Gauguin & Van Gogh: Inscription of the Other
As painters in reaction against the bourgeois and fascinated by the exotic and colorful, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) repeatedly centered their art on the representation of the other. Their interest was in foregrounding what had been deemed unimportant or catapulted into the background by earlier artists. Whether travelling to Tahiti or Provencal Arles, Gauguin and Van Gogh actively sought out what was not part of the dominant bourgeoise urban scene of their day. In understanding their art as a social practice, Gauguin and Van Gogh's paintings are marked with a revolutionary zeal. By choosing to give status where it had previously been denied and challenging traditional arrangments of form upon the canvas, Gauguin and Van Gogh contributed to aestheic and social innovations within late nineteeth century art. Central to these innovations were their shared concern for raising the status of the marginalized other.
One of the most interesting results of Gauguin and Van Gogh's alteration of art as social practice is the fact that they mixed social conventions. Gauguin's use of dark-skinned native Tahitian women in Madonna-like poses seemed to subvert tradition-al Christian iconography in several ways. First, Gauguin's use of dark skinned women universalized the image of the Madonna across the races rather than suggesting it was exclusive to white cultures. Second, even more radical was its implication of overt sensuality rather than the traditional Europeanized depiction of the chaste virgin. By choosing to show his Tahitian models in their customary bare-breasted poses, Gaguin appeared to be countering the constrictive notion that the female body must be veiled. Gauguin's art sanctifies the human body itself as sacred. In infusing the standardized icon of female spirituality with a pagan vividness, Gauguin seems to be indicating that spiritual...