Thursday, March 17th
11am–11:10am
Introduction
ADRIANO PEDROSA, Artistic Director, MASP


11:10am–1pm
LINDA GODDARD
Before and After: The Fragmentation of the Self in Gauguin’s Avant et après
Written in the final year of his life, Gauguin’s unconventional memoir Avant et après (Before and After, 1903) is often seen as a confessional text, whose seemingly unpolished style has been understood as a marker of his amateur status as a writer. Conversely, this talk presents its episodic, fragmentary structure as consciously crafted, motivated on the one hand by Gauguin’s primitivist self-fashioning, and on the other by his engagement with the European literary fascination with fragmentary modes of composition. Goddard connects Avant et après to contemporaneous literary projects by Gauguin, notably his satirical newspaper Le Sourire [The Smile], which shares with his memoir an interest in invented identities (pseudonyms and alter egos) and experimental crossovers between art and writing. Gauguin’s shifting authorial personae, the author argues, and his unstable identity as both “artist” and “writer,” dramatize his efforts to negotiate a position on the borders between the French colonial and Indigenous communities in Polynesia.

IRINA STOTLAND
The Holy Heads of Paul Gauguin. The Iconography of Gender, Race, and Spirit of His Self-portraits
An inquiry into Paul Gauguin’s iconography inevitably leads to self-portraiture, his chosen arena for developing a personal visual vocabulary. The focus is a group of five self-portraits and the evolution of their disembodied-head iconography. Gauguin progresses from probing the binary of matter vs. spirit to challenging the binaries of either race or gender and concludes with a destabilization of all three. Stotland suggests that Gauguin draws on the tradition of the Holy Face of Jesus images. The accounts of a miraculously-imprinted visage of Christ originally strengthened the iconophile argument by linking icons to the Incarnation’s circumscription of divinity. Gauguin exploits the still popular format’s connotations of transcendence to image a self that exceeds matter. His iconography expands over time to include gender (Self-portrait with Halo and Snake and Still-life, of 1889) and both gender and race (Black Venus and Jug in the Form of a Head, 1889, and Self-Portrait, Oviri, 1894–5).

FERNANDO OLIVA
Self-portrait (Near Golgotha): representing oneself and the other, in Brazil
A self-portrait that does not refer only to the artist who created it but also to the other—be it the spectator, towards whom he directs his gaze and seems to be complicit, or the entire audience and the art system, summoned to witness the suffering of that same artist, who one more time puts himself in the role of Christ. Golgotha, from Hebrew, means “Calvary,” the place where Jesus Christ would have been crucified. In Gauguin’s oeuvre, the relation with the Passion is not a fortuitous one, especially in the final period of his life, when the artist was depressed and sick and went through trials and tribulations of all kinds, not only emotional but also material and financial. In Self-portrait (Near Golgotha) (1896), which belongs to the MASP collection, he resumes one of his favorite roles, that of the artist-martyr. This presentation will focus on this unique work in Gauguin’s path, the only self-portrait that the artist kept with himself from its painting in 1896, until his death, at his home in Tahiti in 1903. The arrival and reception of the canvas in Brazil, in 1952, reinforced the primitivist myths which Gauguin cultivated so much throughout his life. Before being brought to MASP, the painting was exhibited to the public in Rio de Janeiro, in a house of the Brazilian elite. In the building of the ambiance that surrounded it, the symbolic and strategic presence of a background of exuberant foliage draws attention. One of the press reports at the time had a sensationalist headline, “In the tropical jungle,” highlighting how the garden with mango trees and jackfruit trees created the ideal setting for the narrative of exotic lands that followed the painting.

Mediation: Laura Cosendey, assistant curator, MASP


3pm–4:30pm
STEPHEN EISENMAN
Gauguin’s Skirt: 25 Years Later
A generation ago, questions concerning Gauguin’s gender, racial and national identities were rarely broached. They were however central to Eisenman’s book Gauguin’s Skirt (1997) and a few of his subsequent publications about the artist. Today, these issues are nearly always addressed in considerations of Gauguin and his work, but mostly remain in the background, as if they were unpleasant distractions from more central issues of biography and style. Eisenman’s MASP seminar presentation will review the arguments of his book in their original historical and scholarly context and consider them in light of recent developments. Among the question addressed will be how the category “third sex” (and the Maohi correlate “mahu”) stand up in the context of recent considerations of entangled and contingent gender identities; and how his characterization of Gauguin’s Tahitian and Marquesan artworks as anti-colonial fits within the broader field of 20th- and 21st-century post-colonial studies.

NORMA BROUDE
Paul Gauguin and His Art in the Era of Cancel Culture: Reception and Reassessments
Half a century ago, postmodern critiques began to present the art world with a demythologized Paul Gauguin, a much-diminished image of the artist/hero once universally admired as “the father of modernist primitivism.” Augmented more recently by an internet echo chamber that traffics in blanket labels, a largely unnuanced image of Gauguin—as predatory womanizer, agent of colonialism, and even sexual offender whose art should be “canceled,”—has become entrenched in the popular literature, despite scholarly efforts to contextualize that image and to challenge its alignment of Gauguin with patriarchal values that, in fact, he openly denounced. After examining the relationship of Gauguin’s thinking to that of his grandmother, the utopian socialist and feminist activist, Flora Tristan, whose radical ideas inflected both his writings and his art, Broude will ask: why Gauguin’s progressive and feminist cultural positions were so long forgotten and ignored in the art historical literature? And why do they continue to be ignored by his critics today?

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU
50 Shades of Brown: Skin Color in the French Colonial Imaginaire or the Eroticism of the Vahiné
One of the peculiarities of colonial racial ideologies in French nineteenth-century culture was its dermatological color spectrum, part of a broader typology including physiognomy, hair, body type, cranial measurement, and other pseudo-scientific attributes. In its crudest formulations, the “blacker” the skin, the less human the subject, and while no human skin is chromatically black, all skin colors range from the unpigmented albino (found in many countries) to the darkest shades of purple-brown. Yet, in European and American colonialist discourse, including its diverse fetishistic components, there exists a complex and often contradictory relation of eroticism to skin color whose contradictions are vividly illustrated in the iconic figure of the Polynesian Vahiné. While Paul Gauguin may be seen as exemplary of this type of racialist fantasy, he was in no way its inventor, only its inheritor. But by examining closely the aesthetic and racialist discourses around the figure of the Vahiné, we may better understand the entwined relations between fetishism, racism, and colonial desire in the erotic Imaginaire of French colonialism.

Mediation: Isabella Rjeille, curator, MASP


4pm–6pm
HEATHER WALDROUP
Re-Possessing Gauguin: Material Histories and the Contemporary Pacific
In an article published in 2018, drawing on Greg Dening’s historical studies of the Pacific, Waldroup suggested that we think about Gauguin as yet another form of European cargo, washed up on a Pacific beach: strange and not necessarily wanted, in the past or the present. The author’s considerations of “Gauguin as cargo” draw on material culture studies, which ask us to consider the physical properties of an object as well as the power of objects to serve as archival records of past encounters. This presentation will continue the conversation on Gauguin in the Pacific as both historical and contemporary figure, as well as responses to the colonial gaze by contemporary artists within and outside the Pacific. By examining further the relationships between the images created by Gauguin, the enduring legacies of colonialism, and the responses to these histories by contemporary Pacific artists, Waldroup moves the conversation on Gauguin towards the present and particular, to think of Gauguin’s works as artifacts (however unreliable) of European and Indigenous encounters.

CAROLINE VERCOE
“I Am My Other: I Am Myself”: Encounters with Gauguin in Polynesia
This presentation explores the ways that Pacific contemporary artists have responded to Gauguin’s art, life, and legacy. He emerges not only as a prominent figure in Modern art but also in the colonial history of the Pacific. Alongside icons like James Cook and Robert Louis Stevenson, who also died and were buried in Polynesia, Gauguin has inspired both literary and cinematic representations. Just as he has come to symbolize particular tropes for feminist and cultural theorists, so too have Pacific artists developed concerns relating to gender and identity politics, colonialism and postcolonial critique, coalescing around the figure of Gauguin. His interrogation of the binary states of innocence and experience, and self and other, along with an engagement with colonial stereotypes of the noble savage and dusky maiden, the primitive and civilized have provided rich points of departure for artists in the Pacific.

TAMAR GARB
Exoticism, Eroticism, Extractivism: Gauguin’s “I” as Image and Origin
By focusing on Gauguin’s Self Portrait with Manau Tu Papau (1892–3), amongst other works, Garb will think about self-construction and self-delusion in his pictorial adumbration of the tropics. The critical reading of Gauguin’s relationship to Tahiti has shifted, from suspicion to reverence, canonization to contempt. An acknowledged Modernist master, whose self-mythologizing led to the invention of a new mode of picturing, he has also become the poster boy of exoticist exploitation and extractivism. Now he is perceived alternately as primitivist paedophile, a Me Too monster avant la lettre, and a revered European supplicant to the promise and potential of a tropical Paradise. Most interestingly, his experimental paintings and self-construction have become a resource for contemporary artists from Kehinde Wiley to Guy Tillim, Peter Doig, and Michael Armitage. Is this a male thing? Can Gauguin be remade for the contemporary global art world? Does his eye/I originate a mode of looking that is still productive? If so, at what cost and for whom?

Mediation: Fernando Oliva, curator, MASP

ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU
Abigail Solomon-Godeau is Professor Emerita, Department of Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara, and lives and works in Paris. She is the author of Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic Histories, Institutions and Practices (1992); Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (1997); Chair à Canons: Photographie, discours, féminisme (2015); Photography After Photography: Gender, Genre and History (2017); monographs on the Australian artist Rosemary Laing (2011) and the Austrian artist Birgit Jurgenssen (co-authored with Gabriele Schor, 2013). Her essays on photography, 18th and 19th century visual art, feminism, and contemporary art have been widely anthologized and translated.

CAROLINE VERCOE
Dr. Caroline Vercoe is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the first Pacific woman to graduate with a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Auckland. She specializes in contemporary Pacific art and performance art, with a particular interest in issues of race, gender, and representation, and has been teaching, curating, and researching in these areas for over twenty years. She has published in academic journals as well as in many publications, including In Pursuit of Venus, Gauguin in Polynesia, Pacific Art Niu Sila, Oxford Bibliographies, and One Day Sculpture.

IRINA STOTLAND
Irina Stotland received her doctorate in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA. A specialist in nineteenth-century French art, her research interests include Post-Impressionism and self-portraiture. Her research on Paul Gauguin’s self-portraits appears in Gauguin’s Challenge. New Perspectives After Postmodernism (ed. Norma Broude, 2018). She is currently teaching at Montgomery College LLI, Rockville, Maryland, USA, and lecturing at various museums and educational organizations.

FERNANDO OLIVA
Fernando Oliva is a curator at MASP, where he took part in the exhibitions and editing of catalogs such as Degas: dança, política e sociedade [Degas: Dance, Politics, and Society]; Tarsila Popular [Tarsila do Amaral: Cannibalizing Modernism]; Rubem Valentim: construções afro-atlânticas [Rubem Valentim: Afro-Atlantic Constructions]; Maria Auxiliadora: vida cotidiana, pintura e resistência [Maria Auxiliadora: everyday life, painting, and Resistance] and Histórias da infância [Stories of Childhood], among other projects.

HEATHER WALDROUP
Heather Waldroup is Associate Director of the Honors College and Professor of Art History at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, USA. Her research on Gauguin has been published in Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, The International Journal of Heritage Studies, and Gauguin's Challenge: New Perspectives after Postmodernism. She worked as a cultural lecturer, with a focus on Gauguin, on the Aranui III cruise ship, and served as an early consultant for the exhibition that became Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise. Her research on photography has been published in Photographies, Journal of Pacific History, Modernism/Modernity, History of Photography, Photography and Culture, Shifting Focus: Colonial Australian Photography 1850–1920, and elsewhere. She has also curated exhibitions of photography and Pacific art.

LINDA GODDARD
Linda Goddard is Professor of Art History at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of two books: Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926 (Peter Lang, 2012) and Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin (Yale University Press, 2019), as well as numerous essays on the relations between art and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France. She edited a special issue of the journal Word & Image on Artists’ Writings, 1850–present (2012) and her essays on Gauguin have appeared in the catalogs of exhibitions, including Gauguin: Maker of Myth (2010) and Gauguin: Portraits (2019).

NORMA BROUDE
Norma Broude is Professor Emerita of Art History at American University in Washington, DC. A pioneering feminist scholar and specialist in nineteenth-century French and Italian painting, Broude is known for her critical reassessments of Impressionism and the work of Degas, Caillebotte, Cassatt, Seurat, and the Italian Macchiaioli. Her paradigm-shifting books include World Impressionism: The International Movement 1860–1920 (Harry N. Abrams, 1990) and, most recently, Gauguin’s Challenge: New Perspectives after Post Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2018).

STEPHEN EISENMAN
Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA, and the author of Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames and Hudson, 1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion, 2007), The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (Reaktion, 2015), William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (Princeton, 2017), and other books. He is also co-founder of the environmental justice non-profit organization, Anthropocene Alliance. He and the artist Sue Coe are now preparing for the publication of part two of their series, American Fascism Now, for Rotland Press.

TAMAR GARB
Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London. Her research interests have focused on questions of gender and sexuality in European art as well as on contemporary art, and the history of lens-based practices in Southern Africa. Key publications include Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic practices in Late Nineteenth Century Paris (1992), Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin de Siecle France (1996), and The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914 (2007). In 2011 she co-curated Gauguin, Maker of Myth (with Belinda Tompson) at Tate Modern, London. Recent curatorial projects include: Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (V&A, 2011); Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive (Walther Collection, 2015) and William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: A Conversation in Letters and Lines (Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2016).