Spirit of the Dead Watching

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Spirit of the Dead Watching: Paul Gauguin

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Gauguin Oil Painting - Spirit of the Dead Watching

Keywords: Spirit, Dead, Watching

Work Overview: Spirit of the Dead Watching
Artist Paul Gauguin
Year 1892
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 116.05 cm × 134.62 cm (45.6 in × 53 in)
Location Albright Knox Art Gallery

Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manaò tupapaú) is an 1892 oil on burlap canvas painting by Paul Gauguin, depicting a naked Tahitian girl lying on her stomach. An old woman is seated behind her. Gauguin said the title may refer to either the girl imagining the ghost, or the ghost imagining her.

The subject of the painting is Gauguin's young native wife Teha'amana (called Tehura in his letters), who one night, according to Gauguin, was lying in fear when he arrived home late: " ... motionless, naked, belly down on the bed: she stared up at me, her eyes wide with fear, '... Perhaps she took me, with my anguished face, for one of those legendary demons or specters, the Tupapaus that filled the sleepless nights of her people."

Art historian Nancy Mowll Mathews says the painting is a direct descendent of a previous series of "frightened Eves" that Gauguin painted from 1889.[4] His 1889 Breton Eve, shown at the Volpini exhibition of 1889, represented Eve as in fear of the snake, reinterpreting the traditional Christian theme of innocence before the fall.[5] In his letter of 8 December 1892 to his wife Mette (famously neglecting to mention that the girl in question was his lover),[6] he says "I painted a nude of a young girl. In this position she is on the verge of being indecent. But I want it that way: the lines and movement are interesting to me. And so, I give her, in depicting the head, a bit of a fright." He then needed to find a pretext for the girl's emotions.[4] At first (in his letter to Mette) Gauguin made the old woman the subject of her fright, but later in his account in Noa Noa made himself the subject of her fear. Mathews says it is too simple to attribute Tehura's terror to her belief in spirits and irrational fear of the dark; she says, following Sweetman,[7] that Gauguin's sexual predilections should not be ignored when trying to understand the work. Rather, she suggests the girl's fear was a response to Gauguin's aggressive behavior, consistent with his known battering (so says Mathews) of his wife Mette, the submissive fear in her eyes his erotic reward.[8][9][10]

Stephen F. Eisenman, professor of Art History at Northwestern University, suggests the painting and its narrative is "a veritable encyclopaedia of colonial racism and misogyny". Eisenman's book Gauguin's Skirt challenges conventional notions of the political and gender content of Gauguin's paintings. In Spirit he sees parallels not only with Manet's Olympia (see below), but also with the Louvre Hermaphrodite in the boyishness of the features and the a tergo posture. The androgynous depiction is in keeping with Polynesian cosmology and its stress on the dual nature of things.[11][12]

Other historians such as Naomi E. Maurer have viewed the narrative as a device to make the indecency of the subject more acceptable to a European audience.[13]

Gauguin was an admirer of Édouard Manet's 1863 Olympia. He had seen it exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle and commented in a review, "La Belle Olympia, who once caused such a scandal, is esconced there like the pretty woman she is, and draws not a few appreciative glances". After the French state purchased Olympia from Manet's widow, with funds from a public subscription organised by Claude Monet, Gauguin took the opportunity to make a three-quarter size copy when it was exhibited in the Musée du Luxembourg. The copy is not an especially faithful one and it is thought he completed it from a photograph.[14] Edgar Dégas later purchased it for 230 francs at Gauguin's 1895 auction of his paintings to raise funds for his return to Tahiti.[15] It is known that Gauguin took a photograph of Manet's Olympia with him on his first visit to Tahiti.[16] Claire Frèches-Thory remarks that Olympia, the modern equivalent of Titian's Venus of Urbino, is a constant presence in Gauguin's great nudes of the South Pacific: Spirit of the Dead Watching, Te arii vahine, and Nevermore.[14]

When Gauguin exhibited Spirit of the Dead Watching at his largely unsuccessful 1893 Durand-Ruel exhibition (in particular he failed to sell Spirit at the elevated 3,000 francs he had set for it), several critics noted the compositional similarities with Olympia. Thadée Natanson, a founder of La Revue Blanche, called it the "Olympia of Tahiti", while Alfred Jarry, more pointedly, dubbed it "the brown Olympia".

In the 1992 Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, published as Avant-Garde Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History, the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock examines the problems faced by a white art historian in writing an art history that recognises the historical subjectivity of a woman of colour such as Teha'amana, known otherwise to art history only by her representations within the discourses of masculinity and colonial imperialism.[18][b] She attempts this by concentrating on a detailed reading of a single painting, the Spirit of the Dead Watching, advancing a new theory of avant-gardism as a kind of game-play involving first reference, then deference, and finally difference. In this case the object of reference is Manet's Olympia, the deference was to Manet as leader of the avant-garde treatment of the nude, and the difference (amongst other matters) was the colour of the subject and the role of the second figure in the painting, the whole a gambit by which Gauguin hoped to usurp Manet's place in the avant-garde.[20]

Pollock notes a structural correspondence between the two paintings. In Spirit of the Dead Watching, a viewer for the scene is invoked by Teha'amana's gaze on the bed, a viewer for whom Gauguin has to invent a narrative, while in Olympia the implied narrative is that of prostitution, as critics of the time such as Emile Zola clearly recognised.

In Gauguin's final version of his narrative, as published in Noa Noa, he makes the second subject of his painting, the spectre, a surrogate spectator within the painting, and then (with Teha'aman's gaze) relocates and displaces Teha'amana's fear and paranoia on him, the intruder. Thus, by formal reference to Manet's Olympia, Gaughin has reintroduced himself, taking his place in the avant-garde as artist, as owner, and as colonist.

There are five sources for Gauguin's description of the painting: a letter to his patron Daniel Monfreid dated 8 December 1892, another letter to his wife Mette the same day, his 1893 manuscript Cahier pour Aline ("Notebook for Aline"), the first unpublished 1893-4 draft of Noa Noa (ca) and then finally the published 1901 version prepared together with his collaborator Charles Morice (fr).[22] Richard Field has provided a critical analysis of these sources.[23]

Letter to Daniel Monfreid
In an 8 December 1892 letter to Daniel Monfreid, Gauguin gives the titles of eight paintings he is sending out for exhibition in Copenhagen.[24] He translates the title Manao tupapau as "Think of the Ghost, or, The Spirits of the Dead are Watching" and goes on to say that he wants to reserve it for a later sale, but will sell for 2,000 francs. He describes the painting as follows (without explaining the subject is a nude):

This picture is for me (excellent). Here is the genesis (for you only). General Harmony. Dark dull violet, dark blue and chrome. 1. The draperies are chrome 2. because this colour suggests night, without explaining it however, and furthermore serves as a happy medium between the yellow orange and the green, completing the harmony. These flowers are also like phosphorescences in the night (in her thoughts). The Kanakas believe that the phosphorous lights seen at night are the souls of the dead.

In short, it is a fine bit of painting, although it is not according to nature.

Letter to Mette Gauguin
In an 8 December 1892 letter to his wife, Gauguin gives translations of the Tahitian titles of the paintings he intends to send. He stresses this is for Mette's eyes only, so that she can provide them for those who ask for them. He fixes a price of at least 1,500 francs for the painting, and goes on to describe it as follows:[25]

I painted a nude of a young girl. In this position she is on the verge of being indecent. But I want it that way: the lines and movement are interesting to me. And so, I give her, in depicting the head, a bit of a fright. It is necessary to justify this fright if not to explain it because it is in the character of a Maori person. Traditionally these people have a great fear of the spirits of the dead. One of our own young girls [in Europe] would be frightened to be caught in this position. (The women here would not.) I have to explain this fright with the least possible literary means as was done formerly. So I did this. General harmony, somber, sad, frightening, telling in the eye like a funeral knell. Violet, somber blue, and orange-yellow. I make the linen greenish-yellow: 1 because the linen of this savage is a different linen than ours (beaten tree bark); 2 because it creates, suggests artificial light (the Kanaka woman never sleeps in darkness) and yet I don't want the effect of a lamp (it is common); 3 this yellow linking the orange-yellow and the blue completes the musical harmony. There are several flowers in the background, but they should not be real, being imaginative, I make them resemble sparks. For the Kanaka, the phosphorescences of the night are from the spirit of the dead, they believe they are there and fear them. Finally, to end, I make the ghost quite simply, a little old woman; because the young girl, unacquainted with the spirits of the French stage, could not visualise death except in the form of a person like herself. There you have the script that will prepare you for the critics when they bombard you with their malicious questions. To conclude, the painting had to be made very simple, the motif being savage, childlike [13]

According to Gauguin, the phosphorescences that could be seen in Tahiti at night, and which natives believed to be the exhalations of the spirits of the dead, were emitted by mushrooms that grew on trees.[13] The description of the spirit of the dead that the artist would have been familiar with came from the work of Pierre Loti, who described the spirit as a "blue-faced monster with sharp fangs"; the decision to paint an old woman instead of a bizarre demon may have been prompted by the desire to use a symbol that would be more familiar to a European audience.

The painting was among the eight canvases Gauguin sent for exhibition at Copenhagen in 1893. He evidently prized it highly, for in his letter to Monfreid quoted above he said he wanted to reserve it for a later sale, although he would let it go for 2,000 francs. Later that same year, when he returned to Paris, it was exhibited at his Durand-Ruel show, where it failed to sell for the 3,000 francs he asked for it, despite favourable reviews from critics including Edgar Dégas. It was included in his unsuccessful 1895 Hôtel Drouot sale to raise funds for his return to Tahiti, when he was obliged to buy it in for just 900 francs. Subsequently he left it in the care of a dealer, who failed to sell it. By 1901 it was with Gauguin's new dealer Ambroise Vollard, with whom Gauguin had reached an arrangement that allowed him a measure of financial security in his final years. Vollard valued it at between only 400 and 500 francs. Eventually it reached the newly opened Galerie Druet (fr), where it was acquired by Count Kesslar of Weimar, a noted patron of modern art. As publisher, Kesslar was responsible for publishing in 1906 the first monograph on Gauguin, by Jean de Rotonchamp.[44]

Subsequent owners included Sir Michael Sadler and Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill. It was purchased in 1929 by A. Conger Goodyear, whose art collection was bequeathed to the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts housed at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery.

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Summary

A Tahitian female lies naked on her belly, terrified by the presence of the spirit of death. Behind her, with an averted phosphorescent eye, the spirit is personified in the form of a harmless old woman dressed in a black shawl. According to island mythology, the title has two meanings: either the young girl is thinking of the ghost, or the ghost is thinking of her. Bold ambiguous shapes and colors (yellow blanket, blue pareu, phosporescent greenish sparks on a violet background) intensify the eerie atmosphere and enigmatic quality of the painting.
Commentary

Gauguin describes the incident that prompted the painting in his diary. Returning home unexpectedly late one night he struck a match and saw his wife, Tehura, "immobile, naked, lying face downward on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with fear . . . Might she not with her frightened face take me for one of the demons and spectres of the Tupapaus, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights?" (Noa Noa, Louvre manuscript, pp. 109-110). Native Polynesians believe(d) that the phosphorescences of the light are the spirits of the dead.

Gauguin liked to preserve the enigma of realities and interpretations. In his letters and in Noa Noa he writes of two constructions: an abstract, or "musical part" in which colors and composition simply present the pictorial study of a Polynesian nude; and a "literary part" which links the earth-bound soul to ghosts, the diabolic, and the death spirits. He admits to writing the genesis of this work ". . . for those who must always knows the whys and the wherefores." Is this painting to be read as a variation of the "Oceanic" or sexually-charged nude image (Gauguin copied Manet's Olympia recumbent nude with--perhaps as a decorative accessory--a black woman servant in attendance), or as a symbolic image of fear as in other of his lithographs and woodcuts on this Manao tupapau theme?

This painting, framed, appears again, in the background of Gauguin's "Self-portrait with Hat" suggesting its significance to him. The Manao tupapau is seen in reverse, indicating that the artist is looking at himself in a mirror.

It might be interesting to contrast the handling of unearthly silence, and tension between inner and outer realities in this painting with the way it is handled in Munch's painting, The Dead Mother (see this database) and/or personified in Dickinson's poem, Because I could not stop for death (see this database).

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