Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Savage Sensuality: Gauguin Reaches Mythic Proportions

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Paul Gauguin famously said, “I am a savage.” A Parisian fascinated by barbarian lands, he created works that mingle fantasy, delusion and savagery. Featured in the exquisite exhibit “Gauguin: Maker of Myth” at the National Gallery, and known as the leading artist of the Primitivist movement, he looked to the so-called “savage races” for insight into primal human nature. Gauguin wanted an unstifled, unashamed and uninhibited Rousseauist return to nature, to tear down the towers of a rotting civilization and reclaim real human nature.

His works, accordingly, focus on Tahitian culture, with strange barbaric iconography, half of it invented by Gauguin himself. The problem, of course, is that they represent some form of what we would now call exoticism, or worse, ethnic fetishization, in presenting the lure of the so-called barbarian races as symbols of liberty. He was more interested in the idea of Tahiti than the reality. He brought his invented tribal gods to Paris to shock civilized Europeans.

However offensive to modern tastes, his works are all the more gorgeous for their mixing of fantasy and reality. They have a dreamlike quality. The women in his paintings are languid, sensual and dark, exuding a cool sexual freedom that shows in their bare breasts, pink cheeks and direct looks. The scenes are dotted with flowers and fruit, evocative of a Garden of Eden before the fall, with dark Eves resting in the shade.

His paintings are rife with images of idolatry, from his wooden, neo-primitive carvings of imagined Tahitian gods to his yellow Christ, wax-like and medieval among the pink women of Brittany. The fierce, skewed colors — the colors of dreams — and the rawness and wildness of his paintings, their sexuality and their savagery, are wonderfully foreign in the cool, white vault of sophistication that is the National Gallery. As always with rebels who are canonized, from Gauguin to the Sex Pistols, there is something odd about seeing these paintings in a temple of civilized culture like the Gallery. But they stand out all the more for their strangeness, their fetishist qualities and their wildness.

The highlight of the exhibit is probably the famous “Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch,” which shows a young nude woman, terror in her eyes, in a purple night scene with bright fireflies and the hooded figure of Death in the corner. If you look closely, her brown skin, gorgeous and vital, is layered with yellows, purples, blues and greens.

Gauguin was the prophet of savagery, messiah of primitivism, and “Maker of Myth,” as the title of the exhibit suggests. Wild, dark, sensual, his paintings are all the more lovely for being inventive. “Gauguin: Maker of Myth” is an exercise in beautiful delusion.

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