Blessing, Blasphemy, or Both?

I went into the Paul Gauguin's portraits display thinking about blasphemy. I've recently read My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winning Turkish novelist, a novel that intertwines meditations on art, Islam, and murder. Different artists argue about the purpose of art, some embracing Western portraiture, others rejecting it as elevating man over God. Through his portraiture, Paul Gauguin seems to also interrogate this question: do he and his subjects usurp the place of God or does Gauguin see his subjects as God does, bearing His image. 

Gauguin often explicitly links himself with Christ and Christ’s suffering. Self portrait with Yellow Christ, centers on Gauguin. He stares out from the painting from deep shadows. Behind his hooked nose, his eyes look haggard and drooping from consuming insomnia. Behind him are the Yellow Christ and another of Gauguin's work, Anthropomorphic pot, an angel and a devil on each shoulder. Christ is executed as almost a sketch, a flash of color in an otherwise muted scene. Christ's crucified body leans over one of Gauguin’s shoulders as if to embrace him. The anthropomorphic pot is Gauguin's own visage melting in fire and frozen in anguish. Over his other shoulder, this demon seems to whisper that he will never be neither understood not appreciated. This painting seems to ask the question of My Name is Red. Is Christ embracing Gauguin, or bowing to the artist? Do the Christ and the pot show the torn nature of the painter or do they equate Gauguin’s interiority with God? Is he selflessly exposing himself so we see and appreciate the depth and value of his humanity, or is he selfishly exalting himself above all else? Is it blessing, blasphemy, or both?

In viewing the portraits, especially the self portraits, I could not help but think the answer lay closer to blasphemy. Typically, I completely support most uses of Jesus and Christian symbolism in art. I was very excited when Netflix’s Daredevil reenacted Pieta by Michelangelo in season three. I could (and have) look at altarpieces all day. Even Piss Christ (A crucifix submerged in urine), is fundamentally about Christ and his role in the world. Gauguin seems to use Christ and Christian symbolism only as a means to talk about himself. The crucifixion is a prop to emphasize his own perceived suffering, not to show himself humbled at the foot of the cross. The symbols and images are not about Christ. They are neither reverent nor irreverent. They are merely tools the artist uses to inflate his own tortured soul.

However, Gauguin’s perspective seems to shift later in his life. This sense of selfishness may be inflated by the concentration of self-portraits at the beginning of the exhibit. Later in his life and toward the end of the exhibit, Gauguin retreated from France to the Pacific Isles where he portrayed their inhabitants and recast Christian art with those he encountered. The exhibit discussed the privilege that Gauguin brought to the Pacific, and despite his desire to be seen as an outsider, he inevitably brought that privilege and perspective to his portraits. Just as a reading based on his use of Christ in self portraits is limited, I found this reading centered around the privilege of Gauguin compared to the islanders to be a limited reading of the artwork, and one that seems to not fully appreciate Gauguin or the Polynesians. 

It is clear from the portraits that Gauguin is not able to escape, as he desires, the influences of Europe. The color and style are clearly similar to contemporaries such as Van Goth and Cezanne. However, attributing this failure to privilege misses why Gauguin stayed in Tahiti. Discussions of privilege frame the world in the context of wealth, prestige, and power, implicitly elevating wealth and power as the highest values that can be achieved. Emphasizing Gauguin’s privilege seems to come at the expense of the people he lived among, as if he assumes the trappings of the indigenous people only as a means to separate himself from his European contemporaries, not for the value he sees in Polynesia. The framing of privilege can only see the relationship between Gauguin and the Pacific Islanders as exploitative, taking and monetizing their lives because Gauguin has the power to do so.  To the contrary, Gauguin states that he sees in the Polynesians a good that he can neither describe nor capture. Despite his own power and relative wealth, he sees something in the people around him that has far more value than his previous life in France. His failure is not in his inability to shed his European influences, but his inability to truly capture the wonder, value, and majesty of the people he encountered in the Pacific Isles.

Power and wealth are valuable things to hold, but they are hollow ends in and of themselves. The goal of more equitable distributions of power and wealth are not power and wealth, but justice, peace, and human flourishing. Wealth and health are measurable and actionable, but goodness cannot be quantified. Viewing the world as a struggle for power, elevates power as the goal of existence, leading to endless cycles of exploitation and oppression. In this framework, power and wealth become the measure of all things, and thus we cling to them, for relinquishing them will necessarily denigrate one's self. If the most valuable thing we can have is power, then no one will give it up. If wealth is the most valuable thing, everyone will get rich if given the chance. With everyone seeking money and power, people will inevitably have and have not. Gauguin does not see the world as a struggle for money and power. Gauguin is able to see that for all his advantages, he lacks what the people whom he calls "savages" and "barbarians" have. He sees in them something more valuable than wealth or power, and forsakes his life in Europe in an attempt to truly paint the beauty he sees. Gauguin sees their humanity and a value in the hearts of all of us, value that runs too deep for words, and exhausted all his skills and creativity trying to express it. 

Gauguin described the Buddha as "a simple mortal who neither conceived nor apprehended God, but who conceived and comprehended fully the intelligence of the human heart." This represents all the best and worst of Gauguin. At once he is dismissive of the insights of the Buddha and self aggrandizing, implying that his own grasp and apprehension of God far exceeds the Buddha's. While it seems that Gauguin remained decidedly self-centered in his many self portraits, he also seemed to conceive and appreciate the intelligence of the human heart. In himself and the Polynesians, the outcasts and the disadvantaged, he sees a shared humanity, more powerful and enticing than the wealth and prestige of France. Over a century later, these works still convey a sense, even if seen dimly, of the immense value and dignity Gauguin saw clearly.