Gauguin & Van Gogh

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 bourgeois 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 arrangements of form upon the canvas, Gauguin and Van Gogh contributed to aesthetic and social innovations within late nineteenth 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 imp

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hand to bear heavy symbolic significance. Art scholars have indicated that the hand can be read as an ancient symbol of Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, the life-forming mother even as it simultaneously symbolizes the masculine power to create (Graetz, 1963, p. 236). For Graetz the conjoining of this woman's hand with Lazarus' can be said to symbolize Van Gogh's own spiritual rebirth and reconnection to the female. The "woman-angel" can be seen to symbolize "his inner female counterpart, the soul, the "anima", animating the imprisoned body" (Graetz, 1963, p. 236). Here Van Gogh's art appears to indicate that there must be a continual transgression across boundaries, that it is dangerous for the other to be kept to far distant from the self. Fusion, as symbolized here, is what provides for the greatest growth. By offering a detailed analysis of two of their respective paintings, Van Gogh's Memory of the Garden at Etten and Gauguin's Garden at Arles, some of the most intriguing aspects of their focus and occasional ambivalence toward the other can be demonstrated. It must be emphasized that heterology as a theoretical concept insists that the radicality of the other be recognized and respected. Following anthropological preceden
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Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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