Avant-Garde Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Color of Art History

Abstract

In the late 1880s Gauguin, Van Gogh and Bernard abandoned Paris to seek out in rural Brittany, Provence - and later in Tahiti - what Van Gogh called purer nature of the countryside. Griselda Pollock challenges history's usual interpretations of this search for an art of consolation in the distant and exotic regions by arguing that these artists were cultural colonizers. They exhibited the modern tourist's attachment to home - modern Paris and its worlds - while being fascinated by what they imagined was a pre-modern other. Through a thorough reading of Gauguin's 1892 painting of his Tahitian wife, Manao Tupapau, the author proposes a new theory about the avant-garde as a series of gambits, a game of reference, deference and difference. This painting refers and defers to Manet's Olympia (1863). Where it was seen to differ was in the colour of the nude: critics named it a brown Olympia. Careful deconstruction of this epithet allows Professor Pollock to explore the ways in which racist discourse structures and history, posing questions of cultural, sexual and ethnic difference in order to make us all self-critical, not only in regard to the gender, but also to the colour of history.

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