Paul Gauguin and the complexity of the primitivist gaze

Abstract

The article describes the complexity of Paul Gauguin’s primitivism in a philosophical, more precisely, phenomenological way. It focuses on the phenomenological gaze that, in all its complexity, is active in Gauguin. In his ‘Tahitian’ paintings, we encounter a double gaze: the individual gaze, as painted by Gauguin, makes the spectator aware of the distance between Western and Polynesian cultures. Firstly, colonialism is a gaze that reduces the other to a primitive state in order to esteem this state as more pure and authentic. Secondly, it is precisely the other that resists representation and, as such, gazes back. Gauguin’s anti-conquest, therefore, is not a mere personal, political or cultural revolt, but something that is phenomenological, hidden within the power of his art. Instead, it is the spectator who becomes the intruder, the voyeur, caught red-handed in his own primitivist gaze.

Keywords

• Paul Gauguin
• the gaze
• phenomenology
• colonialism