The realm of visual arts was not spared by the #MeToo campaign, which provided audiences of early 2018 with a powerful incentive to rethink an enduring topic; the links between an artist’s life and the appreciation of their works. Should allegations and/or demonstrations of sexual misconduct and abusive behaviour modify our aesthetic judgements?
Last December, Chuck Close, an American hyperrealist and celebrated portraitist, was accused by several former models of sexual harassment. These allegations resulted in the removal of one of his works from the Lemieux Library of Seattle University and the sine die postponing of a retrospective set to open next May at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. When the allegations were made, another Close exhibition was already running at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Rather than closing the show in advance, the school committee established a counter-display focused on women artists, entitled The Art World We Want. This attempt to avoid censorship whilst opening a space for public dialogue received mixed reviews. Nevertheless, the fact that institutions rarely overtly tackle the issue of the gender imbalance of power in the art world in their exhibitions cannot be denied.
Indeed, while countless shows have celebrated Picasso’s muses and the Spanish master’s erotic paintings and etchings, how many among them have reminded their public of his legendary and destructive misogyny? He reportedly declared to his fellow painter and lover Françoise Gilot that “women are machine for suffering” and immediately added “for me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats”.
The unconventional and sometimes criminal biographies of certain visual artists are well documented nowadays. However, they do not feel like the stuff for museums that are always keener to celebrate ‘pure’ artistic genius away from the ‘contingencies’ of life.
At first glance, it might indeed seem useless to mention a dead painter’s personal shortcomings since he cannot be held accountable for his past actions anymore. Only his canvases stay. Furthermore, when a painter has already been consecrated in canonical art history and entered the collections of the most prestigious museums, what kind of action can be taken? You cannot punish the artist by stripping away the accolades he received. You cannot put an end to ongoing contracts and artistic collaborations. The only thing you can do is put all of his paintings in storage and hope that nobody will ever talk about this foul individual again. But if the painter is, let’s say, Paul Gauguin, the odds are reasonably against the success of your planned ‘punishment-through-oblivion’ scheme.
Like Paul Cézanne or Edvard Munch, Gauguin is nowadays considered as one of the ‘fathers’ – enjoy the non-masculine-biased metaphor – of twentieth-century visual art. The self-styled head of an artists’ colony in Pont-Aven (Brittany), he is celebrated today for his “synthetic” line and his daring use of colour. However, such artistic innovations came at a cost. Gauguin is also remembered for having run away from his family when it became an obstacle to his artistic ‘quest’ and desire to live away from ‘civilization’.
Paul Gauguin is one of the most common examples when philosophers attempt to discuss the intersection between art and morality. Bernard Williams developed his radical concept of “moral luck” by basing it on a rather fictionalized version of Gauguin’s life. In the case of Gauguin, “moral luck” means that in order to decide if the artist was morally right to abandon his family, you should take a look to the offshoots of Gauguin’s Tahitian adventure, namely his paintings.
If you deem them a failure – a possibility since Gauguin’s line is still considered by some critics and art appreciators as ‘clumsy’ and inferior to the works of his friend-turned-scapegoat Vincent Van Gogh – the painter should have stayed at home and cared for his family. Conversely, if you consider that he made a decisive contribution to the progress of modern art through his artworks, he was right to take the chance of ruining his bourgeois marriage and embark on questionable adventures.
If Williams’ thought experiment can be questioned upon several aspects, the most striking one is that the moral philosopher evacuates the most problematic feature of Gauguin’s biography. Not only did he abandon his wife but while away in Polynesia, he took several thirteen-year-old ‘child brides’ and infected them with venereal disease. His ‘marriages’ were only made possible by the fact they took place on colonised islands where the ‘native’ girls did not enjoy the same amount of legal protection as their white counterparts living in France’s mainland.
For decades, Gauguin’s relationships with young Polynesians is still a subject of discomfort for his biographers and admirers. In 2017, Edouard Duluc, director of the movie Gauguin – Travel to Tahiti was blamed for having chosen a seventeen-year-old actress to embody Tehura, one of the painter’s child brides. He defended himself by claiming that the historical reality was already well-established and that it was acceptable for a movie-maker to indulge in producing a fantasy account of Gauguin’s life. He also contended that his movie is simply an adaptation of Noa Noa, Gauguin’s travel diary documenting his first stay in Tahiti between 1891 and 1893. Since in his autobiography Gauguin idealizes and celebrates his wife-muse as an uncorrupted and divine Eve, Duluc feels allowed to present the artist’s relationship with Tehura as unproblematic, consented and harmonious.
In doing so, Duluc is at best naïve. Considering Noa Noa as an objective account of Gauguin’s life in the South Seas overlooks its somewhat commercial nature – Gauguin devised his book as a means to advertise and sell the paintings he brought back from Tahiti to Paris – and the numerous personal ambiguities of the painter. The Impressionist Camille Pissarro, his estranged master, publicly declared that he did not believe at all in his former pupil’s conversion to ‘pure’ and ‘savage’ life. According to Pissarro, Gauguin was as much a colonist as any other in Polynesia, only willing to exploit and selfishly profit from local people.
Despite his undoubtedly unpleasant character, Gauguin was an incredibly gifted colourist, sculptor, ceramist and engraver. The problem is the continuous presentation of his artistic evolution as a selfless “sacrifice” for the betterment of art, even if it is the way in which the painter wanted to be perceived and remembered.
It is time to discard the myth that the (typically white male) artist is a superior being entitled to transgress, while others have to abide by laws and conventions. If art is not an ethical matter, as so many ‘free spirits’ have put it for two centuries, maybe artists and curators should work out a non-moral and non-heroic vocabulary to describe aesthetic actions.
