Going Native: Key Themes in Abg. Solomon-Godeau on Gauguin and Primitivist Modernism

The Exhibition as Blockbuster and Mythic Biography

• The 1988 Gauguin exhibition was a museological blockbuster: it opened at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, and closed at the Grand Palais (Paris).

• It functioned not only as a display of artworks but as a case study in how the modern artist is marketed as a Promethean, agonistic hero.

• Paris expansion: Gauguin became the cover story in mass media (e.g., Télérama, Figaro) in the weeks before the opening, rivaling mainstream icons (Princess Di, Johnny Hallyday).

• Visitor traffic: lines from the Grand Palais entrance to the Métro; average daily attendance reported as viewers.

• Scholarly apparatus mirrored the blockbuster model: a heavy catalogue (≈7-pound, 300-franc), a multi-country symposium (three days), corporate sponsorship on both sides of the Atlantic (Olivetti in France; AT&T in the United States), plus satellite exhibitions (Pont-Aven school graphics and Polynesian photography).

• Two narratives presented within the show:

  • A temporal, formal trajectory tracing Gauguin’s stylistic evolution.

  • A biographical, heroized life narrative via text panels detailing his travels, affairs, and mistresses.

• These narratives are unified by a Promethean, shamanlike image of Gauguin, culminating in a full-page photograph of his hand in the Grand Palais catalogue.

• The author aims to interrogate myth as a necessary part of art-historical analysis: mythic speech is depoliticized in Barthes’ sense, yet it is a productive discourse that shapes social reality through beliefs, attitudes, texts, and artifacts.

• Barthes’ definition of myth: a form of depoliticized speech that mystifies social and economic relations but also participates in the creation of social reality; thus, myth must be studied for its silences, absences, and omissions as much as for its explicit content.

• Central questions include: Is Gauguin the inventor of primitivism, or is primitivism the discourse that instrumentalized Gauguin? Is Gauguin producing the discourse, or is the discourse producing Gauguin?

• The exhibition’s approach reveals how mythic discourse, over a century, remains a powerful cultural investment with little critical self-correction.

Primitivism, Mythic Speech, and the Breton-Gauguin Frame

• Gauguin is cast as a founding father of modernist primitivism; the focus is less on primitivism as a stylistic option than on primitivism as mythic speech—an imagined, culturally embedded discourse about difference and otherness.

• Mythic speech, per Barthes, operates as a set of beliefs about the artist’s privileged access to the inner, primordial self; it also becomes a site where social realities (race, sex, power) are constructed and naturalized.

• The author emphasizes attending not only to what myth says, but to what it omits, excludes, or mystifies—the silences that reveal historical and psychic repressions.

• The Breton phase is treated as a discursive construction rather than an ethnographic record: Brittany becomes a stand‑in for primitive life—a mythic site of stasis, spirituality, and rural purity—the “Other” that Parisian modernity desires to banish or fantasize about.

• The Bretonism postulate: a mythic archetype that uses Brittany as a symbolic anchor for Gauguin’s primitive project, while Brittany itself is a modern, economically diverse region (fishing, kelp harvesting, iodine, etc.).

• The Breton “return to origins” is tied to a broader cultural longing for an imagined childhood or pastoral purity, a Rousseau-inspired atavism that predates but informs Gauguin’s later Pacific fantasies.

• A recurring paradox: the journey outward to “discover” one’s real self is, in truth, a journey inward—an act of recognition that legitimizes the artist’s original creative power.

• The Breton era is also marked by the conspicuous absence of adult male figures in the thematic gaze, a pattern the author connects to proposed misogynist readings of Gauguin’s women and to a broader fantasy of an unchanging rural femininity.

• The formal developments (Synthetism, cloisonnism, primitivism, Symbolism) are read not as purely aesthetic shifts but as responses to a broader crisis in representation and to modernity’s social relations.

The Two Narratives: Formal Evolution vs Biographical Hagiography

• The exhibition’s formal trajectory focuses on stylistic evolution, color, and representation; the biographical narrative foregrounds Gauguin’s travels, relationships, and “mythic” life events (mistresses, conquests).

• The curation uses two intersecting but divergent paths:

  • Chronology and style: a progression from early works to later self‑portraits (Autoportraits 1893–94; Autoportrait près de Golgotha, 1896).

  • Biography: text panels chronicling activities, travels, and relationships.

• The tension between these paths demonstrates how myth makes life into an enduring, legible icon of creation and difference.

• The catalogue’s iconic image—the artist’s hand—functions as a visual entry into the myth of the creative genius and the primitivist project.

The Polynesian Sphere: Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the Colonial Gaze

• Gauguin’s primitivism is temporally and geographically linked to colonial expansion (Brittany → Tahiti → Marquesas) and to a tri‑colored path of empire (France’s colonies).

• Tahiti is framed in European imagination as La Nouvelle Cythère; the body of the Other (the vahine) is eroticized and idealized within a colonial gaze of knowledge/power asymmetry.

• The nonreciprocity of this power relation is expressed both in violent colonial dispossession and in the discursive production of exotic bodies.

• The Maori body is complex: simultaneously exoticized and limned as feminine; the Maori male is often feminized in nineteenth‑century imagery; the Maori’s perceived androgyny is a key feature in Gauguin’s writings (as described in Noa Noa and related texts).

• The tropics are coded as a paradise of sensual life, yet this paradise is underwritten by colonial domination, disease, and cultural disruption.

• Representations of Tahiti and the South Seas evolved from Rococo vahines to nineteenth‑century naturalist/academic tropes, all underwritten by Orientalist and ethnographic clichés.

• The critical distinction between Tahitian reality and Gauguin’s imaginative reconstruction is central: Gauguin’s knowledge of Maori religion, for example, was largely drawn from earlier texts (noa noa manuscript material) and Teha’amana’s role as intermediary is highly mediated and contested.

The Ethnography of Availability and the Spectacle of the 1889 Expo

• Gauguin’s availability to Tahitians and his status as a colonial subject interacting with a colonial administration shaped his work and its reception.

• The 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris featured simulacra of native villages (Bisso and Etnographic displays) and a “History of Human Habitation,” framing Tahiti as a colonial stage set.

• The exhibit’s central display of Tahiti and other colonies was a fountain of exoticism: a colonial Disneyland that legitimated empire through staged authenticity.

• Gauguin frequented the colonial pavilion and the Café Volponi’s “Synthetist” pavilion; the framing of the primitive within imperial contexts is a critical component of Gauguin’s mythic discourse.

• The darker side of primitivism is linked to fantasies of empirical knowledge, power, and rape; Noa Noa’s margins include phrases that reveal a longing to possess and violate—an ethical and historical complication that underlines the primitivist myth.

• The population of Tahiti declined dramatically by Gauguin’s time due to disease and colonial disruption; missionaries and Western acculturation altered indigenous practices and dress; the “authentic” primitive culture Gauguin sought had already been significantly altered by colonial contact.

Teha’amana, Noa Noa, and the Textual Game of Appropriation

• Noa Noa’s textual material relies on earlier sources, including Moerenhout’s Ancien Culte mahorie (1837); Gauguin’s marginal glosses in Noa Noa conceal the extent of textual appropriation and misrepresentation.

• Teha’amana, Gauguin’s Tahitian mistress, becomes a theoretical conduit to mythoi; her function is overdetermined as a vehicle for Gauguin’s epic Edenic world, while her own knowledge of traditional religion is mediated and often misrepresented.

• The Noa Noa text’s Edenic rhetoric (streams, gold‑glowing faces, and harmonious nature) serves to normalize a sexual economy that elevated and exploited younger Tahitian partners.

• Gauguin’s letters (e.g., to Mette Gauguin) reveal explicit sexual and colonial fantasies (e.g., a 50-year-old artist with a 13-year-old mistress), which the essay treats as central to understanding Gauguinism’s erotic and exploitative underpinnings.

• Huyghe’s claim that the 13‑year‑old Tahitian girl is “equivalent to 18 or 20 years in Europe” exemplifies how mythic speech seeks to sanitize or normalize ethically troubling relations.

• The broader ethical concern is how the primitivist myth naturalizes and makes innocent the artist’s sexual relations with very young girls, revealing the problematic coexistence of artistic genius and sexual domination.

• The essay argues that the Polynesian body is not simply a picturesque subject but a field of contested power relations—racialized, gendered, and colonial—that Gauguin’s myth often erases or naturalizes.

Plagiarism, Borrowing, and the Production of Meaning

• Gauguin’s artistic practice was deeply interwoven with textual borrowings and a collage of sources: photographs, engravings, and printed matter were used directly as references for painted figures and compositions.

• Examples of borrowings include: Borobudur temple reliefs, Thebes wall paintings, Trocadéro collections, Easter Island inscriptions, Manet’s Olympia, Cranach’s Diana, and Hiroshige woodcuts for Breton seascapes.

• This collage operation was perceived by contemporaries in different ways: some celebrated it as Symbolist richness; others (e.g., Camille Pissarro) described Gauguin as simply “pilfering the savages of Oceania.”

• The central argument is that Gauguin’s feminine and primitive representations are not purely original inventions but reconfigurations of pre‑existing signs—an art-historical Borgesian labyrinth of textuality where meanings are repeatedly written and rewritten.

• Barthes’s idea that myth becomes form is invoked to explain how Gauguin’s signs persist beyond historical contingency, turning into an autonomous, self-referential system of signs.

• The critique argues that the romance of primitivism obscures the fact that Gauguin’s art also functioned within a framework of colonial and patriarchal power, and that the supposed originality often rests on a deep reservoir of borrowed images and discourses.

The Enduring Question: Myth, Modernity, and Responsibility

• The essay concludes that modern art history must continue to interrogate the mythic mode, especially when it intersects with imperialism and gender politics.

• The Gauguin myth—feminine, primitive, Breton, and Maori—appears as a set of scripts that can be activated in multiple ways, depending on the viewer’s position and the critic’s aims.

• The author points to other voices (Segalen, Mirbeau, Pissarro, Huyghe, Barthes, Clifford) to illustrate how the discourse around Gauguin and primitivism has been contested and reinterpreted, sometimes revealing a more complex, less idealized truth about the colonial encounter and artistic creation.

• The text frames a broader concern: how to reconcile admiration for artistic innovation with critical awareness of how that innovation has relied on racialized, gendered power structures that harmed real people.

Notable Quotations and Theoretical Anchors (Selected)

• "Myth, as Roland Barthes famously defined it, is nothing more or less than depoliticized speech—consistent with the classical definition of ideology (a falsification or mystification of actual social and economic relations)." (paraphrased summary)

• "Mythic speech cannot be dispelled by the facts it ignores or mystifies the truth of Brittany, the truth of Polynesia, the truth of Gauguin; rather, it must be examined in its own right."

• "No more Pegasus, no more Parthenon horses! One has to go back, far back … as far as the cada from my childhood, the good old wooden horse." (Gauguin’s avowals about atavism)

• Pissarro’s blunt judgment: "Gauguin is always poaching on someone’s land; nowadays, he’s pil­laging the savages of Oceania."

• Huyghe’s claim about the 13‑year‑old Tahitian girl’s age relative to European norms: "equivalent to 18 or 20 years in Europe."

• Segalen and cross‑cultural texts: Segalen’s view of Gauguin’s Tahiti as a stage for exotic imagination and his own later fictional reconstruction of Tahitian life (Les Immemoriaux).

Chronology and Key References (Selected Highlights)

• 1883: Gauguin makes a decisive break from his bourgeois life and patents a new artistic path.

• 1886–1889/1890: Pont‑Aven period; Gauguin and Emile Bernard develop cloisonnism and a primitivist rhetoric; Brittany is a central locus.

• 1887: Trip to Panama and Martinique; early encounters with exoticizing motifs begin to crystallize.

• 1889: Universal Exhibition (Paris) consolidates the colonial spectacle of Tahiti and the South Seas; Gauguin’s primitivist framework gains public exposure.

• 1891: Gauguin leaves Brittany for Tahiti; later moves to the Marquesas; intensifies the autobiographical and mythic dimensions of his work.

• Noa Noa: Gauguin’s key text that blends mythic Edenic longing with contested claims about Tahitian religion and culture; later shown to rely on earlier sources and to involve textual appropriation.

• Important figures cited: Roland Barthes, Victor Segalen, Camille Pissarro, Octave Mirbeau, Bengt Danielsson, Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock, Joseph Gobineau, Claude Frèches-Thory, Christopher Miller, Hélène Cixous.

Notes

• 1) Segalen’s role: a diarist and author who became a prominent writer on Gauguin; his early naval experiences and later literary work shaped the exoticist discourse around Gauguin.

• 2) The Everett/Art History citation: see p. 11 for a discussion of the sources and Judgments about Gauguin’s era(s).

• 3) Orton and Pollock (1980): Les Données Bretonnantes; foundational in rethinking Brittany as a mythic, rather than historical, field.

• 4) Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son; Gauguin’s primitivist synthesis is often criticized by contemporaries as borrowed rather than original.

• 5) Camille Pissarro: Painting, No. 60, 172; source material for the debate on Gauguin’s appropriation of motifs.

• 6) Claire Frèches-Thory; Gauguin et la Bretagne 1886–1890; Grand Palais exhibition catalog context.

• 7) Wayne Andersen: Gauguin’s Paradise Lost; a contested interpretation of Gauguin’s thematic unity around women’s life cycles.

• 8) Holistic view: eclectic borrowings (Borobudur reliefs, Thebes, Easter Island inscriptions, Olympia, Diana) illustrate Gauguin’s Symbolist collage.

• 9) Henri Dorra; The First Eves in Gauguin’s Eden; critical in discussing Edenic female imagery.

• 10) Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski; Gauguin’s Self-Portraits and the Oviri; gender and the artist’s image.

• 11) Noa Noa’s textual origins: material drawn from Ancien Culte mahorie and Moerenhout’s Voyages; issues of appropriation and misrepresentation.

• 12) The role of Teha’amana: intermediary figure whose function in Noa Noa embodies the broader myth of Tahiti as Edenic and primal.

• 13) The colonial gaze and its complicity: the Expo, villages, and “History of Writing” as a lexicon of exoticism.

• 14) The Maori and the gendered, androgynous perceptions: the Maori male often depicted with feminine traits; the Tahitian “vahine” as emblem of tropical femininity.

• 15) The critique of “bretonism” and colonial romance: the idea that the supposed primitive cultures were often modern adaptations or modern economies in disguise.

• 16) The broader philosophical point: primitivism is a historically contingent discourse shaped by colonial power and patriarchal norms, not an abstract universal truth about art.

The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (Contextual Headline)

• The closing section signals a broader movement: Feminism and Art History as a field, foregrounding the need to examine gender, power, and representation in art history, particularly in the study of primitivist modernism.

// This set of notes synthesizes the two interwoven strands of the source: the critical analysis of Gauguin’s primitivism as myth and discourse, and the historical context of colonialism, gender, and representation that shaped its reception and legacy.