Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Allegory of Virtue and Vice
by Suzanne Donahue, Mount Saint Mary College

In response to his dealer Ambroise Vollard’s request for recent artwork inspired by exotic lands, Paul Gauguin executed a series of ten large drawings that he shipped to Paris from Tahiti early in 1900.[1] Surprisingly little has been written about the elusive Tahitian subjects in this series, although the technique has been scrutinized. This paper examines a compelling image from the suite of drawings, a pair of figures that operate on multiple levels and function as complex symbols whose uneasy meanings “float and contradict.”[2] Scholars have categorized Polynesian Beauty and Evil Spirit from enigmatic to sinister,[3] and the image has been read as a variation of the Temptation theme featuring Eve in liaison with Satan.[4] I would like to propose a metaphorical reading for Polynesian Beauty and Evil Spirit, by suggesting that allegories can be read into the composition which reveal Gauguin’s concerns with gender, religion, and social issues. Drawn to the concept of divine androgyny in world religions as a mode to express utopian harmony, Gauguin sought balance by addressing extremes in his art: male/female, human/divine, man/beast, East/West, primitive/civilized, colonizer/colonized, virtue/vice.

While the Biblical tale of Eve and the serpent had long fascinated the artist,[5] as in Words of the Devil from 1892, a notable shift emerged in Gauguin’s figural work after living in Tahiti for nearly ten years. Rejecting narrative and an earlier obsession with Eve as femme fatale responsible for the downfall of man, Gauguin’s mature style evolved into a metaphoric language that constructed the Polynesian native as a paradigm of virtue, innocence, and unspoiled Tahiti. An education in the Catholic seminary provided haunting models of good and evil[6] that naturally shaped Gauguin’s conception of Virtue’s antithesis as a devilish horned figure. His prolific writings often mention Virtue and Vice by name, revealing the allure of the sacred and profane.[7]

The 1889 canvas entitled Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake depicts a highly synthesized dialogue of opposing forces, and emphasizes Gauguin’s intensely subjective outlook. Appearing both angelic and demonic, the self-portrait hovers between earthly and sacred realms, suggested by the heavenly wings, halo, and background of red hellfire. Apples and snake together identify the sitter as a fallen angel.[8] The portrait’s references to polarities in religion derive from Gauguin’s interest in esoteric writings and his Theosophical world view, a philosophy based upon the notion that all great religions shared similar doctrines and essential truths.[9]

The concept of androgyny has existed for centuries in almost every religion and time period, evidenced in Western culture by the existence of Hellenistic Greek sculpture and writings by Plato, Virgil, and others. During the nineteenth century this complex concept endured as a theme in art, literature, and mysticism, symbolizing perfection through the union of opposites.[10] Scholars have shown that the literary androgynous ideal imagined by Balzac and Péladan affected Gauguin.[11] I would suggest, however, that androgynous creator-gods in world religions and myths appealed to his Theosophical outlook, and collectively established a precedent for him to reconcile dualities in his art. Examples of divine androgynes from Indian, African, and Asian art were available in Paris.[12] Adopting a highly personal approach to religion,[13] he began to conceive of the Tahitians in androgynous terms and to articulate the similarities, rather than differences, between male and female.[14] A passage from his quasi-autobiographical treatise Noa Noa (1893-97) conveys his views,

“Together they engage in the same tasks with the same activity or the same
indolence. There is something virile in the women and something feminine in
the men. This similarity of the sexes make their relations the easier.”[15]

The language of Symbolism stirred Gauguin to elicit a broader universal truth by implying meaning through symbols instead of merely relying on form to convey his ideas. Whether visualized as a mythological god, as in Idol with a Pearl, or as a being at one with nature in Where Are You Going?, both from 1892, the Tahitian body was chosen as the preferred vehicle to indicate divine harmony through an asexual figure. The personal value he found in the androgyne theme resonated in a letter that guided a friend to aspire to a spiritual state:

“You must regard yourself as Androgyne, without sex. By that I mean that heart and soul, in short all that is divine, must not be the slave of matter, that is, of the body.”[16]

In this priestly role,[17] Gauguin linked transcendence beyond the natural world with the abstract concept of androgyny to symbolize a heightened sense of completeness aligned with spiritual perfection.

Pursuing a new artistic voice, Gauguin explored Brittany, Panama, and Martinique before relocating in 1891 to Tahiti. Romanticized since its so-called “discovery” by English explorers in 1767 and its annexation by the French in 1843,[18] Tahiti, Gauguin believed, would fulfill his lifelong search for the exotic ideal, a dream (or delusion) enhanced by fanciful postcards that justified the French colonialist enterprise. Gauguin’s preconceived image of an unspoiled arcadia was dissolved after he encountered Christianized natives who spoke French and dressed in Western clothing.[19]

References to world religions where androgyny figures prominently “provide the context” for interpreting this image as an allegorical web of dualities springing from the Western theme of virtue and vice. Resonating with visual contradictions, Polynesian Beauty and Evil Spirit is rarely mentioned by critics, scholars, or Gauguin himself in relation to the fanciful construction of an idyllic world. The calculated structure of the composition implies that Gauguin alludes specifically to androgyny and also more generally to the notion of harmony and balance.

Gauguin’s letters earnestly described a new printing method that he had recently invented. Beginning with two sheets of paper, he placed a clean piece directly upon one covered in ink. Then, he drew an image in pencil onto the top paper, and pulled away the inked sheet below, revealing, in reverse, a printed image on the back side. When the Polynesian Beauty and Evil Spirit drawing is compared to its inked mirror image on the recto, a sharp contrast materializes. The subtle, naturalistic shading in the original drawing, created by fine blue and brown pencil lines, transmutes into dense, opaque shadows on the reverse side. Murky and expressive, the otherworldly effect of these inked shadows reflected Gauguin’s mystical vision. Distinctions between “matter and spirit” evident in his writings parallels the visual imagery.[20] Inspired by epinal prints and woodcuts, the crudity and directness of the inked “print” served to distance the artist from the industrialized West and to relate instead to island life.

The reclining figure exhibits the most striking change, now appearing strangely bearded, with her beauty and femininity – although not her virtue – negated. By applying facial hair to the female form Gauguin implied the fusion of sexes, wittily replacing the academic ideal of long, flowing hair with a five-o’clock shadow.[21] Deftly carrying the allusion to androgyny further, he dissolved one of her breasts into the shadows, destabilizing the revered nude genre, and in the process subverting eroticism and desire toward the notoriously handsome Tahitians. By invoking the divine androgyne, prevalent in both Polynesian and Hindu art, he implied that Enlightenment could only be attained by abandoning earthly desire. Gauguin’s letters align virtue with divinity, goodness, purity, and indirectly with the androgynous ideal. I will return to the horned figure shortly, whose non-human appearance is exaggerated on the inked side.

A related image from the original series of ten drawings presents the pair standing side-by-side. Frontally posed, it becomes easier to determine the male sex of the horned figure, and to conclude that Gauguin composed the subjects in gendered terms. He presented woman as androgynous native, virtuous and primitive, signifying nature; conversely, man appears non-human, horned and devilish, as corrupt civilization, personifying culture. The compressed space forces our attention onto the iconic figures, offered as symbols. The ambiguous connotations are difficult to resolve since the only cultural markers to suggest meaning are visible in the bodies themselves. Male and female dichotomies strongly correlate to colonizer and colonized, representing distinct civilizations that intersect but never fuse. This reading is underscored by the symmetrical composition itself that, evoking stability and balance, distinguishes duality from chaotic opposition. In Gauguin’s world, colonizer and native co-existed in harmony, but remained separate, unfused.

Hinduism was perceived as a mysterious and foreign religion by most Europeans at the fin-de-siécle. Gauguin, I believe, alluded to this ancient culture by commingling the visual form of Ardhanarisvara, the hermaphroditic Shiva, with the Polynesian subject here. Scholars have shown that Gauguin read translated Hindu texts during the Paris interlude,[22] and his interest in Hindu art has been documented.

Like the religious art of other cultures, all Hindu art struggles with the fundamental challenge to convey the divine in concrete terms. This sense of the “unknowable” nature of the deity is especially strong in Hinduism, where it is common for a deity to be “defined” in terms of “negatives” since the (unknown) “positives” are beyond comprehension. Hindu traditions emphasize both representational likeness and abstract concepts (another duality), promoting the idea that the gods are present in varied forms. This “indefinable” aspect of the divine encourages a multi-valent interpretation (where any one thing can be viewed as body or symbol of the deity, just as well as anything else).[23]

Ardhanarishvara is an image where two deities, male and female, converge.[24] Parvati represents the female goddess of abundance, of both food and life itself. Often Parvati is shown as “Lalita,” identified by the circular mirror she carries and her placement in front of a rounded Indian throne-back[25] – two symbols alluded to in Gauguin’s image.

Careful examination of the iconography of Polynesian Beauty and Evil Spirit reveals that Gauguin drew upon the polarity of virtue and vice for inspiration, a theme that could be interpreted in both pagan and religious terms. Seventeenth-century author Cesare Ripa wrote in his text Iconologia that Vice symbolized a “depravity of manners, or that course of action opposed to Virtue.” “Vice,” he explained, “is allegorically characterized by the figure of an ugly squinting and deformed dwarf…denot(ing) corruption and perversion of principles.” Conversely, Virtue signified “moral excellence, …represented by the figure of a graceful young woman with a modest air and a steady countenance, dressed in white robes, with wings on her shoulders, and the…sun on her breast.”[26]

Gauguin overturned Ripa’s Western standard by allegorizing the figures in Tahitian terms. A passage from Noa Noa displayed his feelings about the natives:

“Their manners (have) a natural innocence, a perfect purity. Man and woman are comrades, friends rather than lovers, dwelling together almost without cease, in pain as in pleasure, and even the very idea of vice is unknown to them.”[27]

De-classisized, Gauguin’s Virtue reclines awkwardly and dons exotic rather than traditional Greek attire. Uncultivated and primitive, her bare-breasted, tanned body calls to mind a Rousseauian “noble savage,” while Ripa’s graceful Virtue “alludes to solidity, truth, and intellectual strength.” Gauguin’s informally posed indigene suggested similar ideals in a radically different way, and represented the purity and innocence that he had hoped to find, aligning goodness with the primitive, savage, and exotic.

Gauguin’s drawing relates to a canvas completed four years earlier, known today as Queen of Beauty or The Noble Woman. His own description remains the best,

“I have just finished a canvas…that I believe to be much better than anything I’ve done previously: a naked queen, reclining on a green rug, a female servant gathering fruit, two old men, near the big tree, discussing the tree of knowledge; a shore in the background….I think that I have never made anything of such deep sonorous colors.”[28]

Dubbed the “Black Olympia” by critics,[29] the ambitious painting was derived from the notorious nudes by Titian, Lucas Cranach, and Manet (and also a Java relief).[30] Curiously, these prototypes displayed women of easy virtue. As Heather McPherson has observed, the reclining pose itself was associated with promiscuity, and Manet’s scandalous treatment in 1863 forced the viewer to confront urban prostitution.[31] Gauguin’s own words, however, suggested the opposite when he mused that “Decidedly the savage is nobler than we.”[32] In 1895, writer Auguste Strindberg responded negatively to Gauguin’s unusual nudes, claiming, “You have invented a new earth and sky, but I do not feel at ease in your creation…and your Paradise is inhabited by an Eve who is not my ideal.”[33]

Rejecting the visible world in favor of the visionary, Gauguin’s Queen of Beauty metaphorically aligned an entire race with childlike innocence in both the painting and later drawing. Poised awkwardly, she half-leans, half-reclines at a decorative diagonal across the picture plane.[34] In the drawing, extracted from her tropical realm and situated indoors, the figure and her pose seem more contrived. Her floral paréu and fan function as exoticized attributes linking the figure nostalgically to traditions that no longer existed. Crafted from the indigenous materials of bark-cloth and straw, the simple attributes symbolically reinstated Oceania’s unique cultural identity at a time when the fabric was mass-produced in France and exported back to the colonies.[35] Furthermore, the symbols of paréu and fan reinforced the figure’s allegorical role as Tahiti incarnate.[36]

The position and shape of the fan, traditional accoutrement of the coquette,[37] evokes a circular medievalizing halo, although Gauguin subverted the religious allusion by obscuring it with dense hatchmarks. The hallucinatory feeling of the shading sets off the sitter’s face and creates the illusion that it floats in space, detached from the head.

Distinguished as virtue’s opposite, a horned creature set in view peeks over her shoulder, unacknowledged and mysterious. Identified as male in the companion print, the horned head is accorded the greatest importance, as it similarly is in Tahitian art. The earliest depiction of a horned figure in Gauguin’s oeuvre appears in a nearly life-sized carved wooden head dating from 1895-97. Unique in his art, this sculpture may represent a veiled self-portrait. If so, what does the artist reveal about himself? The horned head strongly resembles the most feared religious symbol in Christianity, the devil. Gauguin had earlier shown himself as Satan in Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake.[38] However, the symbolism in the wooden head side-steps clear-cut analysis, since the visual tradition of horned pagan beasts must be addressed. Greek mythological creatures of the Minotaur, Bacchus, Pan, and satyrs denote decadence and excess.

In addition, primordial bulls decorated perfume bottles and prehistoric caves in Southern France and Spain, representing the earliest known artwork to man. Several of these discoveries occurred while he resided in Paris.[39] For Gauguin, as for Picasso a generation later, this horned beast must have been the supreme primordial symbol representing virility and masculinity. Figuratively, the symbol may represent bestiality, barbarism, crudeness, bull-headedness and raw animal instinct. The horned bull remained unknown in Tahiti until Europeans imported it.[40]

In Oceanic myth, horned animals play a principal role. Of the myriad models available, the most striking to consider is the water-buffalo, the principle domestic animal in Indonesia (Selawesi). The bull is a status symbol and the main sacrificial animal, close to man in daily life and myth. The bull personifies bravery and is believed to ward off evil. In Indonesia/Selawesi, bull horns adorn houses and also the head gear of male dancers, and buffalos figure prominently in art. Small-scale male and female sculpted figures are often crafted in pairs, with the male donning horns.

Collapsing man and beast into one potent symbol, what at first seemed aligned with vice may, in fact, suggest the opposite. Benevolent rather than menacing, the horned creature’s position in relation to the reclining figure implies he may be protecting or guarding his companion, instead of stalking her. Supporting this assertion is the probability that Gauguin’s drawing may have been mis-titled by historian Richard Field in 1977, when the image was left untitled by the artist. Are these allusions to well-known sacred and pagan symbols merely coincidental? Fascinated with double-meanings, the artist likely intended his image to be read in a variety of ways.

By draining allusion to narrative, the artist reduced his characters to symbols, in the process celebrating the notion of hybridity in a modern world. Arguably led to dualities from his interest in androgyny, Gauguin’s image portrays two extremes that never fuse, but instead co-exist in the same reality. Like the subjects portrayed here, who reside in close proximity without interacting, Gauguin’s image conveys his feelings on colonizer and colonized – two cultures linked but separate, existing side-by-side in French Polynesia without opposition – a highly personalized message that harmony depends on careful balance, and a strong dose of tolerance

1. Richard S. Field, Paul Gauguin: Monotypes (Philadelphia: Museum of Art, 1973), 20. The works were mailed in March 1900 according to a letter to the artist’s friend Daniel de Monfried. Field categorizes these transfer drawings as monotypes, although Gauguin never used this terminology himself. Segalen, Lettres, lxii. Perplexed, Vollard forwarded the pieces to de Monfried, documented in a letter of Sept. 1901. Vollard informed de Monfried that he intended to dispatch to him “about ten printed drawings which have reached me.” Cited in Field, 20, n.38. Segalen, Lettres, 223-25.

2. I would like to thank Dr. Roos and Dr. Mainardi for their helpful insights, especially for pointing out that the identifications don’t have to relate to only one thing regarding these characters.

3. Richard Brettell, “Suite of Transfer Drawings,” The Art of Paul Gauguin, Ed. Richard Brettell, et al. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1988) 449; Merete Bodelsen, “Gauguin Studies,” Burlington Magazine 1109 (April 1967): 221.

4. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes, diss., Hebrew U, 1969 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985) 255-56.

5. The femme fatale theme was popular in Symbolist circles. See Patricia Mathews, Passionate Discontent.

6. Debora Silverman, “Pleasure and Misery: Catholic Sources of Paul Gauguin’s and Pablo Picasso’s Abstraction,” Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies, Visions, ed. Richard Meyer (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003): 217. Silverman has explored Catholicism as a framework from which to examine Gauguin’s artwork, arguing that his religious upbringing greatly influenced his attitudes towards painting.

7. Paul Gauguin, Letters to His Wife and Friends, ed. M. Malingue, 24. For instance, when asked by a friend for advice he replied, “I am not clear myself as to what constitutes virtue and vice.”

8. Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, “Paul Gauguin’s “Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake”: The Artist as Initiate and Magus,” Art Journal (Spring 1987): 22-28.

9. Jirat-Wasiutynski, 22-28.

10. A.J.L. Busst, “The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century,” Romantic Mythologies, Ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967): 4.

11. Stephen Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, 1997, chp. 2.

12. Examples would have been available in the Louvre, the Museum of Man, and at the 1889 World’s Fair.

13. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Gauguin’s Religious Themes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985) 2,8.

14. Busst, 1-95. The androgyne was an enduring sacred symbol known from art, literature, and religions from nearly every culture and age.

15. Gauguin, Noa Noa, trans. O.F. Theis, 20.

16. Cited in Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed: An Interpretation of Gauguin’s Polynesian Symbolism (Ann Arbor, 1983) 52.

17. This priestly role was first suggested by Jirat-Wasiutynski, 22-28.

18. Douglas Oliver, The Polynesian Islands, 142.

19. Bengt Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas (New York, 1966), was the first to dispel many of the myths surrounding Gauguin’s romanticized life in Tahiti.

20. Deborah Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, n.40, p.479.

21. In addition, the reclining nude pose was derived from Greek and Roman river gods, and was later secularized during the Renaissance. Gauguin may have used the pose to allude to both male and female precedents, blurring the line further between the sacred and profane. This idea was pointed out by Therese Dolan.

22. Vance.

23. T. Richard Blurton, Hindu Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993): 9-12. Almost all Indian art is religious (10), while the way the content is clarified to the viewer may differ (11) Hindu sculpture traditionally functioned as objects of veneration (11), while paintings and illustrations were used for story telling and instruction (12). Hindu deities, like Greek gods and goddesses, are content-oriented (and have histories and functions).

24. Blurton, 99. Shiva appears on the right, Parvati on the left.

25. Blurton, 98-99. Parvati often carries a ladle, never weapons. For illustration, see (in Blurton) Goddess Lalita, 11th c. Pala period, basalt, Eastern India. Find also: J Maitra, “The Benighn Devi and the Puranic Tradition,” Shastric Traditions in the Indian Arts, Ed. A.L. Dallapiccola, Stuttgart, 1989.

26. Cesare Ripa, Iconology (English ed., vol. 2) 156.

27. Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, trans. O.F. Theis (New York: Dover Publ., 1985; 1919) 20. This edition of Noa Noa is the first English translation, and was edited from the 1897 (Louvre manuscript, edited by Charles Morice) and 1901 editions (edited by Morice, and published under both authors names without illustrations).

28. Quoted in Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, et al., The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002) 122; Letter to Daniel de Monfried (April 1896); Annie Joly-Segalen ed., Lettres de Paul Gauguin à Georges-Daniel de Monfreid (rev. ed. Paris, 1950; orig. Victor Segalen, 1919) no. XXI.

29. Brettell, 398, reports that Leclercq labeled the painting “Black Olympia” when it was exhibited in Paris in 1898.

30. For illustrations, see Brettell, 399, and Ives and Stein, et al., 123.

31. Heather McPherson, “Manet: Reclining Women of Virtue and Vice,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 6:115 (Jan. 1990): 34.

32. Cited in Eisenman, 172.

33. Cited in Cachin, 210. Strindberg’s letter, along with Gauguin’s response, was reproduced in the exhibition catalogue of the Gauguin sale held at the Hôtel Drouot on Feb. 18, 1895 in Paris.

34. The pose of Gauguin’s figure, while not as stiffened as in Puvis’ early Renaissance style, remains intentionally awkward, recalling Manet’s depiction of Morisot in Repos.

35. See Danielsson; Eisenman.

36. Elizabeth Childs, “Paradise Redux: Gauguin, Photography, and Fin-de-Siècle Tahiti,” The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, ed. Dorothy Kosinski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 139. Childs claimed that Gauguin used photographs to authenticate his vision. Her categorization of a photo in Noa Noa as “Gauguin’s feminized allegory of modern Tahiti” inspired my ideas regarding his use of allegory.

37. McPherson, 36.

38. This is also visible in the relief panel Be In Love and You Will Be Happy, 1890.

39. For example, the Altimira, Spain cave paintings were published in 1880.

40. Douglas Oliver, The Pacific Islands, 11, says that Tahiti had only rodents before human contact.