Primitivism and the Construction of the "Other"

Painter Paul Gauguin sought to escape European civilization and technology when he took up residence in the French colony of Tahiti and adopted a simple lifestyle which he felt to be more natural than the one he had left behind. Feminist postmodern, postcolonial critics point out that in his paintings The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch, Parau na te Varua ino, Anna the Javanerin, Te Tamari No Atua , and Cruel Tales , among others, Gauguin depicted passive and sexually exposed Tahitian female bodies.

It may be argued, however, that Gauguin's view of Tahiti as an earthly Arcadia of free love, gentle climate, and naked nymphs is quite similar, if not identical, to that of the classical pastoral of academic art, which has shaped Western perceptions of rural life for millennia. Gauguin’s search for the primitive was manifestly a desire for more sexual freedom than was available in nineteenth-century Europe, and this is reflected in his art. In addition, however, he undoubtedly was sending a double-edged message to the Beaux Arts schools that the pastoral tradition of academic painting ought to be more inclusive, and not based solely on idealized figures from copied from Ancient Greek classical models.

Gauguin also believed he was celebrating Tahitian society and defending the Tahitians against European colonialism. Feminist postcolonial critics, however, decry the fact that Gauguin took adolescent mistresses, one of them as young as thirteen. They remind us than like many men of his time and later, Gauguin saw freedom, especially sexual freedom, strictly from the male point of view. Using Gauguin as an example of what is "wrong" with primitivism, these critics conclude that, in their view, elements of primitivism include the “dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power both colonial and patriarchal”.

To these critics, primitivism such as Gauguin's demonstrates fantasies about racial and sexual difference in "an effort to essentialize notions of primitiveness” with “Otherness”. Thus, they contend, primitivism becomes a process analogous to Exoticism and Orientalism, as conceived by Edward Said, in which European imperialism and monolithic and degrading views of the "East" by the "West" defined colonized peoples and their cultures. In other words, although Gauguin believed he was celebrating and defending the Tahitians, to the extent that he allegedly saw them as "other", he participated in the outlook of his time and nationality to a greater extent than he realized and in the guise of celebrating them victimized the Tahitians all over again.

Although some of the insights of these postcolonial critics are valuable, their critiques embody the fallacy of Presentism (a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past), amplified by a lack of knowledge of historical and intellectual context.