51. Monsters | Claire Dederer
A Fan's Dilemma
Last year I visited Berlin with a friend to see this guy. We had a long weekend with time to kill and as luck would have it, The Nationalgalerie had an interesting looking Paul Gauguin exhibition on. I didn’t know much about Gauguin, as we never studied him much at school, all I knew was that he had painted a lot of half-naked incredibly colourful Tahitian women. I had no idea about France’s colonisation of the Kingdom of Tahiti (in 1880) either. The exhibit itself was titled “Paul Gauguin - Why Are You Angry?” and it centred the experience of the painted women as subjects themselves, not Gauguin. I remember thinking that this was the first exhibit in my life that I’d been to where the artist was not the star of the show and it was exhilarating. I got to experience each of his paintings not as admiration of his technique, but more as a ‘What the hell was this 43 year old man doing in the company of half-naked 12 and 13 year old girls.’ FRIGHTENING how I’d never thought of the perviness of his paintings before.
I learnt so much from this exhibit:
‘Many of Gauguin's most well-known pieces depict native Tahitian women in various states of dress. What is striking about these works is that the women seem elusive, distant. One wonders what they are thinking and what their side of the story is. The art is intriguing, but it necessarily silences the voices of these indigenous women. What is left is essentially a white, male-centric view of indigeneity. It's important to recognise this when viewing Gauguin's art and appreciate the opportunity we have, as viewers, to seek out and learn about these marginalised women.’
We learnt how Gauguin had left the art capital of Paris, and his wife and five children in 1891 to embark on a spiritual and artistic quest to French Polynesia, where he lived until his death. He was barely making a living in Paris before he left for the colony, and once there, he set about establishing himself as a self-created “savage artist”. This is where he met his Tahitian ‘wife’, Teha'amana who was 13 years old. (!!!)
Teha'amana, also known as Tehura, was around 13 years old when she met Gauguin, according to Gauguin's own autobiographical journal, Noa Noa. At this young age, Teha'amana quickly became his 'native' wife, although whether she was a willing participant or not is unknown. 'Native' wives were commonly taken by French colonialists like Gauguin at the time, but these marriages were not usually legally binding. Their marriage lasted a few years, until 1893 when Gauguin returned to France. When the artist eventually did come back to the islands several years later, Teha'amana refused to live with him again.
This part is sickening:
Teha'amana's marriage to Gauguin was apparently arranged and completed in a single afternoon. These marriages were often made by the family to enhance status or financial standing in the community. However, as a foreigner, Gauguin also would have profited immensely in terms of access to fresh, local food and sexual relations. Teha'amana apparently conceived and bore a child to Gauguin during their brief marriage, although little is known about the child who may have been adopted into another family.
Needless to say, I could not wait to leave the museum and I never wanted to see another Gauguin painting as long as I live. Thank you very much. And thank you Nationalglerie, I wasn’t angry when I arrived but I definitely was by the time I left.
I thought about that exhibition in Berlin a lot while I read Claire’s book Monsters. We’re living through a long overdue time of questioning the ways in which we’ve been forced to look at the world and this book is perfectly timed. Claire covers the Me Too movement and the reckoning that has thankfully followed, naming monstrous and entitled sexual predators such as Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby. Men like Roman Polanski, Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso - knowing what we know now, can we truly appreciate the art they’ve produced without the stain of their monstrous acts.
Should we love it?
Does genius deserve special dispensation?
And what should we do with beauty, and with our unruly feelings about it?
Claire explores these questions and our relationships with the artists whose behaviour disrupts our ability to understand the work on it’s own terms.
Since I started reading this book I notice she’s been getting a lot of attention on the internet. Josh Cook writes ‘book-ish’ and I love every one of his posts. His feelings on Monsters here:
