Visual Analysis Essay: When Will You Marry? by Paul Gauguin
The analysis of past artworks and artistic masters through contemporary lenses has been an important practice in art education, especially within the last decade. In particular, many artists who were previously glorified have been exposed for their problematic behaviours and are now studied using critical analysis. This is not to say that their work is no longer valid or beautiful, but rather to understand the potential biases behind their work. One such artist is Paul Gauguin, who has been critiqued for his depictions of Polynesian women. One piece which clearly illustrates the importance of viewing art critically is When Will You Marry?. This piece can be analyzed using many different “lenses” but the most fruitful to understanding its meaning historically and in a contemporary sense are through postcolonial theory and feminist theory.
This piece must be viewed through a postcolonial lens for its significance to be properly understood. Firstly, When Will You Marry? by Paul Gauguin is not a reflection of the reality of life in Tahiti, but the projected dream of a European tired of a “civilized” society. By the 19th century when this work was painted, Tahiti had been colonized by the French and English, and much of what Gauguin described as the “unspoiled natural primitiveness” (https://www.gauguin.org 2011) of Tahitian culture was already replaced by Western culture. Gauguin had left his wife and five children in France with hopes to live a fulfilling and natural life in more “exotic” and “savage” cultures. When he arrived, he was disappointed by reality and chose to spend his days painting to ward off his disappointment. His paintings often drew on local mythology, live models, and what he imagined to be the Tahiti of time past. In this painting, in particular, many aspects of his representation of the two Tahitian women who are his subjects are important to the postcolonial analysis. The definitive power imbalance between the viewer and subject is similar to that commonly found in paintings depicting the “other”. Though the woman in the front is indifferent to Gauguin and the viewers’ gaze, the second woman seated behind her seems to be entirely aware of it. She holds up a hand in a mudra, a symbolic Buddhist gesture, which denotes threatening or warning and appears to be looking at her friend out of the corner of her eye. Gauguin captures a glance between them, where one friend is perhaps warning the other of the danger he represents. Gauguin chose to paint women, usually between the ages of thirteen to fifteen, whom he was sleeping with and a couple that he later married. This use of non-European women's bodies as something to be exoticized and simultaneously sexualized for the pleasure of the white man is very important to understand the drive behind Gauguin’s works. Finally, the intended audience of Gauguin’s work was the typical European consumer of art at the time, the middle-aged white male. To finance his trips he often sold works to his friends. This is one of the reasons many of his works depict young, beautiful women. The gaze and spectatorship is a key to the role of looking in the formation of one’s self, and the use of the colonial “other” as something to be entertained by and through which to solidify a Western identity is typical of work by Gauguin, and later by the Fauves and Orientalists.
Another lens through which to analyze When Will You Marry? is that of feminist theory. Art historian Griselda Pollock observed that “female artists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot painted and drew female subjects in the home, in contrast to their male counterparts who painted landscapes, street scenes, architecture, and featured the gaze as a defining feature of the public sphere” (Sturken and Cartwright 2018, 125). Although this observation was made about Gauguin’s European contemporaries, it nonetheless applies to his works, which make the gaze and landscape their prime focus. Furthermore, Gauguin’s focus on the gaze is not only significant in postcolonial analysis, but also a feminist analysis. The fact that neither subject is looking directly at him, and that the viewer is privy to a somewhat intimate moment between two women is yet another example of the power imbalance held in the gaze present within this piece. Within this painting as in many others, a question is raised about who is allowed to look. The subjects of the painting, being non-Western women, are inherently assumed to be somewhat owned by the male gaze. Gauguin's painting of Tahitian women gives himself and the viewer, intended to be a white man, the right to gaze upon them whether they like it or not. The woman signalling danger to her friend is aware that she is the subject of a gaze which is given the privilege of observing her, though she cannot change the history of colonial othering which has been enforced upon her. Also, the painting’s title is inscribed in the bottom right in Tahitian, reading “Nafea faa ipoipo”. Gauguin presumably titled this piece as such because of the white flower behind the woman in the foreground's ear, which suggests she is seeking a husband. Tahiti was and remains today a matrilineal society, and yet Gauguin’s interpretation of the flower depicts marriage as the be-all and end-all in a Tahitian woman’s life. It was more than likely that the flower was meant to show that the woman would soon choose a husband herself, but for a European this concept was inconceivable, and Gauguin chose to erase the Tahitian cultural significance of the flower, applying instead a European lense upon its symbolism. Finally, though Gauguin expected to find, and by his account did find, “exotic” and “sensual” women, a feminist analysis makes it clear that such generalized projections become a nearly universal cultural trope. Whether the Tahitian women in this painting or others fit the image pictured in Gauguin’s mind is improbable, and so he used their bodies to create the image he desired and knew would sell.
Both postcolonial theory and feminist theory are important lenses of analysis through which to critically view When Will You Marry? by Paul Gauguin. Both feminist theory and postcolonial theory pay close attention to the significance of the gaze as a form of displaying and enacting power upon women and othered bodies. Because the subjects of the painting are colonized non-European women, both of these lenses can be used to understand the biases and stereotypes imposed upon them by 19th-century Western culture. In conclusion, this allows for a critical view of the work from multiple perspectives, during which both analyses build upon each other.