley Trower’s
Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: The
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012).
35 Achille Delaroche, “Concerning the Painter Paul Gauguin, from an Aesthetic Point
of View,” reproduced in Gauguin, Avant et après (Gauguin’s Intimate Journals),
trans. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: Dover, 1996), 19.
36 See Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture,
176.
37 Jean-Marie Guyau, L’Art au point de vue sociologique [1888], new edition 2001
(Paris: Fayard, 2001), 16.
38 On the 1889 congress see Francois Duyckaerts, “1889: Un Congrès houleux sur
l’hypnotisme,” Archives de Psychologie 57 (1989), 53–68. On the relationship
between suggestion and hypnotism see Hippolyte Bernheim, New Studies in
Hypnotism [1891], trans. Richard Sandor (New York: International Universities
Press, Inc., 1980).
39 The keynote references were in a letter to Daniel de Monfreid of February, 1898.
Gauguin’s Letters from the South Seas (New York: Dover, 1992), 62.
40 See Schneck, “The School of the Hospital de la Charité in the History of Hypnosis,”
and L.-R. Regnier, Hypnotisme et croyances anciennes (Paris: Progrès Medicale,
1891), XVII.
41 George T. M. Shackelford, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are
We Going?” in Gauguin Tahiti, eds. George T. M. Shackelford and Claire Frèches-
Thory (Boston: MFA Publications, 1988), 108.
42 Gauguin, Noa Noa, the Tahitian Journal, trans. O. F. Theis (New York: Dover, 1985),
50–4.
43 Gauguin, letter to Charles Morice, July 1901, in Paul Gauguin, Letters to His Wife
and Friends, ed. Maurice Malingue, trans. Henry J. Stenning (Boston: Museum of
Fine Arts Publications, 2003), 227.
44 Gauguin, Letters from the South Seas, 62.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Malingue, ed., Paul Gauguin, Letters to His Wife, 227.
48 Gauguin, Letters from the South Seas, 62.
49 Gauguin to André Fontainas, March 1899, in Paul Gauguin, Letters to His Wife and
Friends, ed. Malingue, 217.
50 Ibid., 216.
51 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus [1833], ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor
(Oxford: University Press, 1987), 42.
8
“All men could be Buddhas”1: Paul Gauguin’s

Marquesan Diptych
June E. Hargrove
University of Maryland
Paul Gauguin moved in September of 1901 from Tahiti to the Marquesas

Islands, where he manifested a last burst of creativity. The coherency and
power of his productivity are remarkable given the deteriorating state of his
health and the upheaval of relocation. Confronted with his own mortality,
spitting blood, and morphine dependent, Gauguin was driven to assert what
he regarded as his rightful place in the history of art, “a new link in the chain
already begun,” fearful that his contributions risked being forgotten. To remedy
this predicament he poured what energy he could muster into communicating
through word and image “to establish the right to dare all” before he died in
May 1903.2
The deceptive simplicity of the Marquesan paintings has led viewers to
admire them for their idyllic beauty rather than their creative legacy. Gone
are the arcane Tahitian titles—in fact, Gauguin supplied almost no titles at all
for them, encouraging the notion that they can be taken at face value. Many
authors interpret these scenes as depictions of everyday life, ignoring the odd
juxtapositions and allusions to Christian subjects. Moreover, Gauguin endowed
compositions from this period with prototypes so conspicuous that they raise
further questions about the substance as much as the style of his paintings.
Though this emulation has been attributed to flagging creativity, the deliberate
referencing of other artists should be read as a strategy to insert himself in the
continuum of the Western tradition. His sources are more than an exercise
in borrowed motifs; their metamorphoses constitute a benchmark for his
accomplishments and a blueprint of his creative development.
This essay examines two enigmatic paintings from 1902—Bathers and

Marquesan Man in Red Cape (Plates 6 and 7)—in the context of Gauguin’s prolific
contemporary writings. His prose presents ideas that pertain to his aesthetic and
metaphysical concerns at the end of his life, and each painting encodes aspects of
his artistic and religious beliefs. Each painting refers to a specific prototype that
endows the composition with a self-conscious reflection on his creative process:
the Bathers is the natural man who protests conventions; the Marquesan Man
in Red Cape is the ideal prophet who transcends the worldly. While Gauguin
grounds the identities of the principal subjects in the biblical figures of Adam and
Christ, the subjects are informed by his universalizing theosophical beliefs. The
works function as parables, for which his writings provide clues to decipher their
complex form and content. Although the canvases have twice been associated,
the implications of this union have yet to be examined.
Bathers
By the time that Gauguin reached the Marquesas, he had abandoned Polynesian
titles and visual prototypes for his pictures, and it is not clear when and how his late
works were named. The majority of them received titles in the 1903 posthumous
exhibition organized by Ambroise Vollard, but no evidence indicates how his
Parisian dealer selected them. Most are little more than descriptive labels. Nor
are these titles firmly attached to the works. Many of the current titles are recent
attempts to clarify the ostensible subject of the paintings.
Now called Bathers, this rustic tableau was perhaps the Scène de paysans in
the 1903 show.3 The bland name reflects the absence of any apparent activity. The
group suggests a family, with a boy standing by his father. The nude child holds
a small bird with a red head. To the right and further back are two women, one
seated and one standing, partially cropped by the edge of the painted surface.
The latter has been associated in Gauguin’s oeuvre with pregnant women.4 A
preparatory drawing for the composition, Tahitian Family, shows her in a
different grouping, where, especially on the drawing’s verso, she does look
pregnant.5 This seems less apparent in the final painting.
The mood of the Bathers is pastoral, one of fertility and lushness that has
an earthy flavor, accentuated by such details as the swollen udder of the she-
goat. The setting recalls an earlier painting, Landscape with Two Goats (1897,
St. Petersburg: Hermitage Museum, W. 562), which is repeated as a night scene in
“All men could be Buddhas”: Paul Gauguin’s Marquesan Diptych 205
watercolor in Noa Noa (Fragrance).6 This narrative presents a fictive account of

Gauguin’s first stay in Tahiti, written after the fact. During his Parisian sojourn in
1894–5, Gauguin and his close friend Charles Morice collaborated on a second
version. When he returned to Tahiti with this manuscript, he inserted more of
his own images and additional poems by the Symbolist poet. His watercolor
precedes Morice’s joyous verses “Vivo” (the Polynesian reed pipe), which
describe a man by the sea in daylight, amidst flowers, as in the Bathers.
The stance of the central figure in this picture unabashedly imitates the pose
used by Cézanne for several images of bathers. Gauguin probably knew all of
Cézanne’s versions of the Bathers first hand, but his composition most resembles
the 1877 Bathers at Rest (now in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia). This
composition likewise inspired the standing woman on the right. Cézanne
repeated his painting as a lithograph (Figure 8.1) in 1898 at the behest of Vollard,
who might have sent an impression to Gauguin. The lithograph, rather than
Cézanne’s painting, is Gauguin’s most likely source.7 The latter surely realized
that the older artist intended the print for widespread diffusion as a gesture of
protest, since the French state had recently excluded the Bathers at Rest from
the Impressionist canvases grudgingly accepted out of the Gustave Caillebotte
bequest for the Luxembourg Museum.8 Gauguin had been in Paris in 1894–5,
during the height of the scandal, which epitomized the narrow-minded thinking
of the academicians. Léon Gérôme wrote a diatribe against the Caillebotte legacy,
concluding that “there would have to be a great slackening of public morality for
such filth to be accepted.”9 In the Racontars de Rapin Gauguin mentioned the
Caillebotte collection just before his scathing observation that “the Luxembourg
was a house of prostitution.”10 His wrath was exacerbated by the concurrent
rejection of his Tahitian masterpiece Ia Orana Maria (We Greet the Mary) by
the same institution.11
For Gauguin, artists who worked in the academic style, such as Gérôme,
whose paintings of nude women lolling in the pseudo-sensuality of orientalizing
harems, sold their soul for official and commercial gain. That moral
condemnation from them should be leveled at modern artists, like Cézanne
(and himself), whose subjects were elevated by their creative sincerity, infuriated
him. He recognized that it was the style rather than the degree of exposed flesh
at issue. He saw attitudes toward dress in European culture as hypocritical for
suppressing what was natural in human sexuality, and this served him as a
metaphor for the artificial conventions of Western art. He responded to what he
perceived as reactionary canons of the academy in his words as well as in his art.
Figure 8.1 Paul Cézanne, The Bathers (Large Plate), 1898, colored lithograph, 19 ×
24¾ in. (48.2 × 62.9 cm).
In particular, vehement charges against the perverse and detrimental aspects of

European clothing are prominently aired in Noa-Noa:
Among peoples that go naked, as among animals, the difference between the
sexes is less accentuated than in our climates. Thanks to our cinctures and
corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an
anomaly ….12
These ideas are informed by Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, fashionable

among the Symbolists from the late 1880s.13 For instance, in the chapter
entitled “Adamitism” (so named for the religious sect who went naked),
clothing, “a consequence of Man’s Fall,” symbolizes the process of concealing
and revealing the Divine. This metaphor for earthly and spiritual concerns
pertains directly to the degrees of nudity versus clothing that are represented
in the Bathers.14
Carlyle’s “philosophy of clothes” provides the vehicle to seek an allusive

meaning to life in the face of the collapse of the philosophical systems of the
past. In “The World out of Clothes,” his anti-hero Diogenes Teufelsdröckh
purports “to expound the moral, political, even religious Influences of
Clothes.”15 Teufelsdröckh’s cynicism perverts the old adage “clothes make the
man.” Expressed in the language of a skeptic, the treatise is peppered with
observations displaying an irony worthy of Gauguin himself. Satirizing an
imaginary “Dandiacal Sect” in Ireland, whose “Monastic Vow of Chastity”
is “rigidly enforced,” Teufelsdröckh documents its corresponding sartorial
affectations,
innumerable skirts, lappets, and irregular wings of all cloths …; through the
labyrinthic intricacies of which their bodies are introduced by some unknown
process. It is fastened together by a multiplex combination of buttons, thrums,
and skewers; to which frequently is added a girdle of leather ….16
Gauguin transposes Carlyle’s philosophy in his 1903 anti-memoirs, Avant et

Après, when he attacked art critics, “The Critic out of Clothes” (“La critique
déshabillée”), playing on the previously mentioned chapter, “The World out of
Clothes” (“Le Monde déshabillé”).17
Ever since H. R. Rookmaaker drew attention to the French translation of
Carlyle’s treatise in the Mercure de France, 1895–7, scholars have mined this
text for its relevance to Gauguin.18 Rookmaaker demonstrates how significant
the subject and style of Sartor Resartus had become for the painter by 1897,
when he undertook “l’Eglise Catholique et les temps modernes” in Diverses
Choses, the manuscript that follows Noa-Noa.19 In this essay Gauguin aims
to reconcile modern scientific knowledge with his religious interpretation
of the meaning of life, stemming from his understanding of the Bible.20 He
grapples with his beliefs in conjunction with his art in this abstruse but
rewarding text, which finds its counterpart in his large-scale painting Where
Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Figure 7.5).21 He
envisioned this mural as a summation of his thoughts on art, religion and
the cycle of life. Granted the visual and verbal ruminations on life, death and
the fate of the soul were precipitated by the death of his beloved daughter
Aline in 1897, the underlying ideas had been germinating in his thoughts
for a decade. They were to intensify throughout his art and his writings until
his own death in 1903. The program of the 1897 canvas directly informs the
works of 1902.
In 1902, as Gauguin painted the Bathers, he was transforming “l’Eglise

Catholique” into l’Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme.22 Written as the artist was
locked in bitter disputes with the neighboring missionaries in the Marquesas,
l’Esprit Moderne digresses into a tirade against the Catholic Church, which
among other things he blamed for destroying the local culture. Conspicuous
evidence of this, in Gauguin’s mind, was the missionary dress code.
Gauguin’s own flagrant disregard for the proprieties of dress was notorious.
If not working around the studio in the nude, he was usually clad in a flowered
pareu, like the red and yellow one barely visible behind the white towel in the
Bathers. Gauguin’s behavior provoked the local authorities, who harassed him
relentlessly from the outset of his Oceanic project. Already a decade earlier in
Mataiea, on Tahiti, the gendarme Jean-Pierre Claverie (alas, soon to arrive on
Hiva Oa) had fined the artist for “public indecency” when he was caught bathing
in a “state of nature.”23
In the Bathers Gauguin mocks his adversaries by further hiding the bright loin
cloth under a cloak of false modesty. The 1892 painting of Eve, Parau na te varua
(Washington: National Gallery of Art, W. 458), introduces the act of covering
her sex with a white cloth to denote the Fall. Now the artist takes the story a
step further. In shame, Adam hides not his genitals but the cover he is forced
to take after the Fall.24 The adoring gaze of the naked little boy accentuates the
artifice inherent in the adult’s gesture of covering his sex. His bird alludes to the
European goldfinch, a traditional attribute of the Christ-child that symbolizes
the Resurrection (Figure 8.2).25 Christian iconography here underscores the
innocence of childhood as a point of departure in the cycle of life, as well as
Gauguin’s overarching theme of regeneration.
The anti-clericalism that permeates Gauguin’s attitudes, however heartfelt,
is characteristic of a larger ideological conflict endemic to the Third Republic,
the separation of Church and State. In Gauguin’s case, this anti-clericalism
did not foster a sympathy for the Republican establishment, which he saw
as equally repressive. His contrarian streak made opposition to colonial
authorities inevitable. He found himself in the paradoxical situation of
advocating ferociously anti-colonial sentiments at the same time he was a de
facto colonist.26 As strongly as he may have come to identify with the native
population at the end of his life, he was irrevocably a colonizing “other” in
their land.
The autobiographical and the artistic are never far from Gauguin’s political
and spiritual beliefs. Bathers demonstrates how these levels mutually reinforce
Figure 8.2 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Madonna of the Goldfinch, c. 1767/70, oil on
canvas, 2413⅜16 × 1913⅜16 in. (63.1 × 50.3 cm).
each other in his art. Not only is Gauguin’s painting an homage to a venerated
master, it protests against the petty conventions of the academic tradition that
censored Cézanne’s (and his own) art, at the same time it vindicates his hostility
to bourgeois moral pretensions, epitomized in the strictures of the Church.
Man in the Red Cape
In contrast to the Bathers (Plate 6), the Marquesan Man in Red Cape (Plate 7)
appears almost excessively clothed. His costume is out of kilter with the dress
code in Polynesia for either ethnic group, European or Marquesan. To the left
behind the man are two shrouded figures whose path is obscured by rocks,
diagonally opposite a dog and a bird, silhouetted against a flowering shrub,
occupy the lower right corner, probably a hutu plant. These pairs aside, the
essence of the composition bears a striking resemblance to William Holman
Hunt’s The Light of the World (Figure 8.3). Although Gauguin was influenced by
the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement with regard to the decorative
arts, he demonstrated little interest in Pre-Raphaelite painting. Thus the choice
of Hunt’s image of Christ as a prototype is an anomaly.
Hunt took inspiration for the composition from Revelations (3.20): “Behold,
I stand at the door, and knock ….” The title stems from the Gospel according
to John (8.12), where Christ states: “I am the Light of the World.”27 Holding a
lantern, Christ knocks at the door, a metaphor for asking the viewer to allow
him into her/his soul, to be embraced in faith. He will thus illuminate the path
to salvation. Wearing a gem-studded cloak and a crown entwined with thorns,
Hunt’s soulful Christ stands preoccupied at the overgrown door. Behind him lies
a dark forest with a distant stream; at his feet are fallen apples, which connote
the fall from paradise. By the end of the century, the image, dispersed through
countless reproductions the world over, occupied the status of a Protestant icon.
The role of the imagination in painting was a point of contention between
Gauguin and van Gogh. Gauguin’s Portrait of Vincent Van Gogh Painting
Sunflowers (1888, Amsterdam: Van Gogh Musuem) confronts how much he
deplored van Gogh’s dependency on the actual motif.28 This issue further divided
them in their respective approaches to religious painting. After deprecating
Gauguin’s Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889, West Palm Beach, Florida:
Norton Museum of Art) to his brother, Theo, Vincent held up The Light of the
World as a model of sacred art.29 For Vincent, Hunt’s fidelity to nature anchored
the painting’s overall symbolism in truth. Such a comparison, one presumably
communicated to Gauguin in a now lost letter, would have stung his sensitivities
to the quick.30 The obsessive realism of Hunt’s technique would have repelled
him more keenly than the attachment to nature he decried in van Gogh. Basing
his composition on Hunt’s painting may have been his ultimate riposte in
the debate. The specter of Arles haunted Gauguin, who attempted to ease his
Figure 8.3 William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World, 1860, print after by
William Henry Simmons. Line and stipple engraving on ivory chine mounted on off-
white plate paper, 35½ × 20¼ in. (90.1 × 51.2 cm).
conscience in the final months of his life through his laudatory (but self-serving)
recollections of the Dutch painter in Avant et Après.31
Like Hunt’s Christ, Gauguin’s Marquesan man, clad in a blue tunic and a
red cape, stands at dusk in a clearing beside a stream in the forest—not unlike
the European landscape in Hunt’s composition. Both men gaze pensively at the
viewer. The colorful orientalizing belt worn by the figure in Gauguin’s painting
is for a Polynesian man as elaborate an accessory as the jeweled clasp of Christ’s
mantle in the Hunt. He has a woman’s flowing hairstyle—as does Christ—and
white frangipani flowers in lieu of a crown, both attributes deemed sexually
ambiguous.32 Whereas Christ is poised to tap on the door, the Polynesian holds
a few green leaves; his gesture is as curious as his apparel is odd.
When exhibited by Vollard in 1903, the work may have been the picture
entitled Tahitiens sous des arbres.33 The figure with his long hair and exotic attire
gave rise to the impression that he represents a shaman or magician, hence the
1949 title, the Sorcerer of Hiva Oa.34 The piece of leafy green that he holds has
been connected with herbal healing and magical potions.35 This hypothesis finds
corroboration in the observation of the renowned anthropologist E. S. Craighill
Handy, who stated that the tau’a (the priest or shaman) wore a red mantle in the
Marquesas.36
The mysterious aura of the subject gave rise to the hypothesis that the
painting is a portrait of Ha’apuani, who was said to have been destined from
birth to be a tau’a. When the arrival of the missionaries put an end to this
career, Ha’apuani became the master of ceremonies for festivities on Hiva Oa. As
guardian of the ancient Marquesan customs, he is credited with instructing his
friend, Gauguin, in native lore.37 While the subject’s identity remains unproven,
he seems to represent an individual who has the aura of a shaman, and Ha’apuani
is a plausible candidate.
Gauguin painted this canvas as he was revising his 1897 essay “l’Eglise
Catholique …” into l’Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme. The earlier version gained
impetus from le Jésus historique, an abridged French translation of the last section
of the English poet Gerald Massey’s text The Natural Genesis.38 Although the
painter wholeheartedly agreed with the translator’s anticlerical persuasion, he
took issue with the contention that the historical Jesus was a Talmudic magician.
Gauguin thought that this debate was missing the point—it was “unimportant
whether [Jesus] was or was not a historical figure”; he was necessary as “an ideal
‘Type’ towards which [Man] could strive.”39 Although anyone could become an
“ideal type,” Gauguin privileged the artist as prophet in the soul’s pilgrimage.
His self-portrait as Christ evokes the analogy of the artist as prophet, martyr and
spiritual leader.
After Gauguin had studied the complete edition of The Natural Genesis, he
realized that the translator had garbled its message. Massey sought to unite the
world’s revealed religions into a universal cult, originating in Africa through
Egypt. He was not using the Jewish sorcerer to validate the existence of an actual
man called Jesus. His broader perspective concurred with Gauguin’s view of the
“symbolic nature of Christ.” Massey claimed that the Christian Jesus was a later,
erroneous conflation of the Jewish shaman and the mythological Christ, who
stems from the Egyptian god Horus.40 He illustrated a Gnostic seal (Figure 8.4),
conflating Horus and Christ as a symbol of resurrection, which Gauguin copied
into l’Esprit Moderne.41
Gauguin was predisposed to view Christ, and indeed the entire Bible, in
Symbolist terms. Since his days at Le Pouldu, the painter had been interested in
Theosophy, the religious philosophy that lay the foundation for his idiosyncratic
construction of Christian, Buddhist and Maori religious tenets. One of his
favorite readings from that time was Balzac’s novel Seraphita, which filtered the
doctrines of Swedenborg to stress the “‘correspondences’ between earthly and
heavenly things.”42 With his renewed interest in religion, Gauguin found support
in The Natural Genesis to reinforce his passionately held views about the symbolic
Christ. He had long allied Christ with Buddha in his theosophical approach,
and now he modified his thesis to embrace a vision of Christ “with Buddha,
Horus, and others …. as symbols of an astrological myth.”43 Although Gauguin
was not interested in pursuing Massey’s esoteric universalizing mythology, he
drew freely from a variety of spiritualist writers, including Massey, to revamp his
manuscript into an exegesis of his personal syncretism.
By superimposing the image of a Marquesan man onto the famous icon of Christ,
Gauguin made the two men synonymous partners in the search for enlightenment
that propelled his own metaphysical journey, as an artist and as a man. If this is
indeed the image of an ideal Type at the threshold of his epiphany, then Gauguin’s
thoughts on metempsychosis—reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul—
would account for why the Polynesian man holds a green leaf.44
The Perfect Way, written by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland in 1887,
influenced the artist in his beliefs. The authors lived from 1874 to 1880 in Paris,
while Kingsford earned a medical degree. Both were Christians, “unable to
swallow the literalistic reading of the Bible or the dogmas of the churches.”45
They read the Bible as allegory, charting the soul’s destiny.
Figure 8.4 Gnostic seal, Horus and Christ as a symbol of resurrection, from Gerald
Massey, The Natural Genesis, 1883, p. 454.
The French translation of their book published in 1891 had a preface by

Edouard Schuré, the spiritualist whose writings were so influential among the
Nabis.46 While in Brittany, Paul Sérusier had interested Gauguin in Schuré’s
theosophical novel Les Grands Initiés (1889), as well as the Buddhist text of
Maria Caithness, Kingsford’s patroness.47 Lady Caithness, Kingsford and
Maitland promoted the premise of metempsychosis, which they also called

Transmigration of Souls, derived from Indian religions. In sum their work
“taught the reincarnation of the individual soul in many different ‘bodies’ or
personalities, to learn the lessons that culminate in its union with the divine
spirit, ‘the Christ within.’”48 In The Perfect Way they stipulate:
The soul, or permanent element in man, is first engendered in the lowest forms
of organic life, from which it works upwards, through plants and animals to
man. Its earliest manifestation is in the ethereal or fluidic material called the
astral body ….49
Metempsychosis, in its strict sense, consists in the overshadowing of a soul

already incarnate, by one which has completed its transmigrations, and become
freed from Matter and all planetary bonds. This divine overshadowing differs
both in kind and degree from those astral visitations which are familiar to so
many under the names of “guides” or “controls” ….50
Gauguin mentions reincarnation, “an idea of the Indian metempsychosis,” in

the Ancien Culte Mahorie.51 In l’Esprit Moderne, he amplifies his conviction that
the soul begins in some minuscule form, like algae, passing through a series of
animated stages until it attains its human perfection—“virile spirituality”:
In passing through all the intermediary stages from inferior and superior
animality, then to virile spirituality, we touch upon a latent problem, which
poses itself in spite of all; it’s that of the existence of the soul anterior to the
animated stage of life of the microbe, of the animated life that manifests itself
even beyond itself, in the form as tiny as the spores of algae.52
He concludes that “the soul of plants, of animals, of man in his highest state,
constitute life, all of equal value.”53 Thus the green leaf—a bit of algae—links
the man with the cape to the person behind him. The image of an ideal Type at
the threshold of enlightenment, he holds out the promise of metempsychosis,
reinforcing the concept of the cycle of life through which the soul passes. Having
achieved the culmination of his earthly passage, he prepares to enter the realm
of pure spirit.
According to Gauguin’s beliefs, the attainment of this transcendent state would
explain the androgyny of the male figure. In Gauguin’s Skirt, Stephen Eisenman
makes this effeminate quality central to his thesis, focusing on its implications
for the artist in conjunction with the mahu, the South Pacific phenomenon
known as the third sex.54 In Paradise Reviewed, an Interpretation of Gauguin’s
Polynesian Symbolism, Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk gives this thoughtful consideration
in the context of the South Pacific, noting the complex Western trends to which
Gauguin would have been susceptible. She summarizes her analysis, saying that,
“implicit in the rise of mysticism, dandyism, and the interest in the androgyne,
long hair was associated with Christ, St. John the Baptist, an expression of the
self, and sexual ambivalence …. It is not mere coincidence that Gauguin gives
his goddesses and gods long hair ….”55
Gauguin arrived in Polynesia with the attitudes toward androgyny
common to the Symbolist circles that he frequented. In Balzac’s Seraphita,
androgyny is pivotal to the metamorphosis of the hero/heroine into an angel.
The theosophical literature that Gauguin and his friends read was saturated
with the premise that the union of spirit and matter is personified in the
androgyne.56
Kingsford and Maitland held androgyny to be fundamental to their beliefs.
“The perfect condition … is reached … by a process of evolution … from the
lowest to the highest, whenever the Divine Spirit working within, has completed
the generation of Man, making him spiritually ‘in the image of God, male and
female.’” For them, “then, ‘Adam’ represents the bodily or sensuous nature
in man; and his wife [Eve] his psychic and spiritual nature.”57 This attitude
permeates The Perfect Way:
In creating Man, God creates one whole and perfect being, formed of two
distinct parts, Adam the earthly, exterior man, and Eve the spiritual and interior
man, his soul and “living mother.” … By the addition of her the two natures
become one Humanity.58
Already in the Ancien Culte Mahorie Gauguin writes a passage that is noticeably
close to this:
and this idea of the coexistence of two principles which are God … One, soul,
life or part intelligence of the deity, represented by the name Ta’aroa, is male; the
other purely material and consisting in a certain way the body of the same God,
is female, called by the name Hina, the two composed, by their union all that
exists in the universe.59
In The Natural Genesis, Massey describes one aspect of mythical Christ

(Osiris, Horus, Mithras, Apollo, etc.) as “the type under which he desires to
appear before all men, … his hair on his shoulders when he proceeds to the
heaven.” He adds that “this long hair of the adult Horus reaching down to the
shoulders is a typical feature in the portraits of the Messiah, the copy of the
Kamite Christ ….”60 The striking femininity of the Marquesan Man in a Red
Cape reflects his state of spiritual perfection, combining the two sexes, as he
sheds his material being.
The couple on the left in the Liège canvas are among Gauguin’s stock
characters; they are “witnesses of the life cycle,” sometimes accused of being
“unsympathetic observers.”61 Gauguin identified such a pair in Te Arii Vahine
(1896, St. Petersburg: Hermitage Museum, W. 542), as “two old folks, near a big
tree, discuss the Tree of Knowledge.”62 The Tree of Knowledge was, after all, the
bearer of the forbidden fruit that led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from
the Garden of Eden. When he was finishing D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-
nous? Où allons-nous? He described “two people who dare to think of their
destiny,” and later, in 1901, as “two sinister figures, wrapped in clothes of a sad
color, putting next to the tree of science their note of sadness caused by science
itself.”63 This anxiety between faith and science in a post-Darwinian age reflects
the initial purpose for which Gauguin wrote “l’Eglise Catholique et les temps
modernes.”
The same pair of figures recurs in the Man with a Cape. They are isolated from
the prophet’s path but they share the tranquil landscape, progressing toward
cosmic harmony with nature. They walk along the stream—perhaps the river
Lethe, “of which the dead are said to drink in order to obtain oblivion of their
past before returning to new earth-bodies.”64 The nearest figure seems to receive
the leaf—“like algae”—from the man in the cape. If the individual must still face
the trials of the finite, the soul transcends the constraints of human existence
through its cyclical oneness with the universe. These two are a counterpart, both
conceptually and compositionally, to the animals in the other corner.
The off center placement of the shaman figure in the painting gives the pair in
the lower right corner greater prominence. The fox-like dog appears as Gauguin’s
alter-ego. In a drawing made in the manuscript of his last memoir, Avant et Après,
a woman greets the dog, “Bonjour M. Gauguin.”65 The blue-green bird is familiar
as the “bird of the Devil,” so dubbed by Gauguin in his 1897 oil Nevermore
(London: Courtauld Gallery, W. 558).66 The vignette recasts a traditional
medieval allegory of good over evil, the triumph of salvation over death, as seen
in a capital from the Romanesque church of Moissac (Figure 8.5), illustrated by
a vintage postcard. The iconography fits well with Remy de Gourmont’s article of
1900, “La Gloire et l’idée de l’immortalité,” in the Mercure de France, fusing “the
immortality of one’s soul and of one’s artistic achievements.”67 Thus the artist,
in the guise of the dog, defies death, personified by the avian agent of doom,
because he achieves immortality though his art.
Figure 8.5 Griffon and bird, detail of the Saint-Martin capital from the Romanesque
cloister of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, twelfth century, c. 1885, postcard.
Diptych
The Bathers functions as the earthly foil to the spiritual ideal of the Marquesan
Man. Previous pairings of the Bathers and the Marquesan Man in Red Cape
have not extended to any theosophical or aesthetic ramifications. In his
biography of Gauguin, David Sweetman compares them to a diptych, where
on the “‘unclothed’ side, the goat and child convey the more earthy notions of
lechery and procreation” whereas the “‘clothed’ side … suggests magic and the
supernatural ….”68 Eisenman, in Gauguin’s Skirt, expands on this, proposing
that the two men—perhaps the same model—with their long hair “describe the
composite nature of the Polynesian mahu.”69
Gauguin’s understanding of The Natural Genesis affords a credible rationale
as to why he would emphasize feminine characteristics in a male figure. Massey
identifies the androgynous and perfect Osiris (Christ), “the one god who
includes the bi-unity of both sexes,” with that figure’s manifestation as “the two
Horuses, the child and the virile male.”70 This interpretation, incidentally, gives
added weight to the little boy holding the bird beside the “virile male” in the
Bathers. Gauguin does not quote all of this in L’Esprit, but he comes close to
Massey’s text when he writes: “The prince of thirty years is identical with Horus
or Christ ….”71
The Bathers and the Marquesan Man in a Red Cape could be paired as
Adam and Christ, whom both Gauguin and Massey describe as “le deuxiéme
Adam.”72 Kingsford and Maitland cite the Apostle Paul, “‘He is at first Adam, a
living soul’—a soul having derived life; ‘He is at last Christ, a life-giving Spirit’
or spirit that is itself Divine life.”73 The child aspiring to be the man who seeks to
transcend the trials of human existence is the paradigm that Gauguin found in
the person of Christ.
The Bather and the Marquesan Man are at the core of Gauguin’s spiritual
enterprise, representing the two components of the soul’s existence: the physical
and the spiritual. In l’Esprit Moderne, he elaborates on man’s two births, “that
of the body born of flesh, and that of the moral or intellectual, born of the
spirit ….”74 Together they bracket the cycle of life, “progressives, going along an
undefined way, a transitory age because it is temporary, but before arriving at an
ulterior life of pure spirituality … Nirvana.” Reiterating his notion of the Ideal
Type, Gauguin qualified Nirvana as “the goal to attain presented by Christ, and
before him by Buddha. And all men could be Buddhas.”75
Notes
1 Gauguin, l’Esprit moderne, 305, “Le but à atteindre présenté par le Christ, par
Boud’ha auparavant. Et tous les hommes deviendront des Boud’has,” in Philippe
Verdier, “Un Manuscrit de Gauguin: L’Esprit moderne et le Catholicisme,” Wallraf-
Richartz Jahrbuch, XLVI/XLVII (1985–6): 273–98, followed by his annotated
transcription of Gauguin’s manuscript L’esprit moderne et le Catholicisme, 299–328.
See also the essay by Elizabeth C. Childs, “‘Catholicism and the Modern Mind’:
The Painter as Writer in Late Career,” in Gauguin/Tahiti, eds. George T. M.
Schackelford, Isabelle Cahn, Claire Frèches-Thory (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts
Publications, 2004), 224–41.
2 Victor Segalen, ed., Lettres à Georges-Daniel de Monfreid (Paris: Georges Crès et
Cie, 1920), LXXXI, October 1902.
3 Galerie Ambroise Vollard, Exposition Paul Gauguin (Paris, 1903), no. 9. The Vollard
catalog has a number of Tahitian titles for works executed in the Marquesas,
which has given rise to confusion. In the catalog raisonné by Georges Wildenstein,
Gauguin, this painting is labeled Tahitian Family (W. 618), which remains standard
nomenclature for the related transfer drawing and monotypes. Wildenstein

numbers are used to identify comparisons with paintings not illustrated.
4 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, 1969. New York: Garland, 1985), 440, describes her as also pregnant in
both the Riders on Beach (W. 620) and, 458, the Sister of Charity (W. 617).
5 The drawing is illustrated in Ronald Pickvance, Gauguin (Martigny: Fondation
Pierre Giannada, 1998), 135–6.
6 The collaborative version of Noa-Noa, drawn from Gauguin’s 1893 manuscript,
was substantively modified by Charles Morice, but the two men seem to have
agreed on the content to the extent that Gauguin willingly recopied them into his
manuscript. The original 1893 manuscript is in the collection of the Getty Museum
and the second version, now in the Louvre, Department of Drawings, includes
miscellaneous other essays known collectively as Diverses Choses. The poem is on
p. 52, the watercolor on p. 62. The goat appears in W. 565 and separately.
7 Richard Brettell, “The Final Years: Tahiti and Hivaoa,” in The Art of Paul Gauguin
(Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 1988), 395–494, 482, posits that the
source was the lithograph rather than the painting.
8 Melvin Waldfogel, “Caillebotte, Vollard and Cézanne’s ‘Bagneurs au repos,’” Gazette
des Beaux-Arts 65, no. 1153 (February 1965): 113–20; 118.
9 Ibid., 116. Gérôme, responding to an inquiry, in the Journal des Artistes, April 8,
1894, “Je le repete, pour que l’Etat ait accepté de pareilles ordures, il faut une bien
grande fletrissure morale.”
10 Paul Gauguin, Raconteurs de Rapin, “Le Luxembourg était une maison de passe,” in
The Writings of a Savage, ed. Daniel Guérin, trans. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1996), 224.
11 Amboise Vollard, Souvenirs d’un Marchand de Tableaux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1937),
33.
12 Paul Gauguin, Noa-Noa, trans. O. F. Theis (New York: Dover Publications,
1985), 42–4, also cited in Stephen Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London and New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 115–16, who rightly cautions, 118, that in the
1893 Noa-Noa the “feminist gloss on the subject of clothes and androgyny is
absent.”
13 H. R. Rookmaaker, Synthetist Art Theories: Genesis and Nature of the Ideas on Art of
Gauguin and his Circle (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1959), 39–42, 136, 194–5,
232–3.
14 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus [1833], eds. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1987), 46.
15 Ibid., 41.
16 Ibid., 213.
17 Paul Gauguin, Avant et après (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1994), 192.

18 Rookmaaker, Synthetist Art Theories, 232–3.
19 Gauguin, Diverse Choses, 1896, in the manuscript of Noa Noa (Musée du Louvre,
Paris, Département des Arts Graphiques, Fonds du Musée d’Orsay, RF7259).
20 See “l’Eglise,” Diverses Choses, 306–7. Debora Silverman, van Gogh and Gauguin,
the Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), considers
the impact of Gauguin’s seminary education on his art and discusses this text, see
particularly 121–39, 380–3.
21 Richard S. Field, Paul Gauguin: The Paintings of the First Voyage to Tahiti (Ph.D.
diss., Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1963, New York: Garland Press, 1977),
289, n. 30, establishes that this title is a direct quotation from the preface of the
revised edition of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, The Perfect Way (London:
Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887), vii, which recurs in the French edition, La Voie
Parfaite, Alençon (Imprimerie Typographique F. Guy, 1891), with the preface by
Edouard Schuré.
22 See note 1.
23 Bengt Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, trans. Reginald Spink (New York:
Viking Press, 1966), 280, states that in September/October 1891, in Mataiea, the
artist had been fined for “public indecency” when caught bathing in a “state of
nature” by Jean-Pierre Claverie, who arrived in Atuona in December 1902. He
notes, 283, that Gauguin was sent home from the local court in 1903 for appearing
in a “loin-cloth,” i.e. pareu.
24 Wayne Andersen and Barbara Klein, Gauguin’s Paradise Lost (New York: Viking,
1971), 107, summarizes Carlyle’s theme as “clothing which shrouds the body’s
shame.”
25 Herbert Friedmann, The Symbolic Goldfinch, Its History and Significance in
European Devotional Art (Washington, DC: Pantheon Books, 1946), 7.
26 See, for example, Gauguin, Avant et Après, 212–14, for an instance of his virulent
critiques. Whether Gauguin’s behavior is seen as eccentric, indifferent, colonialist,
anti-colonial, anti-bourgeois, primitive posturing or natural, it puts him in the
camp of an “ethnographic liberal,” as defined by James Clifford, The Predicament
of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1988), 79.
27 The Pre-Raphaelites, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1984), 117–19, summarizes
the painting’s iconic status. Soon after completion, the painting was popularized by
engravings, particularly those of Simmons and Ridgway.
28 Vojtěch Jirat-Wasiutyński, “Painting from Nature versus Painting from Memory,”
in A Closer Look. Technical and Art Historical Studies on Works by Van Gogh and
Gauguin, edited by Louis Van Tilborgh (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1990), 90–102.
See also Technique and Meaning in the Paintings of Paul Gauguin, co-authored with
H. Travers Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115–36.
29 Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 3 vols. (Greenwich:
New York Graphic Society, 1959), 3:L614, 229, to Théo, November 17, 1889.
Silverman, van Gogh and Gauguin, the Search for Sacred Art, 295–308, talks about
their disagreement over sacred art.
30 Douglas Cooper, Paul Gauguin: 45 Lettres à Vincent, Théo et Jo van Gogh
(Lausanne: Bibliothèque des arts, 1983), 23. See also Maurice Malingue, ed., Paul
Gauguin: Lettres à sa femme et à ses amis (Paris: Grasset, 1946), edn. 1992, LXCV,
November 1889, 178.
31 Gauguin, Avant et Après [1994], 21–32.
32 This description paraphrases Naomi Maurer, “The Pursuit of Spiritual Knowledge:
The Philosophical Meaning and Origins of Symbolist Theory and its Expression in
the Thought and Art of Redon, van Gogh, and Gauguin” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Chicago, Chicago, 1985), 173, among the many scholars who have remarked upon
this.
33 See Galerie Ambroise Vollard, Exposition Paul Gauguin, no. 46. See note 2 for
comments on the use of “Tahitian” to describe Marquesans. Brettell, “The Final
Years,” 480, quoting a 1949 Basel catalog, no. 43, associates the painting with
Vollard’s no. 32, L’Esprit veille, but this title is attached to an unrelated monotype,
Richard S. Field, Paul Gauguin, Monotypes, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia
Museum of Art, 1973), no. 66. That suggests that an oil of that composition may
have been in the exhibit.
34 Solange de Behr-de Kerchove de Denterghem, ed. Gauguin: les XX et la libre
esthétique, exh. cat. (Liège, Musée d’art moderne, 1994), no. 61.
35 Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed, an Interpretation of Gauguin’s Polynesian
Symbolism (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 155, “snapping his fingers”; Brettell, “The
Final Years,” 484, asks if he holds “a drug, a medicine, an aphrodisiac?”; David
Sweetman, Paul Gauguin: A Complete Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995),
509, “traditional healing or magical potions.” Paul Gauguin, von der Bretagne nach
Tahiti, ein Aufbruch zur Moderne, exh. cat. (Graz, Landesmuseum Joanneum,
2000), 220, quotes Gilles Artur suggesting that the two women are sick and coming
to the shaman for medicinal remedies.
36 Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed, 153–4, quotes E. S. Craighill Handy, Native Culture
in the Marquesas (Honolulu: Bernice Bishop Museum Bulletin, 1923), 227.
37 Guillaume Le Bronnec, Gauguin, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Georges Wildenstein,
1958), 196–7. Bengt Danielson, Gauguin in the South Seas, trans. Reginald Spink
(New York: Viking Press, 1966), 256, calls Haapuani “a man of considerable
significance in the native community” and a “feared magician, generally credited

with the ability to work black magic on anybody.” He was fluent in French. Teilhet-
Fisk, Paradise Reviewed, 154, accepts Haapuani as the model.
38 The full title is The Natural Genesis: or Second Part of the Book of the Beginnings,
Containing an Attempt to Recover and Reconstitute the Lost Origins of the Myths
and Mysteries, Types and Symbols, Religion, and Language with Egypt for the
Mouthpiece and Africa as the Birthplace (London: Williams and Norgate, 1883).
Jules Soury’s translation of section 13 of The Natural Genesis, called le Jésus
historique, was published in San Francisco (1896). Massey was a spiritualist who
strove to prove that all of the world’s religions were ultimately one. Amishai-
Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes, 416, 425, 451–3, offers key insights into
Gauguin’s use of Massey to advance his own parallels between the Bible and other
religions.
39 Gauguin, “l’Eglise,” Diverses Choses, 280, “Jesus was human because his humanity
was necessary for his mission to save mankind, not through his Crucifixion, but by
giving Man an ideal ‘Type’ towards which he could strive.”
40 The third volume of Massey’s magnum opus is entitled Ancient Egypt, the light of
the World (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907).
41 Mary Lynn Zink Vance, “Gauguin’s Polynesian Pantheon as a Visual Language”
(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1986), 262; on copying the seal
illustration into his manuscript of l’Esprit Moderne, 39.
42 Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes, 424, in a section, 424–8, that expands
on the importance of this novel to Gauguin’s preconceived notion of Christ as an
ideal type. She previously, 402, outlines the story and its philosophical scope, using
the most frequently cited edition, Honoré de Balzac, Seraphita (Paris: Calmann-
Levy, 1950).
43 Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes, 451. I am indebted to Thomas Tweed
for his assistance in understanding the role of Buddhism in nineteenth-century
spiritualist circles.
44 According to Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes, 439–40, Gauguin had
already realized a painting about metempsychosis, Te Rohutu—The Sojourn of the
Souls, in 1897 after Aline’s death. This painting, now lost, is known from a sketch in
Gauguin’s letter to Monfreid in May 1897.
45 Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (New York: State University of
New York Press, 1994), 337.
46 See note 21 for comments on Kingsford, Maitland, and Schuré. The latter’s Les
Grands Initiés, 1889, was popular among the Symbolists. Field asserts that The
Perfect Way was seminal for Gauguin’s philosophy as it evolved during the second
voyage to Tahiti. Gauguin would have sympathized with its anti-clerical bias.
47 Verdier, “Un Manuscrit de Gauguin: L’Esprit moderne et le Catholicisme,” 284.

Serena Keshavjee, “The ‘Scientization’ of Spirituality,” in The Seductive Surfaces:
The Art of Tissot, ed. Katharine Lochnan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999),
213–44; 218, states that Lady Caithness, President of the French Theosophical
Society, brought Schuré into the spiritualist movement. Active in London and
Paris, she strove to reconcile Catholicism with eastern spiritualism. Vojtěch Jirat-
Wasiutyński, Paul Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism (Ph.D. diss., Princeton
University, Princeton, 1975. New York: Garland Press, 1978), 232, summarizes
Schuré’s ideas on androgyny, Christ/Orpheus/Buddha, and re-incarnation that were
influential for Gauguin.
48 Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment, 342.
49 Kingsford and Maitland, The Perfect Way, 43, and passim.
50 Ibid., 72.
51 See Ibid., 45–72; Gauguin, Ancien Culte Mahorie, 19, “une idée de la métempsycose
indienne.”
52 Gauguin, l’Esprit moderne, 303. “En passant par tous les termes intermédiares de
l’animalité inférieure et supérieure, puis de la spiritualité virile, nous touchons à un
problème réservé mais qui se pose de lui-même malgré tout; c’est celui de l’existence
de l’âme antérieurement à ce terme de vie animée du microbe, de vie animée qui
même se manifeste au delà de lui, en forme infime aussi dans les spores des algue.”
53 Gauguin, l’Esprit moderne, 306. “l’âme des plantes, des animaux, de l’homme à son
état supérieur constitue la vie, toutes au même titre.”
54 Eisenman, “Sex in Tahiti,” Gauguin’s Skirt, 91–147.
55 Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed, 80.
56 Ibid., 52–3, cites Balzac and quotes Mme. Blavatsky, but any number of his
contemporary spiritualists extolled androgyny. And Gauguin’s letter to Madeleine
Bernard, in Malingue LXIX (October 1888): 138, substantiates this.
57 Kingsford and Maitland, The Perfect Way, 152–3.
58 Ibid., 185.
59 Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes, 32, relates this idea to Moerenhout,
Voyages, 2:565: “Hina est le nom sous lequel sont toujours représentés, dans les
nature, les élémens et la matière, ou la partie femmelle, la cause passive avec la-
quelle Taaroa s’unit et engendre.”
60 Massey, Ancient Egypt, 480–1.
61 Henri Dorra, “Unsympathetic Observers,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts LXXVI, no. 1223
(December 1970): 367–72. Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed, 155, also says the pair
“foreshadows death.”
62 Segalen, Lettres à Monfreid XXI (April 1896): 85–6: “deux vieillards, près du gros
arbre, discutent sur l’arbre de la science.” Many scholars have associated these
figures across Gauguin’s oeuvre, see Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed, 163.
63 Segalen, Lettres à Monfreid XL (February 1898): 119, “deux personnages qui osent
penser à leur destinée,” and letter to Morice, Malingue CLXXIV (July 1901): 300–1:
“deux figures sinistre, enveloppées de vêtements de couleur triste, mettent près de
l’arbre de la science leur note de douleur causée par cette science même….”
64 Kingsford and Maitland, The Perfect Way, 72. Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed, 154,
however, describes the setting as “tropical woods, near a small river (probably the
same river that ran beside Gauguin’s house and the same woods he walked through
from his house to the shore).”
65 Gauguin, Avant et Après [1994], drawing no. 17.
66 Segalen, Lettres à Monfreid XXIX (February 14, 1897): 101.
67 Remy de Gourmont, “La Gloire et l’idée de l’immortalité,” Mercure de France
(November 1900): 289–319.
68 Sweetman, Paul Gauguin, 511; Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, 102–3, who itemizes how
they function in opposition. The size of Gauguin’s canvases varies considerably, but
these dimensions are not unique.
70 Massey, Ancient Egypt, 411–12.
71 Gauguin, l’Esprit moderne, 307, “Le prince de trente ans est identique avec le Horus
ou Christ, qui se manifeste à l’age de trente ans.”
72 Gauguin, l’Esprit moderne, 310; Massey, Ancient Egypt, 404.
73 Kingsford and Maitland, The Perfect Way, 242. They state, 165, “Adam signifies the
Red, hence the Blood.”
74 Gauguin, “l’Eglise,” Diverses Choses, 294: “celle du corps qui nait de la Chair, et celle
du moral, de l’intellectuel qui nait de l’Esprit ….”
75 Gauguin, l’Esprit moderne, 301: “progressives, en voie indéfinie d’agrandissement,
… un âge transitoire puisqu’elle est temporaire; mais devant aboutir à une vie
ultérieure de pure spiritualité” …. “Nirvana.” Gauguin, l’esprit moderne, 305: “Le
but à atteindre présenté par le Christ, par Boud’ha auparavant. Et tous les hommes
deviendront des Boud’has.”
Part Three
Reception: Resistance and

Empowerment
9
Taking Back Teha’amana: Feminist

Interventions in Gauguin’s Legacy
Elizabeth C. Childs
Washington University in St. Louis
In art history Gauguin holds a foundational place in the development of French

modernism. That over half a million people attended a recent retrospective of his
work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014 is clear evidence that
the artist’s significance has been recognized well into the twenty-first century.1
But of course this interest in Gauguin’s work built during his lifetime, and was
robust in Paris even a few years after his death in 1903. A substantial critical effort
in Paris to promote Gauguin as the powerful equal of van Gogh and Cézanne
appeared in the Salon d’Automne retrospective in 1906. With a remarkable
exhibition of 227 works, borrowed from such notable figures as dealer Ambroise
Vollard and collector Gustave Fayet, Gauguin’s art returned to Paris in a robust
and provocative display of works in all media that confirmed his vital interest to
contemporary artists from France and abroad, as well as to Parisian critics and
collectors.2 While that landmark retrospective was somewhat overshadowed by
the drama of the introduction of the Fauves, Gauguin nonetheless emerged as
a major star early in this posthumous period. Given that ten of the final twelve
years of his life had been spent half a world away in Pacific islands that were
French colonies, it is remarkable that so much of the work actually made a return
1
This essay derives from a talk delivered at the College Art Conference in February, 2016 in a session
entitled “The Modernities of French Art and Its History, 1780 to Present,” chaired by Natalie
Adamson and Richard Taws. I am most grateful to them for initial comments on this material.
trip to Europe, and ended up in leading galleries and collections. This curious and
essential circumstance is owed in large part to three forces: Gauguin’s sustained
determination to shape his own critical legacy and to get his artwork returned
to Paris even from such distances; the entrepreneurial acumen and international
aspiration of dealers, Ambroise Vollard in particular; and the dedication of
admiring colleagues such as Georges-Daniel de Monfreid who were willing to
work as intermediaries between Paris and Polynesia. Gauguin’s art on view in
Paris now invited artistic reckoning with his style, his materials, his ambidextrous
talents in multiple media and his alluring but nonetheless esoteric and exotic
subjects that asserted bold differences from his peers’ subjects typical of muted,
late Impressionism or Paris’s new trends in Symbolism. An interest in Gauguin’s
work rapidly spread to international audiences in the first few decades of the
twentieth century—notably through the sales of Vollard across Europe, and the
exhibitions of Post-Impressionism organized by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912 at
the Grafton Galleries in London.3 By 1936, in conjunction with an exhibition of
abstract modern art at the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr had famously
codified the main currents of European Modernism as clear, reductive paths that
flowed from the “great” French four: Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne and Seurat.4 In
Barr’s teleological view, Gauguin and his Synthetist art—influenced by Japanese
prints, and in dialogue with Cézanne—led directly to the 1905 innovations of
Fauvism, and then ultimately to currents of German Expressionism and to the
abstract art of Barr’s day. While this is only one strand (privileging male European
painters) of the many threads of reception and innovation spurred by encounters
with Gauguin’s work, Barr’s graph demonstrates that thirty-three years after the
artist’s death, Gauguin was fully enshrined in art discourse as a key progenitor
of modernism. Such a lineage emphasized the formal innovations of his work,
but did little to take into account the conundrums posed by his subject matter,
which frequently immersed Breton and Polynesian women in a wide range of
primitivist projection and fantasy. It was to be several generations before the
critical voices of feminism and postcolonial understandings of France’s empire
would open a sustained agenda of questions about gender and race in Gauguin’s
rendering of the Caribbean and the Polynesian body.
The contributions of Gauguin’s art to the stream of French modernism were
of course far more than novel and exotic subjects. His work was strikingly
innovative within the development of an anti-naturalist symbolism, and a
decorative, proto-abstract modernism. His art takes its inspiration as much
from imagination and from notions of decorative harmony, and independent
Taking Back Teha’amana: Feminist Interventions in Gauguin’s Legacy 231
color, as from the empirical world. But such aesthetic concerns have often been
deemphasized in postmodernist art histories by increased consideration of the
colonial context of his sojourns to the South Seas that foregrounded his position
of privilege as a French male, his engagement with French notions of race,
and his mythification of Pacific Islanders in face of the cultural hybridities he
encountered in the modern French colonies of Tahiti and the Marquesas.
He resolutely dismissed bourgeois norms—separating from his European
wife and children to live in the South Seas, where he had, in sequence, several
young Polynesian lovers. The first of these, Teha’amana, was perhaps the
most famous, as he wrote a great deal about her, and depicted her in some
works of art. It is frequently speculated that many of the images of young
Polynesian women Gauguin produced during his first Tahitian trip of 1891–3
are in fact representations of Teha’amana, a young woman of 13 or 14 years
whose family, originally from Rarotonga (Cook Islands), lived near a remote
village of Fa’aone on the far side of Tahiti. She became, by Gauguin’s account,
his model and mistress during much of his two-year sojourn. Yet relatively
few paintings are firmly connected to her by title, or by specific context. His
portrait of her painted in 1893, Merahi metua no Tehamana (Plate 4) directly
features her name in the painted inscription of the title at the lower left edge
of the canvas; it is perhaps the only work which incontrovertibly claims its
subject is Teha’amana.5 Other iconic works, such as Manao Tupapau (see
Figure 10.1), do not refer to the young woman by name in the title, but rather
are understood to depict her given the context of Gauguin’s remarks made
in letters or his writings. In this case, Gauguin featured a description of the
painting in his fictionalized journal Noa Noa, but that account should not be
taken as a biographical truth. Rather, the text, written in Paris with the aid
of Symbolist poet Charles Morice, featured descriptions of many of the key
paintings that, like this one, Gauguin wished to promote after including them
in his Parisian exhibit at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in the fall of 1893.6 The
persona of Teha’amana became more than a model or partner: she emerged
in his art and thinking as an embodiment of the artist’s travels, his longings
and his nostalgic attempts to take part in an “authentic” Tahitian culture he
regarded as fading in the wake of the modern French colonial presence in
the Pacific. Much of his account seems modeled on the tale of Rarahu, the
young Tahitian lover of a visiting European sailor in the popular travel novel
Le Mariage de Loti, with which Gauguin, van Gogh and many of their circle
were familiar before Gauguin’s travels to the South Seas.7
As for the historic Teha’amana, firm facts about her life are few. Historians’
efforts to locate her photograph have thus failed, although records show that
some women of that era in Tahiti bore this first name.8 We gather from Gauguin’s
accounts that Teha’amana spoke little French, that she accepted what appears
to have been her mother’s directive for her to become Gauguin’s “wife,” and
that she told him many stories from ancient Polynesian religion. Aspects of
this relationship may be typical of the temporary partnerships some Europeans
of the era took up with some young Polynesian women. Yet the assertion of
Gauguin learning traditional religion from her was surely a fiction, both
because the practices were no longer active in a Christianized Tahiti, and his
paraphrasing show that Gauguin gained his knowledge of Tahitian religion from
French ethnographic texts.9 Beyond these surmises, we know little about the
historic Teha’amana. If she indeed existed as an individual, rather than being
created by the artist out of an amalgam of his encounters with Pacific Islander
women, she is the classic subaltern about whom the traces have vanished in the
colonial archive.
A source of much comment, and the frequent discomfort of modern readers
of Noa Noa, is the young age of Teha’amana (around 13) at the time of her
partnering with Gauguin. From a modern point of view, it seems impossible,
or at least inappropriate, that she could consent to this adult relationship.
And given the artist’s older age of 43, it seems an exploitative behavior, and a
borderline pedophiliac relationship on the part of the artist. Yet Teha’amana
evidently chose to remain with the artist (and not take the option of returning to
her family, which Gauguin claims was part of the initial arrangement), perhaps
following an older tradition on the island in which young women had, since
the arrival of Bougainville, often entered into temporary liaisons with foreigners
with whom strategic alliances might prove useful.10
We also know that when Gauguin returned to Tahiti in 1895, Teha’amana
was now married to a Tahitian youth name Ma’ari, and declined to live with the
artist again.11 It seems likely she had used him as much in her own way, as he had
used her; agency is probably not one-sided here. That is, in an age when colonial
privilege inserted itself into many aspects of island life, Teha’amana may have
been self-aware in her family’s pursuit of the reciprocal (albeit transient) social
advantages of her living with a visiting French man. And after he left, she simply
moved on to the next chapter of her young adult life, rather than mourning the
departure of the European lover in the literary conceit of a sobbing Rarahu that
we find in the Loti novel.
It was in the wake of the emergence of both feminist and postcolonial critique
that Gauguin, his writings and his representation of Polynesian women became
a key subject of art historical comment and inquiry. One of the first sustained
critiques emerged in the writing of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, in her responses to
the massive Gauguin retrospective of 1988 at the National Gallery of Art,12 which
intrigued her aesthetically but sparked a feminist critique as she contemplated
the artist's representation of women. She resolved this paradox through an
analysis of the mythologies that go into constructing the persona of Gauguin as
a father of modern art, and as a founder of the gendered discourse of European
primitivism.13 Her account emphasizes the larger history of colonial violence,
in which white male power is often exercised over indigenous female bodies. In
her account, Gauguin comes off as not just a colonist enjoying white privilege in
the form of sexual tourism, but also as an avant-garde artist whose very subject
depends on his ready exploitation of female Polynesians as models, and in the
case of Teha’amana, as model, mistress and housekeeper. His confidence and
privilege result, she claims, from the histories of colonial representations of
Polynesia in the annals of science and tourism since the Europeans first arrived
in Tahiti in the 1760s. Gauguin is, in her view, but the most egregious of his time
in a long line of modernists’ exploitations of the female Other ranging from
Courbet’s peasants to Picasso’s demoiselles.
A subsequent and influential view by Griselda Pollock published in 1992
further excoriated Gauguin for his colonial mentality.14 Pollock as a leader in
feminist and Marxist art history was deeply sensitive to the artist’s ingrained
categorizations of the European, of the Other and of his blinkered sense of
entitlement in exploiting the latter. She asked questions about the place of
Gauguin in a critical account of modernism, in which—until the later twentieth
century—many questions of gender, sexuality and sexual difference had been
repressed in what she viewed as patriarchal celebrations of great masters. She
argued that “the work of Gauguin … supplies the fantasy scenarios and the
exotic mise-en-scène for not only masculinist but also imperialist narratives”
of the canon of European modern art.15 Gauguin pursued, she argued, personal
liberation through an unfettered sexuality and aesthetic primitivism that resulted
in an art whose often troubling subjects had been left unaddressed, while it was
subsequently validated by the twentieth-century path of French modernism.
Pollock claimed that as a self-aware white critic of the twentieth century, she
required “the mediating distance of feminist analysis”16 to reposition Gauguin’s
work out of the master narratives, and she thus strove to reidentify with the
position of Teha’amana, “the historical Tahitian woman …. who appears only

as the object of representation in a Western art history, as Teha’amana is known
to us only through her historic encounter … with Gauguin.”17 Pollock asserted
that no historic specificity could be found in Gauguin’s representations of
Teha’amana, particularly the nudes, and that rather her presence was erased
to become a sign not of a Tahitian woman but rather of a European man [the
artist], and a sign of art’s traditions, and canons—what remains is “merely the
mark of difference from ‘the privileged male of the white race’.”18
These critical interventions, coming in the last two decades of the twentieth
century, paralleled the emergence of a caucus of feminist artists dedicated to
exposing the patriarchal habits of the Euro-American art world, particularly
in the widespread absence of women artists featured in major encyclopedic
museums. Interventions by the Guerilla Girls in New York in particular protested
the near absence of women artists, as well as the predominance of the images
of the female nude at such major sites as the Museum of Modern Art and the
Metropolitan Museum.19 Thus the feminist elevation of Teha’amana as a historic
figure whom Gauguin had eclipsed in the project of making his primitivist art
was but one thread in a larger wave of the feminist critique of both the canon,
and the institutions, of art.
In light of such critiques that often dominated the criticism of the late twentieth
century, Gauguin seemed to invite banishment to the ever-growing list of dead
white male artists who used others badly to achieve their art. But a question to
come out of this ardent judgment of Gauguin as exploitative colonist was how
precisely was the work received back in Paris? And in particular, what was the
position of the female viewer of these works—there must have been many at
gallery shows and the retrospectives—and did she find her gaze thwarted by
Gauguin’s subjects? Were early-twentieth-century female viewers required to
identify (à la Laura Mulvey) with their own objectification, and to accept the
female’s position as one of the object of appropriation, and/or as the (mere)
muse and non-interactive model?20 Picasso’s primitivism, famously informed by
his knowledge of Gauguin and represented by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907,
New York: Museum of Modern Art), might urge us to think that this was the
case.
But there is an additional perspective to bring forward, that of the emergent
modernist woman artist, who willingly confronted Gauguin, and took (in her
affiliation with his work) not only the satisfactions of entering into artistic
dialogue with the avant-garde canon, but perhaps other useful positions as well.
This essay explores that possibility of, simply put, what a modern, or today, a
contemporary woman artist could get out of an encounter with Gauguin’s art.
How could this be productive? The answers foreground the deeply varied terrain
that is the reception of the modernist legacy, by varied creative minds, over time.
Several case studies from the early twentieth century and from today are
particularly useful in exploring this question: these include the careers of
German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) and the Hungarian-
Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–41), as well as a range of dynamic
Polynesian contemporary artists who have critically engaged the legacy of
Gauguin. For these women, the work of Gauguin does not close down their
subjectivity in the face of racist cliché, nor blinker their encounters with
modernism. Rather, his art serves to open up platforms of opportunity, and
of feminist interventions and appropriations in the seemingly male-controlled
field of avant-garde modernism. Their work addresses both styles and subjects
of Gauguin’s art, bringing the agency of the woman artist and her self-image
directly to the center stage.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, from Bremen, was attracted to the cosmopolitan
Paris art world. In 1900, Becker first traveled to Paris, where she studied both at
the Colarossi Academy and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1901, she married
Worpswede artist, Otto Modersohn, and over the next six years traveled back
and forth between rural Germany and Paris. In Paris, she lived on her own,
and was deeply attracted to the work by Gauguin she encountered in 1900
at the Exposition Universelle; in 1905 in the collection of Gustave Fayet; in
the Folkwang Museum, Essen; and then, significantly, back in Paris in 1906
at the Salon d’Automne, which included 227 Gauguin artworks.21 She also
frequented the gallery of Vollard, who was aggressively promoting Gauguin
on an international scale. She then returned to Worpswede to her family, and
thereafter the biography ends tragically; in late 1907, Modersohn-Becker died
soon after giving birth to a daughter. So her relationship to the art of Gauguin
coincides to a mere seven years of her short, productive career.
The attractions of Gauguin were several for her: large iconic forms, bold
shapes, bright planes of flat color. She was lured by the language of modernist
simplification that Gauguin had honed, in the company of Synthetist artists,
Emile Bernard and Louis Anquetin. But it is in her most radical subjects that
Modersohn-Becker rethinks the model of Gauguin. At the height of her interest
in his painting, she engaged the genre of the female nude—mothers nursing or
holding children, often along with ripe fruits, and in a striking work of 1905,
probably the first example of a modernist female self-portrait in the nude

(Figure 9.1). Standing in front of a bank of brilliant, flowers, she holds small
blossoms, and wears more in her hair—a reference that is at once both peasant-
like and tropical. Bare-chested, she holds forth a flower in front of verdant
foliage, miming the direct presentation of the female body found in many of
Gauguin’s Tahitian scenes, including the iconic Two Tahitian Women (see Figure
3.7) of 1899 that had been on view at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1906.
In her self-portrait, Modersohn-Becker crowns herself as a lighter-skinned
cousin of these tahitiennes, appropriating his formulation as a platform for her
confident control both of art’s history and of her own representation. She here
inhabits and foregrounds for the viewer associations of both male and female
worlds—the sphere of nature used by Gauguin to essentialize the feminine, and
the self-assurance of a sophisticated, aspiring artist. Half smiling, fully aware,
and inserting herself into a canon of female nudes as both subject and object, she
claims the domain of modernist primitivism as her own.
Modersohn-Becker’s admiration for Gauguin may well have gone beyond
style and subjects to a general adoption of an avant-garde persona, with its
insistence on self-liberation from bourgeois norms. Modersohn-Becker
demanded independence within her marriage, in which she was asked to
care for a step-daughter.22 In 1906, she fled family life to work alone in Paris,
where she soon claimed to be “living the most intensely happy period of my
life.”23 Perhaps Gauguin’s Noa Noa (which she read in 1905)24 underscored
a certain disdain for European bourgeois convention that, albeit across
genders, was a model for this artist. While in Paris, she actively collected
photographic reproductions of Gauguin.25 Subsequently, living back in
Germany, her passionate interest in Gauguin’s career remained; in the late
months of her pregnancy she asked Rainer Maria Rilke, still in Paris, to send
her reproductions of Gauguin’s art that were on sale at Druet.26 In a state of
domesticity that she saw as overly isolated, she longed to surround herself
with Gauguin’s art as a talisman of the progressive art scene in Paris she had
left for a hiatus of maternity that turned out to be tragically definitive and
final. It is a rather ironic twist that Gauguin himself, once isolated from the art
scene of Paris in Tahiti, surrounded himself in his studio with photographic
art reproductions as well.
Thus in spite of their differences in gendered visions of their subjects,
Gauguin nonetheless served Modersohn-Becker as a dual inspiration—both
of the progressive formal aesthetics of the Parisian avant-garde to which she
Figure 9.1 Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with an Amber Necklace II, 1906,
oil on linen, 24 × 20 in. (61.1 × 50 cm).
longed to contribute, and also of the non-conventional life of the artist-traveler.

It is interesting to ponder that if her career as a modernist had continued beyond
1907, she might have taken up the legacy of Gauguin’s representations of islander
women more critically, as she matured as a woman artist and as an expressionist,
but such a chapter in art history will remain a speculative fiction.
A second case study is the Hungarian–Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil, born to

a Punjabi-Sikh aristocratic father and a Hungarian-Jewish opera-singer mother.
She is now often hailed as the first modern artist of India—a designation
intended to suggest both her cosmopolitan understanding of the currents of
European modern art and her strong roots in indigenous Indian culture. As
a young woman, her family brought her to Paris to study art. From 1929 to
1934, she worked in Paris, absorbing both the artistic currents of the capital,
and profiting from the elevated position in the cultural world that she, as a
woman of wealth and a high Indian position, could assume. She thus was both
insider and outsider in Paris, and she also became a staunch devotee of Parisian
modernism, that was now understood to derive in part from the work of van
Gogh and Gauguin. In both of these artists, she admired the focus on humble
subjects, and in the case of Gauguin, the flat forms, and decorative qualities of
the work.
In 1934, her family returned to India, to the western Himalayas, where she
aspired to paint not her own class, but rather the common classes of India, and
to locate ancient Indian motifs that could inform her art. In works that examine
the life of young Indian women such as Child-Wife of 1936 (Figure 9.2), there is a
decided echo of some of the images of Teha’amana, especially his Merahi metua
no Tehamana (Plate 4): in both, we find a parallel straight-forwardness and
sympathy, with the figure of an isolated young woman pushed forward into the
viewer’s attention, and an emphasis on the youth of the bride echoing the self-
confidence of Gauguin’s Teha’amana. Yet within a year of finishing this canvas,
Sher-Fil reported to a friend that this canvas was “too influenced by Gauguin”
and she was now getting away from that artist’s influence.27
In no place is the debt to Gauguin more evident than in her work Self-Portrait
as a Tahitian, from the very end of Sher-Gil’s Parisian period, in which she
paints herself, nude to the waist, as a “Tahitian”28 (Figure 9.3). The reference is
clear; the designation Tahitian distinctly conjured Gauguin, and her choice to
show herself bare-breasted, with long unbound hair, and dressed in a simple
unpatterned wrap at her waist, all recall the iconic images of Tahitians painted
more than three decades earlier by Gauguin.
Yet Sher-Gil rejects the obvious position of the Tahitian woman as the object
of the male gaze, by making the gaze a reciprocal conversation with herself. She
aestheticizes her face, and poses in a three-quarter position that showcases her
breasts. She is the model, and she is the artist. She is, like Modersohn-Becker,
taking on the mantle of Gauguin as a kind of gateway, to paint her way into
Figure 9.2 Amrita Sher-Gil, Child-Wife, 1936, oil on canvas.

Figure 9.3 Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian, 1934, oil on canvas, 357⅜16 ×
22⅛ in. (90 × 56 cm).
a recently established canon. She is effectively playing the double role of the
modern woman artist as subject/model, and as agenic painter.
The ambition of this work is further articulated by two aspects of the
background. First, just behind her is the suggestive shadow of a figure,
evidently male, whose hair is cropped around the ear, and who thus might be a
doppelgänger of the artist or a figure of the male modernist who inspires her—
she thus paints a doubled personage that fuses herself as model with a shadowed
rendering of her own agency. The background here is neither Tahitian nor
Indian, but significantly a pastiche of a Japanese screen, one that may depict the
elegant world of the courtesans of the Yoshiwara, and their lives characterized (in
the European imagination at least) by studied beauty, ritual and sexual pleasure.
This exotic reference invokes two key ideas. Both van Gogh and Gauguin had
famously used Japanese art as a source of inspiration, particularly as they explored
the utopian dream of establishing a shared studio in the south at Arles. This
homage to Japanese art thus links Sher-Gil to the artistic appropriations of these
canonical artists she so admires. And yet more generally, this Japanese reference
suggests the cross-cultural inspiration that had constantly reinvigorated and
stimulated innovation in modernist painting. Her imaging of herself as one who
moved in and out of her Indian and European identities, asserts strength in her
own hybridity by referencing this tradition within modernism that grounded
itself through the incorporation and reinvention of the foreign. Rather than
rejecting Gauguin’s subjectivities, we find here Sher-Gil’s embracing them to
her own end, in a formulation in which Teha’amana’s legacy is not simply as
a female subject, exoticized by the European male gaze of the artist, but rather,
insistently as both modern agent and muse to the woman artist.
In a contemporary photographic collage made by the artist’s nephew Vivan
Sundaram, Sher-Gil appears as a lively partner to her sober doppelgänger in the
painted self-image (Figure 9.4). Sundaram, who has studied his aunt’s oeuvre
in depth, captures here Sher-Gil’s projection of her double identity as both
artist and model, as he appropriates Gauguin’s tahitiennes as fuel for personal
affiliation, and expression. He aptly stages her as a woman artist who sees herself
as equal to Gauguin, both as the modernist innovator and as a confident subject.
For these two twentieth-century women artists—one German, one
Hungarian-Indian—who aspired to a place in the cosmopolitan world of
French art, emulation of and affiliation with the artwork of a cornerstone
figure like Gauguin ensured that their work would at least demand notice. They
displayed both confidence and hubris in taking on the aesthetic legacy of an
Figure 9.4 Vivan Sundaram, Self as Tahitian, 2001, digital print, 23¼ × 11¾ in. (59 ×
30 cm).
avant-gardist who had become the mainstream in Parisian criticism, exhibition

and in the art market so soon after his death. Moreover, to assimilate their own
bodies to the exotic nudes that were his signature subject was a clever act of
artistic usurpation that bypassed the gendered borders seemingly established
by so many of his subaltern, passive female Polynesian subjects. By stepping
up, and using to their own ends the Gauguinesque tropes of the semi-nude
model set in the trappings of exoticism (such as Sher-Gil’s Japanese screen) or
verdant nature (behind Modersohn-Becker’s nude self-portrait), these women
artists claimed places not just alongside—but out in front of an acknowledged
modern master. In this process, Sher-Gil and Modersohn-Becker take the stage
themselves in a double role, leveraging the traditional position of the figure of
female model as muse into the fully agenic position of the self-aware modern
woman artist.
If we fast-forward several generations, we find a world in which
decolonization, postcolonial discourse and separatist fervor has deeply changed
the colonized Pacific that Gauguin painted at the turn of the twentieth century.
For Pacific Islanders, Gauguin’s work is well known, but less as a repertoire of
fine art contemplated in Paris museums and gallery exhibitions, and more as a
vocabulary of clichés of European fantasy about the Polynesian body. The broad
diversity with Gauguin’s oeuvre—which ranges broadly from painting to prints,
monotypes, woodcarving and ceramics; from still-lives, portraits and genre
scenes staged in Paris, Brittany and Martinique as well as in Tahitian and the
Marquesas—is generally not well-known among contemporary Pacific artists.29
In a transnational and postcolonial Pacific, Gauguin’s art is reduced by some to a
troubling vocabulary of vahines—a litany of “dusky maidens” who seem frozen in
time by an inflexible Western gaze, and a fantasy of Pacific women as perpetually
willing and available. As a consequence, the voices of many Polynesian women
artists are critically engaged, seeking to deconstruct a Gauguin-authorized
myth of Polynesian womanhood. These Pacific artists and writers alike reflect a
generation that sees little value in the touristic visions with which Gauguin’s art
has inscribed Polynesia in a broader global imagination; they resist a world in
which their island homes are labeled as primitive, paradisiacal retreats for those
weary of the world’s capitals, and where a luxury international cruise liner boasts
the artist’s name, and its young Pacific Islander hostesses go by the sobriquet
“Les Gauguines.” In 2009, Samoan activist and poet Selina Tusitala March, for
example, authored a poem: Guys like Gauguin. It is a fluid rant. She writes in part:
thanks Bougainville
for desiring’ em young
so guys like Gauguin could dream
and dream
then take his syphilitic body
downstream to the tropics
to test his artistic hypothesis
about how the uncivilized
ripen like pawpaw are best slightly raw ….30
Maori artist Kay George (b. 1954) is a resident of Rarotonga (coincidentally

the birth-home of Teha’amana). She works in digital photography, placing
contemporary images of herself and friends over reproductions of Gauguin’s
paintings, thereby restoring agency and specific presence to Gauguin’s evacuated
and anonymous Polynesian subjects. She claims that she was first drawn to
Gauguin’s work by its palette and form, but as a Pacific Islander was unsettled
by the content. In these examples, she started with the famous Nafea Faa Ipoipo
(When will you marry?) (W. 454), the Gauguin painting that made world art
market history in 2015 when it allegedly sold on the private market for nearly
300 million dollars.31 That iconic Gauguin painting foregrounds fin-de-siècle
Parisian sentiments of nostalgia for a seemingly vanishing paradise, and the
(presumably male) viewer’s desire for the Tahitian—evident in the form of the
willing woman crouching in the foreground, who leans voluptuously toward
the viewer and pulls her blouse suggestively to the side. Over this staging of
the vahine, Kay George layers images of contemporary women (Figure 9.5)—
confident, in modern clothes. She takes back Teha’amana, countering what she
sees as the predatory gaze of artist and nineteenth-century imperialist viewer as
well. Her bold coloration still offers a sensual allure of the tropics, but it is not, in
this artist’s view, wedded to a stereotype of the perpetually available or “willing”
Polynesian woman.
In a recent series of digital montages by Samoan artist Tyla Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou
(b. 1985), who works in Auckland, Gauguin’s canonical paintings of Tahitian
women serve as platform for both satire of the canon that authorizes Gauguin’s
place in modern art, and for a bracing resistance of the viewer ‘s gaze, through
her use of humor and visual disjunction (Plate 8). The original Gauguin
she takes up here is also When will you marry (W. 454). In her series, Vaeau
Ta’ufo’ou uses the process of mechanical reproduction to showcase her central
theme of artificiality, emphasizing that these are not authentic “fine art”
Figure 9.5 Kay George, Looking Forward, 2009, digital montage, 19¾ × 32¼ in. (50 × 82 cm).
paintings by Gauguin, but rather, glossy reproductions that share more with
tourist posters and blockbuster postcards. To further build her irony, Vaeau
Ta’ufo’ou inserts—in the manner of amusement park cut-outs—faces of
herself and friends, smirking, pouting, and humorously grimacing to counter
the presumably all-consuming gaze of the viewer. These women mock and
resist—they invert the compliant dusky maidens of Bougainville’s texts or
Gauguin’s canvases. Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou adds plastic flowers to her models’ hair, a
glaring and even vulgar touch intended to underscore that the very falseness
of cliché is her subject. She writes:
For me, [it is important] to …. investigate and critique stereotypical images that
have been constructed by those other than who they represent—‘outside’ views
proliferated via a range of media which have established … homogenic cultural
representations that continue to be (ab)used today.32
Teha’amana resurfaces as the cipher of a used past, a woman who inspired

an exoticist French representation that cannot be measured by its fidelity to a
vanished history. Contemporary Tahitian writers such as Chantal Spitz (b. 1954)
speak to Gauguin not as painter and artist, but rather as the thief who profited
from the Polynesian identity of his models, and who has brought an unworthy
fame to the Maori people.33 In some poems, she uses his position in the European
canon to frame her claim to a modern, activist, anti-French, Polynesian identity.
Gauguin’s fictions of the vahine’s compliance with the viewer’s desires, and
an essentialist fusion of her with an abundant tropical nature, such as in his
signature image of a youthful islander drinking at a spirit-filled waterfall in
Pape Moe/Mysterious Waters of 1893 (W. 498), were once sanctioned in Parisian
modernism by their novelty and their reworking of Arcadian tropes. While
still honored by the world of modern art museums, they also now find echoes
in travel brochures, posters and postcards circulated by an elite, international
tourist industry. In speaking back to the empire of inherited clichés, and in taking
back the heritage of Teha’amana, Spitz, Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou, George and other Pacific
Islander artists offer instead a productive window into today’s complex Pacific
realities. It is a world where women’s artistic voices assume a central place—
over, around, and through the discursive field once dominated by their silent
images in a long-standing Franco-centric modernist canon and constellation
of art institutions. These contemporary artists urge us to rethink the legacy
of Gauguin’s path through modernism and his complicated place in a more
global world of artistic endeavor that extends far beyond the reaches of Paris,
and the early-twentieth-century patterns of sale, exhibition and criticism in

Europe and the United States. Their work clarifies how its legacies may open up,
rather than close down, our understanding of the vibrant Polynesian world that
both inspired such images in the past, and now insistently takes them back on
its own terms.
Notes
1 Curator Starr Figura reported these attendance figures (personal communication,

March 30, 2016) for the exhibition Gauguin: Metamorphoses, held at MoMA from
March 8 to June 8, 2014.
2 Isabelle Cahn, “An Echoing Silence: The Critical Reception of Gauguin in France,
1903–1949,” Van Gogh Museum Journal (2003): 28–30.
3 On Vollard’s international clients for Gauguin’s art, see Suzanne Diffre and Marie-
Josèphe Lesieur, “Gauguin in the Vollard Archives,” in Gauguin Tahiti, eds. George
T. M. Shackelford and Claire Frèches-Thory, exh. cat. (Boston: Boston Museum of
Fine Arts Publications, 2003), 306–11. On Fry, see Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern
Art in Britain, 1910–1914, exh. cat. (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997).
4 See the dust jacket of Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat. (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936).
5 The words Tehamana and Teha’amana are two manners of writing the same
Tahitian name. Gauguin’s use of the name Tehura for his mistress in his text
Noa Noa is generally understood to be a substitute for these Tahitian names, as
this shorter name may have been more palatable (e.g. intriguing, but not overly
exotic) to his French readers. Yet the interchangeability of these names in his
various accounts may also suggest that the young Polynesian woman he presents
in his writings as his domestic partner was perhaps romanticized, or partly
fictionalized.
6 Gauguin’s account of returning home to find Tehura afraid in the dark is a
cornerstone of his mythologizing of encounters with indigenous women and their
alleged mystery, simplicity and spirituality. He describes her as “immobile, naked,
laying face downward flat on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with fear.”
Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal, trans. O. F. Theis (1919, New York: Dover
Publications, 1985), 33.
7 On the popularity of Loti’s novel and its incarnation of various myths of paradise,
see Elizabeth C. Childs, Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2013), 26–9 and
249, nn. 21–8.
8 The photograph published by Philippe Peltier as Tehamana is not of her; the dates
of the negative are too early for that woman to have been 13 when Gauguin met
her in 1891. See George T. M. Shackelford and Claire Frèches-Thory, eds., Gauguin;
Tahiti, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2004), 54.
9 On Gauguin’s now well-known reliance on the ethnographic texts by Jacques-
Antoine Moerenhout, see Nicolas Wadley, Noa Noa: Gauguin’s Tahiti (Salem: Salem
House Publishing, 1985), 109–12.
10 Bengt Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, trans. Reginald Spink (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1965), 115. See also the remarkable analysis of the
explorer accounts of encountering Tahiti’s young women, who were often presented
to foreigners by their elders, in Serge Tcherkézoff, Tahiti—1768: Jeunes filles en
pleurs: La face cachée des permiers contacts et la naissance du mythe occidental
(1595–1928) (Pirae: Editions Au vent des îles, 2004).
11 Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, 195.
12 Richard Brettell, Françoise Cachin, Claire Frèches-Thory, Charles F. Stuckey
and Peter Zegers. The Art of Paul Gauguin, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of
Chicago/Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1988).
13 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of the
eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper Collins, 1992),
312–29.
History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992).
15 Ibid., 8.
16 Ibid., 11.
17 Ibid., 10.
18 Ibid., 48.
19 The group was formed by seven women artists in 1985 in response to a MoMA
exhibition which purported to be a global survey of the most important
contemporary art. On this and other groups and interventions, see Norma Broude
and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of
the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Abrams, 1994), 86–129.
20 The classic Mulvey essay that lays out the paradox of the female viewer of an art
implicitly intended for the heteronormative male gaze is “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” rept. in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory
and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),
833–44.
21 Diane Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 226.
22 For example, in 1905 she wrote to her mother “[My husband is] always satisfied. I
have the strong desire from time to time to live a little. That one is so terribly stuck
when one is married is rather hard …” Ibid., 130.
23 Letter to the artist’s sister Milly, of May 1906, quoted in Ibid., 135.
24 Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 141.
25 Paul Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker, trans.
and annotated by J. Diane Radycki (Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, 1980), 302, no. 9.
26 Letter of August 1907 cited in Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 221.
27 Letter to Denise Proutaux of July 1937, in Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-portrait in Letters
and Writings, ed. Vivan Sundaram (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2010), I: 391.
28 An important consideration of this painting is Saloni Mathur, “A Retake of Sher-
Gil’s Self-Portrait as Tahitian,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 515–44.
29 Here, I am grateful for conversations on this subject with Prof. Caroline Vercoe, of
the University of Auckland, New Zealand. See also her excellent essay on Pacific
artists’ criticism of clichés about Pacific Islanders in “The Many Faces of Paradise,”
in Paradise Now: Contemporary Art from the Pacific, ed. Melissa Chiu (New York:
The Asia Society Museum, 2004), 34–47.
30 Selina Tusitala Marsh, “Guys like Gauguin” (2009) quoted in Suzanne Greub,
ed., Gauguin Polynesia, exh. cat. (Munich: Hirmer Verlag for the Ny Carlsberg
Glyptotek and Seattle Art Museum, 2011), 348.
31 Chris Johnston, “Paul Gauguin’s When Will You Marry? Becomes Most Expensive
Artwork Ever,” The Guardian (February 7, 2015).
32 Statement by the artist, 2011, reprinted in Caroline Vercoe, “Contemporary Worlds:
Artists in the Pacific Respond to Gauguin,” in Greub, Gauguin: Polynesia, 352.
33 The most widely-read novel by Spitz is Island of Shattered Dreams (Wellington:
HUIA Publishing, 2007). A particularly pointed diatribe against the legacy of
Gauguin in Polynesia is her essay “Où en sommes-nous cent ans après la question
posée par Gauguin: D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?,” in
Riccardo Pineri, ed., Paul Gauguin: héritage et confrontations. Actes du Colloque
des 6, 7, et 8 mars 2003 (Papeete: Editions le Motu et l’Université de la Polynésie
Française, 2003), 100–7.
10
Re-Possessing Gauguin: Material Histories and

the Contemporary Pacific
Heather Waldroup
Appalachian State University
Possessing Tahiti was a complicated affair. Indeed, who possessed whom?

Native and Stranger each possessed the other in their interpretations of
the other. They possessed one another in an ethnographic moment that got
transcribed into text and symbol. They each archived that text and symbol
in their respective cultural institutions. They each made cargo of the things
they collected from one another, put their cargo in their respective museums,
remade the things they collected into new cultural artefacts. They entertained
themselves with their histories of their encounter. Because each reading of
the text, each display of the symbol, each entertainment in the histories, each
viewing of the cargo enlarged the original encounter, made a process of it, each
possession of the other became a self-possession as well. Possessing the other,
like possessing the past, is always full of delusions.1
In his eloquent essay “Possessing Tahiti,” the historian Greg Dening offers a rich
metaphor for thinking about colonial encounters, particularly about exchanges
of objects and ideas between Indigenous and European actors in the Pacific. As
Dening notes in the passage above, moments of encounter were (and continue
to be) translated by the agents who experienced them into artifacts: linguistic,
ontological and material. Through words and images, stories and things, works
of art and works of literature, indigenous and colonial subjects made sense
of the often unintelligible, incomprehensible situations in which they found
themselves. In the Pacific, these encounters took place on the beach, on the ship
deck, and in the village, but also in whaling and port towns, at expositions and
performances. As Europeans arrived in the Pacific, Islanders traveled through
the rest of the world. In the present, these original encounter narratives have
been retold, many taking on new forms and meanings. Cargo—whether as
commodity, or baggage or sustenance—becomes the physical manifestation of
these encounters. Like all objects, cargo can also be lost, set aside, stolen, forgotten
or transformed. Some cargo may be collected (or taken) and displayed in sites of
cultural significance and authority. Even when contained within museums, with
their missions of preservation, these objects can be particularly vulnerable to
physical decay: they may have been moved around the world, subjected to light
and heat and air, to the detrimental oils of human fingers. Paint can flake away,
revealing new textures hidden beneath.
Gauguin’s artworks are many things, as the rich variety of essays in this book
reminds us. In just one aspect of their art-historical significance, they are material
reminders of the entangled histories of Polynesians and Europeans, and serve
as records of encounter for one particular Frenchman who came to the Pacific
at the end of the nineteenth century. In other ways, Gauguin got the Pacific
wrong: he was perhaps, in some aspects—to borrow Dening’s term—delusional.
Certainly, Gauguin benefitted from the colonial infrastructure that France had
been developing for some decades prior to his arrival, and as many have noted,
he arrived in Tahiti with colonialist baggage (cargo) of his own, built on the
romanticized narratives of Pierre Loti, his experiences at the 1889 Universal
Exposition and his own primitivist fantasies. Yet in other ways, as scholars such
as Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk have argued, in spite of some initial misunderstandings,
for a European Gauguin had an unusually keen understanding of the complex
colonial culture in which he lived.2
This latter direction of inquiry, while offering thoughtful commentary on
Gauguin’s relevance as an historical figure outside of his role in the development
of European modernism, occupies a relatively small percentage of the very
large archive of scholarship on Gauguin. In this essay I am moving in a slightly
different direction, albeit influenced by this Pacific-informed body of scholarship:
Gauguin is a significant if problematic player in Pacific colonial history. The
images he produced there are complex and often troubling colonial-historical
records, informed by his Pacific experience but also his Symbolist-infused
interest in ghosts and spirits, dualities of good and evil, and the world of the
uncanny. Beyond even the puzzle of Gauguin’s original project or intentions are
the popular-culture manifestations of his works, as tourist advertisements and
postcards. Even today his legacy (often in romanticized and popularized form)
remains a key advertising trope for tourism in the region. As Jean-François
Re-Possessing Gauguin: Material Histories and the Contemporary Pacific 253
Staszak has also stressed, the ubiquity of Gauguin’s image in the Islands
themselves suggests the need to examine this relationship further; he writes,
“Being well known and widely appreciated, they are free advertising for
tourism in Polynesia.”3 Because of this continued connection with neocolonial
capitalism in the Pacific, Gauguin’s work needs to continue to be considered
within the context of Pacific history in addition to his contributions to European
modernism.4
Dening’s metaphor of possession makes for an intriguing approach to the
study of Gauguin’s role in Pacific colonial history. Certainly Gauguin attempted
to possess Tahiti, and Hiva Oa: through embodied experiences, through the
production of intellectual and aesthetic representations, and of course, through
his sexual encounters with young women. Furthermore, in the 125 years that
have passed since Gauguin first disembarked in Papeete, the cargo produced
out of these encounters has taken multiple forms. Gauguin’s artworks, through
their inclusion in museum collections and the academic authority of art history,
have become canonical representations of European modernism: celebrated for
their powerful use of color, rich iconography and complex compositions and
content. In a very different vein, through their use in contemporary advertising
and on postcards, Gauguin’s works have served to further primitivist and
exoticist desires for Western visitors within touristic discourses. Finally, while
the original intentions for his work might have been something more obscure,
the reproduction of a romanticized narrative of Gauguin’s experiences in the
Pacific furthers a history of sexualized representations of Polynesia based in
popular tales of “going native.”
Recently, Caroline Vercoe has written of the impact of Gauguin on
contemporary Pacific art by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, noting
that “[Gauguin’s] interrogation of binaries like innocence and experience, and
self and other, along with his engagement with colonial stereotypes of the noble
savage and dusky maiden, and the primitive and civilised, have provided rich
points of departure for artists in the Pacific.”5 Examining works by artists including
Graham Fletcher, Kay George, Shigeyuki Kihara and Tyla Vaeau, Vercoe stresses
that Gauguin is an ambivalent and vexing figure in Pacific visual culture: at once
an imposed and unwelcome presence, yet one that offers an opportunity for
Indigenous artists to create new narratives in response to histories of colonial
violence and oppression. Taking this conversation further, this essay concludes
with the discussion of two contemporary artists, Debra Drexler and Adrienne
Pao, whose works address histories of contact, colonialism and the impact of
the tourist gaze in the Pacific. Drexler and Pao have very different stakes in
the history of Pacific representations: Drexler is a non-Indigenous artist living
in Hawai’i, while Pao is of Hawaiian descent but born and raised on the US
mainland. Still, both artists create work that challenges us to interrogate the
continued relations of native and colonialist, tourist and visitor in the Islands.
It is not my intention that this essay will be the final word on Gauguin
and Polynesia. Quite the contrary: we need to continue to question Gauguin’s
relationship to Pacific colonial history, and this conversation needs to include
scholars, writers, artists and others from inside and outside the Pacific. As a place
to begin (or perhaps we are in medias res), we might think about ways to re-possess
Gauguin, to develop new avenues of inquiry into his place in Pacific colonial and
social histories. As one possible methodology, I propose here that we consider a
material turn in our studies of Gauguin: that, drawing on Dening, we think about
his artworks as cargo of a particular sort, as cargo that can be possessed and re-
possessed. Cargo is an apt metaphor for things that are mysterious, are contained,
that are found washed up on the beach (for Dening, a key site of contact, exchange
and translation).6 Gauguin’s work in both two and three dimensions are material
objects that have traveled from the past, that are anchored in history but with
contemporary social lives; they are material in that they are multisensory, in the
way that material culture studies asks us to examine objects; and they are material
as artifact: that we can consider what kind of cultural work they do (in addition
to their visual content, or what they look like).7
A material-culture approach also informs my placement of Drexler’s and
Pao’s work in conversation with Gauguin’s. Drexler’s installation, Gauguin’s
Zombie, is a direct response to Gauguin’s presence in the Pacific, including the
travels of his possessed body. Pao’s photographic series, Hawaiian Cover-Ups,
does not directly engage with Gauguin, but does think about the artist’s own
body, the material culture of tourism, and the landscape and natural history of
the Islands in relationship to European tourism and the tourist gaze. Through
his work, through the creative capital of oil painting (including its popular
translations), and through the academic authority of the discipline of art
history, Gauguin has made a lasting impact on the visual world of the Pacific.
Thinking materially about Gauguin might enable us to develop new avenues of
discussion, encompassing social history as well as art history, Pacific history as
well as European modernism. It might give us some satisfactory responses—
at least for the meantime—to the question, “What does Gauguin mean for the
contemporary Pacific?”
Gauguin and the contemporary Pacific
In the summer of 2003, in connection with various events held on a global stage
to mark the centenary of Gauguin’s death, I attended a fascinating exhibition.
This was not at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts (although each mounted intriguing exhibitions of their own around
this time), but at a high school, the Lycée Samuel Raapoto, in Arue, Tahiti. The
exhibit, entitled Koke, Hiohio matou ia oe: Gauguin, nous te Regardons, was
curated by students at the Lycée with the support of their art teacher, Jean-
Pierre Hua. It included reworking the paintings of Paul Gauguin as two- and
three-dimensional artworks and tableaux vivants. One student, Yolande Amaru,
revisioned Vahine no te Vi (1892, Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, Cone
Collection, W. 449) as a woman holding a cell phone (this was before the days
of smartphones). Another student, Margarette Hummer, reworked The Loss of
Virginity (1890–1, Norfolk, VA: Chrysler Museum of Art, W. 412) as a three-
dimensional sculpture influenced by comic book art and contemporary body
adornment styles: in her piece, the woman and dog were both tattooed and
pierced. For a tableau vivant produced collectively by several students and
modeled on Ta Matete (1892, Basel: Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, W. 476), the
students painted a backdrop that resembled Gauguin’s dreamscape of Tahiti, with
decorative trees and non-natural colors, and posed in front of it wearing their
contemporary clothing (sunglasses, board shorts and sundresses). Finally, the
students created an installation of Gauguin-themed consumer goods available
for purchase throughout the Islands. Entitled Gauguin, nous te Mangeons,
the installation presented the viewer with bags of taro chips, coffee mugs and
souvenir t-shirts, all of which used Gauguin’s artwork in some way in their labels
or logos. The artworks, the tableaux vivants and the installation all drew on the
material culture of a Papeete suburb in the twenty-first century. Altogether, the
exhibition created and curated by the Lycée students was funny, thoughtful,
clever and globally minded.
Clearly, Gauguin is already part of the contemporary Pacific, and has been
for some time. Beginning in the 1970s, scholars educated in Pacific art, culture
and history began discussing the Oceanic influences on Gauguin’s work, beyond
merely the more obvious formal-primitive ones. In particular, studies by Bengt
Danielsson and Teilhet-Fisk, as noted above, offered early close analysis of the
impact of Pacific art and culture on Gauguin.8 Although Danielsson’s text is
arguably colonialist in its leanings, as Vercoe has stressed, the research, informed
by onsite knowledge of contemporary Tahitian life and culture, found in both

works has had lasting implications for later generations of Gauguin scholars.9
Teilhet-Fisk’s text in particular has become part of the canon of Gauguin
literature: her work is often cited in the 1988 catalog for the National Gallery
exhibition, and this author admittedly sees its inclusion in a bibliography as a
touchstone for thorough scholarship on the artist.10 In the decades since, and
in addition to Vercoe’s work mentioned above, scholars including Elizabeth
Childs, James Clifford, Viviane Fayaud, Margaret Jolly, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel,
Bronwen Nicholson and Roger Neich, Riccardo Pineri, Jean-Francois Staszak,
Jean-Yves Tréhin, and Lee Wallace have published studies of Gauguin informed
by knowledge of Pacific history and culture.11 Furthermore, a number of rich
directions have emerged around exhibitionary practice for Pacific art that serve
as interesting comparanda for studies of Gauguin’s Pacific works. For example,
the 2006 exhibition Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, held at the
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, was not about Gauguin, but it did consider the
movement of Indigenous objects both within their original contexts and into
Western museum collections, thinking about the production and exchange of
objects from both Indigenous and colonial perspectives.12 Finally, in a move that
Gauguin himself might appreciate (as it had both popular and prestige elements),
the 2014 exhibition Tiki Pop at the Musée du quai Branly foregrounded Gauguin’s
role in a longer history of popular representations of the Pacific.13
This is not to say that the scholars above are all celebratory of Gauguin,
embracing him as some kind of anti-imperial hero. As Margaret Jolly has
wisely noted, “I doubt Gauguin inspires many contemporary Tahitians who
are struggling to resist rather than perpetuate [the] interests” of imperialism.14
Chantal Spitz has harshly criticized the idea that Gauguin has any significance
at all within Pacific history.15 Teresia Teaiwa juxtaposes Noa Noa with Epeli
Hau’ofa’s novel Kisses in the Nederends not to glorify or even foreground the
work of the artist, but to interrogate “the discursive effects of militourism and
its reification of the ‘Polynesian’ body.”16 Further, viewing Gauguin as a point of
departure for Indigenous artists and writers, rather than seeing contemporary
Pacific cultural production as rooted in Indigenous epistemologies and histories,
risks replicating imperialist approaches to writing history that position the
‘arrival’ of Europeans as the beginning of contact narratives. Many scholars
might acknowledge that Gauguin has a presence in the Pacific, but this does not
make him a desired or welcome one. Certainly, wherever it is that Gauguin lies
in Pacific history, his space is a messy, contested one.
Yet, Gauguin does remain present in the Pacific, in both material and narrative
form, and for this reason, we continue to grapple with his legacy. Gauguin’s
relationship to the tourism industry in particular calls for continued interrogation
of his connections with global capitalism and neocolonialism more broadly.
In my own work I have stressed that the use of Gauguin’s paintings in tourist
advertisements suggests to potential visitors both that these images represent an
unmediated representation of 1890s Tahiti and that Island culture has remained
unchanged in the intervening century.17 Gauguin’s particular presence within
tourist discourse (both written and visual) also points to his connections with
militourism, a term used by Teaiwa to speak to the interconnections of military
presence and the tourism industry, in which each entity supports and upholds
the other, particularly within colonial spaces.18 Any globally-informed study of
the artist—and Gauguin also considered himself a global citizen—might benefit
from starting with these imperial-colonial connections.
But his works (and their responses and translations) are also located in the
Pacific, in addition to being about the Pacific. For this reason, discussions of
the artist would be richer from continued engagement with Pacific Studies
scholarship, making more space for Indigenous and other more critical
responses to the artist that are not only focused on European and North
American tourism and that do not only see the Pacific as exotic-erotic backdrop
to Gauguin’s modernist, synthetic productions. As Teaiwa notes, Pacific Studies
locates the subject of its inquiry within the Pacific itself: while explaining that
the field remains, to a large extent, loosely defined, it is ideally interdisciplinary,
comparative, and regionally focused.19 In this vein, we might think of Gauguin
as cargo on a Pacific beach.
Gauguin as cargo: Objects and places
My thoughts about Gauguin as cargo are influenced by a material turn in

my own broader research program, particularly around the materiality of
photographs (which, like Gauguin, are things from the past that have traveled
through time to visit and even confront us in the present). My very visual-
culture based education often stressed the role of ‘images’ as though they
were phantasms of sorts, holograms loaded with social meanings but perhaps
floating outside of historical discourse. There are merits to this approach,
certainly: John Berger’s Ways of Seeing was a formative text in stressing that
there are many ways of looking at art, and I have certainly found visual culture
studies useful in both my teaching and my scholarship.20 Berger (drawing on
Benjamin) stresses the significance of reproduction, and like many others I
first encountered Gauguin’s paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures as
reproductions in library books. Later I was able to look at (though not touch)
Gauguin’s artworks in museum collections, hung on walls or placed behind
glass. More frequently, my students interact with these pieces in digital format,
often without a strong sense of scale, media, texture or provenance of the
work in question. (One exception to this was the delightful experience of
accompanying some of my students to the Gauguin: Metamorphosis exhibition
at MoMA in 2014, after which one student noted, “I never realized that Gauguin
worked in so many different media.”)
But my thoughts on the object-ness and object-hood of Gauguin’s works
began to shift when I had the privilege of touching a Gauguin creation: in this
case, a letter in the British Library, that I was allowed to hold, in white-gloved
hands, with special permission and under an archivist’s close gaze. As with
Roland Barthes’s umbilicus, Gauguin had touched this, and now I have touched
it. A sensory connection is/was produced. The letter had traveled across time
and space to materialize in my own hands, the paper brittle but Gauguin’s neat
script still legible. Material culture studies encourages us to think about objects
(including artworks) themselves as primary sources, artifacts of the past that
can tell us things if we are willing to listen (and look, and touch).21 When re-
examined in this way, Gauguin’s works bear a number of historical marks: I have
seen his fingerprints in paint and clay, fossilized traces of his physical body. I
imagine the expert movement of his hands and carving tools across the surface
of dark, beautiful toa, incising and polishing wood grown in Island soil. Of
course, we might consider this approach with any artist, but given the particular
complexity of Gauguin himself and of his legacy, thinking about him from a
material culture perspective has enabled me to grapple with both Gauguin the
man and Gauguin the cargo, to consider when they are the same, and when they
are not.
We are not generally allowed to touch works in museums, and it is even
more rare that we can go as far as material culture studies persuades us to do,
in the twenty questions we are meant to ask an object (which include sniffing
and licking). But looking can still be a powerful tool: archaeologist and material
culture scholar Ian Hodder, for example, encourages us “to look more closely,
harder at the thing, to explore how society and thing are co-entangled.”22 Looking
can be a path to understanding the richer history of things, not only the content
of images, but the physical and historical travels of the thing itself. Nicholas
Thomas has taken on this project with a particular focus on the Pacific in his key
text Entangled Objects, in which he stresses that exchanges (of objects and ideas)
carry with them discourses that—like Gauguin’s uncanny paintings repurposed
as tourist advertisements—expand beyond the immediate nature of whatever
is being exchanged. He reminds us, “exchange thus mediates conditions and
relations that are not, or not wholly, constituted within the immediate frame of
exchange.”23 Dening’s metaphor of exchange as cargo further reminds us both
that it is often things in which these discourses are manifest, and that these
things can be both, at once, gift and burden.
As an example of how this approach might happen, we might consider Manao
Tupapau (Figure 10.1), a painting with a long art-historical genealogy. The
work was created with Gauguin’s avant-garde, Parisian art-collector audience in
mind, yet at the same time, it records some aspects of Tahitian material culture
(particularly textile production) at a time of great cultural transformation and
Figure 10.1 Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau, 1892, oil on burlap mounted on canvas,
28¾ × 36⅜ in. (73.025 × 92.3925 cm).
change.24 It was also created in a small house in a Tahitian village; it was shipped
across several oceans; and it was eventually purchased by a wealthy American
businessman. In addition to its various social lives—its connections with French
imperialism, European modernism and twentieth-century American capitalism—
the painting has a material history as well: its creation out of rough canvas and thick,
dry paint and heavy wooden frame. The painting itself is, of course, an astonishing
thing: j298 powerful form and gaze continue to haunt us in the present. On first
viewing the work in person at the Gauguin in New York Collections exhibition in
2002, I was further struck by the vividness of the colors (it always seems dark in
reproductions), particularly the strength of the purple background and the near-
phosphorescence of the decorative floral forms, along with the sturdiness of its
wood frame and the distinct presence of the canvas’s texture through the paint.
It seemed heavy, hanging on the wall, and even outside of the content, the work
had a corporeality I do not always encounter in paintings. In front of me, Manao
Tupapau seeming like a live, breathing, vibrating thing, part ghost, but also part
reliquary. It had a physicality that I had not fully experienced in reproductions of
it, and as material culture studies stresses, this physicality was both multisensory
and imbued with history. Like the perfumed monoï oil and tie-dyed pareu sold at
the marché in Papeete, Manao Tupapau was made in Tahiti, a hybrid product with
connections to both Indigenous and colonial cultures.25
Gauguin and contemporary art: Some additional thoughts
As objects that have traveled from the past and remain hypervisible in the present,
both as tourist advertisements and as objects held in museum collections primarily
in the US and Europe, Gauguin’s works from the Pacific are colonial cargo of a
particularly authoritative sort. That the strange, uncanny and often obscure works
Gauguin produced persist more than a century after his death in both popular
and academic discourse—two worlds that do not always align—would attest to
both his art historical significance as well as the continued appeal, for Westerners,
of the romantic-primitive narrative. The combination of the two has further
manifested in a striking number of exhibitions either entirely or strongly focused
on Gauguin in the past decade, from the most hegemonic of European museums
to commercial galleries to perhaps the most populist of art spaces, the Crystal
Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.26 Few avant-garde,
Theosophy-minded artists would seem to have such wide-ranging appeal.
Stuart Hall reminds us that images are the “saturating medium, the
saturating idiom, of communication worldwide,” easily crossing what might
otherwise be barriers of written and spoken language.27 As Berger and other
visual culture scholars stress, images (particularly in the digital world, never
imagined by Benjamin or Barthes) are highly mobile, reproducible things, easily
adaptable and subject to recoding. The translation of Gauguin’s oil paintings to
contemporary global commodity is just one example of this, cleverly captured
in the exhibition developed by the students of Lycée Samuel Raapoto with the
support of their teacher. Images are also potential sites of dialogue: between
past and present, but also between communities today. I would like to turn now
to the generative potential of his works, as part of conversations in the present
about the continuities of colonialism, about the enduring force of the tourist
gaze, on attempts to unravel the romantic-primitive narrative. In this way, also,
we might re-possess Gauguin, to think about and respond to our current forms
of cargo.
Adrienne Pao’s Hawaiian Cover-Ups series makes for an unexpected though
intriguing comparison with Gauguin’s work. Pao is not specifically referencing
Gauguin in this photographic project, but she does foreground the female body
(in this case, her own body) to comment on the sexualized representation of
Indigenous women and the conflation of the Indigenous body (particularly the
feminized subject) with landscape and nature in primitivist representations of
the Islands. In the series, Pao poses in various locations throughout Hawai’i,
including a pineapple field and Waikiki Beach. Her reclining posture in all the
photographs recalls both a number of Gauguin’s nudes as well as the longer
European tradition of the reclining, sexualized female nude with which Gauguin
was engaging.28 Pao’s body is partially or wholly covered in materials that are
loaded with cultural meanings, often very different for Islanders and outsiders,
including floral leis, sugar, chicken feathers and coconuts. The series further
recalls Ana Mendieta’s Silhuetas, which also used the artist’s nude body, covered
in various substances, to address themes of race, exile, diaspora and postcolonial
relationships to land.29 Like Mendieta’s work, Hawaiian Cover-Ups also has a
performative quality, suggesting that the photographs are part of a longer, ongoing
creative process and conversation. Altogether, in the series the artist’s covered
body stands as a powerful response to a history of uncovering of Indigenous,
especially Polynesian, women in popular and artistic representations.
Pao herself writes that the Hawaiian Cover-Ups series focuses on the theme of
consumption, particularly the relationship between consumption and identity.
She explains, “As someone who is part Native-Hawaiian while born and raised
in California, I wear many hats in relationship to the Hawaiian experience. I
represent outsider and insider, tourist and indigenous person, colonizer and
colonized. In this body of work, I use certain materials as cover-ups. These
materials are consumed in two ways—one in direct relation to tourism and
the other serving a purpose for the locals themselves.”30 Consumption is a
rich metaphor to employ in this way: through the series the artist references
the material and natural history of the islands, their collection as “natural
and artificial curiosities” by early European explorers, the extraction of raw
materials for the sake of imperial production, and the imposition of invasive
species (both accidental and intentional), all of which have altered the social and
natural landscape of the Islands. That Pao employs materials in her work that
are consumed as food also speaks to the loss of land for maintaining Indigenous
foodways and ongoing concerns with Indigenous food dependency and public
health connected with the importation of processed foods.
In the piece Seeking Liberty in the Dole Plantation/Hala-kahiki Kapa (Pineapple
Covering) of 2005, Pao uses pineapple as an artistic material to examine the
complex relationship between Hawai’i and the mainland United States (Figure
10.2). In this work, Pao lies in a pineapple field, transformed into a horizontal,
pineapple-covered Statue of Liberty, her body covered with fruit and wearing a
spiky pineapple-leaf crown. Pao’s use of pineapple and the choice of a specific
rather than general location, the Dole plantation, reference the development of
the plantation economy in Hawai’i, its association with Hawaiian immigration
histories and Hawaiian annexation into the United States, as Sanford Dole was a
key player in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the first governor of
the Territory of Hawai’i after annexation. As a staple of mid-century American
mainland recipes, when canned, pineapple also references the development of
“tiki bar” culture after the Second World War and the sexualization of the islands
through the figure of the “hula girl.”31 Looking at the photograph, one can only
imagine Pao’s own physical discomfort in its production: the pineapple plants
on which she lies, presumably unclothed, are spiky and sharp. This physical
discomfort further stresses that the relationship between Hawai’i and the US
mainland continues to be defined by colonial domination.
Similarly, in Lei Stand Protest/Kapua Leihua Kapa (Lei Flower Covering)
of 2004, the artist reclines beside a gumball machine at an airport shop, her
body covered in flower leis while another woman nearby sells leis at an open-
air booth (Figure 10.3). In this piece, Pao references the way leis are used
Figure 10.2 Adrienne Pao, Seeking Liberty in the Dole Plantation/Hala-kahiki Kapa
(Pineapple Covering), 2005, C Print, 30 × 26 in. (76.2 × 66.04 cm).
as a symbol of arrival, both for Hawaiians arriving home and for tourists.
“Home,” in this sense, is a contested place: what does this mean for someone
of Native descent who grew up on the mainland? What might it mean for
Local culture, the descendants of nineteenth-century plantation workers who
have lived in Hawai’i for many generations? These are not questions with easy
answers, but Pao’s series presents them to us, her viewers, with eloquence
Figure 10.3 Adrienne Pao, Lei Stand Protest/Kapua Leihua Kapa (Lei Flower
Covering), 2004, C Print, 30 × 26 in. (76.2 × 66.04 cm).
and grace. These questions also speak to Pao’s complex stakes in this project,
as a native Hawaiian raised on the mainland, a diasporic subject with all the
accompanying feelings of longing and desire that engenders. Finally, while the
Hawaiian Cover-Ups series comments on the eroticization of the Indigenous
female body, at the same time Pao refuses the gaze (particularly the eroticized
tourist gaze, often gendered masculine and racialized as white) by covering
her body with various materials. In I Always Wanted to Be a Mermaid/Pupu

Kapa (Shell Covering) of 2005, Pao employs objects that have both sacred value
for Islanders and erotic connotations for Europeans (in the form of Venus’s
birth), yet produces a dream image that is entirely her own, a first-person
account of her relationship to the Hawaiian landscape and sea (Figure 10.4).
Like Dening’s metaphor of cargo, Pao’s iconography draws on materials that
Figure 10.4 Adrienne Pao, I Always Wanted to Be a Mermaid/Pupu Kapa (Shell

Covering), 2005, C Print, 30 × 26 in. (76.2 × 66.04 cm).
move between worlds of Indigenous and colonizer, are both welcome and
imposed, and are sites of agency and oppression.
Pao is, of course, Hawaiian and not Tahitian, and as Teilhet-Fisk established,
Gauguin’s works are specifically located in French Polynesia and not a more
generalized “Polynesian” experience. While still drawing on her specifically
Hawaiian heritage and history, Pao also engages with more pan-Polynesian
contemporary issues: the lingering impact of European and American
colonization, the sexualization of Indigenous women, and the continuation of
exoticist and primitivist stereotypes in popular and tourist representations. In this
way, and while not directly engaging with Gauguin’s legacy in French Polynesia,
Pao’s work makes for an insightful commentary on ongoing Indigenous and
colonial relationships in the Pacific: a relationship she experiences acutely, even
as a diasporic subject.
Gauguin’s material body may be interred on Hiva Oa, but Debra Drexler’s
multimedia installation, Gauguin’s Zombie, invites us into a world in which
his decaying, possessed body has been resurrected (Figures 10.5, 10.6). The
installation has been described as “a postcolonial morality tale, laying bare
the tenuous immortality of those canonized by art history, and revealing the
Figure 10.5 Debra Drexler, Gauguin’s Zombie, 2002, multimedia installation at the
Honolulu Museum.
Figure 10.6 Debra Drexler, Gauguin’s Zombie, 2002, multimedia installation at the
Honolulu Museum.
persistence of cultural practices that continue to exploit and commodify.”32 The

installation began as a series of paintings, but after a visit to Tahiti (and the Musée
Gauguin in particular), the artist chose to expand it to an installation, influenced
by the general atmosphere and landscape of Tahiti.33 The final result is presented
in the form of a satirical “exhibition” in which the corpses of the “men who
changed the history of art”—that is, the great masters of modernism, including
Picasso and van Gogh—have been put on display in a National Ethnographic
Museum. Unfortunately for the curatorial staff, Gauguin’s dead body, while
included in the exhibition, has reanimated in zombie form, only to harass female
visitors to the museum.34 He is then repatriated to France, where he attempts
but fails to revitalize his past life.35 The project astonishes in its scope, which
includes oil paintings, relief prints, a reproduction of a thatched hut, a simulacra
of a museum gift shop and documents from the fictional exhibition. Drexler
also recreated Noa Noa, Gauguin’s Tahitian journal/travelogue/fantasy account,
as Neo Neo, meaning “putrid smelling,” a set of relief prints with handwritten
text (copying Gauguin’s script) with his version of the events of his resurrection
(Figure 10.7).36 The themes of the installation are wide-ranging, including a
critique of ethnographic museums and, in particular, their display of human
Figure 10.7 Debra Drexler, Neo Neo, 2002, relief print on paper, 12 × 15 in. (30.48 ×
38.10 cm).
remains; the commercialization of the museum through gift shop sales; and
the continued validity of modernism in contemporary art worlds (Drexler is,
primarily, an abstract painter). Gauguin’s Zombie was exhibited at the Honolulu
Academy of Arts—now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art—in 2002, the
Schaefer International Gallery of the Maui Arts Center and Cultural Center in
2003, and the White Box’s Annex in New York in 2005.
Gauguin’s Zombie has a sense of humor, yet is also highly critical of Gauguin.
Sarah Lauro has written that Gauguin’s Zombie speaks to the “substanceless”
manner in which Gauguin depicted Tahiti: from a colonial perspective,
disembodied; indeed, one might say, from a zombie gaze.37 I would add to
Lauro’s thoughtful discussion that Drexler is particularly critical of Gauguin’s
sexism and treatment of women. In one painting featured in the installation,
Old Habits, Drexler re-creates Manao Tupapau with the female figure in lingerie;
the raven from Nevermore watches over the scene, along with the tupapa’u from
the original work (Figure 10.8). Gauguin appears here in embodied form rather
than implied (as locus of the gaze), as in the original painting and the narratives
he produced to explain its meaning. Yet in spite of Gauguin’s own propensity
for celebratory self-portraiture, either in recognizable form or as his frequently
employed iconography of the dog or wolf, he appears here fully nude, his body
hairless and slightly paunchy, holding his detached penis in his hand. Gauguin’s
unclothed, emasculated figure, rendered in vivid yellow tones, stands at the
center of the painting, instead becoming locus of our gaze—and potentially,
our mockery. An identification tag hanging from his body resembles one
would find in a morgue or attached to a specimen in a natural history museum,
underscoring the decayed state of his corpse. The woman he attempts (and, one
would assume, fails, given the state of his genitalia) to seduce looks away with a
bored expression. Gauguin is just another client, another European man in her
bedchamber. Through a critique of Gauguin’s sexual virility—made legendary
through the artist’s own writings—Old Habits inverts Manao Tupapau, Gauguin’s
own modernist gambit (as Pollock argues), to foreground the damaging effects
of colonial sexual violence and introduced disease.38
Drawing on this critique of Gauguin’s sexism, Gauguin’s Zombie also very
much operates as a powerful critique of the contemporary art world, which, in
spite of many inroads made by feminist artists, remains largely dominated (at least
in terms of commercial sales) by male artists.39 In satirizing Gauguin’s reputation
as a “notorious womanizer” and emasculating him, Drexler re-possesses the
myth of the romantic European hero in the tropics.40 In this manner, she also
Figure 10.8 Debra Drexler, Old Habits, 2002, oil on canvas, 72 × 72 in. (182.88 ×
182.88 cm).
critiques the broader modern (and postmodern) fetishization of the artist-hero,

perhaps best embodied in the new canon: the hard-drinking masculinist ethos
of abstract expressionism, minimalism, and other postwar movements very
much dominated by men. As a non-Indigenous artist living in the Pacific (she
is on the faculty of University of Hawai’i at Mānoa), Drexler occupies a very
different subject position in relationship to both Gauguin and to Pacific histories
and cultures than does Pao. Yet her feminist response to Gauguin nevertheless
speaks richly to the sexualized dimension of Gauguin’s work, an element that
draws on imperialist paradigms and the often sexualized nature of colonial
violence. Ultimately, Drexler’s work allows us to re-possess Gauguin himself, to
keep him in the Pacific while, at the same time, interrogating the structures of
patriarchy that allow both his art and his (embellished) history to be uncritically
celebrated. Through the material of Gauguin’s dead body, Drexler’s installation

re-possesses Gauguin, with all the cultural baggage he brings with him.
Gauguin’s postmodernisms
Inquiries about the nature of my research are often met with surprise: what
more can there possibly be to say about a dead, white, French painter? And
was he not kind of an awful person? The answers to these questions are: (1)
quite a bit and (2) yes, very likely. This is anecdotal evidence for sure, yet it
stresses the continued entanglement of Gauguin’s art production with his
romanticized biography, and the idea that everything that could possibly be
said about him has already been uttered. Yet as the relevance and timeliness
of this very volume attests, there remains much to be discussed. Gauguin does
many things in the postmodern world. For myself, perhaps the richest gift he
has given me is that he taught me to embrace the potential for an ambivalent
response to art: that things can be at once beautiful and troubling, and that
unraveling the distinctions between the two can make for a compelling
series of conversations. When I encounter Gauguin’s works in museums,
I am continually struck by their strange and unholy loveliness, even when I
am acutely aware (perhaps more than most museum patrons) of the colonial
power structures that enabled their production. In other avenues, Gauguin’s
work can be juxtaposed with contemporary creative productions from both
inside and outside the Pacific, enabling us to talk about colonialism and its
continuity, about representation, about cultural appropriation, about the
enduring legacy of the romantic-primitive myth for many Westerners. For
contemporary Indigenous artists, for Pacific Island artists living in diaspora,
and for non-Indigenous artists living in the Pacific, Gauguin’s artworks do not
have to be source material, but they do offer us a common language, a place
to start conversations if not to end them. Gauguin the man, Gauguin the myth
and Gauguin the artist-producer all contribute their own forms of cargo to the
social landscape of the contemporary Pacific. As Dening notes in his essay,
“There is more mystery than I can unfold in the ways Past and Present, Native
and Stranger, Words and Things are bound together.”41 The material objects he
has left us can only be vessels for continued conversations in the future. Why,
then, are we still talking about Gauguin? The answer is simple: because the
conversation is not finished.
Notes
1 Greg Dening, “Possessing Tahiti,” Archaeology in Oceania 21, no. 1 (April 1, 1986):
117.
2 Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed: An Interpretation of Gauguin’s Polynesian
Symbolism (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 1975.
Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).
3 Jean-François Staszak, “The Artist and the Tourist: Gauguin in Tahiti,” in Travel,
Tourism and Art, eds. Jo-Anne Lester and Tijana Rakic (Farnham and Burlington:
Ashgate, 2013), 157.
4 Heather Waldroup, “Musée Gauguin Tahiti: Indigenous Places, Colonial Heritage,”
International Journal of Heritage Studies 14, no. 6 (2008): 489–505; Heather
Waldroup, “Traveling Representations: Noa Noa, Manao Tupapau, and Gauguin’s
Legacy in the Pacific,” Journeys 11, no. 2 (2010): 1–29.
5 Caroline Vercoe, “I Am My Other, I Am My Self: Encounters with Gauguin in
Polynesia,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 13, no. 1 (2013): 108. See
also Caroline Vercoe, “Contemporary Worlds: Artists in the Pacific Respond to
Gauguin,” in Gauguin Polynesia, ed. Suzanne Greub (Munich: Hirmer Verlag for Ny
Carlsberg Glyptotek and Seatte Art Museum, 2011), 346–53.
6 See Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas
1774–1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980).
7 See “Twenty Questions to Ask an Object: Handout | H-Material-Culture | H-Net.”
Accessed August 9, 2016. https://networks.h-net.org/twenty-questions-ask-object-
handout. See also Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material
Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 1–19.
8 Bengt Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, trans. Reginald Spink (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1965); Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed: An Interpretation
of Gauguin’s Polynesian Symbolism.
9 Vercoe, “I Am My Other, I Am My Self: Encounters with Gauguin in Polynesia,”
107.
10 Richard Brettell, Francois Cachin, Claire Freches-Thory, Charles F. Stuckey
and Peter Zegers, The Art of Paul Gauguin, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of
Chicago/Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1988).
11 See Elizabeth C. Childs, “The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and
Photography in the Fin de Siècle,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience:
Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup (Toronto and London:
University of Toronto Press, 2001), 50–70; Elizabeth C. Childs, Vanishing Paradise:
Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University
of California Press, 2013); Elizabeth C. Childs, “Gauguin and Sculpture: The Art
of the ‘Ultra-Sauvage,’” in Gauguin: Metamorphoses, ed. Starr Figura (New York:

Museum Of Modern Art, 2014), 36–47; James Clifford, “The Mahu Goes Native.
Sexist or Subversive? Gauguin’s South Seas Visions and Renegade Hybrid Style,”
London Times Literary Supplement, November 7, 1997, p. 7; Viviane Fayaud, Le
paradis autour de Paul Gauguin (Paris: CNRS, 2011); Margaret Jolly, “Fraying
Gauguin’s Skirt: Gender, Race, and Liminality in the Pacific,” Pacific Studies 23,
nos. 1/2 (2000): 86–103; Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, “‘Les Bons Vents Viennent de
L’étranger’: La Fabrication Internationale de La Gloire de Gauguin,” Revue D’histoire
Moderne et Contemporaine (1954–) 52, no. 2 (April 1, 2005): 113–47; Bronwen
Nicholson and Roger Neich, Gauguin and Maori Art (Birkenhead: University
of Washington Press, 1996); Riccardo Pineri, “Introduction,” in Paul Gauguin:
Héritage et Confrontations, Actes Du Colloque de 6, 7, et 8 Mars 2003 (Papeete:
l’Université de la Polynésie Française, 2003), 5–14; Staszak, “The Artist and the
Tourist: Gauguin in Tahiti”; Jean-Yves Tréhin, Gauguin, Tahiti et La Photographie
(Papeete: Ministère de la Culture de Polynésie Française: Musée de Tahiti et des
Iles, Te fare lamanaha, 2003); Lee Wallace, Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern
Sexualities (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003). These are just a few
examples from a developing body of literature.
12 Ivan Gaskell, “Encountering Pacific Art,” Journal of Museum Ethnography no. 21
(2009): 202–10.
13 Sven Kirsten, Tiki Pop: America Imagines Its Own Polynesian Paradise (Köln:
Taschen, 2014).
14 Jolly, “Fraying Gauguin’s Skirt,” 99.
15 Pineri, “Introduction.”
16 Teresia Teaiwa, “Reading Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Hau’ofa’s Nederends:
‘Militourism,’ Feminism, and the ‘Polynesian’ Body,” in Inside Out: Literature,
Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, eds. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob
Wilson (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 250.
17 Waldroup, “Musée Gauguin Tahiti: Indigenous Places, Colonial Heritage,” 490.
See also Jean-Francois Staszak, “Primitivism and the Other. History of Art and
Cultural Geography,” GeoJournal 60, no. 4 (2004): 353–64; Staszak, “The Artist
and the Tourist: Gauguin in Tahiti”; and Vercoe, “I Am My Other, I Am My Self:
Encounters with Gauguin in Polynesia.”
18 Teaiwa, “Reading Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Hau’ofa’s Nederends: ‘Militourism,’
Feminism, and the ‘Polynesian’ Body,” 251.
19 Teresia Teaiwa, Jon Goss and Terence Wesley-Smith, “For or Before an Asia Pacific
Studies Agenda? Specifying Pacific Studies,” in Remaking Area Studies : Teaching
and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific, ed. Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 110–24.
20 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972).
21 Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” 1.

22 Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and
Things (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 3.
23 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism
in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 8–9.
24 Waldroup, “Traveling Representations: Noa Noa, Manao Tupapau, and Gauguin’s
Legacy in the Pacific.”
25 See Ibid.
26 “Gauguin Exhibitions, Current and Past | Gauguin Gallery.” Accessed August 24,
2016. http://www.gauguingallery.com/exhibitions.aspx.
27 Sut Jhally, [DVD] Stuart Hall: Representation and the Media (Media Education
Foundation, 1997).
History (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1993).
29 Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999).
30 “Hawaiian Cover-Ups: Adrienne Pao.” Accessed August 22, 2016. http://
adriennepao.com/?page_id=127.
31 Jane Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
32 Marcia Morse, “Gauguin’s Zombie (Review),” Contemporary Pacific 16, no. 1 (2004):
225-9; 228.
33 Personal communication with the artist, July 2016.
34 Rita Goldman, “Gauguin’s Zombie,” Centerpiece: The Maui Arts and Cultural Center
Magazine (May 2003), 22.
35 Sarah Juliet Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 178.
36 Debra Drexler, Gauguin’s Zombie: An Installation by Debra Drexler (Honolulu:
Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2002).
37 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie, 181.
38 Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893.
39 Kira Cochrane, “Women in Art: Why Are All the ‘Great’ Artists Men?,” The
Guardian, May 24, 2013, sec. Life and style. https://www.theguardian.com/
lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2013/may/24/women-art-
great-artists-men.
40 Molly Kleiman, “Debra Drexler: Resuscitating Gauguin,” NY Arts Magazine.
Accessed June 24, 2016. http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/?p=2985.
41 Dening, “Possessing Tahiti,” 103.
Notes on Contributors
Norma Broude is Professor Emerita of Art History at American University in

Washington, DC. A pioneering feminist scholar and specialist in nineteenth-
century French and Italian painting, Broude is known for critical reassessments of
Impressionism and the work of Degas, Caillebotte, Cassatt, Seurat and the Italian
Macchiaioli. She is author of The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth
Century (Yale University Press, 1987), Impressionism, A Feminist Reading: The
Gendering of Art, Science, and Nature in the Nineteenth Century (Rizzoli, 1991;
reprint, Westview Press, 1997) and Edgar Degas (Rizzoli, 1993). Among her
edited books are World Impressionism: The International Movement (Abrams,
1990) and Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist
Paris (Rutgers University Press, 2002). She was General Editor of The Rizzoli
Art Series (thirty-two monographs published between 1991 and 1994) and
served on the editorial advisory committees of the Art Bulletin (1995–8) and the
Woman’s Art Journal (2006 to the present). Broude is also co-editor, with Mary
D. Garrard, of several influential texts that have helped to define and chart the
evolution of feminist art history.
Elizabeth C. Childs is Etta and Mark Steinberg Professor of Art History at

Washington University in St. Louis. A specialist in European avant-garde
modernism (particularly painting, photography and prints), she has published
on key figures including Daumier, Degas, van Gogh and Gauguin, as well as on
selected chapters of American art, including the photography of exploration,
the earth works of Robert Smithson, and the exoticism of John La Farge and
historian Henry Adams. In her work and extensive publications on Gauguin, she
has focused on Gauguin’s relationship to indigenous Tahitian and Marquesan
culture as well as to colonial society, his work as a writer, his uses of photography,
his interests in world religions and theosophy and his construction of a
primitivist identity. She is the author of Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in
Colonial Tahiti, 1880–1901 (University of California Press, 2013), and her essays
appear in the catalogues of several major recent Gauguin exhibitions, including
Gauguin/Polynesia (2012) and Gauguin:Metamorphoses (2014). Future projects
include a monograph on Gauguin’s late work and writings.
276 Notes on Contributors
Dario Gamboni is Professor of Art History at the Université de Genève. He is

a honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Meret Oppenheim
Prize 2006, and was a Fellow at CASVA, the Henry Moore Institute and the Clark
Art Institute. He has been a guest professor at universities around the world and
has curated and co-curated exhibitions among which Une image peut en cacher
une autre (Grand Palais, Paris, 2009). He has published widely on modern and
contemporary art, especially on the fin-de-siècle and the early twentieth century.
His books include The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the
French Revolution (Yale University Press and Reaktion Books, 1997), Potential
Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (Reaktion Press, 2002) and
The Brush and The Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature (University of Chicago
Press, 2011). On Gauguin, he has published several articles and a monograph,
Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious Centre of Thought (French: Les Presses du Réel,
2013; English: Reaktion Books, 2014).
Linda Goddard is Lecturer in Art History at the University of St. Andrews in

Scotland. She is the author of Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–
1926 (Peter Lang, 2012) and editor of a special issue of Word & Image on “Artists’
Writings, 1850–Present.” She also co-edited a special issue of Forum for Modern
Language Studies on “Artists’ Statements: Origins, Intentions, Exegesis.” Her essays
on Gauguin have appeared in Art History, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, the catalog for the exhibition, “Gauguin: Maker of Myth” (Tate, 2010) and
elsewhere. She is currently working on a book about Gauguin’s writings.
June E. Hargrove is Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art at the

University of Maryland, College Park. She has published widely on topics
in French sculpture and the public monument, and in 2012 she received the
Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Government for
scholarship about the cultural heritage of France. She was the co-editor of
Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870–1914 (Yale University Press, 2005),
to which she also contributed an essay on 1870 war memorials. Hargrove has
written and lectured around the globe on Paul Gauguin, and her publications on
a broad spectrum of Gauguin’s work have appeared in journals such as the Art
Bulletin, the Revue de l’Art and the Van Gogh Museum Journal, as well as in many
catalogs and anthologies. The most recent of these is her essay “Paul Gauguin:
Sensing the Infinite,” to appear in Sensational Religion: Sense and Contention in
Material Practice, ed. Sally Promey, Yale University Press.
Notes on Contributors 277
Barbara Larson is Professor of Modern European Art History at the University

of West Florida. She is author of The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and
the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (Penn State University Press, 2005)
and lead editor of The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture
(Dartmouth College Press, 2009) and Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and
Cultural History (Ashgate, 2013). She has published extensively on various
topics in science and visual culture in the modern period and is series editor of
“Science and the Arts since 1750” (Routledge/Taylor & Francis). Her fellowships
have included National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the
Humanities, and MacGeorge, among others.
Martha Lucy is Curator and Deputy Director for Research, The Barnes
Foundation. She is the co-author, with John House, of Renoir in the Barnes
Foundation (Yale University Press, 2012). Her articles and reviews have appeared
in the Oxford Art Journal, the Revue d’Art Canadienne and Burlington Magazine.
She has also contributed essays to several exhibition catalogs, including Renoir
in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and The Steins Collect:
Matisse Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Metropolitan Museum). Dr. Lucy
has a wide range of scholarly interests, from evolutionary themes in the work
of Odilon Redon to anti-modern currents in modern European painting. Her
current research focuses on the sense of touch during the industrial age.
Irina Stotland is an independent scholar and curator. She received her

doctorate in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr PA,
with a dissertation entitled “Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portraits and the Concept
of Androgyny.” A specialist in nineteenth-century French art, her research
interests focus on gender and sexuality studies and psychoanalytical art history,
with special emphasis on self-portraiture and the construction of identity in
representations. She is currently teaching (Montgomery College LLI, Rockville
MD) and leading an education program in history of art for a private company
(Altitude Consulting, Rockville MD).
Heather Waldroup is Associate Director of the Honors College and Professor of

art history at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Her scholarly articles
on Paul Gauguin have appeared in Journeys and International Journal of Heritage
Studies. She has worked as a cultural lecturer, with a focus on Gauguin’s art,
on board the Aranui III and served as an early consultant for the exhibition
278 Notes on Contributors
that became Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise, held at the Seattle Art
Museum in 2012. Her research on fin-de-siècle photography has been published
in Photography and Culture, History of Photography, Women’s History Review
and Modernism/Modernity. She has also curated exhibitions of photography and
of contemporary Pacific art.
Alastair Wright is Associate Professor in Modern Art, University of Oxford.

Ph.D. (with distinction), Columbia University, 1997. Recipient of a number of
honors, including Getty Research Fellowship (2000–1), Princeton University
Bicentennial Preceptorship (2004–7) and Leverhulme Research Fellowship
(2014–15). Publications include Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton
University Press, 2004) and Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints,
exh. cat. (Princeton University Art Museum, 2010). Essays on Gauguin’s work
published in a number of exhibition catalogs. Essays on modernism published in
Art History (forthcoming), October, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Artforum,
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, The Burlington Magazine and various edited
volumes.
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Index
Notes: Page locators in italics refer to figures.

Above the Abyss 110–12, 115, 119, 120 Avant et après 30, 31, 72, 217
abstraction 104, 108, 113, 115, 121 on art critics 33, 207
ambiguity 103–9 on Flora Tristan 74–5, 83
abstraction and 104, 108, 113, 115, 121 on marriage and family customs in
appropriation of objects 107–8 Polynesia 84
in backgrounds to paintings 107 on prostitution and corruption in
in ceramics 104–5, 105, 116–17 Polynesia 81
challenge for art history 119–21 repetition 150
decoration and 115–16
Gauguin rarely comments on 112–14 Bachofen, Jacob Johann 89
and multiple viewpoints in ceramics back, bodies in paintings viewed from 46
and sculpture 116–17 Balzac, Honoré de 41, 58, 170–1, 188, 213,
polyiconicity 106–7, 106, 108, 110–12, 216
114, 114, 120–1 Barr, Alfred 230
“potential images” and 112 Barrucand, Victor 4
reception and research 103–9 Bathers (Cézanne) 205, 206
speaking in parables 109–14 Bathers (Gauguin) 204–9
techniques of 115–19 pairing with Man in the Red Cape
in titles 118–19 218–19
visual perception studies and 109–10 Baudelaire, Charles 24, 134, 135, 137, 139 188
The Ancestors of Teha’amana 85–6 Be in Love and You Will Be Happy 58, 60
Ancien Culte Mahorie 49, 181, 215, 216 Bernard, Claude 180, 186
androgyny Bernard, Émile 73, 78, 103, 121, 139, 188,
adolescent 54 235
Christ and 216, 218 Bernard, Madeleine 43, 73, 187
in colonial discourse 41, 42 Blavatsky, Madame 185–6
Gauguin’s concept of 42–4 Bodelsen, Merete 104, 106, 114
performativity and 44 borrowing, in manuscripts 16–17, 24–6,
self-portraits 45–61 151 n.1
of Tahitian bodies 84 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de 26, 140,
transcendence and 215–17 232, 244, 246
animism 180 Bretonnerie/Breton Matters 114, 114, 119
Anthropomorphic Pot 60 Brettell, Richard 25, 105
anti-clericalism 208 Brooks, Peter 71, 163
appropriation and reiteration in Buddhism 183, 194, 195, 214
manuscripts 16–17, 24–6
art critics, Gauguin’s attack on 32–3, 207 Cahier pour Aline (Notebook for Aline) 22,
Aurier, Albert 104, 188–9 22, 23, 73, 58, 116, 207
Auti te pape 107, 108, 116, 118, 119 dedication 22, 27–8
Index 299
“point of beginning” 170 and Tahitian paradise lost 140, 141,

reproduction of Camille Corot 149, 150, 169–70
painting 28, 29, 29 color
writing as Aline 28 and hypnosis 189–92, 194–5
Caillebotte legacy 205 writing, musical role of 198
canine images 58–9 contemporary art and Gauguin. See
cargo 252 Pacific contemporary art, impact of
Gauguin’s artwork as 252, 253, 254, Gauguin on
257–60 contemporary critics of Gauguin 3–4
Carlyle, Thomas 79, 181, 198, 206–7 Cormon, Fernand 159, 161
“The Catholic Church and Modern Corot, Camille 28, 29, 29
Times” 179, 181, 183, 187, 193, 194, “Correspondances” (Baudelaire) 137–8, 139
207, 217 costume
censorship 205 Carlyle’s philosophy of clothes 207
ceramics European 206
ambiguity 104–5, 105, 116–17 Gauguin’s 45, 48, 49, 55, 208
multiple viewpoints 116–17 missionary 208
Cézanne, Paul 113, 230 women’s 206
Bathers 205, 206 critics. See also feminist critique of
childhood Gauguin
innocence of 208, 209 of Gauguin, contemporary 3–4
manuscripts and associations with Gauguin’s attack on art 32–3, 207
29–30, 33
Childs, Elizabeth 9, 42 D’Alleva, Anne 86
Christ Danielsson, Bengt 118, 255
Gauguin links himself to 43, 59 Darwin, Charles 166, 169, 180, 183, 277
Gauguin’s view of 210, 212–13 Darwinism and Darwinian theory
Hunt’s image of 210, 211 7, 159, 165, 217
Marquesan man as 212, 213, 219 Dauber’s Gossip (Racontars de rapin) 32–3
Massey on androgynous 216, 218 Day of the God (Mahana no atua) 107,
Christian iconography 208, 209 116, 164, 165
citations 22–4 de Man, Paul 134, 135, 147
civilized/savage 15, 16, 45, 48, 49 Delacroix, Eugène 51
clothing. See costume Demont, Bernard 108
Clovis Asleep 54 Dening, Greg 251, 271
colonial Denis, Maurice 188, 190
body providing access to prehistoric desire and evolution 158, 164, 172–4
past 161–3, 166–9 despair 169–72
history Diderot, Denis 140
exchanges of objects and ideas 251–3 Dietrich, Linnea 72, 73
Gauguin’s role in Pacific 252–3 digital montages 244–6, 245
identity 4, 15, 33, 41–2 Diverses choses (Various Things) 19–20, 23,
injustice, protesting 81–2 25, 27, 113, 207
colonialism associations with childhood 29–30
effect on Tahitian women 131 citation 24
Gauguin’s work and 2, 3, 4, 5, 70–1, 89 comparing artists to children in 33
penetrating veneer of 130, 132–7, Van Gogh drawing 28, 30
147–50 Dorra, Henri 107, 119, 157
300 Index
Doublenecked Vase Joined by a Peruvian Sher-Gil 238–41, 239, 240

Stirrup-shaped Handle 116 Spitz 246
Double-Vessel in Unglazed Stoneware Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou 244, 246
Decorated with Engraved Cats female personas in Gauguin’s writing
104–5, 105 28–31
Drexler, Debra 253–4, 266–71, 266, 267, feminist critique of Gauguin 1–2, 69–71,
268, 270 84, 233–4
Pacific women’s engagement in 243–7,
Eisenman, Stephen F. 5, 15, 41–2, 71, 107, 269–71
215, 218 reconsidering 71–3, 84–5, 93
Elkins, James 120 Féré, Charles 190, 192
Eller, Cynthia 91 Field, Richard 25, 105
energy waves 192 Fire Dance (Upa Upa) 193, 194
Enfantin, Prosper 74, 75 Fisherman and Bathers on the Aven 107
Entangled Objects 259 Flourens, Marie-Jean-Pierre 179–80
eroticism 193 flower/eye image 106–7, 167
Esielonis, Karyn 3-4 Foster, Hal 25, 42
Eve 208, 216, 217 Fragrant Isle (Nave nave fenua) 147–9,
Gauguin’s theme of Tahitian 157–8 148, 150, 168
Maraü- 58
Oviri- 58 Gauguin, Aline. See Cahier pour Aline
temptation for Polynesian 147–9, 148 (Notebook for Aline)
evolution Gauguin, Mette Sofie (née Gad, wife of
and desire 7–8, 158, 164, 172–4 Gauguin) 76, 92, 100
and loss 7–8, 169–72 Garden of Eden 51–2, 149, 157, 217
evolutionary themes 164–9 Gathering Grapes at Arles – Human Misery
evolutionism 181, 183, 185–6, 196–7 80–1, 81
exhibitions Gauguin’s Skirt 71, 215, 218
contemporary 256, 258, 260 Gauguin’s Zombie 254, 266–71, 266, 267, 270
early 20th century 229–30 gender fluidity 46–9, 54, 55–6
Exposition Universelle 1889 159–61, 160, George, Kay 9, 244, 245, 253
163 good and evil 217, 253
Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise Guyau, Jean-Marie 192–3
51 Guys like Gauguin 243–4
the Fall 141, 149, 196, 208, 210, 217 Haan, Jacob Meyer de 76, 79, 181, 182,
family, changing definitions in French 183, 184, 185, 189, 190, 193, 194,
dictionary 89 198
female artists, writers and critical Ha’apuani 212
engagement with Gauguin’s legacy Haggard, H. Rider 90
234–47 Hawaiian Cover-Ups 254, 261–6, 263, 264,
Drexler 253–4, 266–71, 266, 267, 268, 265
270 health, Gauguin’s declining 203
George 244, 245 Henry, Charles 190, 192, 194
March 243–4 Here They Make Love (Te Faruru) 145, 146
Modersohn-Becker 235–7, 237, 241, Hina 49–50, 58, 85, 139, 141, 197, 216
243 Hina Maruru 143
Pacific 243–7 Historiated Frame 59
Pao 253–4, 261–6, 263, 264, 265 Hiva Oa 208, 212, 253, 266
Index 301
homosexuality 42, 44, 54, 55 legacy of Gauguin 229–31, 257

Humboldt, Alexander von 193 for contemporary Pacific art 253–4,
Hunt, William Holman 210–12, 211 255–7, 260–71
hypnosis 188–9 female artists and writers and critical
and colour states 189–92, 194–5 engagement with 234–47
First International Congress on Drexler 253–4, 266–71, 266, 267,
Experimental and Therapeutic 268, 270
Hypnotism 193 George 244, 245
March 243–4
I Always Wanted to Be a Mermaid/Pupu Modersohn-Becker 235–7, 237,
Kapa (shell covering) 265–6, 265 241, 243
ideal type 212–13, 215, 219 Pacific 243–7
Idéistes 186 Pao 253–4, 261–6, 263, 264, 265
identities Sher-Gil 238–41, 239, 240, 243
colonial 4, 15, 33, 41–2 Spitz 246, 256
hybrid 46–9, 54, 55–6 Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou 244, 246
performativity of 44, 45, 48, 49, 55 feminist interventions in 1–2, 69–71,
switching 56–9, 56, 61 84, 233–4
identities, assumed 26–33 reconsidering 71–3, 84–5, 93
as Aline 28 Lei Stand Protest/Kapua Leihua Kapa (Lei
“as an artist” 32–3 Flower Covering) 262–4, 264
as “Mani” 27 Les Meules jaunes ou La Moisson blonde
as “Paretenia” 31 (The Yellow Haystacks or The Blonde
in portrait by “Vahine Pahura” 20, 29 Harvest) 106
as “Tit-Oil” 32 Les Meules Jaunes ou La Moisson Blonde
immortality through art 217 (The Yellow Haystacks or The Blonde
Inaga, Shigemi 107 Harvest) 106, 114, 119
incomprehensibility of Gauguin 103, Les Misérables 52–3
112–13 Les Origines 167, 172, 173
Italian Woman Playing the Mandolin 28, 29 L’Esprit moderne et le Catholicisime 74,
208, 212, 213, 215, 219
Japanese art, homage to 241 The Light of the World (Hunt) 210–12, 211
journalism, political 82 comparing Man in the Red Cape with
212
Kingsford, Anna 213, 214, 216, 219 The Little One is Dreaming (La Petite rêve)
53–4, 107, 113, 116
La Petite rêve (The Little One is Dreaming) loss and evolution 7–8, 169–72
53–4, 107, 113, 116 The Loss of Virginity 58, 255
Lafargue, Paul 84 Loti, Pierre 6, 131, 132, 140
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 183 L’Univers est crée (The Universe is Created)
Lamarckian theory 8, 186 164–5, 166, 171–2
Landscape with Two Goats 204–5 Lust for Life 72
language, inability to seize the world Lycée Samuel Raapoto 255
134–9
L’Apres-midi d’un faune 139 Mahana no atua (Day of the God) 107,
Le Sourire 31–2, 82 116, 164, 165
“Paretenia” 31 Maitland, Edward 213, 215, 216, 219
“Tit-Oil” 32 Mallarmé, Stéphane 32, 58, 110, 134–5,
Leclercq, Julien 4 147
302 Index
friendship between Gauguin and 139 matrilineal past and challenge to

influences in Noa Noa 130, 135, 137, patriarchal order 86–91
139, 141 Mauclair, Camille 4
Man in the Red Cape 210–18 McLennan, John Ferguson 89
pairing with The Bathers 218–19 Mendieta, Ana 261
Manao Tupapau (She Thinks of the Spirit Méphis 82, 91–2
of the Dead or the Spirit of the Dead Merahi metua no Tehamana 231, 238
Thinks of Her) 71, 103, 112, 231, Méry, Gaston 4
259–60, 259 metempsychosis 215
Old Habits recreation of 269, 270 Milton, John 79, 181, 190
“Mani” 27 Minnelli, Vincent 72
manuscripts 15–16 Mirbeau, Octave 4, 24, 74
activating creative tension between Modersohn-Becker, Paula 235–7, 237,
media 17–18 241, 243
anonymity and attribution 23–4 Moerenhout, Jacques-Antoine 6, 24, 25,
appropriation and reiteration 16–17, 85, 129, 140
24–6 Molard, Judith 54
assuming different personas 26–33 Molard, William 54
borrowing in 16–17, 24–6 Monfreid, Georges-Daniel de 46, 59, 103,
childhood, associations with 29–30, 33 230
citations 22–4 Morice, Charles 3, 17, 22, 24, 27, 58, 131,
crossover between “high” and “low” art 141, 188, 205, 231
forms 32 myths, Polynesian 24–5, 49–50, 85–6, 129,
cut-and-paste composition 17, 18, 20, 23 195
different voices in 19–21, 23 Moerenhout as source for 6, 24, 25, 85,
female personas 28–31 129, 140
fragmentary manner of text
composition 17–21 Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?)
handwriting 20, 21 244
Le Sourire 31–2, 82 digital montages 244–6, 245
newspaper cuttings 22, 23–4, 23 The Natural Genesis 185, 212–13, 214, 216
reproductions 17, 24, 25–6, 28–9 Nave nave fenua (Fragrant Isle) 147–9,
writing as “an artist” 32–3 148, 150, 168
Maraü, Queen 52, 131, 137–9, 138 Neo Neo 267, 268
March, Selina Tusitala 243–4 neo-vitalism 179, 180, 181
Marquesas Island paintings 203–19 neurology 186, 188, 190
marriage Nirvana 183, 185
and family customs in Polynesia 84 Noa Noa
Gauguin’s own 92 account of Tahitian queen 131, 137–9,
Gauguin’s views on 80–1 138
Tristan on 80 acknowledgement of inaccessibility of
martyrdom, exploration of 43, 45, 46, Tahiti culture 130, 132–7, 149
59–60 ambiguity in 105, 107
Maruru (Offerings of Gratitude) 141–5, 143 analysis of passage part Naturalist part
Massey, Gerald 183, 185, 212, 213, 214, Symbolist 132–7, 136
216, 218 Baudelairean influences 135, 137, 139
Mata Mua (Olden Times) 143–5, 144 blindness an expression of Gauguin’s
material culture 254, 257–60 distanced position 130, 132, 147–50
Index 303
claims to discover “real” Tahiti 129–30, Offerings of Gratitude (Maruru) 141–5, 143
131–2, 137, 140, 145 Old Habits 269, 270
crossover between “high” and “low” art The Old Women of Arles 106
forms 32 Olden Times (Mata Mua) 143–5, 144
description of self-portrait setting 46, 48 origins
disillusionment with tropical paradise imagery 157–8
131, 140, 141–5, 149, 150, 169–70 melancholia over mystery of 169–72
efforts to reconcile science and Oro 195
spirituality 164 Oviri 58, 59
European clothing 206 Oviri 57–8, 57
first draft 130
gap between writer and world 134–9, Pacific contemporary art, impact of
140–1 Gauguin on 243–7, 253–4, 255–7,
Mallarméan influences 130, 135, 137, 260–71
139, 141 Drexler’s Gauguin’s Zombie 254,
manuscript 17–21 266–71, 266, 267
myths 49–50, 195 George 244, 245
opening paragraph 130–1 March 243–4
performativity and androgyny 44 Pao’s Hawaiian Cover-Ups 261–6, 263,
plagiarization 24–5, 129 264, 265
similarities between Tristan’s Spitz 246
Peregrinations of a Pariah and 76, 82 Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou 244, 246
Symbolism 130, 134–9 Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in
village wise man vignette 83–4 Polynesia 256
woodcuts (see Noa Noa Suite) Pahura, Vahine 20, 29
Noa Noa Suite 26, 141–50 The Painter of Sunflowers 106, 107
invoking paradise lost and Gauguin’s paleontology 159
distanced position 130, 141, Pao, Adrienne 253–4, 261–6, 263, 264, 265
147–50, 169 parables 112–13
Maruru (Offerings of Gratitude) 141–5, paradise lost 130, 131, 140, 141–5, 149,
143 150, 169–70, 171–2
Mata Mua (Olden Times) 143–5, 144 Parau na te varua 208
Nave nave fenua (Fragrant Isle) 147–9, “Paretenia” 31
148, 150, 168 patriarchal order
Noa Noa 141, 142 challenge to 89–91
pretence that Gauguin has “gone selective appropriation of Gauguin’s
native” 129, 145 life and art 93
Te Faruru (Here They Make Love) 145, Pérégrinations d’une paria (Peregrinations
146 of a Pariah) 76, 82
techniques 8, 26, 105, 117–18, 145, The Perfect Way 213–15, 216
147, 169, 172 personas
Noa Noa (woodcut) 141, 142 adoption of exotic dandy 55
Nochlin, Linda 1, 69 assuming different, in manuscripts
Notebook for Aline. See Cahier pour Aline 26–33
(Notebook for Aline) Tristan adopts hybrid 82–3
Pissarro, Camille 3, 24, 27
objects plagiarism 3, 24–5, 85, 129, 151 n.1
appropriation of 107–8 Poe, Edgar Allen 23
artworks as 257–60 Pollock, Griselda 70–1, 72, 233–4
304 Index
polyiconicity 106–7, 106, 108, 110–12, Racontars de rapin (Dauber’s Gossip) 32–3
114, 114, 120–1 Redon, Odilon 107, 110, 112, 114, 115,
Polynesia 164, 167, 169, 172, 173
elusiveness of a true image of 26 Gauguin’s letter to 167
Gauguin rails against prostitution and reincarnation 215
colonial corruption 81–2 reiteration and appropriation in
marriage and family customs 84 manuscripts 16–17, 24–6
myths 24–5, 49–50, 85–6, 129, 195 repetition 25, 26, 107, 150
paradise lost 130, 131, 140, 141–5, 149, reproductions 17, 24, 25–6, 28–9
150, 169–70, 171–2 Rilke, Rainer Maria 236
position of women 86–9
social protest 81–2 Sartor Resartus 79, 181, 193, 198, 206, 207
Portrait de Gauguin/Portrait of Gauguin savage
110–11, 111 /civilized 15, 16, 45, 48, 49
Portrait Dedicated to Monfried 59–60 notion of 44, 56–7, 58, 61, 145
Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan 76, 78, 79, Schuré, Edouard 186, 214
181, 182, 183, 190 science and spirituality 8–9, 164, 171,
Portrait of Meyer de Haan 183, 184 177–88, 199
Portrait of the Artist with Glasses 59, 60 Seeking Liberty in the Dole Plantation/
“Possessing Tahiti” 251–2 Hala-kahiki Kapa (Pineapple
postmodernism 271 covering) 262, 263
prehistory, discourses of 159–63 Self-Portrait (1889) 190, 191
Exposition Universelle 1889 159–61, Self-Portrait (1893) 51–2, 51
160, 163 Self-Portrait of the Artist at His Drawing
idea of colonial body providing access Table, Tahiti 46–9, 47
to 161–3 Self-Portrait of the Artist with the Idol
vision metaphor 161 49–50, 50
primitivism 2, 15–16 Self-Portrait at Lezaven 49
“dilemma” 25–6 Self-Portrait Near Golgotha 59, 60
as a “search for origins” 157–8 Self-Portrait, Oviri 56–9, 56
Promenades dans Londres 76–81 Self-Portrait with a Hat 52–5, 53
influencing Gauguin’s social protest 81 reverse side 54
prostitution 79–80 Self-Portrait with Palette 55–6
transcription 76–8, 77 self-portraits
watercolour 76, 78, 79 categories of 45
prostitution painted before departure for Tahiti 45
Gauguin transcribes section of Tristan’s Polynesian 45–61
writing on 79–80 Portrait Dedicated to Monfried 59–60
Gauguin’s views on 73, 80–1 Portrait of the Artist with Glasses 59,
pseudonyms 26–7 60
“as an artist” 32–3 Self-Portrait (1889) 190, 191
“Mani” 27 Self-Portrait (1893) 51–2, 51
“Paretenia” 31 Self-Portrait of the Artist at His
“Tit-Oil” 32 Drawing Table, Tahiti 46–9, 47
psychophysiology 190, 192 Self-Portrait of the Artist with the Idol
49–50, 50
Quatrefage, Armand de 161, 162, 169 Self-Portrait Near Golgotha 59, 60
Self-Portrait, Oviri 56–9, 56
Index 305
Self-Portrait with a Hat 52–5, 53 “fossilized” body in evolutionary

Self-Portrait with Palette 55–6 universe 166–9
Séraphîta 41, 58, 213, 216 Teaiwa, Teresia 256, 257
sexual relationships with young girls 2, Teha’amana/Tehura 71, 85–6, 129, 131–2,
71, 232 231, 247 n.5
sexual victimization, explored in Self- biographical facts 232
Portrait with a Hat 52–5, 53 extra toes 167, 171
She Thinks of the Spirit of the Dead or the as informant about myths 24, 25
Spirit of the Dead Thinks of Her. See Merahi metua no Tehamana 231, 238
Manao Tupapau (She Thinks of the Pollock on 234
Spirit of the Dead or the Spirit of the Spirit of the Dead Watching 52, 54–5
Dead Thinks of Her) Tahitian Eve 158, 167–9, 172–3, 174
Sher-Gil, Amrita 238–41, 239, 240, 243 Teha’amana Has Many Parents 85–6
Sundaram’s photographic collage 241, young age of 232
242 Teilhet-Fisk, Jehanne 215–16, 252, 256
social politics 83–4, 187 theosophy 183–6, 213
social protest in Polynesia 81–2 Thomas, Nicholas 259
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 2, 15, 70, 158, 233 “Tit-Oil” 32
Eisenman on work of 71 titles
on representations of Polynesian myths ambiguity in 118–19
24–5 Marquesan paintings 203, 204, 212
soul touching a Gauguin creation 258
Bathers and Man in the Red Cape as tourism 73, 233, 246, 252–3, 257
two components of 219 tourist gaze 254, 261, 264
location of 179–80 Tristan, Flora
reincarnation and transmigration of adopting a male voice 82–3
215 analogies in writings and lives of
Souriau, Paul 110, 189 Gauguin and 76
Spirit of the Dead Watching 45, 52, 54–5, 59 association with Saint Simonians 75
spirituality Gauguin echoing views of 74
intersection with Symbolism in Man in Gauguin’s knowledge of literary legacy
the Red Cape 210–18 76, 82
and science 8–9, 164, 171, 177–88, 199 Gauguin’s notion of transcendent
Spitz, Chantal 246, 256 androgyny paralleling 43–4
Stoneware Pots, Chaplet 116, 117 Gauguin’s remarks on 74–5
Strindberg, Auguste 166 hybrid persona 82–3
Sundaram, Vivan 241, 242 influencing Gauguin’s attitude to
Sunflowers in an Armchair 106 women 91–2
Surrealism 107 Méphis 82, 91–2
Symbolism 107, 130, 132–9 Pérégrinations d’une paria 76, 82
intersection with spirituality in Man in portrait 70
the Red Cape 210–18 Promenades dans Londres 76–81
Tour de France 92
tableaux vivants 255 Union Ouvrière (The Workers’s Union)
Taine, Hippolyte 89, 110, 181, 186 83–4
Te Faruru (Here They Make Love) 145, 146 woman messiah 91–2
Te nave nave fenua (Tahitian Eve) 7, 106, Two Tahitian Women 90
147, 157, 163 juxtaposing with Two Women 89
evolution and desire 158, 172–4 Nochlin’s feminist critique 1, 69
306 Index
Two Women 86–9, 87, 88 women

juxtaposing with Two Tahitian Women 89 Gauguin on injustices to 73–4
Gauguin’s experience of strong 91–2
Union Ouvrière (The Workers’s Union) Gauguin’s preoccupation with 84–5
83–4 matrilineal past and challenge to
The Universe is Created (L’Univers est crée) patriarchal order 86–91
164–5, 166, 171–2 in Tahitian society 86–9
Upa Upa (Fire Dance) 193, 194 woodcuts
an exploration of “fossilized” body idea
Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou, Tyla 9, 244, 246, 253 167
Vairumati 195, 198 invoking paradise lost and Gauguin’s
Vaïtüa, Princess 46, 48, 49, 58 distanced position 130, 141,
Van Gogh, Vincent 147–50, 169, 171–2
disagreement with Gauguin over role L’Univers est crée (The Universe is
of imagination in painting 210, 212 Created) 164–5, 166, 171–2
Lust for Life 72 Memory of Meyer de Haan 193
Portrait de Gauguin/Portrait of Noa Noa Suite 141–50
Gauguin 110–11, 111 Auti te pape 107, 108, 116, 118, 119
sketch in Diverses Choses 28, 30 Maruru (Offerings of Gratitude)
Vase in the Form of Leda and the Swan 141–5, 143
116–17, 117, 119 Mata Mua (Olden Times) 143–5,
Vercoe, Caroline 249, 253, 255, 256 144
vibrations 192 Nave nave fenua 147–9, 148, 150,
Vision of the Sermon 8, 45, 107, 179, 168
187–90, 193 Noa Noa 141, 142
visual culture studies 258, 261 pretence that Gauguin has "gone
visual perception, studies of 109–10 native” 129, 145
vitalism 179, 180, 181, 183, 189, 193 Te Faruru (Here They Make Love)
Vollard, Ambroise 32, 204, 205, 212, 230 145, 146
techniques 8, 26, 105, 117–18, 145,
Wadley, Nicholas 107 147, 169, 172
Wallace, Lee 42 Wright, Alastair 7, 26, 169
When Will You Marry? (Nafea Faa Ipoipo) writers, Tahitian writers 243–4, 246, 256
244 writings of Gauguin. See manuscripts
digital montages 244–6, 245
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? The Yellow Haystacks or The Blonde
Where Are We Going? 103–4, 171, Harvest (Les Meules jaunes ou La
179, 194–9, 196, 207 Moisson blonde) 106, 106, 114, 119
Woman-vase with Snake-belt 117, 119 young girls, sexual relationships with 2,
Woman with a Flower 48 71, 232
Plate 1 Paul Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888, oil
on canvas, 28½ × 36⅓ in. (72.2 × 93.0 cm). NG1643; 4940. Purchased 1925. National
Galleries of Scotland. Photo: courtesy National Gallery of Scotland, Dist. RMN-
Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York, USA.
Plate 2 Paul Gauguin, Marine avec vache ou Au-dessus du gouffre/Seascape with Cow
or Above the Abyss, 1888, oil on canvas, 28½ × 24 in. (72.5 × 61 cm). Musée d’Orsay,
Paris, France. Photo: © Musée d’Orsay/RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt/Art
Resource, New York, USA.
Plate 3 Paul Gauguin, Te nave nave fenua (Delightful Land), also called “Tahitian
Eve,” 1892, oil on canvas, 36 × 28½ in. (91.3 × 72.1 cm). Courtesy Ohara Museum of
Art, Kurashiki, Japan.
Plate 4 Paul Gauguin, The Ancestors of Teha’amana, or Teha’amana Has Many Parents
(Merahi metua no Tehamana), 1893, oil on canvas, 301⅜16 × 21⅜ in. (76.3 ×
54.3 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles
Deering McCormick, 1980.613. Photo: courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago/Art
Resource, New York, USA.
Plate 5 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1894, oil on canvas, 21¾ × 18 in.
(55 × 46 cm). Private collection. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York, USA.
Plate 6 Paul Gauguin, Bathers, 1902, oil on canvas, 36¼ × 28¾ in. (92 × 73 cm).
Private collection, New York, USA. Photo: courtesy the collector.
Plate 7 Paul Gauguin, Marquesan Man in Red Cape or Sorcerer of Hiva Oa, 1902,
oil on canvas, 36¼ × 28¾ in. (92 × 73 cm). Musée Boverie, Liège, Belgium. Photo ©
Liège, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Boverie.
Plate 8 Tyla Vaeau Ta’ufo’ou. When Will You Marry? (Dee and Dallas Do Gauguin
Series), 2009, digital montage, 8 × 11 in. (20.32 × 27.94 cm). Private collection. Image:
courtesy the artist.

BROUDE, Norma. Gauguin's Challenge

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Gauguin’s Challenge

First published in the United States of America 2018

© Norma Broude and Contributors, 2018

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension

Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2515-1

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Introduction: Gauguin after Postmodernism Norma Broude 1

Part One Constructing Multiple Identities 13

Part Two Symbolism, Science, and Spirituality 101

4 Gauguin and the Challenge of Ambiguity Dario Gamboni103

Part Three Reception: Resistance and Empowerment 227

9 Taking Back Teha’amana: Feminist Interventions in Gauguin’s

Notes on Contributors 275

1 Paul Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the

1.1 Paul Gauguin, page from Noa Noa with photographs of a

4.6 Paul Gauguin, Bretonnerie/Breton Matters, c. 1889, pencil on

6.2 Armand de Quatrefages, cover, Hommes Fossiles et Hommes

9.3 Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian, 1934, oil on canvas,

GRAY Gray, Christopher, Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin

GUERIN Guérin, Marcel, L’Oeuvre gravé de Gauguin (Paris: H. Floury,

W. Wildenstein, Georges, Gauguin, I (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts Editions

It is now several decades since postmodern critiques presented the art-historical

castigated, as much for his life as his art, in terms of late-twentieth-century

of a series of “plagiarisms,” both visual and verbal. The latter characterization of

as sites of ideological struggle that were fully in contact with contemporary

interpretation. He analyzes several of the unconventional techniques used by

Constructing Multiple Identities

Gauguin’s Alter Egos: Writing the Other

Responses to Gauguin’s art have been inseparable from reactions to his

the distinction between creating and reproducing.12 Addressing the physical

interest already supplied by the combination of writing, sketch and reproduced

Citation is central to Gauguin’s writing. On the opening page of his first

Additionally, in Le Sourire, the newspaper that he wrote, printed and

Le Sourire also avoids adopting a coherent perspective by foregrounding

1 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of

is, a matter of pastiche.” Hal Foster, “The Primitivist’s Dilemma,” in Gauguin:

Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portraits in Polynesia:

he also understands Gauguin’s inclusiveness as masking a secret “wish to be

Paul Gauguin’s concept of androgyny

of androgyny from his images of self and incorporating the iconography of

Noa Noa (1893–4): Performativity and androgyny

Gauguin’s Noa Noa (1893–4) is a utopian narrative that consistently challenges

Paul Gauguin’s Polynesian self-portraits

After moving to Tahiti in 1891, Gauguin created nine self-portraits within a

introduces the theme of sexual victimization to the painting. In Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait of the Artist at His Drawing Table, Tahiti (1891–4)

Self-Portrait of the Artist with the Idol (1893), Self-Portrait (1893)

Self-Portrait (1893) (Figure 2.3) includes an inset of Eugène Delacroix’s

Self-Portrait with a Hat (1893–4)

symbolize his purity as an artist.62 Similar background organic motifs appear in

Gauguin’s portrait of William Molard (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, W. 506)

Self-Portrait with Palette (1894)

Self-Portrait, Oviri (1894–5)

Figure 2.5 Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait, Oviri, 1894–5, bronze relief.

Gauguin revealed the magnitude of Oviri’s personal importance by designating

Self-Portrait near Golgotha (1896), Portrait Dedicated to Monfreid

declining strength and mortality, in these last self-portraits, Gauguin presents

Introduction: Gauguin after Postmodernism Norma Broude 1

Part One Constructing Multiple Identities 13

Part Two Symbolism, Science, and Spirituality 101

4 Gauguin and the Challenge of Ambiguity Dario Gamboni103

Part Three Reception: Resistance and Empowerment 227

GRAY Gray, Christopher, Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin

GUERIN Guérin, Marcel, L’Oeuvre gravé de Gauguin (Paris: H. Floury,

W. Wildenstein, Georges, Gauguin, I (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts Editions

Evolution and Desire in Gauguin’s