Symbolist Alienation
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The problem with this Symbolist alienation from modern life was that it sought to find a zone or space outside the modern, an impossibility given the grounding of Symbolist alienation in uniquely modern conditions and experiences and the extreme modernity of Symbolist art itself. Symbolist alienation was itself a modern experience, as was its search for a primitive realm beyond modern “reason,” civilization, technology, social divisions, uprooted, uncertain identities, and anxieties about the future. Another way to see the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Symbolism and of all Western primitivist movements is to note the impossibility of the mind finding a space outside itself. Yet this is exactly what much Symbolist art pursued. It was modern, Western mind seeking imaginary zones and spaces outside itself and constructing a series of “primitive” Others in the unspoiled countryside, in animals, in non-Western cultures and primitive landscape settings, and in “pure,” “essential” bodies (usually female). Seen more critically, we can see none of these supposed realms were inherently “primitive” except as metaphoric constructions of the modern Western mind. The very notion of the “primitive” was inseparable from the overly-refined, exhausted, alienated Western mind which invented this category as an imaginary place to which it could escape while simultaneously pursuing a self-consciously avant garde, modern, urban, Western aesthetic consciousness. The contradictions of all primitivist movements in modern art are many.
Seen more historically and in response to contemporary social realities, the Symbolist movement was in part an escapist retreat from the modern and all its confusion, troubles, and corruptions, a self-blinding diversion into an enchanting dream world, private, hermetic, often elitist amidst collectivist fantasies and nostalgia, mystical, at times archaically “Catholic”, at times “Buddhist”, at times Orientalist and or Tahitian, at times medievalizing and feudal, at other times rustic and pastoral, primitivist or exotic. For the socialist Impressionist painter, Pissarro, Symbolism was as an escapist bourgeois artistic response to an increasingly threatening working class and to the deteriorating social order.
“The bourgeoisie, frightened, astonished by the immense clamor of the disinherited masses, by the insistent demands of the people, feels that it is necessary to restore to people their superstitious beliefs. Hence the bustling of religious symbolists, religious socialists, idealist art, occultism, Buddhism, etc., etc.” .
Pissarro also singled out Gauguin for “having sensed this tendency” and for jumping on the Symbolist bandwagon.
Paradise Lost and the Problems of Brittany
Though Gauguin hoped to find in Brittany an unspoiled, “primitive” world which could nourish his modern “primitive” art, he found something more akin to a paradise lost. Brittany was already popular as a tourist attraction with Parisian investors building large hotels and developing restaurants, cafes, and shops. The Emperor of France, Napoleon III himself, had already conferred status on the new resort by visiting its biggest hotel. Britanny had also become an artists colony with hundreds of more traditional painters churning out picturesque, quaint, tourist landscapes featuring the local villagers and peasants in their “unspoiled” world. Much of this “primitive” culture and costume was actually less than a hundred years old and was, in a certain sense, part of a Breton modernity invisible to nostalgic Parisian eyes.
In the end, the Brittany which Gauguin discovered turned out to be contaminated by the very forces he was fleeing. In this sense, Gauguins own presence was paradoxical in so far as the highly sophisticated, avant-garde artistic “simplicity” and “primitivism” he fashioned in Brittany was the extension of a modern urban intellectual and spiritual malaise far from the experience and concerns of Breton villagers and farmers. They may have had visions after Catholic sermons but these did not correspond to Gauguins Symbolist aesthetic visions. On a more mundane level, Gauguin got involved in an drunken cafe brawl and broke his ankle. His dissatisfaction with Brittany was further compounded by poor prices fetched by his Brittany paintings when he organized a small one-man show in Paris in 1889. He did, however, make enough money to finance a trip to the French colony of Tahiti.
The Flight to Tahiti (1891-1993, 1895-1903)
In 1891, disillusioned by his failure to sell much of his work, burdened by financial problems, hounded by creditors including his abandoned wife and children (who received little or no support), Gauguin fled further afield to the French colony of Tahiti where he hoped to escape his problems, live cheaply in a more authentic “primitive” setting conducive to his new Symbolist vision, and enjoy a male, colonial sexual paradise known as such since its discovery in the mid-eighteenth century.
The move to Tahiti drew on a number of currents in later nineteenth-century French culture. In addition to expressing a Symbolist critique of contemporary urban life, Gauguins Tahitian imagery linked up with the popularity of Golden Age landscapes in French art as seen in Puvis de Chavannes, Corot, Renoir, Cezanne and others. It also capitalized on a new popular interest in the South Seas as seen in the fiction of French writers like Pierre Loti or American writers like Melville.
In particular, Gauguins Tahitian landscapes drew on the bestselling travel and adventure books of Pierre Loti, especially his novel, Rarahu (1880). Loti specialized in distant adventure stories. In an interesting parallel with Gauguin, two of Lotis biggest sellers were novels about French peasant life set in Brittany and the Basque regions. Along with such romance-travel writers as Loti, the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, with its “Pavilion of Colonies or the History of Human Habitation” was also important in confirming the colonial fantasies Gauguin sought to realize.
In an interview given just before he left, Gauguin showed the powerful appeal of the Tahitian myth in France.
“I am going away to be at peace, to rid myself of the influence of civilization. I want to produce nothing but art that is simple, very simple. To do that, I need to steep myself in unspoiled nature, to see nothing but savages, to live their life, with no other concern but