What are you lookin at?
  • By Paul Gauguin/Courtesy the National Gallery of Scotland
  • What are you lookin’ at?

This morning, Seattle Art Museum is hosting the press preview for Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise. The exhibition opens Thursday. There are virtually no works of art in the Pacific Northwest by the Peruvian-descended French artist Paul Gauguin, according to an essay in the big, fat, hardcover catalog by former SAM director Derrick Cartwright.

This is the first time the museum has ever held a significant display of his works—driven in part by the fact that SAM’s Polynesian holdings eclipse its Gauguin non-holdings.

And this show is meant to be different from the rest of the Gauguin shows, which over the years have tended to exacerbate the awfulness of Gauguin’s racist, sexist adventures on the “primitive” islands of French Polynesia at the dawn of the 20th century.

“This time,” organizers of the show write, “the artworks of Polynesia do not merely serve as a visual background.”

How do you solve a problem like Gauguin? We are about to see.

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

13 replies on “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Gauguin?”

  5. Gauguin drives me up the wall. The racism, the misogyny, the pedophilia… ugh. And the enduring popularity he receives despite it all. He irks me like no other Primitivist of the late 19th or early 20th centuries.

  6. If you find his work emotionally and aesthetically pleasing to you, what the hell else do you need? He was a painter, not a philosopher or a politician.

  8. Oh Christ, don’t we have anything better to get our undies in a twist about than Gaugin? You find me some 19th century male painters who were not racist and sexist by 21st century definitions. I’ll bet that will be a long list.

    And he is way more interesting than many of his contemporaries, that ‘green grocer’ Cezanne for instance (which is what Breton called him). A jerk, sure, but an an interesting nutcase simultaneously.

  9. Seriously, sometimes you Seattleites (sp?) surprise we with your willingness to go down any black hole intellectualism throws in front of you. It’s something completely distinct from what passes for pretentious bullshit in San Francisco (and the Bay Area is where the publish Bitch!, so we know a thing or two about pretentious, lazy feminist criticism).

    How do you solve a problem like Gauguin? You admit that racism in art happened. You place it in its historical context. You appreciate how Gauguin fits into the development of modern painting. You think through it like a fucking person, just like the constitution, the bill or rights, our slave raping founding-fathers, and the rest of fucking history!

    That’s what studying history involves! Try it.

  10. IOW:

    I would like all my art to conform perfectly to my world view. Including art created before the easy popularity of my modern worldview was formed. I will attempt to create outrage whenever an artist contradicts, even posthumously, my worldview. Because being insecure and inconsistent about my principles drives me to subconsciously feel my worldview is tenuous and weak and therefor requires constant swarm validation and generating outrage makes me feel righteous without having to actually make any real changes myself.

  11. @9 and @10 – Said better than how I was going to say it.

    Can someone post a Gauguin painting that they consider racist and explain why it’s racist? I’ve never gotten that from his paintings, so I’d like to understand what I’m missing. (Is painting half-naked brown people intrinsically racist?)

  12. No Gauguin WAS an awful racist by todays standards. Like about 99% of his white European contemporaries. But unlike him they never set about documenting fucking their way across the French colonies. So we tend to remember him for it. He was merely a product of his time and place.

    But it’s largely irrelevant as to why one should or should not appreciate his art. His art is sublime.

    It’s certainly worth it to know about the cultural and historical circumstances informing a particular artists work. But self righteous hindsight and moral judgement is rarely going to help with any serious evaluation of his or anyone else’s art.

    This kind of moral outrage shit would make it nearly impossible to fairly appreciate any historical personage or art. Even the sacred cows of THIS generations hipster artists. William S. Burroughs? Child rapist and Wife Murderer. Gandhi? Horrific sexist who let his wife die. You could go on and on.

Comments are closed.