Paul Gauguin and the Erotics of the Exotic: Primitivism, Brown Skin, and the Colonial Gaze

I can’t think of an artist who evokes as much discomfort and fascination as much as Paul Gauguin does and this is mainly because of his paintings in which he shows an eroticised portrayals of young, brown-skinned Tahitian girls. Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist artist who turned his back on the ‘sterile’ and industrialised European society in order to find purity and truth in the so-called primitive world. Gauguin’s oeuvre is soaked in sensuality, mysticism and deep colonial ambivalence. A typical Gauguin’s painting includes a bare-breasted adolescent girl reclining in a dreamlike island paradise landscape and this vision of both the Tahitian girls and their culture is as aesthetically pleasing as it is troubling and thus rightly criticised for its objectification and exploitation.

Fig.1  O Taiti (Nevermore), 1897

Fig.2  Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892

Flight from Civilization, Search for Eden

Disillusioned by what he perceived as the emptiness of Western civilization, Gauguin left France in 1891 and sailed to Tahiti which was, at that time, a French colony in Polynesia. In that untouched tropical paradise he sought a sensation he described as authenticity; a return to nature, to innocence, to primal instinct. But this was not an anthropological quest. Nor a spiritual quest. It was an erotic quest and one quite successful artistically.

Gauguin imagined Tahiti as a prelapsarian Eden, a place untouched by European corruption. But when he arrived he found not a paradise but an island already colonised and half-transformed by Catholic missionaries and French administration. This is beautifully described in Mario Vargas Llosa’ novel ‘The Way to Paradise’. But instead of documenting this disillusionment and the reality of the island, Gauguin invented his own mythology and he did it so beautifully and so convincingly that even today it is hard to imagine it wasn’t reality. Gauguin invented his own tropical fantasy in groovy colours, populated by sensual brown-skinned girls, palm trees, ripe fruit and enigmatic deities.

Fig.3  Aha Oe Feii or Are You Jealous,? 1892

Fig.4  Parau na te Varua ino (Words of the Devil), 1892

Fig.4a

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