Modern Art and Visual Culture 1660-1900

The massive 1988 Gauguin exhibition which debuted at the NationalGallery of Art in Wash‑ ington,D.C.,traveled totheArt Instituteof Chi‑ cago, and ended its run at the Grand Palais in Paris, is perhaps most interestingly considered as an exemplum not only of museologicalblockbust‑ erism but, as well, of the construction of the , (male)artistasprometheanandagonistichero. In the Parisian incarnation, the weeks before the opening witnessed Gauguin asthe cover Story in mass-media publications such as Telerama and Figaro, displacing more familiar cultural icons such asPrincessDi orJohnny Halliday.Fromthe moment the exhibition opened, lines routinely stretched from the entrance of the Grand Palais to the Métrostation; I was told that anaverage of 7,000 people saw the show each day. The accom‑ panyingscholarly apparatus conformed equally to the now-familiar terms of these kinds of exhibi‑ tions: a seven‐pound, BOO-franc catalogue pro‑ duced by a Franco‐American e'quipe, brimming with facts and factoids; a three-day symposium uniting scholars from several countries; blue-chip

corporate sponsorship on both sides of the Atlan‑ tic‐‐Olivetti in France,AT&T inthe States;and satellite exhibitions of both the graphic work of the Pont‐Aven school and historical photographs of Polynesia. Also attendant upon the show were disputes, if not polemics, concerned with prob‑ lems of dating in publications such asThe Print Collector’s Newsletter, and the reissue of numer‑ ous older Gauguin monographs. Consistent with this discursive presentation of

theartistandhiswork‐a presentationwhich, for short, may be designated business asusual‐the physical presentation of the exhibition and the catalogue were insistently concerned with a cer‑ tain inscriptionof the artist. In the Grand Palais, for example,at various strategic points,the viewer was confronted with over‐life‐size photographic blowups of Gauguin. And departing from the overall stylistic/chronological organization of the show, the very last room was consecrated to a medleyofGauguin’sself-portraits,revealingapro‑ gression (if that is the right term) from the rather louche Autoportrait avec chapeau (1893‐94) to the lugubrious Autoportrait pre‘s de Golgotha (1896). In other words, there were at least two narratives proposed by this exhibition; one struc‑ tured around a temporal, formal trajectory (the

314

stylistic evolution and development of the artist’s work), and the other around a dramatized and heroicized presentation of the artist's life. The former narrative was produced through curatorial strategies of selection and exclusion; the latter, through the interpolation of Gauguin asa bio‑ graphical subiect‐for example, the use of text panels chronicling his activities, his travels, his mistresses. These two narratives were unified under the mystic sign of the promethean artist; thus, fully in keepingwith the exigencies of secu‑ lar hagiography that characterizes mainstream, culturally dominant approaches to art, the cata‑ logue offers us a full-page photograph of Gau‑ guin’s hand. This shamanlike image is as good a point of

entry asany other into the mythof Gauguin,and by extension, into the discourse of artistic primitivismwhich Gauguin istaken to exemplify. Gauguin’s position ishere quite central insofar as he is traditionally cast asthe founding father of modernist primitivism. I amless concerned here, however, with primitivism as an aesthetic op‑ tion‐a stylistic choice‐thanwith primitivismas aform of mythic speech. Further, it isone of my themes that the critical interrogationof myth isa necessary part of art-historical analysis. Myth, as Roland Barthes famously defined it, is nothing more or less than depoliticized speech‐consis‑ tent with the classical definition of ideology (a falsification or mystification of actual social and economicrelations).Butmythicspeechisnotonly about mystification, it isalso, and more crucially, aproductive discourse‐a set of beliefs,attitudes, utterances, texts andartifacts that are themselves constitutiveofsocialreality.Therefore,in examin‑ ing mythic speech, it is necessary not only to de‑ scribe itsconcretemanifestations,butalso to care‑ fully attend to its silences, its absences, its omissions. For what is not spoken‐‐-what is un‑ speakable, mystifiedorocculted‐turns always on historical aswell aspsychic repressions.

Second only to the life of his equally mytholo‑ gized contemporary Vincent van Gogh, Gau‑ guin’s life is the stuff of which potent cultural fantasies are created. And indeed have been.

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU

Preeminently,the myth isassociated, in both the popular and the art-historical imagination, with Gauguin’s ten years spent in Polynesiaand‐inte‑ grally linked‐his assumption of the role of sav‑ age. Simultaneously,Gauguin’slifeisalsodeemed tragic and accursed. A glance through the card catalogue yields some of the followingbook titles: Ovirz’: The Writings of a Savage; The Noble Sav‑ age:A Lifeof PaulGauguin; Gauguin’sParadise Lost,La Vie passionée de Paul Gauguin; Poétes etpeintres maudit;Les‘Maudits;Gauguin:Peintre maudit; and‐my personal favorite‐Gauguin: Sa Vie ardente et miserable. Even during his lifetime Gauguin was as‑

sociated with the flight from, variously, bourgeois lifeand respectability,the wear and tear of life in the cash nexus, awife and children, materialism, “civilization." But no less mythically important than the things escaped are the things sought‐‑ the earthly paradise, its plenitude, its pleasure, its alluringandcompliant femalebodies.To admirers of Gauguin during his lifetime and the period immediatelyafter‐I referhereto such indispens‑ able and powerful promoters as Albert Aurier, Charles Morice, Daniel deMonfried, and most crucially, Victor Segalenl‐Gauguin’s voyage of life was perceived in both the most literal and gratifyingly symbolic sense asa voyage ever fur‑ ther outward, to the periphery and margins, to what lies outside the parameters of the superego ‘ and the polis.Onabiographical level,then, Gau‑ guin’s life provides the paradigm for primitivism as a white, Western and preponderantly male quest for anelusiveobjectwhose very conditionof desirability resides in some form of distance and difference, whether temporal or geographical. In themythof Gauguin “theman,”weare thus

presented with a narrative (until quite recently, one produced exclusively by men) that mobilizes powerful psychological fantasies about difference andotherness,bothsexual and racial.On aformal level‐‐‐or on the level of Gauguin the artist‐an‑ other narrativization isat work. Here, the salient terms concern originality and self-creation, the heroismand pathos of cultural creation, atelos of avant-gardismwhose movement ischartedstylisti‑ cally or iconographically.

GOING NATIVE

Common to both the embrace of the primi‑ tive‐howeverdefined‐andthecelebrationofar‑ tistic originality isthe belief that both enterprises are animated by the artist’s privileged access, be it spiritual, intellectual or psychological, to that which is primordially internal. Thus, the struc‑ tural paradox on which Cauguin’s brand of primitivism depends is that one leaves home to discover one’s realself; the journey out,aswriters such asConrad have insisted, is, in fact, always a journey in; similarly, and from the perspective of a more formally conceived criticism, the artist “recognizes” in the primitive artifact that which was immanent,but inchoate;theobject from“out there” enables the expression of what is thought to be “in there.” The experience of the primitive orof theprimitiveartifact istherefore,andamong other things, valued asan aid to creation, and to the act of genius located in the artist’s exemplary act of recognition. Is it,the historic Gauguin that soperfectly in‑

carnates this mythology, or is it the mythology that so perfectly incarnates Gauguin? Did Gau‑ guin produce this discourse, or did the discourse producehim? Fromwhichever sidewetackle this question,it mustbesaidthat Gauguinwas himself an immensely persuasive purveyor of his own my‑ thology. But the persuasiveness of Gauguin’s primitivism‐both asself-description and asaes‑ theticproject‐atteststotheexistenceofapower‑ ful and continuing cultural investment in its terms, a will to believe to which 100 years of uncritical commentary bears ample witness. Mythicspeech cannot bedispelled by the facts, it ignores or mystifies‐the truth of Brittany, the truth of Polynesia, the truth of Gauguin; rather, it mustbeexaminedin itsown right.Andbecause myth’s instrumentality in the present is of even greater moment, we need to attend to its avatars in the texts of contemporary art history. Thus, while it is fruitless to attempt"to locate anorigin of primitivist thought, wecan at any point along the lineattempt tounpackcertainof primitivism’s constituent elements, notably the dense inter‑ weave of racial and sexual fantasies and power‐‑ both colonial and patriarchal‐‐that provides its raison d’étre and which, moreover, continues to

315

informitsarticulation. InsofarasGauguin iscred‑ ited with the invention of modernist primitivism in the visual arts, such an investigation needs to reckon both with Gauguin’s own production‐‑ literaryaswellasartistic‐andwith the successive levels and layers of discourse generated around it.

For mypurposes here,it issufficient to begin in 1883, when, at the age of thirty-five, Gauguin makes his decisive break with his previous life as a respectable bourgeois and paterfamilias; ter‑ minatedfrom the investmentfirmof Bertinin the wake of the financial crash of 1882,heresolves to become a full-time artist. Three years later he leaves his wife, Mette Gad Gauguin, and his five children in Copenhagen and returns to Paris. Then begins hisrestlesssearch for “luxe,calme et volupte’," a troubled quest for another culture that’s purer, closer to origins and‐an equally in‑ sistent leitmotif‐cheaper to live in. By July 1886, he is installed at Pont‐Aven, at

the PensionGloanec. It isduringthis first Breton sojourn that hebegins to present himself, quite self-consciously, asasavage. Simultaneously, and in concert with other artists‐notably EmileBer‑ nard‐he begins to specifically adumbrate the goals and intentions of aprimitiveart. Brittany is thus presented in Gauguin’s correspondence,and in the subsequent art-historical literature, asthe initialencounter withculturalOtherness,arevivi‑ fying immersion in a more archaic, atavistic and organicsociety.Suchaviewof Brittanyisexempli‑

Brittany: there I find the wild and the primitive. When my wooden shoes ringon this stony soil, I hearthe muflled,dull,andmightytone I amlook‑ ingfor in mypainting.”DanieldeMonfried,Gau‑ guin’s close friend and subsequent memorialist, tiedthe moveto Brittanyspecifically to Gauguin’s ambitionsfor hisart: “Hehopedtofindadifferent atmosphere from our exaggeratedly civilized soci‑ ety in what, he thought, was a country with ar‑ chaic customs. He wanted his works to return to primitive art.”2 Since the publication of Fred Orton and Gri‑

selda Pollock’s important essay of 1980, “Les Données Bretonnantes,” which significantly does

2. Javanese village at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris (Roger-Viollet).

not even appear in the Grand Palais catalogue’s bibliography,this conceptionof Brittanyassome‑ how primitive, severe and eminently folkloric has been revealed as itself a mythic representation. Indeed, Pollock and Orton’s evocation of Pont‑ Aven in the late 1890s suggests nothingso much asProvincetown in the l950s‐an international artists’ colony,and apopular site for tourism, co‑

, existingwith,and formingthe economy of,arela‑ tively prosperous and accessible region whose diversified economy was based onfishing (includ‑ ingcanningandexport),agriculture,kelpharvest‑ ing and iodine manufacturing. Far from constituting the living vestiges of an

ancient culture, many of the most visually distinc‑ tive aspects of Breton society (preeminently the clothing of the women) postdated the French Revolution;they were, in fact, asOrton and P01‑ lock demonstrate, aspects of Breton modernity.3 But from the perspective of an inquiry into the terms of a nascent primitivism, what needs be emphasized is the construction of Brittany as a discursive object; in keeping with analogous con‑ structions such asOrientalism,wemight call this construction “Bretonism.” Accordingly, the dis‑

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-CODEAU

tance between the historicalactuality of Brittany in the later 1880s and the synthetist representa‑ tion of it is not reducible to adistance from or a distortion of anempirical truth, but must beex‑ amined asadiscursive postulate in its own right. Of what, then, does this "postulate consist?

On a formal level, the developments one ob‑ serves in Cauguin’s work of 1886‐90,and indeed in the work of the Pont-Aven circle asa whole, have little to do with Brittany, whether real or imagined These years encompass the first two Breton soioums, punctuated by the 1887 trip to Panama and Martinique,and the crucial encoun‑ ter withtribalarts andcultureatthe 1889Univer‑ sal Exhibition [2, 3] Gauguin’s jettisoning of phenomenological naturalism with respect to color,atmosphereandperspective,andhisassimi‑ lation of, variously, Japonisme, French popular imagery and Emile Bernard’s cloisonnisme, all of whichhadlongsincebeendiscursivelyconstituted asthe primitive, did not require Brittany for its realization. On the levelof motif,however,Bretonismsig‑

nals a new interest in religious and mystical ico‑ nography‐Calvaries, self-portraits as Christ, Magdalens, Temptations and Falls. To be sure, this subject matter is not separable from the emerging precepts of Symbolism itself,any more thanCauguin’sself-portraitureasChristormagus is separable from his personal monomania and narcissism. In this respect, Synthetism, cloison‑ nisme, primitivism and the larger framework of , Symbolismall representdiverse attempts to nego‑ tiate what Pollock andothers have termed acrisis in representation‐a crisis whose manifestation is linked to a widespread flight from modernity, urbanityandthesocialrelationsof advancedcapi‑ talism. To commentators such as Camille Pissarro,

Symbolism was itself a symptom of bourgeois re‑ trenchment in the face of a threatening working class:

C O l N C N AT I V E

the bustling of religious symbolists, religious socialists, idealist art, occultism, Buddhism, etc., etc.4

And he reproached Gauguin for “having sensed this tendency” and, in effect, pandering to it. But from either perspective, it seems clear that Bretonism fulfills a desire for the annihilation of what is deemed insupportable in modernity, which in turn requires that the Brittany of Breton‑ ism be conceived asfeudal, rural, static and spiri‑ tual‐the Other of contemporary Paris.

Stasis‐being outside of time and historical pro‑ cess‐is particularly crucial in the primitivizing imagination, insofar aswhat is required isan imag‑ inary site of psychic return. The “return to ori‑ gins” that Gauguin claimed as his artistic and spiritual trajectory is emblematized in another fre‑ quent quotation: “No more Pegasus, no more Par‑ thenon horses! One has to go back, far back . . . asfar asthe dada from mychildhood, the good old wooden horse.”5 Gauguin’s words limn an ata‑ vism that is anterior to and more profound in its implications than the search for a kind of ethno‑

317

graphic origin in either Brittany or the South Seas. This atavism has its lineage in Rousseauist

thought, in various kinds of temporal exoticism, in certain currents in Romanticism, and‐closer to Gauguin’s own t i m e‐i n a new interest in the child and the child’s perception. While it might be possible to argue that Gauguin's numerous im‑ ages of children‐Breton girls and adolescents, naked little boys (some of them quite strikingly perverse)‐‐themselves constitute an element of Bretonism[4, 5], it is also possible that the preva‑ lence of children, like that of unindividuated Breton women, masks something largely absent from the Bretonist vision‐namely, adult men and their activities. Why should the character‐‑ physiognomic, sartorial or spiritual‐of Breton men be of no interest? While there is no simple answer to this question, I would like to suggest that the absence of men from Bretonism may be structurally similar to the absence of men in the nineteenth-century discours prostitutionelle. In other words, in the same way that discussions of proxénétisme and other forms of male entre‑

s r

v' (i. ‘ i i > k, {figiiiw ’m“ ~ ' ~ \ , w-gififwi'r’fi“ , \ ‘..x. www . . . . . 3

\ m , » ‘Wm. . ~ ” Rn“ \ ‘ r ' , ~ j v m i ,“ M i ‘ M y“ I “ m . U “ Hmfin? rif‘fmi’ Km,’ ‘ w mm;a’,w,;gzn,fx'o}fm A A RNew $5?”ng Wm \ c wM: M \,»\o)1&&fififih

w 3 h “Iff'«w A

‑ ‘ ' I I

n’ u

‘. n ‘ '0 fl _'

‘o ‘ ' 3:3 . 5. .

GOING NATIVE

Brittany work is the “realist” Suzanne Coussant of 1881) participates in many of the same struc‑ tures of desire asdoes Bretonism itself. Signifi‑ cantly, during the Breton periodGauguin elabo‑ rated his peculiar mythology of the feminine‐a hodgepodge of Wagnerian citations, fin-de-siécle idées recues about woman’s nature,Strindbergian misogyny,Frenchbelles-lettristeversions of Scho‑ penhauer andsoforth. Modernart‐historicalliter‑ ature abounds in grotesquely misogynist exegeses of the meanings in Gauguin’s representations of women.8 In terms of my larger argument, it is enough to note that like the putatively archaic, mysterious and religious Bretonne, the deflower‑ ed maiden, the naked Eveand the woman in the waves (all from the Breton period) alike reside in that timeless and universal topos of the masculine imaginary‐femininity itself. Unmistakably, inCauguin’s writing and in his

art, the quest for the primitive becomes progres‑ sively sexualized, and wemust ask if this is aspe‑ cific or a general phenomenon. From 1889 on, there is an explicit linkage of the natural and Edenic culture of the tropics to the sensual and the carnal‐nature'splenitudereflectedinthe de‑ sirability and compliance of “savage women.” “The first Eves in Cauguin’s Eden,” asone art historian refers to them, appear in 1889 (the two versions of Eve bretonne, Ondine, Femmes se baignent, and, in the following year, Eve ex‑ otique). Much psychobiographic ink has been spilled over the fact that the head of the Eve exotique derives from aphotographof Gauguin’s mother‐Aline Chazal. But if werecall that Eve means mother to begin with, andthat, biblically speaking, Eve is the mother of usall, Gauguin’s use of his mother’s photograph could mean any number of things. Given the ultimate unknow‑ ability of an artist’s intentions, motivations and psychic structures, there seems little point in psy‑ choanalyzingthe subject through thework. Of far greater importance to my mind is an analysis of the availabilityandindeedthe self-evidenceof the constellation Eve/Mother/Nature/Primitive to the patriarchal imaginary asaculturalandpsychic construction.

319

Again,weareconfrontedwithaformof mythic speech that can by no means behistorically rele‑ gated to the era of Symbolism I quote acontem‑ porary art historian. Whatbettersymbol for this dreamofagoldenagethan the robustandfertile motherof all races? . . .Cauguin’s Eve is exotic, and assuch she stands for his natural affinity for tropical life. His was more than a passing taste for the sensuality of native women; of mixedori‑ gin‐his mother had Peruvian aswell asSpanish and French blood‐he was deeply aware of his atavism, often referringto himself asapariah and asavage who must return to the savage.9

And from another art historian: AlthoughCauguin’s imageryclearly emerges outof the 19th‐centurytraditionof the fatalwoman, it rejectsthe sterility of that relationship. On the contrary, the ce‑ ramic [theFemmenoire] suggests afruitfuloutcome to the deadly sexual encounter by representing the Femme Noire as full‐bellied and almost pregnant: the female uses the male and kills him,but she needs the phallus and its seed to create new life.Sothe fated collaboration is productive, even though fatal for the male. Cauguin’s imagery is basically an organic and natural one.10

The leitmotifs that circulate in these citations (chosen fairly randomly, I might add)‐strange referencesto mixedblood,persistentslippagesbe‑ tween what Gauguin said or believed or repre‑ sentedandwhat istaken tobetrue, the naturaliz‑ ing of the cultural which, asBarthes reminds us, is the very hallmark of mythic speech‐all these suggest that Gauguin’s mythologies of the femi‑ nine, the primitive, the Other, are disturbingly echoedincurrentart-historicaldiscourse.Further‑ more, insofar as femininity is conventionally linked, when not altogether conflated, with the primitive (a linkage, incidentally, that reaches a delirious crescendo in the fin-de-siecle), is there, wemight then ask,amirrorversion of this equiva‑ lence in which the primitive isconflatedwith the feminine? Is primitivism, in other words, a gen‑ dered discourse?

6. Paul‐Emile Miot, The Royal Family of Vahi‐Tahou from the Marquesas, PhotographedonBoard the French Frigate Astrée, 1869‐70. Paris, Musée del’Homme.

had already resolved to make his life anew in Tahiti. Significantly,hehadalso considered Ton‑ kin and Madagascar; all three were French colo‑ nial possessions. Tahiti, the most recent of these, hadbeenannexedasacolony in 1881(ithadbeen a protectorate until then). Gauguin’s primitivism was not free-floating,but followed,asit were, the

hewrote to Mette Gauguin the following:

May the day come soon when I’ll be myself in the woods of an ocean island! To live there in ecstasy, calmness and art. With a family, and far from the Europeanstrugglefor money.Therein Tahiti I shallbe able to listen to the sweet murmuring music of my heart’s beating in the silence of the beautiful tropical nights. I shallbein amorous harmonywiththe mysteri‑ ous beings of my environment. Free at last, without money trouble, I’llbeable to love, to sing, to die.11

In this asin other letters,Gauguin makes very explicit the equation tropics/ecstasy/amorous‑ ness/native. This was mythic speech at the time Gauguin articulated it, and it retains its potency to this day; one has only to glance at aClub Med brochure for Tahiti to appreciate its uninter‑ rupted currency. Insofarasweare concerned with Polynesia asa

complex and overdetermined representation as well asa real place in time and history, we may

start by asking what kinds of associations were generatedaroundit in nineteenth-centuryFrance. From the moment of their “discovery”‐‐‐a locu‑ tion which itself demands analysis‐by Captain Samuel Wallis in 1767, the South Sea Islands occupiedadistinctpositionin theEuropeanimag‑ ination. Renamed La Nouvelle Cythére shortly after byLouis-AntoinedeBougainville,Tahiti es‑ pecially was figured under the sign of Venus: se‑ ductive climate, seductive dances, seductive (and compliant) women. In the expeditionary literature generated by

Captain Cook, Wallis, Bougainville and the countless successive voyagers to the South Seas, the colonial encounter is first and foremost the encounter with the body of the Other. How that alien body is to beperceived,known, masteredor possessed is playedout withinadynamic of knowl‑ edge/powerrelationswhichadmitsofnoreciproc‑ ity. On one level, what is enacted is a violent history of colonial possession and cultural dis‑ possession‐real power over real bodies [6]. On another level, this encounter will be endlessly elaborated within a shadow world of representa‑ tions‐a question of imaginary power over imagi‑ nary bodies. In French colonial representation, the non‑

reciprocity of these power relations is frequently disavowed. One manifestation of this disavowal

GOING NATIVE

can be traced through the production of images and texts in which it is the colonized who needs anddesires the presenceandthe bodyof thecolo‑ nizer. The attachment of native women‐often the tragic passion‐for their French lovers be‑ comes a fully established staple of exotic literary productioneven beforethe endof the eighteenth century [7]. The perception of the Maori body‐entering

European political and representational systems muchlater than the black or Oriental body‐can beseen to both replicate and differ from the ear‑ lier models for knowing the Other’s body. Like that of the African, the body of the South Sea Islander is potentially‐and simultaneously‑ monstrous and idealized. In the Polynesian con‑ text, these bodily dialectics were charted on a spectrum ranging, on the one hand, from canni‑ balism and tattooing to, on the other, the noble savage (usuallygiven aGrecianphysiognomy)and the delightful vahine. It is the fantasmatic dual‑ ism of cannibalism and vahine which alerts usto the central homology between the Polynesian bodyandtheAfricanbodyin Europeanconscious‑ ness. ForasChristopherMillerhas pointedout in relation to Africanist discourse, “The horror of monstrousness and the delight of fulfillment are counterparts of a single discourse, sharing the same conditions of possibility: distance and dif‑ ference. . . .”12The Maoribodyhas itsownspeci‑ ficity; it did not conform altogether to the model of the black African body. On the contrary, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of the Maori‐and they are overwhelmingly of women‐-‐work to produce'a subject who, if not altogether “white,” is certainly not inscribed within the conventional representational schema for “black." This in turn may account for the perpetual problem posed by the “origin” of the Maori. If neither Black, White nor Yellow (the overarching racialcategories systematized in such summas of racialism asJoseph Gobineau’s Essai sur1’inégczlitédes raceshumaines), theMaorirace, alongwith its placelessness,was clearly disturbing for nineteenth-century racial theory. In this re‑ spect, it would be amusing to think that the “problem” of Maori origins was unconsciously al‑

321

legorized in Cauguin's D’oz‘r venom‐nous, Que sommes-nous, Or‘z allons‐nous? The Polynesian body had another specific va‑

lence, which was structured around the percep‑ tion of its putative androgyny, androgyny here understood in a morphological sense. As Victor Segalen,followingcountlesspreviousdescriptions, specified: “The woman possesses many of the qualities of the young man: abeautifuladolescent [male] comportment which she maintains up to her old age. And diverse animal endowments which she incarnates with grace.”13 Conversely, the young male'Maori was consistently ascribed feminine characteristics. This instability in gen‑ deringwas givenexplicitexpressionin the encoun‑ ter Gauguin described in NoaNoa which hinged onhis“mastery"of homosexualdesire for ayoung Maori who trekked for him in search of wood to make his carvings. \

7. IulienVallou deVilleneuve, Petit Blane que j’aime, lithograph, ca. 18403. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.

8.” I. Webber, A Young Woman of Otaheete Bringing a Present, early nineteenth‐century British print, after a French original (Roger-Viollet).

The logic at work in the literary and iconic production of La Nouvelle Cythere was explicitly structured by the erotic fascination organized around the figure of the young Polynesian woman. “There should belittle difficulty,” wrote one frig‑ ate captain -in 1785, “in becoming more closely acquainted with the young girls, and their rela‑ tions place no obstacles in their way."14 We may recall too that the mutiny on the Bounty was in part a consequence of the crew’s dalliances with the native women. In any case, from the eigh‑ teenth century on, it is possible to identify various modalities in which the South Sea Islands are con‑ densed into the figure of the vahine who comes effectively to function asmetonym for the tropic paradise tout court. Indeed, Maori culture as a whole is massively coded as feminine, and glossed by constant reference to the languor, gentleness, lassitude and seductiveness of “native life”‐‐an extension of which is the importance in Polyne‑ sian culture of bathing, grooming, perfuming, etc.

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU

9. L. Massard, Femme tatouée de l’Ile Madison, Océanie, ca. 1820 (Roger-Wallet).

By the time the camera was conscripted to the discursive production of the Maori body (in the early 18603, agood twenty years before Gauguin’s arrival), these conventions of representation were fully established [8, 9].

In examining popular representational modes ‐whether graphic or photographic‐one can sit‑ uate them with respect to the high‐cultural forms to which they relate as iconographic poor rela‑ tions. Hence, we move from Rococo vahines to “naturalist” or academic representations of u n‑ clothed Tahitians in the later nineteenth century, underpinned, asthey clearly are, by the lessons of academic painting and its protocols of pose and comportment [10].

There was, as well, a fully developed literary tradition concerning Tahiti and to a lesser extent the Marquesas, ranging from what are now deemed high-cultural productions such as Her‑ man Melville’s Typee and Omoo, to enormously successful mass-cultural productions such as the

GOING NATIVE

Marriage of Lotz' by Pierre Loti (the pen name of IulienViaud). “Serious” primitivists such asGau‑ guin and Victor Segalen dismissed books such as theMarriageofLotiassentimental trash‐“prox‑ yne‘tes de divers,” Segalen called them‐but to read Segalen’s Les [mmemorz'aux or to contem‑ plateGauguin’sstrangely ioylessandclaustralevo‑ cations of Tahiti and the Marquesas is to be, in the final instance, not at all far from Loti. In short, the “availability” of Tahiti and the

Marquesas to Gauguin was asmuchafunction of 100 years of prior representation aswas its status asFrench possession, which additionally entitled Gauguin to a 30 percent reduction on his boat ticket and aspurious mission to document native life.Bothforms of availability are eloquently sym‑ bolized in the 1889 Universal Exhibition,whose literalcenter was composedof simulacra of native habitations, imported native inhabitants and tribal objects. William Walton, aBritish journal‑ ist, indicated the scale and ambition of this colo‑ nialDisneylandin his “Chefs d’oeuvre del’Expo‑ sition Universelle": “The colonial department includes Cochin Chinese, Senegalese, Annamite,

323

New Caledonian, Pahouin, Gabonese and Java‑ nese villages, inhabitantsandall. Very great pains and expense havebeen taken to make this ethno‑ graphic display complete and authentic.”15 In addition to these villages, there was amodel

display of forty‐odd dwellings constitutinga“His‑ tory of HumanHabitation” aswell asadisplay of “The History of Writing,” including inscriptions taken from Palenque and Easter Island, The im‑ portance of this lexicon of exoticism for Gauguin should not be‐but usually is‐underestimated. Over a period of several months, Gauguin was frequently within the precincts of the exhibition (theSynthetistexhibitionat theCaféVolponi ran simultaneously).Thus,theexperienceof the prim‑ itive“framed"withinthe PavilionoftheColonies or the History of Human Habitationisanalogous totheprimitivistdiscourse “framed” bythe impe‑ rialism that is its condition of existence and the context of its articulation.

To acknowledge this framing is but afirst step in demythifyingwhat it meant for Gauguinto “go native.” There is, in short, adarker side to primi‑

10. Lithograph after drawing by E. Ronjat, [ndoge‘nes des Iles Tubuai, ca. 1875 (Roger-Viollet).

324

l l . Paul-Emile Miot, Two Tahitian Sisters in Missionary Garb, 1869‐70. Paris, Musée del’Homme.

tivist desire, one implicated in fantasies of imagi‑ nary knowledge,power and rape;and these fanta‑ sies, moreover,are sometimesunderpinnedbyreal power,by real rape.When Gauguin writes in the marginof theNoaNoa manuscript,“1 saw plenty of calm-eyed women. I wanted them to bewilling to betaken without aword, brutally. In away [it was a] longing to rape,"16 we are on the border between the acceptable myth of the primitivist artist assexual outlaw, and the relations of vio‑ lenceanddomination that provideitshistoricand its psychic armature. In makinganargument of this nature,one can

alsomakereferencetothedistinctionbetweenthe PolynesianrealityandGauguin’s imaginaryrecon‑ struction of it. In 1769, the population of Tahiti was reckoned at about 35,000 persons. By the time of Gauguin’s arrival in Papeete in 1891, Europeandiseases had killedoff two thirds of the population. Late nineteenth‐century ethnogra‑ phersspeculatedthat the Maoripeoples were des‑ tined for extinction. The pre-European culture had been effectively destroyed; Calvinist mission‑ aries hadbeenat work for acentury, the Mormon and Catholic missionaries for fifty years. The bid‑ eous muumuus worn byTahitian women were an

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-CODEAU

index of Christianization and Western accultura‑ tion [11, 12].Accordingto Bengt Danielsson,the only Gauguinspecialist who diverges from mythic speech, “virtually nothing remained of the an‑ cientTahitianreligionandmythology ...;regard‑ less of sect, they all attended church-‐at least once aday. Their Sundays were entirely devoted to churchgoing."17 Not only had the indigenous religion been

eradicated,but the handicrafts,barkclothproduc‑ tion, art of tattoo and music had equally suc‑ cumbed to the interdictionof the missionaries or the penetration of European products. The bright‐colored cloth used for clothing, bedding and curtains that Gauguin depicted was of Euro‑ pean design and manufacture. Gauguin did,of course, indicatehis dissatisfac‑

tion with Papeeteasaprovincial town dominated by colonials and demoralized and deracinated in‑ dige‘nes. In later years, in the Marquesas,he saw fit to regularly (and publicly) denounce the prac‑ tice of intermarriage between the resident Chi‑ neseandthe Polynesians.Butthetourist/colonial‑ ist lament for the loss of the authentic, primitive culture it seeks to embrace is itself a significant component of the primitivist myth. For within

GOING NATIVE

this pervasive allegory, as James Clifford points out, “The non-Westernworld isalways vanishing and modernizing. As in Walter Benjamin’s alle‑ gory of modernity,the tribalworld isconceivedas a ruin.”18 In France,Gauguin had imaginedTahiti to be

asensual landof cockaigne where abountiful na‑ ture provided‐effortlessly‐forone’s needs.This was alsowhat the colonial pamphletshehadread toldhim.In fact, installedinhishousethirty miles from Papeete,Gauguinwas almostentirely reliant on the extremely expensive tinned food and his‑ cuits from theChinesetradingstore. Bananasand breadfruit,astapleoftheTahitiandiet,weregath‑ eredby the men once aweek on excursions to the highlands. Fishing, which provided the second staple food, was both a collective and a skilled activity. Ensconced in his tropical paradise, and unableto participate in localfood-gatheringactiv‑ ities, Gauguin subsisted on macaroni and tinned

325

beef andthe charity of Tahitian villagers and resi‑ dent Europeans. Throughout the years in Tahiti and later in the Marquesas,Gauguin’s adolescent mistresses were not only his most concrete and ostentatious talisman of going native, they were

families, his meal tickets. There are, of course, asmany ways to go native

asthere are Westerners who undertake to do so. Gauguin scrupulously constructed an image of himself ashavingaprofound personal affinity for the primitive. The Polynesian titles hegave most of his Tahitian works were intended to represent him to his European market, aswell as to his friends, as one who had wholly assimilated the native culture. In fact, and despite his lengthy residence, Gauguin never learned to speak the language,and mostof his titles are either colonial pidgin or grammatically incorrect.19 His last, rather squalid years in the Marquesas included

(vol. III, pl. 6), 1774. Vile de

326

stints asa journalist for a French newspaper and a series of complicated feuds and intrigues with the various religiousandpoliticalresidentcolonial factions. ' It is against this background that we need to

reconsiderthetext ofNoaNoa. It hasbeenknown for quite alongtime that much of the raw mate‑ rial of the text‐notably that pertaining to Tahi‑ tian religion and mythology‐‐‐was drawn from Gauguin’searlierAncien Cultemahorie, of which substantial portions were copied verbatim from Jacques-AntoineMoerenhout’s 1837 Voyages aux ilesdugrandocéan.20Thus,when Gauguinwrites in NoaNoa that his knowledge of Maori religion was due to “a full course in Tahitian theology" given him by his thirteen-year-old mistress Teha’amana,heisinvolvedin adoubledenial;his avoidance of the fact that his own relation to the Maori religion was extremely tenuous, merely the productof atext hehadjust appropriated,andhis refusal to acknowledge that Teha’amana, like most other Tahitians,had norelation to her for‑ mer traditions.

I will return to this paradigmatic plagiarism shortly, but first I want to say afew more words aboutwhat wemightcallTeha’amana’s structural usevalue for the Gauguin myth.Certainly,andat the risk of stating the obvious, it is clear that Teha’amana’s function asGauguin’s fictive con‑ duit to theancient mythologies isentirely overde‑ termined.N0lessoverdeterminedisthegrotesque afterlife of Gauguin’s successive vahines in the modern art-historical literature. Conscientiously “named," their various tenures with Gauguin me‑ thodically charted,their “qualities” andattributes reconstituted on the “evidence” of his paintings and writing, their pregnancies or abortions me‑ thodically deduced,what isatwork isanundimin‑ ished investment in the mythos of what could be termed primitivist reciprocity. This is a form of mythic speech that Gauguin produces effortlessly in the form of the idyll or pastorale, as in the following passage from Noa Noa:

I started to work again and myhouse was anabode of happiness. In the morning,when the sun rosethehouse

ABIGAIL SOLOMON’GODEAU

was filled with radiance. Teha’amana’s face shone like gold, tinging everythingwith its luster,and the two of us would go out and refresh ourselves in the nearby stream assimply and naturally asin the Garden of Eden, fenua nave nave. As time passed, Teha’amana grew ever more compliant and affectionate in our day to day life. Tahitian noa noa imbued meabsolutely. The hours and the days slipped by unnoticed. I no longer saw any difference between good and evil. All was beautiful and wonderful.21

The lyricism of Gauguin’s own idealized de‑ scriptionof life in Tahitiwith itspiquantallusions to the breaking of bourgeois norms and stric‑ tures‐most spectacularly in the vision of a fifty‑ year-old man frolicking with his thirteen‐year-old mistress‐is one of the linchpins of the Gauguin myth.All the more necessary to instateless edify‑ ing perspectives on Eden, as in Gauguin’s 1897 letter to Armand Seguin: Just to sit here at the open door, smoking a cigarette anddrinkingaglass of absinthe,isanunmixedpleasure which I have every day. And then I have a 15‐year‐old wife [this was one of Teha’amana’s successors] who cooks mysimple everyday fare and gets down on her back for mewhenever I want,all for themodest reward of a frock, worth ten francs a month.22

Such oppositions give some notion of the rich range of material available to the Gauguin de‑ mythologizer.Morepointedlystill,they callatten‑ tion toone of the particularly revealingaspects of what I mayaswell nowcallGauguinism‐namely, the continuingdesire tobothnaturalizeandmake “innocent” the artist’s sexual relations with very young girls,assymptomatically expressed in René Huyghe’s parenthetical assurance in his essay on Gauguin’s Ancien Culte mahorie that the thir‑ teen-year-old Tahitian girl is “equivalent to 18or 20 years in Europe.”23 Huyghe’s anodyne assurance that the female

Maoribody isdifferent from its Western counter‑ part is paradoxically motivated by the desire to normalize asexual relationship which in Europe would beconsidered criminal, let alone immoral. But the paradox is fundamental, for what is at stake in the erotics of primitivism is the impulse to domesticate, aswell aspossess. “The body of

strangeness must not disappear,” writes Hélene Cixous in La [euneNée, “but itsstrength mustbe tamed, it must be returned to the master.”24 In

imageof the woman canbeseen assimilarly struc‑ tured, not only within Cauguin’s work, but asa characteristic feature in the project of represent‑ ing the Other’s body, be it the woman’s or the native’s. Bothimpulses can berecognizedin Gau‑ guin’s representational practice. In the Polynesian pictures as in the Breton

work, images of men are singularly rare, Fre‑

327

13. Paul Gauguin, Parau Na Te Vama [no (Words of the Devil), 1892. Washington, D C , National Gallery of Art, Gift 'of the W. Averell Harriman Foundation in memory of Marie N. Harriman.

quently,andin conformity with the already‐repre‑ sented status of the Maori, they are feminized. Nothing suggests that there is anything behind the men’s pareros, while Gauguin is one of the first European artists to depict his female nudes with pubic hair. In this regard it is interesting to note that Gauguin's supine nude Breton boy (malenudesappear only in the Bretonperiod)has had his penis strangelyelided. But while there is nothingquitecomparableto this oddavoidanceof masculine genitalia in his images of women, and althoughthey arefiguredwithalltheconventional

328

tropes of “natural" femininity‐fruits with breasts, flowers and feathers with sex organs‑ there is nonetheless something in their wooden stolidity, their massive languor, their zombielike presence that belies the fantasy they are sum‑ moned to represent [13].

What lies behind these ciphers of femininity? By way of approaching this question, I want to reintroduce the issue of Gauguin’s plagiarisms. For the scandal of the appropriation of Moeren‑ hout may be seen to have broader implications. Copied for use in L’Ancien Culte mahorie, it resurfaces in the laterNoaNoa. Partsof the same text reappear in Avantetapre‘s. A paragraph from the French colonial oflice pamphlet touting Tahiti for colonialsettlementappears in aletterto Mette Gauguin. In additionto the appropriationof others’ texts,

Gauguin tends to constantly recyclehis own. Bits and pieces of The Modemsz’ritandCatholicism surface in lettersandarticles. In hispersonaldeal‑ ings with artists during his years in France,there isanother kind of appropriation: Emile Bernard, for example, claimed that Gauguin had in effect “stolen” his Synthetism,and there isnoquestion that Bernard's work comprised afar more devel‑ oped and theorized Symbolism when the two art‑ ists first became friends in Brittany. From 1881 through the 18903,one can readily identify aPis‑ sarroesque Gauguin, a van Goghian Gauguin, a Bernardine Gauguin, a Cézannian Gauguin, a Redonian Gauguin, a Degasian Gauguin and, most enduringly and prevalently,aPuvisianGau‑ guin. And as for what is called in art history “sources,” Gauguin’s oeuvre provides a veritable lexicon of copies, quotations,borrowings and reit‑ erations. Drawing upon his substantial collection of

photographs, engraved reproductions, illustrated books and magazines and other visual references, Gauguin, once hejettisoned Impressionism,drew far more from art than from life. Consider, for example, Gauguin’s repeated use of the temple reliefs from Borobudur and wall paintings from Thebes. His borrowings from the Trocadéro col‑ lections,and from the tribal artifacts displayed at

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU

the Universal Exhibition,are obvious. In certain cases, heworked directly from photographs to de‑ pict Maori sculptures that he never saw; photo‑ graphs were often the source of individual figures aswell. The Easter Island inscription from the UniversalExhibitionappears inMerahiMelueNo Tehamana. Manet’s Olympia and Cranach’s Diana are reworked asTeAn’i Vahine. A double portrait of two Tahitian women comes directly from aphotograph.Certainof Gauguin’s ceramic objects are modeledonMochicanpottery.Wood‑ cuts by Hiroshige provide the motif for aBreton seascape. Forsomeof Gauguin’scontemporaries,thisbri‑

colage was the very essence of what they under‑ stood to be Gauguin’s brand of Symbolism, asin Octave Mirbeau’s description of Gauguin’s “un‑ settling and savory mingling of barbarian splen‑ dor, Catholic liturgy, Hindu meditation, Gothic imagery and obscure and subtle symbolism.”25 . For less sympathetic observers, such asPissarro, “All in all . . . it was the art of asailor, picked up here and there.”26 All of which suggests that in Gauguin’s art the

representationof thefeminine,therepresentation of the primitive,andthereciprocalcollapseofone intotheother,has itsanalogue in the very process of his artistic production. For what is at issue is less an invention than a reprocessing of already constituted-signs. The lifeof Gauguin, the art of Gauguin, the myth of Gauguin‐approached from any side we confront a Borgesian labyrinth ofpuretextuality.Feminineandprimitive,Breton and Maori, are themselves representable only to the extent that they exist asalready-written texts, which yet continue to be written. “When myth becomes form,” cautionedBarthes,“the meaning leaves its contingency behind, it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains.”27 In contrast to the recent and elaborate rehabilitation of the primitivizing impulse, Pissarro, closer to the history that the Gauguin myth occludes, always retained his clar‑ ity of judgment: “Gauguin,” hewrote, “is always poaching on someone’s land; nowadays, he’s pil‑ laging the savages of Oceania,”28

GOING NATIVE 329

1. By profession adoctor in the French navy, and by avocationadiaristandwriter,Victor Segalen(1878‐1919) was an influential producer of toney literary exotica. His first naval tour of duty was in Oceania, and he arrived in Tahitiafew monthsafter Gauguin’s death. Subsequently, hepurchased many of Gauguin’s effects, includingmanu‑ scripts, art works, photographs, albums, etc. Segalcn’s es‑ says on Gauguin are anthologizcd in the posthumous col‑ lection Gauguin dans son demier de'cor etautres textes de Tahiti, Paris, 1975. Upon Segalen's return to France,he wrote hisnovelLesImmemoriaux (1905‐6),animaginary reconstruction of Maori life which he characterized as attempting “to describe the Tahitian people in a fashion equivalent to the way Gauguin saw them.” Subsequently, Segalen was posted to China for four years (1909‐13),a sojourn that resultedin thenovelRenéLeys, aswellastwo collectionsof essays,Steles andBriquesettuiles. HisEssai sur l'exoticisme, published posthumously, isameditation on the nature of [Western] exoticism‐a desire for the Other. 2. Cited in John Reward, Gauguin, New York, 1938,

p. 11. 3.FredOrtonandGriselda Pollock,“Les DonnéesBre‑

tonnantes: La Prairie de la Representation,” Art History, Sept. 1980, pp. 314, 329. 4. CamillePissarro:Lettersto HisSonLucien, ed. John

Rewald, New York, 1943, p. 171. 5.Cited in Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern

Painting, New York, 1938, p. 60. 6. Claire F‘réches-Thory, “Gauguin et la Bretagne

1886‐1890," Gauguin (exhibition catalogue), Paris, Grand Palais, 1989, p. 85. 7. Wayne Andersen, Gauguin’s Paradise Lost, New

York, 1971, p. 53. ' 8. Examples are legion, but Wayne Andersen’s book, citedabove, isone of theworst offenders. Itscentralthesis isthat Gauguin’s work isunifiedaround the theme of the woman’s lifecycle,wherein the crucialevent is the loss of virginity,which,asAndersen has it,maybeunderstoodas homologousto the Crucifixionof Christ. Notsurprisingly, this theory promotes afairly delirious levelof formal and iconographical analysis. 9. Henri Dorra, “The First Eves in Gauguin’s Eden,”

Gazette des beaux-arts, Mar. 1953, pp. 18998,p. 197. 10. V6itech Jirat‐Wasiutynski, “Paul Gauguin’s Self‑

Portraitsand the Oviri: The Imageof the Artist, Eve,and the Fatal Woman," The Art Quarterly, Spring 1979, pp.

172‐90, p. 176. 11. Lettres de Gauguin a sa femme et ses amis, ed.

Maurice Malingue, Paris, 1946,p. 184. 12. Christopher L. Miller,Blank Darkness: Africanist

Discourse in French, Chicago, 1985, p. 28.

dans son demier de’cor, p. 99 [my translation]. 14.C. Skogman, TheFrigateEugenie’sVoyageAround

the World, cited in Bengt Danielsson,Love in the South Seas, London, 1954, p. 81. 15.Cited in ChristopherGray,SculptureandCeramics

of Paul Gauguin, Baltimore, 1967,p. 52. 16. Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, ed. and intro. Nicholas

Wadley, trans. Jonathan Griffin, London, 1972, p. 23. There are a number of editions of Noa Noa in keeping with its complicated production and publication history. Originally plannedbyGauguinasacollaborationbetween himself and Charles Morice, he later declared himself dissatisfied with the literary improvements and narrative reorganization that Morice had imposed. At least three different versions are in print, not counting translations. 17.Bengt Danielsson,Gauguin in the SouthSeas, Lon‑

don, 1965, p. 78. 18. James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the

Modern,”Art inAmerica, April 1985,pp. 164‐72,p.178. 19. See in this regard, Bengt Danielsson, “Les Titres

Tahitiens deGauguin,” Bulletindela Société des Etudes Oceaniennes, Papeete,nos. 160‐61,Sept.‐Dec. 1967,pp. 738‐43. 20. See René Huyghe,“Le Clef deNoa Noa," in Paul

Gauguin, Ancien Culte mahon'e, Paris, 1951. Gauguin’s spelling of mahorie is incorrect in any language. 21. Gauguin, Noa Noa,‘p. 37. 22. Letter to Armand Séguin, Jan. 15, 1897. Cited in

Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, p. 191. 23. Huyghe, “La Clef deNoa Noa,” p. 4. 24.Citedin Josette Féral,“The Powersof Difference,”

in The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, Boston, 1980, p. 89. 25.Octave Mirbeau,“PaulGauguin,"L 'EchodeParis,

Feb. 16, 1891.Reprintedin Mirbeau,DesArtistes, Paris, 1922, pp. 119‐29. ‘ 26. Camille Pissarro, p. 172. 27. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today," Mythologies, ed.

and trans. Annette Lavers, New York, 1978, p. 139. 28. Camille Pissarro, p. 221.