Tag Archives: Primitivism

Gauguin’s Romantic Notion of the Noble Savage

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“Out there at least, with winerless skies overhead and wonderfully fertile ground underfoot, Tahaitains have only to lift their arms to gather their food; therefore, they never work.Whereas in Europe men and women satisfy their needs only after ceaseless toil…” -Gauguin, Letter to Williamson, late 1890

Where did Gauguin’s idealization of the savage come from? He believed that life was better or more moral during the early stages of mankind or among primitive peoples, like the Tahitians. This Romantic conception opposed Hobbes’s famous statement the life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” insisting instead that civilization ruined everything.

Romantic Notions: the Nobel Savage

The phrase ‘nobel savage,’ expressing the concept of natural man unencumbered by civilization and divine revelation, has often been ascribed erroneously to Rousseau (Jean-Jaques, not Henri). In English, ‘noble savage’ first appeared in John Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada in 1672:

I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

More than a few people found this idea ridiculous; Dickens, for example, put the term nobel savage to sarcastic effect in 1851, when he used it as a title for a satirical essay. Dickens states his position quite clearly:

“To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance and an enormous superstition. … I don’t care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth.”

Dickens was strongly disassociating himself from 19th century Romantic Primitivism, long before it influenced Gauguin’s thinking or developed into a branch of Modern Art.

“Having lost all their savagery, having run out of instinct and, you might say, imagination, artists have wandered down all sorts of paths, looking for the productive elements that they themselves do not have the strength to create…” Gauguin, Racontars de Rapin, April 1903

Gauguin
Gauguin in Tahiti arrived in 1901 with delightful notions of what savages were–he hoped himself to develop that part of himself. His Utopian views of unspoiled paradises are apparent from his earliest travels; sic:

“For the time being we are living in a Negro shack, and it is paradise compared to the ithmus [of Panama]. Below us, the sea, fringed with coconut palms; above, fruit trees of every variety, and all 25 minutes from town. Negro men and women mill about all day long with their Creole songs and ceaseless chatter. … Nature is at its lushest, a warm climate but with cool spells.” -Letter to his wife Mette June 20 1887

In addition, he admired savages who were untouched by the false morality and the paralyzing effects of civilization. Did Tahiti live up to his expectations of unspoiled paradise?

Yes and no. Upon arriving in June 1891, he found Tahiti more civilized that he would have liked, with Christian churches and colonial offices. He moved to a more remote province and began good work, only to find himself penniless and begging to repatriated (granted in June 1893).

Back in Paris, Gauguin was as eager to explain the nuances of Tahiti as a zealot, despite the fact he had never managed to learn the language and his knowledge of their religion came from a French travelogue. He turned his studio into a wild, Polynesian style bordello and took up a biracial mistress with a monkey. This, combined with an unusual costume, made quite a stir in Paris. He wanted to return as soon as possible, explaining in an interview with L’Echo de Paris in March 1895:

“I had once been fascinated by this idyllic island and its primitive and simple people. That is why I returned and why I am going back there again. In order to achieve something new, you have to go back to the sources, to childhood. My Eve is almost an animal. That is why she is chaste for all her nakedness. But all the Venuses in the Salon are indecent and disgracefully lewd.”

Unfortunately, this last passage can’t help but bring to mind the string of Tahitian wives, all around the age of puberty, that Gauguin took. While his statements about paradise and savages signify more than a desire for young island girls, certainly knowledge of the artist’s life influences how one understands his Romantic notions of Primitivism.

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Paul Gauguin: Martinique Travels and Savage Ideals

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Picking Mangos in Martinique

Learning about Caribbean art, I’ve mentioned a few times how some artists espoused European Primitivism in order to better express their own cultural background. Yes, the irony abounds. Paul Gauguin, who paved the way for the later Primitivism of Picasso and co., is better known for paintings of Tahitian women than of Caribbean subjects, yet the artist had ties to the Caribbean and South America that fostered his later desire to escape to a savage land.

Martinique


Tropical Vegetation

This painting earned Gauguin the beginnings of critical interest and accolades when he exhibited it in Paris in 1888. He had just returned from a trip to Panama and Martinique. The circumstances around its creation were haphazard. Although born in Paris, Gauguin was in many ways impressed by his Peruvian ancestry and childhood memories of Lima. He became dissatisfied with his small start painting in Breton, and wrote to his wife in 1887, “I am off to Panama to live like a savage.” Unfortunately Panama for Gauguin turned into forced labor on the Panama canal rather than a cushy paradise with help from relatives. Gauguin eventually made his way to a “native hut” on Martinique and was ready to begin painting. It was here he produced his first exotic landscapes and here he began to break away from the Impressionism of his mentor Pisarro. Unfortunately, he grew ill and had to be repatriated.


Savage Tendencies

Self-Portrait

Back in Paris, Gauguin sold some paintings, including Picking Mangos to Theo VanGogh. This provided him with enough money to began painting in Brittany, a place that represented to Gauguin something inherently pre-academic. He took on the Breton’s traditional dress down to wooden clogs. His works became freer, bolder in color and more imaginative. In the self portrait above, he positions himself between two recent pieces, his painting The Yellow Christ and a ceramic mug. Over the next three years, his critical reputation grew, at least among the avant garde, but he become obsessed with traveling somewhere wilder and more primitive. As he wrote to his friend Emile Bernard, “Terrible itching for the unknown makes me do things I shouldn’t.”

Gauguin was intent on leaving behind a land made ‘rotten’ by civilization. In a letter to Bernard in 1890, he describes how “I feel I can revitalize myself out there. The West is effete at present, and even a man with the strength of Hercules can, like Anteaus, gain new vigour jst by touching the ground of the Orient. A year or two later you come back robust.” But Gaugiun was now planning to stay much longer than that. He wrote to Odilon Redon in September 1890,

“I will got to Tahiti and I hope to finish out my life there. I believe that my art, which you love, is but a seed, and in Tahiti I hope to cultivate it for myself in its primitive and savage state.”

The Spirit of the Dead