An Imperial Story

This article examines the relationship between the French fin-de-siècle painter Paul Gauguin’s (1848-1903) anti-modernism and the ideology behind the colonial project. Setting out to refute the Western materialistic ‘civilisation’, Gauguin embraced the supposed savage, primitive, and pure ‘Other’. In paintings such as ‘Breton Calvary’ (1889) and ‘The Specter Watches Her’ (1892), Gauguin uses Breton farmers and Tahitian women as formal embodiments of his imagined ‘earthly paradise’ and the primordial ‘savage’ character. However, as the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) argues, there is always a relationship of power within a discourse. Through defining what is ‘primitive’ and what is ‘civilised’ from within a Western paradigm, Gauguin is testifying to a Western hegemony. Though Gauguin’s idealisation of the ‘primitive’ essentially sought to criticise the Western colonial discourse, it essentially reinforces its main ideological justification: the hierarchical dichotomy between the ‘primitive’ and the ‘civilised’.