Paul Gauguin, La Femme Noire

In late 1886, Paul Gauguin left France for the island of Martinique, embarking on a trip that would inspire the course of the rest of his career. Executed in 1889 upon his return to Brittany, La Femme noire is a remarkable, early example of the artist’s deft ability to balance Western and pre-colonial iconographies as well as their corresponding systems of belief. Pre-dating Gauguin’s first trip to Tahiti by nearly three years, the present ceramic stands as a harbinger of Gauguin’s uniquely personal visual lexicon, replete with nuanced cross-cultural referents, which would come to characterize his celebrated mature output. Sculpting in the round, and with the luminous addition of glaze and colored pigment, Gauguin brilliantly weaves together a network of motifs with a seemingly effortless ingenuity of arrangement to create a masterpiece of Symbolist sculpture.

The year prior, in 1888, Gauguin completed La Vision du Sermon—a work which has come to be regarded as the first, and most revolutionary Symbolist painting in his oeuvre (see fig. 1). With it, Gauguin also took transformative stylistic strides, abandoning all reference to prevailing aesthetic and compositional conventions, and renouncing any residual Impressionist influence. It was a rupture which echoed in works like La Femme noire, in which the artist’s exploration of spirituality and earthly mysticism led him toward a succinct expression of the contemporaneous Symbolist credo—the belief that art should convey absolute truths not through perfect fidelity to naturalistic representation but through symbols and iconography.

Like La Vision du Sermon, the religious works of this Brittany period were at first intended simply to reflect local life and culture but assumed a more dramatic and self-reflective character for Gauguin, who began to equate the miseries of his own life and the artistic challenges and struggles he was facing with the ordeals of Christ. Around this time, Gauguin developed a fascination with the motif of the falling or fallen Eve, focusing on the moment of or after the performance of original sin.

In La Femme noire, Gauguin notably chooses to depict Venus rather than Eve. His model is a Martiniquais woman, seated with her knees bent beneath her and her arms held resolutely at her sides. She looks forward with an unwavering gaze, and a stern determination that is intensified by the symmetry of the large ear ornaments which frame either side of her face. On her lap rests a man’s decapitated head, whose mouth agape and eyes wide in shock are made more dramatic by the glaze which pools in their concavities. The head at once serves as a self-portrait of the artist and an allusion to the beheading of John the Baptist. In various tellings of the biblical story, John the Baptist was imprisoned for condemning Herod Antipas for divorcing his wife and unlawfully marrying Herodias, the wife of John’s brother. When offered a favor by the king, Herodias’s daughter Salome, out of revenge for his criticism of her mother’s marriage, requested John’s head to be delivered to her on a platter. Gauguin’s Venus, like Salome—a name by which the work has at times historically been referred—is therefore poised as a femme fatale, here receiving the artist’s adoration as a sacrificial offering. Although at face value its subject might appear to relate to the Judeo-Christian themes that permeated much of his religious work from the Brittany period, the unmistakable symbolism of La Femme noire makes it exceptional within Gauguin’s body of figurative work from this time. It marks a decisive shift in his artistic approach, heralding in the new symbolism inspired by his trip to Martinique.

The woman who is said to have inspired the present ceramic likewise served as the model for a contemporaneous wood carving, Soyez amoureuses vous serez heureuses (see fig. 2). In this work of the same year, the woman is instead depicted as a fallen Eve. Despite the differing narratives, there is considerable iconographic overlap between the ceramic and the carving, and it is precisely the nuanced differences in Gauguin’s use of these motifs which testifies to the ingenuity of his symbolist abilities. With these works, he likewise makes a key enumeration of the distinctions between Western and non-Western systems of belief.

From the base of the present sculpture climbs a sinuous, green stem which splinters into three branches. One extends like a blood vessel into the neck of the severed head; another morphs into the tail of a bowing animal; and the third crawls up the woman’s lap, terminating in a phallic lotus bud. In these four motifs alone—the woman, the flower, the head and the animal—Gauguin conjures a remarkably complex visual metaphor for the cycle of death and regeneration. In a letter to his friend, the artist Odilon Redon, written shortly after in 1890, Gauguin elaborates: “In Europe, this death with its serpent’s tail is plausible, but in Tahiti [where, he wrote Redon, he had decided to go] one must see her with her roots growing back into flowers” (Paul Gauguin quoted in Henri Dorra, The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007, p. 140). In Soyez amoureuses, what appears to be an iris blossom at the lower right similarly caresses the thigh of the struggling woman, an obviously seductive presence. But in Christian iconography, the iris also evokes another symbolic meaning: the suffering of the Virgin Mary. The woman futilely resists the seducer in the upper right corner (who, as in the severed head in the present sculpture, represents Gauguin); the iris and nearby figures, clearly aghast, warn of the shame she will endure as a consequence. Conversely, as art historian Henri Dorra explains, in La Femme noire, Venus is “likely to be impervious to Judeo-Christian belief in original sin and the corresponding need for self-abasement” (ibid., p. 139). In the case of the ceramic, it is in fact Gauguin who has fallen prey to Venus’s seduction—or rather to the Martiniquais woman who inspired her. In the ceramic form, that relationship between artist and muse becomes all the more visceral. In her hieratic pose, she evokes ancient totemic devotional or fertility figures, which in practice were endowed with and worshiped for their innate spiritual potency.

Indeed, the mysticism that permeates the artist’s work of this period was nurtured by the rich ancient history of Brittany. Gauguin moved to the small town of Pont-Aven in 1886 and returned in June of 1889 after his trip to Martinique. During this second stay, he settled in Le Pouldu, a smaller village set apart from the increasingly touristed hub at Pont-Aven. While there, he was once again taken by the remoteness of the region, particularly the extent to which peasant life remained rooted in the customs of the Middle Ages. Particularly pertinent to the present La Femme noire is the fact that in many of his depictions of the Breton world, Gauguin uses sculpture as a key compositional symbol. In Le Christ vert (see fig. 3), the mossy sculptural group of Christ and the Holy Women, based on the figures of the late medieval sandstone Deposition in the cemetery of nearby Nizon, signal, as Gauguin explained “the Breton idea of the sculptor who explains religion through his Breton soul, Breton clothes, Breton local color…” (ibid., p. 131). In Jeune Bretonne (see fig. 4), executed in the same year, Gauguin positions the protagonist between the fleur-de-lis and lions, symbols of French and Breton royalty, on the left, and a sculpture of an indigenous woman, in a similar pose to the woman in La Femme noire, to the right. Though of disparate cultural origins, Gauguin seems to suggest that the two sculptures depicted in these paintings should be considered symbols of a shared heritage. This coalescence reaches its apogee in Portrait de l'artiste au Christ jaune, wherein Gauguin depicts himself as the summation of these two artistic sources (see fig. 5).

In addition to evoking the artist’s ingenious ability to transform symbolic motifs into three-dimensional form, La Femme noire also displays the artist’s acute sensitivity to the distinct qualities endowed by the ceramic material. Gauguin began working in stoneware around 1886 at the encouragement of the famed French ceramicist Ernest Chaplet. Following the proliferation of mass production with the Industrial Revolution in France, and the recent influx in the importation of Japanese objects of applied art, the second half of the nineteenth century saw a revival in the practice of ceramics as an artisanal craft. As an object, La Femme noire shows a remarkable sophistication of construction: “The base of the figure is formed by building up coils of clay, while the upper part in which this technique would have presented difficulties, was modeled in the solid, then cut in half and hollowed out. Finally the two halves were joined together and to the base. By this means Gauguin assured a more uniform rate of firing of the clay, and reduced the danger of cracking.” (Christopher Gray, Sculpture and Ceramics of Paul Gauguin, Baltimore, 1963, p. 31) As Christopher Gray goes on to explain: “When Gauguin worked in wood and potter’s clay, he expressed the craftsman’s innate love and respect for the qualities of his material” (ibid., p. 4).

Gauguin’s ceramic practice served as an important source of inspiration to the younger Pablo Picasso in particular. John Richardson elaborates on how Gauguin’s ceramics “demonstrated that the most disparate types of art—not to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical myths and much else besides-could be combined into a synthesis that was of its time yet timeless,” and continues to note that the present work in particular provided “the main sources for Fernande's air of mystery,” in Picasso’s 1906 La coiffure (John Richardson, The Life of Picasso, vol. I, New York, 1991, p. 461; see fig. 6). To return once more to the present imagery of the artist’s head, at once nourishing and nourished by the stem protruding from the earth below, it becomes clear what Picasso felt in looking at La Femme noire: the act of creation is the artist’s vital form of sustenance. The natural materiality of ceramic lends itself particularly well to this message. As Gauguin himself described it, the process of firing clay results in both the sculpted figure and its maker as being strengthened by the kiln.

La Femme noire is a rare example of the artist’s work in the medium and a crucial piece in our understanding of Gauguin’s life and artistry.

Artist

Paul Gauguin