In Noa Noa, the French painter Paul Gauguin's travelogue of two years in Tahiti, we get the detailed insight of a middle-aged Westerner who viewed Tahitians with both envy and contempt. Gauguin, who cohabited with a 13-year-old girl during his time in the French colony, used race and class to distinguish himself from Tahitians, as with this wording about the islanders' ability to fish for food: "Here I was, a civilized man, distinctly inferior in these things to the savages."
Gauguin was a privileged outsider in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893, and his paintings of semi-clad girls and women are some of the Western art world's first intimately posed portraits of women of color, and some of the first that situated them as central figures rather than subservient or peripheral characters. The epitome of the art world's "subservient" approach: Jean-Leon Gerome's The Bath, from 1880-1885, which hangs on the walls of the Legion of Honor and depicts a black bathhouse worker in North Africa soaping down a lily-white woman.
Academics and cultural theorists have called Gauguin (and Gerome, for that matter) many things in the 100 years since their deaths, including nouns ending in -ist — as in racist, sexist, colonist, and Orientalist. But there's no denying Gauguin's artistic skill with perspective and a paintbrush. And it seems likely that Gauguin will always occupy a central role in art history, as evidenced by last month's sale of a Gauguin Tahitian portrait for $300 million, the highest amount ever paid for a painting. The de Young Museum's new exhibit, "Botticelli to Braque: Masterpieces From the National Galleries of Scotland," features one of Gauguin's finest pieces, Three Tahitians, from 1899, an allegorical portrait of a young man choosing between a chaste woman and a woman of disrepute. Which woman, and which morality, will win out? It's an unfair fight, really, since Gauguin paints the mischievous woman's dress in a more vibrant color (red), puts her in a more vibrant position (staring directly at us), and has her bearing an enticing fruit (a green papaya).
The de Young's audio tour guide describes the papaya as "exotic," and says that Gauguin went to Tahiti "in search of an exotic primitive utopia in which he felt his art could flourish." The art world's continuing emphasis on "exotic" to describe Gauguin's French Polynesian sojourns, and even the inanimate objects he encountered, is a vestige of a century-old world where "otherness" meant anything absent from the top hierarchies of Western traditions. Globalization has jettisoned those hierarchies for good, and even during Gauguin's lifetime, papaya was a widely consumed fruit in the Americas, where it originated.
What has also been jettisoned: the art world's reliance on Western men to portray women in non-Western countries. Women can and do portray themselves, which is the foundation of the exhibit "She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World," currently at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center.
Twelve female photographers reveal a side of Iran and Arab countries where women (and men) navigate conflicting boundaries and find ways to assert themselves — sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes out in the open. In Iran, female singers are mostly prohibited from recording and performing in public, so in a make-believe series called Listen, Tehran photographer Newsha Tavakolian creates an imaginary CD and video series for six female Iranian singers. The video has six screens, with each woman singing animatedly, eyes wide open, before a shiny, sequined curtain — except we can't hear their words. Not one note.
If you search the internet, several of the six women — Mahsa Vahdat, Maral Afsharian, Azita Akhavan, Ghazal Shakeri, Sayeh Sodaifi, and Sahar Lotfi — have fully-voiced sound files and videos that are flush with notes high and low, but at Stanford, their voices are completely silenced. And in Tavakolian's photo series, their eyes are completely closed while they're in the middle of passionate songs. The imaginary CD, titled When I Was Twenty Years Old, has an Iranian woman wearing defiant red boxing gloves in the middle of an Iranian street. Tavakolian has said her series allows the women to still perform before a camera. Tavakolian's Listen is surreal, powerful, funny, beautiful, and troubling, all at the same time.
This mixture of overlapping and conflicting qualities applies to other work in "She Who Tells a Story," including Egyptian photographer Nermine Hammam's series Upekkha, which fuses cutouts of Egyptian military figures from the 2011 revolution with stunning postcard scenes of Europe and other geographies. Young soldiers and blossoming flowers mix together in a synthesis of wartime and peacetime. Upekkha is a Buddhist concept of equanimity, of distancing oneself from extreme situations, and calming oneself as best as one can. The Egyptian soldiers seemed young, inexperienced, and out of place to Hammam, and she says Upekkha helped her come to terms with the soldiers' "vulnerability and sheer youth."
While based in their native countries, Hammam and Tavakolian easily move across borders and cultures. Hammam got her BFA in filmmaking from New York University's Tisch School of Arts, and was a production assistant on the Spike Lee movie Malcolm X. Tavakolian has freelanced for The New York Times, National Geographic, Le Monde, and other U.S. and European media.
Absent from "She Who Tells a Story": The cliches of Western media, where one-dimensional images of women are the rule rather than the exception. Muslim women are especially prone to distortion. In his acclaimed 1981 book, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Edward Said lamented the fact that so few Arab and Muslim journalists were covering the Middle East for Western media. Western reporters who didn't even speak Arabic and Farsi were distorting events from the Middle East, and presenting a false picture of the world, Said wrote. A generation later, the situation has changed — almost completely.
As go the media, so goes the art world. Among Polynesian painters who've emerged in the past 30 years, Emily Karaka stands out for her dense, colorful canvases of native symbols, objects, and iconography. In her native New Zealand's most prominent art institution, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tmaki, Karaka's canvases have been exhibited in the same space where Gauguin's work has appeared. With time, Gauguin's artistic view of Polynesia has been joined by other views that are just as relevant. It's still true that his perspective entered into popular imagination and — because of Gauguin's oversize reputation (and oversize paintings) — has been a mainstay. But now, thankfully, we get a few perspectives from the inside as well.
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