The Gauguin Dilemma

Acknowledgement of Country This series was produced on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The National Gallery of Australia respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Custodians throughout Australia whose art we care for and to whose lands the National Gallery’s exhibitions and staff travel. We recognise their continuing connections to country and culture and we pay our respects to elders, leaders and artists past and present. The Gallery would also like to celebrate the thousands of years of storytelling and art making of First Nations people throughout the Pacific, Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa.

Sosefina Fuamoli (Host) Sweet. Right, I've just hit record on my end. What immediately comes to mind when I say Paul Gauguin?

Angela Tiatia Argh!

Caroline Vercoe Gauguin has just such a compelling story that often I think Gauguin’s story has become bigger even than he was.

Elizabeth Childs There's over a century of fantasy about the Pacific that's going into the minds of people in France and in Britain by the time of Gauguin. And there's a lot of myths that are handed down. Some of them are about beauty. Some of them are about nature. Some of them are about sexuality and women.

Ashley Remer I have absolutely every confidence in calling him a paedophile. That to me is not a debate. The reputation of dead artists seems to be almost bulletproof, because the art world is very, very good at closing ranks and protecting their investments.

Sosefina Fuamoli Earlier this year, I got a phone call from the National Gallery of Australia. I’ve never had that before. I'm not from the art world. I'm a journalist. But they said that's kind of the point, that it's time for some new perspectives, some Pacific Islander perspectives. They told me they’re putting on an exhibition Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, which loosely translates to 'his true world, his true self'. And they were like, look, there's no hiding from the fact that Gauguin is a problematic guy. But we think a podcast could go deep in a way the exhibition can't. So do you want to make one for us? I had to think about it. I don't love old mate Gauguin – not many Islanders do – but I also don't think ‘cancel culture’ has been very effective. So I went online to see what people are saying about him. And the question everyone is asking is, Can you loathe an artist and still love their art? But then I found this quote from Gauguin himself: 'The art of that man explains that man'. This dilemma actually felt exciting to me, so I agreed to do the podcast and the Gallery connected me with a producer and said, basically, take this story wherever it needs to go. And we ended up going places that none of us expected.

Maria Lewis is a screenwriter and author. She's based in Melbourne these days, but her roots are in Aotearoa New Zealand. She's also a pop culture etymologist. That is, someone who can trace an idea in pop culture back to where it first emerged in history. Let's get into it. What's the very first thought that goes through your head if I was to say the name Paul Gauguin?

Maria Lewis It's a year nine high school musical that we had to perform called A Class Act. And there was a song that ruined my life called Gauguin’s Shoes.

Gauguin's Shoes Were I in Gauguin’s shoes. What would I have to lose? I would embrace the music and even thank her…

Maria Lewis He didn't thank her, though, did he? He knocked her up, left her with a child, and he bounced. It was only a few years later when I was still in high school and doing Senior Art Studies that you start to come across his work. And that was when I started to, like, learn more about his life and begin to understand what his work meant, how beautiful it was, but also how harmful it was. How the complexity of that person could be summed up in a very, like, and one and two and three, show tune, literally a show tune… It's just crazy. There was something about his work, aesthetically, that I always found really interesting, because there was a way that he saw us. There was a way that Pasifika features were represented. We were beautiful

Sosefina Fuamoli Glowing brown bodies on golden beaches, eating tropical fruit that 19th century Parisians had never seen before. Very beautiful, but often very young.

Maria Lewis Just the line 'I would embrace the muse' gives you the ick. Yeah. It really does. You would have been the muse in the context of. This story. You know, how does that make you feel?

Sosefina Fuamoli Not great.

Maria Lewis Not great.

Sosefina Fuamoli I say this now with a bit of hindsight, but when I was a kid and I saw these paintings, or at least the postcard versions my mum had framed around the house, I felt a kind of Pasifika Pride. I know that's kind of a cooked thing to say, but growing up Samoan in Australia in the ‘90s, there just weren't that many people who looked like me. So when you see an image on a postcard – a thing someone paid money for – in my kid brain that's winning.

Well, talking about that, you would have been around the age of some of the girls represented in the work at the time. Do you remember if there was any discussion of him being a bit problematic?

Maria Lewis None. In fact, that is one of the things that I find so interesting. Because the things that were challenging about him as a person and historically are right there on the canvas.

Sosefina Fuamoli And that's the Gauguin dilemma. This isn't like Woody Allen or Harvey Weinstein, whose encounters with women and girls were off screen. Consider Gauguin’s painting “Manao Tupapau”. Lying on a bed naked and frightened is Teha'amana. She's 13. Gauguin said he was trying to represent the Polynesian fear of the Tupapau or “spirit of the dead” which is represented here as an older woman in a black cloak in the background. But Teha'amana is not looking at the spirit. Her eyeline is looking toward where Gauguin would have been standing to paint her. Or maybe she's looking at us looking at her.

Sosefina Fuamoli Do you believe in cancel culture?

Maria Lewis Oh, what a question! I don't think Gauguin would have had a wonderful time on Twitter in the year of our Lord 2024. But! I think the thing that is missing from the phrase ‘cancel culture’ is nuance. And what's important to talk about is the talk. The talk itself is what's critical. My friend always says to his daughter, he goes, 'Are your ears on? Are your ears turned on? Are you listening? Are you doing good listening?' I think that's what's really important.

Sosefina Fuamoli Are your ears turned on? Are you ready to do good listening? My name is Sosefina Fuamoli and this is The Gauguin Dilemma Episode 1: Drawing the Line.

Maria Lewis [sings] And I would embrace the muse!

Sosefina Fuamoli No.

Maria Lewis Dude, it's catchy!

Marcus Costello When you're at a dinner party and you mention that you're a Gauguin expert, what kind of reaction do you get?

Maria Lewis That's my producer, Marcus. He did a couple of the interviews for this series. He's speaking with Dr Elizabeth Childs. She's a professor of Art History at Washington University.

Elizabeth Childs Well, I will say through the years, the question I've been asked the most often, is simply Didn't he leave his wife?

Sosefina Fuamoli In 1891, age 43, Gauguin set off from Europe to the island of Tahiti in French Polynesia. He actually moved away from his wife and their five kids six years before that.

Elizabeth Childs But what's interesting is they chose not to divorce. And I think sometimes we forget that a spouse leaving a wife and kids behind to go off and pursue a professional goal was a very common 19th century working class practice. And so I think it's wrong to sort of read it through the lens of the nuclear family of the 1950s. It was a structure that was deeply common among those who weren't wealthy and were often, you know, for better or worse, going off to the colonies to make their way.

Sosefina Fuamoli This is a diary entry by Gauguin just before he set sail to Tahiti. 'The reason why I am leaving is that I wish to live in peace and to avoid being influenced by our civilisation. I only desire to create a simple art. In order to achieve this, it is necessary for me to steep myself in virgin nature, to see no one but savages. To share their life and render, just as children would do, the images of my own brain using exclusively the means offered by primitive art, which are the only true and valid ones.'

Marcus Costello I imagine after a few more questions, people want to know about his philandering and his exploits with younger women. Or let's say it as it is: with girls.

Elizabeth Childs I will resist the choice of the word girls because I think that is a contemporary reading, and he clarifies that his first partner in Tahiti, Teha'amana, was 13. Now that's shocking to contemporary ears, but there's several contexts for that, which include that in France, 13 was the age of sexual consent in the Islands it was also an age at which commonly young people left their families and lived in partnerships, kind of trial marriages for a while. This was common among the teenagers of the time he was in Tahiti. And there's also the reality that women themselves often chose to marry very – what we consider to be – very young today. And a really good example of that is the Queen of Tahiti Queen Marau, she married at the age of 15 and she was the Queen! And I was just in England and went back through Henry the VIII’s marriages and in those days the marriages were young, too. To some extent, these young girls were supported in their partnerships with visiting colonial men because they offered opportunities; opportunities for securing wealth and partnership. So it seems to have been a matter of consensus.

Sosefina Fuamoli Here's something that surprised me. It wasn't until 2021 that French law was amended so that any sexual activity with a person below 15 is automatically classified as sexual assault. There is an exception known as a Romeo and Juliet clause if the two people are within five years of age.

Elizabeth Childs The part that would have deeply offended Tahitians of that moment was not so much the age difference, but the fact he was married. And my own experiences in Tahiti is people would ask about that with the biggest anger being: did he support the kids? Because there's a great belief in a village supporting a child to adulthood. So it gets to that thorny question of Are you going to damn the artist for their personal life? Now, we can pretend it didn't happen, or we can try and separate out the personal life from the art. And I do think we need to point out that there are many, many figures in the art historical canon who live some pretty tacky lives. And I don't hear people having as big a problem with Monet bringing his mistress into the house while his wife is dying of cancer, and having them both under the same roof for months. Or Caravaggio, the known murderer! Have we taken his work out of the galleries? I think the fundamental question is, Are you going to align the life and the work and say that one has to be admirable for the other to even begin to be addressed?

Marcus Costello Can I ask you that question?

Elizabeth Childs Of course, of course. What question do you want to ask? Where do I draw the line?

Marcus Costello Yeah.

Elizabeth Childs I don't think hiding the work is the solution. I can say it's important to think broadly and deeply and to not avoid the difficult parts. I don't think we should be afraid of art, and I don't think we should silence it. But with that comes an obligation to take the time to learn a little bit, and to put it in a context that is responsible. And the stories of art and censorship, or art and difficult pieces, go back to the very beginnings of our records of how art has worked in society. And if we don't take advantage of those moments to reflect on how and why art was made then we're missing a chance to grow and to think.

Sosefina Fuamoli When Gauguin arrived in Tahiti, what he saw was not what he had read about in his heroes’ travel diaries. Gauguin was an atheist. But by the time he arrived in Tahiti, Christianity had swept through the Islands. British missionaries had tried to ban making traditional clothes and speaking the traditional Tahitian language.

Elizabeth Childs So even as much as Gauguin is headed out to the islands, he is not painting for the Islanders. And make no mistake about it: he's interested in what people are thinking back in Paris, in the galleries, in the journals. And he's constantly sending his work back.

Marcus Costello To what extent was he painting from his mind's eye? And to what extent was he painting from what was actually in front of him?

Elizabeth Childs So this isn't about documenting Tahiti. He gets a few books that tell him things. He tells us that he learns some things in some language, from his Tahitian friends. That's not the same as an anthropologist of the time going out and trying to document things. For him, it was about symbolism, expression, and individuality.

Sosefina Fuamoli Symbolism, expression and individuality. So Gauguin painted the vision of paradise he set out to find. And it looked like nothing the world had ever seen.

Marcus Costello Can you remember what it felt like when you first stood in front of a Gauguin?

Elizabeth Childs I think if you go to a lot of art museums and you go into the Renaissance or Early Modern galleries, you're used to a kind of painting that is magnificently beautiful, but highly representational and highly embedded in Western religions and history. And when I saw Gauguin, the colours, the subjects, even the scale, it's like Impressionism on steroids! You know, there's things about it that look familiar, but that are very intensely exaggerated for impact. A couple of strokes next to each other could be read as a tree or a plant, but then he'll change the colour. So you don't expect the ground to be red and the ground's red! And what's that all about? Or you expect a shadow to be in grey or a different colour of green, but it's in the opposite colour. So Gauguin takes those colours and heightens the key and puts them right next to each other and suddenly they vibrate.

Sosefina Fuamoli He wanted to move you with colour. He wanted to make you feel, not just think.

Elizabeth Childs So there's something about the work that's, you know, both familiar and a little irritating, a little resistant. And it's that edge between the things you think you know, and then you're looking more closely and you realise there's something unfamiliar about it. And I think he was most interested in the kind of impact he would have with artists like Degas. Degas came to one of his shows and he was beside himself with excitement and even handed him a carved walking stick as he went out the door. He really wanted to impress that circle.

Sosefina Fuamoli That circle was the centre of the art world and this moment in history, Modernism, was the birth of the artist as we know it.

Elizabeth Childs Because you hit 19th century France, there's no more king. And by the late 19th century, the Church is under attack and a market system, a gallery system, emerges.

Sosefina Fuamoli Before this, artists were told what to paint by the Church or the king, or a handful of extremely rich people.

Elizabeth Childs It was also a time of dealing in temperaments, right? Dealing in persona, dealing in character. So starting in the 1850s, galleries would start promoting artists not just on the basis of what they painted, but who they were, where they went, what they did, and something that would set you apart was really key for marketing your work.

Sosefina Fuamoli Gauguin was like the original influencer, and sailing to Tahiti was like hitting the road for #Vanlife #authentic #savage. In response to a major Gauguin exhibition back in 2010 at the Tate Modern, The Guardian's culture editor, Charlotte Higgins, wrote 'He was a fabulist and a shameless manipulator of the truth, as well as a canny self-publicist, a sort of self-conscious user of shock tactics that we might associate with a modern generation of artists.'

Elizabeth Childs Oof! To say he's a fabulist to me says he uses his imagination. That's no crime. A manipulator of the truth. Why does an artist have to be truthful to what they see? And what does it mean to be truthful? Are you being truthful to your sensations or to what the eyes saw? And that's one of the great debates about Modern art, which starts by giving the artist that flexibility and that mandate to work away from the visual world and in a world of ideas, perceptions and expression. So yeah, that's probably all true, and I don't see that as a problem.

I don't think we're done with Gauguin and I don't think the recent debates are going to make the work seem less interesting or less important to talk about. We need to think more about the voices we don't have, but that's the missing part, as it is with so many stories about art produced under colonialism.

Sosefina Fuamoli As British writer Afua Hirsch says, 'If history is written by the victor, then art throughout the history of modern European traditions has been commissioned by the oppressor.'

Elizabeth Childs The Tahitian histories of the late 19th century are not written down in the same way that the colonial authorities are, so using a fancy word is Critical Fabulation, which is using a way to try and imagine some of those conversations, some of those situations using what we do know, which allows us to sort of fill out the story. It could be a fictional novel of the women, you know, the voices of the women he lived with. It could be a story trying to understand more...

Sosefina Fuamoli I mentioned this to Maria, our pop culture etymologist and survivor of Gauguin’s Shoes.

Maria Lewis Love that as an idea. Critical fabulation sounds like an amazing RuPaul’s Drag Race challenge. Like, I would love to see it, but it's also just about occupying space. Like, who gets to tell stories, period? And who gets to tell stories about us? It’s so rarely us.

Sosefina Fuamoli So there's this AI song generator that came online recently. Basically, you give it a text prompt and it writes you a song. So, I asked it to write me a show tune about Paul Gauguin. I said it has to reference his controversial legacy, and it has to include the perspective of a Tahitian woman. So here it is, one verse and the chorus from an original show tune by yours truly. Maria, this one goes out to you.

AI Generated Song Tahitian Beauty Tahiti’s beauty, you dance beneath his brush. He captured sunlight and the ocean's endless blue. But as the canvas spoke, whispers turned to hush, unveiling a story that left many feeling used. Gauguin! Gauguin! Your art seduced and inspired, yet controversy lingers in the tropical breeze. The colours you paint, a passion that never tired, but the truth behind your brush stroke it's hard to appease.

Sosefina Fuamoli Ashley Remer is not appeased.

Ashley Remer When I found out that the National Gallery was doing this exhibition, I was shocked. By doing the exhibition in the first place you are saying We are celebrating this person. There's no way around that celebration.

Sosefina Fuamoli We came across Ashley in a New York Times article with the headline Is it time Gauguin got cancelled? In it, there's a quote from her that says 'Gauguin was an arrogant, overrated, patronising paedophile. If his paintings were photographs, they would be way more scandalous and we wouldn't have been accepting of the images.'

Ashley Remer I got quite a bit of, I’ll say, feedback from people, and a lot of it was in French.

Sosefina Fuamoli But it hasn't stopped her from speaking out.

Ashley Remer Paul Gauguin is possibly not worthy of the enormous amount of resource that goes into making these major exhibitions. I feel like he's one of the most prominent, important artists that we twist ourselves around to justify his place in the canon, and we are semi silenced in our professional world to focus more on the art rather than the artist.

Sosefina Fuamoli Ashley is the head curator of an online exhibition space called Girl Museum.

Ashley Remer I always tell the anecdote that when I first started the museum and went to a huge museums conference in America, everyone thought I was saying 'grill'. A grill museum. And they were more excited that I was going to be looking at barbecues than when I corrected them to say no, no 'girl'. Girls are the most marginalised group of any group in the world. So if you think of a category, the girl of that category is worse off than anyone else in the world.

Sosefina Fuamoli Ashley went to university in the ‘90s. Back then, the conversation about Gauguin as a problematic figure was in motion. But for Ashley at an undergrad level, the conversation was still mostly about how Gauguin used colour.

Ashley Remer In the ‘90s, I was taught These are all just lines and colours. You could be taught an entire painting without actually talking about the girl in it, you know? So there are ways to think about art to where there is no content. That's just not the way that I think about art. In the art history legacy we have things that have been normalised that are really problematic. In fact, in the Renaissance, it was absolutely normal to find the prettiest girl that you loved and use her face on all kinds of bodies, you know, perfect bodies that she never sat for or consented to. You know, a nude representation with her face on it. The one I'm thinking of right now is Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

Sosefina Fuamoli You know this image: a naked woman in a clamshell, auburn hair blowing in the wind, angels buzzing around.

Ashley Remer Her face is hers. The body is an amalgamation of other people's bodies. She was 19 years old, I believe, when she died. And this painting was done a year or two after this fact and she can't do anything about it because she's dead. That has happened throughout art history. This is common practice. In fact, we love it and we celebrate it and we make placemats out of it and we make posters out of it. And it's everywhere, all over the world. And we're dealing with it now in its new kind of digital reality.

Sosefina Fuamoli That digital reality is photoshopped images of models. It's AI generated naked photos of Taylor Swift. It's revenge porn. It's a school photographer taking it upon himself to remove a birthmark from a fifth grader’s school portrait. And then that little girl looking at her corrected face and asking her mum, why did they do that?

Ashley Remer And so to the point of how can we address his legacy constructively? It has to be done incredibly transparently. I am not an advocate for censorship. I am an advocate for careful, considered, and thoughtful curation. And I think it helps people to understand that if they have a little pit in their stomach when they see a nude 12-year-old girl, that that's okay, you should feel funny to see this thing. It's not wrong. It's not wrong to have that response.

Sosefina Fuamoli Strangely, I think Gauguin would agree. A feeling in your stomach is real. In 1976, American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe took a photo. The portrait, titled Rosie depicts a three-year-old girl. She's sitting on a park bench wearing a dress but no underwear. Her leg is bent at the knee and we can see right up between her legs. The artwork is widely interpreted as a comment on the innocence of childhood. It's a kind of challenge to the viewer. How does that make you feel? Do you find it pornographic? And if so, what does that say about you? Rosie, who is now in her 40s, defends the photograph’s artistic value. She says it was taken with her mother's consent. The photo is on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Asked if all of Gauguin’s paintings that depict naked girls should be removed from public display, Ashley says:

Ashley Remer My honest response is yes, but the problem with that is that's the work people want to see.

Sosefina Fuamoli Ashley doesn't agree with censorship, but there is a point where she does draw a hard line: “Manao tupapau”. The painting of the 13-year-old girl on the bed.

Ashley Remer I don't think that one should be shown. She was the first child bride that he had in Tahiti. First of three. She had a child by him. And that's a whole conversation about what makes a girl. If you're married, if you've had a kid, if you, you know, all these things, you can still be a kid! You're not automatically a grown up because certain things have happened to you.

Sosefina Fuamoli What if there wasn't a frightened girl on a bed in front of him? We know Gauguin had a photograph of Manet's famous painting Olympia. Olympia and Manao tupapau are strikingly similar. When Olympia was put on display, it was a scandal. Not because there's a naked woman, but because the naked woman is covering her vagina with one hand and looking directly at the viewer. Up until this point in history, the naked woman in art had never acknowledged that she's being looked at. She was always looking off into the distance. Olympia was a sex worker. The audience knew this by the little choker she wore on her neck. And here she is, looking directly at the viewer, confronting the male gaze.

Ashley Remer If you look at the painting and go, oh, he imagined that! That's an imagined thing! It's still perverse. It's still problematic. These are character traits that are imbued in the work. You know, you can look at his landscapes and not really get the sort of domestic-abuser-alcoholic, but you look at that work and you get that something very bad is happening with this child. There's plenty of work that isn't problematic. Symbolism and colourism and all the things that are historically why people say Gauguin needs to be valued: there are better and less difficult examples.

Sosefina Fuamoli Yes, talking about colourism and symbolism is less difficult, but that kind of takes us back to the ‘90s when everything was just colours and lines. If we don't see the naked girls, we don't get to question Gauguin's motives.

Ashley Remer So I'm not saying don't necessarily show the works, but it has to be done in such a careful way that, we have to consider that children are coming to see these artworks and potentially there could be children who that is happening to them now. Is that then a learning moment where they can go, oh, teacher, this happened to me. Are museums trained to deal with trauma counselling or museums prepared for that?

Sosefina Fuamoli My name is Sosefina Fuamoli and this has been an Audiocraft production for the National Gallery of Australia. The producer for this series is Marcus Costello. The associate producer is Olivia O'Flynn. The Gallery's Principal Content Strategist and Head of Digital is Marika Lucas-Edwards.

Sosefina Fuamoli Ro, how do you personally feel when you're standing in front of the Gauguin painting?

Rosanna Raymond I have actually stood in front of a Gauguin painting with my friend Dan Taulapapa McMullin, completely dressed up in flora and fauna in The Met because it's essentially how Gauguin saw us. Like, they love it when we’re covered in flowers and look happy. They don't like it so much when, you know, we’re sort of 'Angry Islanders'. They just like happy ones covered in flowers. So, we actually completely covered ourselves with flowers. You couldn’t see our faces or anything. It was great fun.

Sosefina Fuamoli This is artist, activist and the National Gallery's Adjunct Senior Curator for Special Projects, Rosanna Raymond.

So, when you say to people that you're working on a Paul Gauguin exhibition and they say, Isn't he a bit problematic? Like, what's your response? What do you say?

Rosanna Raymond Oh my goodness, am I going to get cancelled because I'm in the same building as Gauguin?

Sosefina Fuamoli Rosanna is actually curating an exhibition alongside Gauguin’s World. It's called the SaVage Klub, and all the work will be by Pasifika artists.

Rosanna Raymond Everyone’s like Oh is it a counter-narrative? And I was like, no, it is not a counter-narrative. We are the narrative. We have a lived experience of the Pacific now, not a couple of hundred years ago – now!

Sosefina Fuamoli My name is Sosefina Faumoli, and this is episode two of The Gauguin Dilemma The Art of the Deal.

Ro, when I say Paul Gauguin, let's get into it, what immediately comes to mind?

Rosanna Raymond Eww! is basically what comes to mind! Eww, like. I can't even say what is it 'syphilitic'? Like, I just imagined all this oozing gooey pulsating, like, kind of like, you know, like….. eww!

And I also think of a man who takes up way too much space in the Moana. I think the way that we can actually put the Pacific experience in the centre is by ensuring that these large-scale institutions are actually showing and collecting the lived experience and art practice of Pacific Island artists today. So, you know, if they spent as much money as they did on that Gauguin show on living artists, then they would be actively engaging in helping a whole new art movement. You know, and in another 200 years, you know, we'll be talking about all this incredible, you know, this incredible change. And, you know, how does it happen? It needs to be supported.

Sosefina Fuamoli Ro likes to rip into Gauguin. That's her shtick. And I kind of respect it. But I also want to know what she really thinks about him.

So, what does his work say about him?

Rosanna Raymond He's colourful. He likes pink. He's haunted. He's obsessive. He sits in the dark. There's a lot of ghosts. I mean, I suppose in a way you can see that he's walking in between a few worlds. And on that level, some of the perception and the way that he painted it was extraordinary. And, and I think that's why you do really get sucked into the beauty of what he puts in front of you.

Marcus Costello So why are we still talking about him?

Caroline Vercoe Gauguin has just such a compelling story that I actually feel like Gauguin’s story has even become bigger than he is.

Sosefina Fuamoli This is Dr Caroline Vercoe. She's an associate professor in art history at Auckland University.

Caroline Vercoe My mum is Samoan. She doesn't really know anything about art history, but she knows Gauguin is a bad man!

Sosefina Fuamoli Back in 2010, Caroline was asked to write a catalogue essay for a big Gauguin exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. Like every Saturday morning, she was with her sisters at her mom's house. She's sitting at the kitchen table working on this essay when her mom looks over her shoulder and asks, what are you writing about?

Caroline Vercoe I said, Oh that’s Gauguin. And she’s like, oh no, you can't write about him! And that made me curious. So I think that we are still talking about him because he is instantly recognisable to a range of different people for a range of different reasons.

Marcus Costello How did that conversation play out?

Caroline Vercoe Oh, I actually agreed with her! I actually agreed with her. Why would someone like me want to do this? But I think my own position around this was that, you know, as an art historian, you often see patterns in visual culture and I think that the more that we can revisit issues that are really pertinent today, like the exploitation of young people, toxic masculinity, the myth of the great artist, I think that for me is a really compelling reason of why I'm interested in continuing to explore this legacy.

I think he was very, very invested in his place in art history and his discourse. And he wrote about this; that his legacy to his children would be his artistic fame. He gave interviews with journalists where he said, I'm going to live with the 'primitive people'. You know, I’m going to 'delink from civilisation' and go off to the Pacific. But then, of course, he gets there and it's a figment of his imagination. So, he sought to represent what he wanted.

Gauguin was the beneficiary of male privilege. He wasn't necessarily wealthy in relation to his Western counterparts, but he was certainly privileged in relation to that society. And I think that he didn't have to adhere to rules that he thought were constraining in Europe or the West.

Sosefina Fuamoli Gauguin did a lot of writing. Noa Noa is his most famous work. It's a kind of travel-diary-fantasy hybrid. Just recently, the last thing he ever wrote Avent et Apres or Before and After was released for public display. He does not hold back in this manuscript. He lets rip on the unchecked power of the Church in Tahiti, and writes about priests and judges who exploit young girls. But it's not always clear if he's actually condemning them.

Caroline Vercoe He also says he's talking about the colour of the brown women that he was painting, that they have this 'golden tone'. And he says, you know, 'for many this would be seen as ugly, but you can have them for next to nothing'. And this can still happen today: seeing the Pacific as this kind of other, you know, as somewhere far away and exotic. He's part of an ongoing practice of Western men going into non-Western places and exploiting young people. Why can't we just say that? No one's going to pass out?

Ashley Remer Gauguin was like the original art bad boy and he constructed himself that way. He mythologised himself that way, and that legacy carries on. I have an anecdote about a research trip that I took to Tahiti, and I met French men who were there specifically, as they said to me, to live like Gauguin. But they were not artists. You know, they were there looking for young girls.

Rosanna Raymond It didn't start with Gauguin. I think a lot of people think that that gaze started with Gauguin. It started in 1768 when Bougainville came to Tahiti and they brought back tales of these 'sexually available beautiful women'. And then Captain Cook read Bougainville’s notes. His crew were filled with those stories. So, you know, you get like a over a century of this myth building before Gauguin got there. I guarantee you Gauguin had read those books.

Sosefina Fuamoli The diaries of Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville aren’t still luring sex tourists. Today, the internet does a much better job. Sex tourism in the Pacific is rife.

Elizabeth Childs Well, one of the first things about Gauguin that interested me is that this whole story could have been swallowed up and not have left the Islands. And that had everything to do with a very powerful dealer by the name of Ambrose Vollard.

Sosefina Fuamoli Ambrose Vollard was the kingmaker of French art. He plucked artists out of relative obscurity, made them a name and made serious coin. Cezanne. Renoir. Manet. Degas. Van Gogh. Picasso.

Elizabeth Childs So Vollard starts paying Gauguin a stipend so he can live, because otherwise Gauguin probably would have come back. And it's important to say Gauguin was planning to come back before he got sick. He was going to go back to Spain. But Vollard was paying him money. And he's paying him to send back paintings, but he's not paying very much for them. I think the limit was 200 francs a painting, which was not very much.

Sosefina Fuamoli Gauguin sends his paintings to a few friends, but the lion's share goes to Vollard. All the while, Vollard is stockpiling the paintings until he has enough for a show. Then in 1898, invitations go out to all the right people. The strategy isn't to sell everything. Not yet. This moment is about buzz.

Elizabeth Childs And then Gauguin dies. And Vollard has a stock.

Sosefina Fuamoli Paintings, prints, wood carvings, ceramics. But he sits on it.

Elizabeth Childs And a few of Gauguin’s friends really start to promote him right after his death.

Sosefina Fuamoli Vollard and Gauguin’s friends' campaign to get Gauguin’s work into French museums. And then it happens. The French government puts on a huge exhibition at the Salon d'Automne in 1906. They want to show off what's happening over in the colony.

Elizabeth Childs And that really clinches it. Vollard is selling, I think it's several hundred paintings, and they're going worldwide. So, it comes down to artists, dealers and critics agreeing internationally that this work is of interest. So, it all could have ended very differently.

Sosefina Fuamoli This story came up again at the end of last year. Rosanna travelled to Tahiti. She was there to connect with local artists for the Savage Club, the exhibition she's curating. One of those artists was Tahiti. Putting into Rosanna recorded a conversation they had when they were on the road.

Rosanna Raymond You know, when he first came out of Papeete, he basically spent all his money and he thought he was going to 'go native' and stop fishing. But he didn't have the skills and he was starving. And it was those Tahitian families that looked after him. And, you know, he wrote about that in his diary, you know, how pathetic he was feeling. And because these 'savages' were the ones that were able to provide for. I mean, he died alone, addicted to morphine, alcoholic and, you know, riddled with disease. He was blind, you know, and now all the rich people can buy it for millions. And they all sit there comparing how many Gauguin’s they have in their institutions. And yet the man himself, you know, died basically alone and unattended to. I think he wanted to go back home. And the dealer said, nobody will be interested in you if you come back home. The interest in you is because you're this guy living this really exotic life and sending these, these …

Tahiarii Pariente Colourful …

Rosanna Raymond Yeah, colourful. And you know, igniting people's imagination. But like, don't burst the bubble by coming back and being human! And I find that, I find it so sad.

Tahiarii Pariente I think also it's quite sad, but it does illustrate the fact that in the Western world, it's a story about money making. And if anybody looked after anybody, it's our people who looked after Gauguin and gave him a place, gave him land, gave him a house, women, food, and inspiration and everything and at the same time, his own people were just about squeezing as much as they could out of him until he died dry under the sun.

Sosefina Fuamoli I wanted to know what other conversations Rosanna had when she was over there. Like, what does the average Tahitian person say when you mention Gauguin?

Rosanna Raymond Yeah, no, I remember the first time I went to Tahiti, and I was really surprised at how many of my Tahitian friends had Gauguin in the house. I was like, Oh, like, oh my God, like we cancelled him like in the ‘80s, like what's what's going on? But then I was just like, oh, is this me sort of like judging through, you know, well, much more political sort of kind of eyes? But then I was also sitting there going, oh, has he just wheedled his way into the centre of even how the Tahitians look at themselves? So when I did ask people that question, “Oh, by the way, what do you think about Gauguin?” What I did notice is they would give me about a sentence, and then they'd just drift off into another conversation and I did not push. Polynesians, you've always got to watch what's not said rather than what's said, actually. So it's a really big clue that, you know, it's a cultural nuance. And unless you know, then you don't know.

Sosefina Fuamoli Okay, so help me make sense of this. You said that it's not part of the natural conversation. And yet you also mention that every other person has a Gauguin picture in their house.

Rosanna Raymond I know, right? It's like, how do you figure that out?

Tahiarii Pariente Hello?

Sosefina Fuamoli Hello? Can you hear us?

Tahiarii Pariente Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sosefina Fuamoli Amazing.

I asked Tahi, why is it that Gauguin’s prints are in everyone's homes, but Polynesians don't like to talk about him?

Tahiarii Pariente Well, we see Gauguin’s presence in memorabilia. Like, his paintings are used, you know, on lighters, on t shirts, on, on, beach towels on mugs, cheap stuff. Which is pretty funny because it's, it's the reverse colonisation process. People will buy themself a $2 memorabilia with a Gauguin print on it, but they don't even know sometimes who actually painted it originally. If you want to see Gauguin, you go to France at the Louvre or other museums. We don't even have a Gauguin here, a real one.

Sosefina Fuamoli The chat I had with Tahi went places I wasn't expecting and you'll hear about that in the last episode, but I want to play one more bit from it now, because it's about that conversation he had with Rosanna in the car.

Tahiarii Pariente Basically comes back to fame. And that really fame is something that does not necessarily benefit to the person who's the source of the fame and that, you have to look out for your own self because you can very, very fast become the tool for others.

Sosefina Fuamoli So when I was approached to host this series, my position on Gauguin was Look, he’s a problematic guy, so let's hash it out. What I didn't expect was to learn he was a pawn in someone else's game and kind of end up feeling conflicted. Even now, I'm not sure if that's quite how I feel. So I was chatting about this with my producer, and he mentioned this moment he had in his interview with Caroline Vercoe when he asked, can you love the work but loathe the man?

Caroline Vercoe Well, to me, I still think that's a bit of a binary because you don't have to either love or loathe it, you know. I think ambivalence is… I think it's important. I actually wrote my whole PhD thesis on American performance art with the artists took on racist and sexist stereotypes.

Sosefina Fuamoli I looked up the work Caroline references in her PhD. It's pretty full on. It's called Couple In A Cage, and it's literally two people in a cage on public display. They sew voodoo dolls and recite made up stories in a made-up language for gold coin donations. And if they need to go to the toilet, a guard escorts them on a leash.

Caroline Vercoe And people really loved them or hated them. But I was arguing or trying to argue that ambivalence – feeling conflicted about something through an artistic experience – is a very valid and, in fact, important way of experiencing art. They want people to get out of their comfort zone. They want you to feel uncomfortable, if only for a moment, because that is probably the experience of other people every day. You know, by being looked at a certain way, by not having a binary gender identity or, you know, being able bodied, do you know what I mean? And I think that, yeah, I'm quite happy feeling ambivalent and conflicted about something. And that is valid and okay with me.

Marcus Costello You sound like someone whose life work is devoted to the in-between space.

Caroline Vercoe Yeah, yeah, that is true. That's true. Yeah. It intrigues me that people think that they can even see art from an uncomplicated place in the first place, you know? Like I was asked in an interview a couple of years ago, oh, don't you think it's problematic that now whenever we have a Gauguin show that they have to curate it in a certain way? It's like, can you not see that all the Gauguin shows in the past have been curated in a certain way? Did you really think that that was a normal and natural way to think about his practice? I don't think you can look at any art from an uncomplicated position, but I certainly think everybody looks at art in different ways and brings their own perspectives to it.

Sosefina Fuamoli Shirley Hazzard was an Australian writer. And there's this quote from her that I think works well here. She says 'It is always tempting to impose one's view rather than to undergo the submission required by art. A submission akin to that of generosity or love.' I think that's a good place to leave things for now.

My name is Sosefina Fuamoli and this has been an Audiocraft production for the National Gallery of Australia. The producer for this series is Marcus Costello. The associate producer is Olivia O'Flynn. The gallery's Principal Content Strategist and Head of Digital is Marika Lucas-Edwards.

Content Note Just a heads up. This episode has a reference to violence against women around the 23-minute mark.

Sosefina Fuamoli Angela, what immediately comes to mind when I say Paul Gauguin?

Angela Tiatia As a painter, quite skilled. Like, I really admire his painting style, but a paedophile, I just, I just can't, I just can't. I think I couldn't have a Gauguin painting in my home, and if I was a gallery owner, I couldn't have a Gauguin painting in my gallery. But I'm not so sure that others would feel the same. Yeah.

Sosefina Fuamoli Have you loved work by an artist only to find out that they have a problematic history?

Angela Tiatia No one comes to mind. Yeah. No one comes to mind.

Sosefina Fuamoli That's… that's good!

Angela Tiatia And I think it's because I really admire female artists!

Sosefina Fuamoli My name is Sosefina Fuamoli and this is The Gauguin Dilemma, Episode 3: Guys like Gauguin.

Angela Tiatia Yeah, I had that full out-of-body experience, too, and then it just made me appreciate…

Sosefina Fuamoli As soon as Angela Tiatia’s face came up on this video call, the first thing we spoke about was our Malu: the tattoos that run all the way around our thighs and down the back of our knees. My first session back in 2016 was 10 hours of meditation and pain, soundtracked by the rhythmic tapping of the ‘au, the traditional instrument used to tattoo the hundreds of dashes and intersecting fine lines representing femininity, protection and wisdom. I also have a taulima. It starts at the tips of my fingers and runs up my arms, across my chest and down my legs. My plan is, in time, for my Malu to continue its journey all over my body.

Angela grew up Mormon. Her mum was a solo parent and worked from a little garment factory she set up in the garage at home. When Angela was little, she said to her mum that she wanted to be an artist, but her mum didn't love the idea.

Angela Tiatia She didn't want me to follow in her footsteps. That was her biggest fear; that I would end up being a factory worker as well. So she really pushed me to go to university and to get a business degree. And her idea of success for me was, 'I'd really love for you to wear the high heels and the mini skirt to be the office', you know, 'Don't do what I do!' And so that was her vision of success for me. And I did end up fulfilling that dream of wearing high heels in mini skirts, but not in the same content. So I became a fashion model.

Sosefina Fuamoli And by the way, she also got that business degree.

Angela Tiatia One of the jobs that I had early in my modelling career was being cast on a Kevin Costner film.

Theatrical Trailer for Rapa Nui Three hundred years ago, Easter Island had a different name. They called it Rapa Nui.

Angela Tiatia So there was this class divide where there were light skinned Rapanuians and then dark skinned Rapanuians. And so, there's red flags all over that already! And even as I was in front of the camera and I was half nude, I had my boobs out and I was barely clothed, and I had the long, dusky maiden hair and I was told to stay out of the sun because they needed my skin to be pale, I intuitively felt that there was something wrong with it. But I was also being paid. So there was a weird dynamic, but I didn't know quite what it was. It had an impact. I came back from Rapa Nui quite changed.

Sosefina Fuamoli This new sense of unease followed Angela as she moved through the entertainment industry.

Angela Tiatia I just felt that whole entire time just so powerless, so voiceless, like a commodity. And so me becoming an artist was the chance for me to claim some of that power back. My first day at school was also my son's first day at primary school. So I remember that day so clearly of dropping him off and then also being really optimistic about my future as well.

Sosefina Fuamoli These days, Angela mostly makes videos, but her first exhibition was a collection of curious objects.

Angela Tiatia In the early ‘90s was when Polynesian Barbie first came out.

Sosefina Fuamoli This is also the time that eBay came online.

Angela Tiatia And so when I was on eBay, I would notice that each object would have like a tag, like hula girl, or breasted maiden, savage virgin, you know, really derogatory terms like that. And so, what became really powerful in that exhibition was that you could see the women were highly sexualised in that they were passive, they were voiceless, and that the men were presented as these savage beasts. She described herself on the back of the box, so she was describing herself as 'Hi, I'm Polynesian Barbie and I live in a village and we eat coconuts all day!' Like this ridiculous narrative that wasn't true. And so, we are presented as this one-dimensional being, like we're not seen as a full human.

Sosefina Fuamoli This was the ‘90s and women can have it all. Other Barbies got mobile phones and careers, while the Pacific Island Barbie was stuck in a time warp.

If you think back over your career as an artist, is there a theme that emerges across all of your work?

Angela Tiatia I think what I'm trying to understand is Who are those in power? Who are those not in power? And what does that force of power or powerlessness; how does it impact the individual or the community?

Sosefina Fuamoli She calls this the 'invisible systemic hand'. Like a puppeteer, the white man's hand reaches out from history and controls the present.

Angela Tiatia So some of the misperceptions that I try to unpack in my work regarding the Pacific is the idea of this 'tropical Paradise', this 'Garden of Eden'. It's abundant, it's pulsating. It's sensual, it's sexual. It's it's it's… there for the taking!

Sosefina Fuamoli So, in World War II, the Pacific Islands became a key military base for the US. The US military is actually still there, and so is a massive nuclear waste dump that could explode as sea levels rise. It's in the Marshall Islands. You should actually look it up. It's terrifying. Anyway, during World War II, US troops stationed throughout the Pacific would sleep with local women and they would get into fights over which women were 'taken'.

Angela Tiatia So one of the ways to combat that was that the woman started wearing these hibiscus flowers behind the ear that would signify whether they were 'taken or not taken'. And then, over time, became seen as traditional. And so, as a young woman, I had always resisted that gesture to signify my availability with the flower.

Sosefina Fuamoli Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis was Angela's first video work. It opens in lush tropical greenery. The camera slowly tracks Angela's bare arm, and we catch sight of a bright red hibiscus flower. Only when she turns her head we realise the flower isn't tucked behind her ear. She's holding it between her teeth. Then, slowly, holding eye contact and without blinking, she pulls the flower into her mouth and eats it.

Sosefina Fuamoli So I'd love for you to introduce yourself in whatever way that works best for you, if you can.

Selina Tusitala Marsh [Selina expresses a traditional welcome]

Sosefina Fuamoli Selina’s middle name Tusitala comes from her Tuvaluan grandfather and literally means 'Teller of Tales' and scrawled across the homepage of her website it says 'Tell your tale or someone else will… or won't.'

Selina Tusitala Marsh I'm a professor of literature based at the University of Auckland and all-round-good-time girl when it comes to poetry and decolonising spaces and places!

Sosefina Fuamoli I love that.

Selena can remember the first time she came face to face with a Gauguin painting. She was in Hawaii at the Honolulu Academy of Art.

Selina Tusitala Marsh And it was kind of down a corridor that was off the main room and almost forgotten. And I turned the corner and I saw the painting and I experienced both this kind of Eww, yuck, horror, it's a Gauguin to. Oh my God. Look at the texture. Look at those recognisable bodies. Like, what's happening here? And I connected to her and I didn't want to like her. But I fell in love with her contours, her colours, her shades, her hues, her textures.

Sosefina Fuamoli And so Two Nudes on a Tahitian Beach 1894 was born.

Selina Tusitala Marsh So I wrote that poem to describe that feeling of Okay, I see you Gauguin. I see the context you've come from and this painting doesn't belong to you anymore.

Sosefina Fuamoli Years later, Selina saw her poem referenced in a New York Times opinion piece.

Selina Tusitala Marsh And when that came back to me I was furious.

Sosefina Fuamoli The writer wanted Gauguin’s paintings removed from The Met's collection.

Selina Tusitala Marsh I'm like, this poem is not about censorship. This poem is not about removing colonial artists. It is about helping to create pathways for the general viewer to understand his politics of the time. It is not about taking the art away, otherwise the poem itself wouldn't exist. For me, it's about finding what resonates within me. What is pono? What Hawaiians call pono, that is: upright and a place of integrity.

Sosefina Fuamoli In the Hawaiian language, if a person is living pono, it means that they have struck the right balance in their relationships with other things, places and people in their lives.

Selina Tusitala Marsh My thing is to not let it get binary, not let it get oversimplified. Because we are human and he was human, and there's no way we can know all of him. It's okay to be pissed off and in love at the same time. Talk to any couple.

Sosefina Fuamoli Yes! Absolutely! Absolutely. There are lots of people who would say, you know, it's not complicated. He was a monster. How do you respond to that?

Selina Tusitala Marsh Gauguin was a monster just closes down the conversation. Where can you go from there? Like, do you want to break the world or do you want to make the world? Making is a cathartic process. It's a healing process, and it addresses historical trauma. And so it's like that Japanese art of Kintsugi, where the value is placed in the picking up and the glueing of or the melding of these broken pieces with goals, and so that the more gold veins in that vase, the more value it holds because of its age and its preciousness and the fact that it refuses to stay broken. Some people do make in that space of rage, and we need that too. But let it sit along all the other responses, because, you know, what are we going to give our kids? Are we going to give them rage and anger with no beauty, with no growth, with no seeds?

[A reading of Guys Like Gauguin by Selina Tusitala Marsh]

Guys like Gauguin

1. Thanks Bougainville for desiring them young. So guys like Gauguin could dream and dream, then take his syphilitic body downstream to the tropics to test his artistic hypothesis about how the uncivilised ripen like pawpaw, a beast slightly raw, delectably thin, dangling like golden prepubescent buds seeding nymphomaniac for guys like Gauguin.
2. Thanks Balboa for crossing the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and pronouncing our ocean the “South Seas”. Hey, thanks, Vasco, for making us your underbelly. The occidental opposite of all your nightmares, your waking dreams and vision of or your laws, your darkest fantasies. Thanks to seeing the earth as a body. The North, its head full of rationality, reason, seasons of meaning, cultivated gardens of consciousness sewn in masculine, orderly fashion. A high evolution toward the light. Thanks for making the South an erogenous zone. Corporeal and sexual, emotive and natural. Waiting in the shadows of dark feminine instinct. Populated by the Africas, the Orient, the Americas and now us.

Selina Tusitala Marsh I've got a French colleague, Nelly Gilet, who put on a staged street show based on Guys Like Gauguin. And she asked me, Do we have your permission for a young white French man to speak these words in this context? And I said, abso-frickin-lutely. The young actor was like, My God, I knew history, but to climb inside these words, in someone's rib cage as I'm memorising these lines, my heart breaks. If it helps get someone curious, have them rethink something – that's what I call decolonising the mind.

Sosefina Fuamoli Selina was the New Zealand Poet Laureate. In 2019, there was a ceremony to mark the end of her two year tenure.

Selina Tusitala Marsh Schools gathered. They Haka’ed me out. It was such an emotional evening. I had my Tokotoko, my walking-talking stick. It's a precious treasure with a fue screwed to the top of that, which is a Samoan Talking Chief’s fly whisk with a huge kind of mane of sennit hair. And I walked, through Parliament in Wellington, back to my, ironically, James Cook Hotel. And it's 11:30 at night. I'm in my bright Puletasi, my bright Samoan fuchsia, red, green, hibiscus-flowered, you know, throat to ankle bursting with colour. And my Tokotoko. And I get to the James Cook Hotel and those glass doors, and I see a group of white businessmen huddled around the bar. The bar’s closing. And I suddenly remember, like, I pause and I remember I'm a woman. I'm brown. And I'm entering into this white space. So, big breath. Shoulders back, and go. And I opened up the doors and stepped in. And the the group turned as one and saw me. And the alpha male of the group, and I knew he was the alpha male because he was the only one with no tie. And he says to me, to the group, 'Wa-hoo! It's the cleaner!' And I walked right up to the group. And I said, 'It's not a mop. It's a Tokotoko.' And he's suddenly like, 'Oh no, we were just joking.' But if you're a Pacific woman with a history, with aunts and mums who worked on the factory floors, and whose relatives still clean office buildings, who still suffer that disproportionate socioeconomic reality. You know, who were brought into Aotearoa, New Zealand, in the ‘70s as a much needed labour force and then chucked out again when the global oil crisis hit in the mid ‘70s as overstayers. Then that stuff has a long past and those words are not neutral.

Sosefina Fuamoli I’ve felt the burn of men's eyes when they see my Malu. I've had guys look at the tattoo on my thighs and then say to me, 'I'd like to see what that tattoo finishes.' Angela’s felt those eyes, too. But it hasn't always been like this.

Angela Tiatia Back in the old days, we were barely covered. Our genitals were only covered with loincloths and the Malu was shown proudly.

Sosefina Fuamoli The old days being: prior to the arrival of Christianity and the body shame that came with it.

Angela Tiatia I grew up in the Mormon religion, and so the first 18 years of my life I spent being fully covered up and being told what to wear and what to do. So for me to decolonise this way of thinking is to become much more fearless in the way of showing my Malu out in public and even within my work.

Sosefina Fuamoli Walking up the Wall is a video of Angela's that looks like something you might find on a fashion label's Instagram. She's wearing ultra high heels, and the top half of her body is in a bodysuit, leaving the lower half and her Malu exposed. She's lying on the ground with her legs up against the wall. Her head turned to look directly at the viewer, and her feet are walking up and down the wall.

Angela Tiatia I was alerted by a cousin of mine that there was this Facebook chat group that had posted a screenshot of me, and then over the top of this image they said, 'Young Samoan girls, this is not what to do if you were to be a proper Samoan young woman'. And so I was the epitome of what not to be, and there were like 900 comments in Samoan language, chastising me like, 'If I see you in the street, I'm going to smash your head against the concrete!' So, quite violent. It displayed to me how misogynistic the culture was if there is a disobedient Samoan female figure. But I felt that it was really important too, because the purpose of doing that work was to open up a conversation, right?

Sosefina Fuamoli I just imagine Selina walking away from those guys in the hotel bar and waiting for the elevator still in their eyeline. I imagine how she feels when the elevator doors close and she's confronted with her infinite reflection in the elevator mirrors. I imagine her swiping into her empty hotel room and sitting on her hotel bed. We're often told just to brush it off and not let it get to you. That's what I did when that guy asked me where my Malu went. But Selina picked up the broken pieces of that night, and she wrote about it for The Guardian. And after that, she wrote a children's book. She called it Mophead. In the book, a little boy on a ferry pokes fun at her Tokotoko. It won the 2020 New Zealand Book Awards for children and young adults.

My name is Sosefina Fuamoli, and this has been an Audiocraft production for the National Gallery of Australia. The producer for this series is Marcus Costello. The associate producer is Olivia O'Flynn, and the Gallery's Principal Content Strategist and Head of Digital is Marika Lucas-Edwards.

Excerpts from a Paul Gauguin Cruises commercial French Polynesia waits for you with open arms. This isn't just a place, it's an atmosphere. She possesses her very own consciousness. When you long to bask in one of the most unspoiled places on Earth, she's waiting for you. Her door and her heart are always open. Paul Gauguin Cruises. Let us help you make French Polynesia part of your story.

Caroline Vercoe I've never been on this cruise, to be honest, but I have certainly had a look at it. And I know people that have taught on it and it is, yeah, it's called the Paul Gauguin. But I don't necessarily think that Gauguin’s story is front and centre, you know, in terms of how it operates now.

Sosefina Fuamoli On the website for the Paul Gauguin Cruise, it says: 'At the turn of the century, Impressionist Paul Gauguin travelled to the tropical shores of French Polynesia to create some of his most renowned masterpieces. Today, his namesake, the 330-guest M S Paul Gauguin, transports discerning guests to the same romantic Tahitian vacation Paradise to explore, enrich and escape.' I also found this, which I thought was interesting. It mentions partnering with the French government to provide locals living in the region's most isolated islands with volunteer consultations by the ship's doctors and free transport aboard the ship if locals need to see a specialist.

Caroline Vercoe I think this is a really productive, constructive, relationship that this business has with that place in that community. But it doesn't need to sanitise some of these issues that everybody kind of knows about. You know, we don't need to try and pretend that he wasn't that, you know, that person. But I don't really want to be a champion or not because I have no vested interest in that cruise ship. Do you know what I mean? It's it's. Yeah.

Sosefina Fuamoli We reached out to Paul Gauguin Cruises, but they said they'd prefer not to comment. To be clear, Caroline Vercoe isn't saying that guests on the ship see Polynesians in the same way as Gauguin saw them. She actually thinks the Cruise could be a positive experience for guests who would otherwise never meet a Polynesian person.

Caroline Vercoe Gauguin is a very, very important tourist drawcard to French Polynesia, and we should not, for, you know, I have colleagues that live in Tahiti and they're like, Oh, you guys, in Aoteroa New Zealand, you're always bagging Gauguin. But, you know, he's a huge economic resource for them. And that is great. You know, good for them. And that is the whole ambivalence around Gauguin. But I also think if we were to reflect that position on, for instance, places like Hawaii, that tourism can actually be weaponised as well.

Rosanna Raymond You will see sandy white beaches. You will see coconut trees. You will see beautiful brown bodies. But in Hawaii, they've taken the coconuts off the coconut trees. So that's one of the life-giving plants of the Pacific. And in the tourist industry, because they, you know, they don't want them to be sued by these falling coconuts. So they’re seen with fear.

Sosefina Fuamoli As a curator, Rosanna works with a lot of Pasifika artists, and some of the contemporary art coming out of the Pacific can be pretty dark.

Rosanna Raymond But tourists don't want to buy those images. And that's because, you know, Gauguin’s painted over them. One of the artists that I'm working with, Francoise Schneider, said, 'Gauguin did not paint Tahitian women. He painted over us.'

Sosefina Fuamoli My name is Sosefina Fuamoli and this is The Gauguin Dilemma, Episode 4: The past isn't dead, it's not even past.

I think it's fair to say Rosanna Raymond doesn't love Paul Gauguin. But for all the mud she swings his way, she actually doesn't want him to be cancelled.

Rosanna Raymond I mean, for me, he is part of the Imperial and part of the colonised story. And if we start wiping that away, then, then we are allowing things to sort of not really let us unpack it in our own ways.

Caroline Vercoe To be honest, figures like Captain Cook and Gauguin do become quite central to discussions around decolonial practices. And it is very important that we keep them centred in these discussions because otherwise it implies that this is actually an indigenous problem.

Sosefina Fuamoli As in poverty isn't a way of life for Indigenous people. It arises when their way of life is interrupted, often when colonial settlers arrive. If we want an Australian example, Blacktown is home to the second highest number of Indigenous people in the state of New South Wales. It's also one of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged areas in the state. Blacktown got its name in the 1820s when the area became known as the Black Town. Back then, Indigenous people from across Greater Sydney were rounded up and taken there to live. In recent years, there's been a push to change the name. And it's a curious chorus of voices who want to refresh the town's racist past. Among them are property developers who think that there's a brand problem with the area. But in a survey of 3,000 local residents, over 80% voted against the proposed name change. Local Indigenous man Gordon Workman told SBS News 'We've got no problem with it. We are black.'

Rosanna Raymond A lot of those people, Cook included, when they came into the Pacific, they came into the Great Moana Nui-a-Kiwi and they met our people, they saw different ways of living and different ways of being, and we changed them to the core. They went back to England, they went back to France and went back to Spain. They were not the same men as they were.

Sosefina Fuamoli Did Tahiti change Gauguin on for the better?

Rosanna Raymond I don't know. I'm a little bit cynical on that one. You know, there's… Racism was fully entrenched by the time they came over though. So I think that while we may have changed them, that they had no way of actually being able to have that change continuous because they go back to Europe and they just go back into this system that did not allow them or did not want them to change. So not much has changed since, actually, probably 1768 when Bougainville came through.

Sosefina Fuamoli So if you were to update things, if you were to correct the record for the 21st century, what would you want people to know about the Pacific today?

Rosanna Raymond I want them to know that the 'Pacific' is not the name, that three quarters of the Earth's surface is known as. I want them to know the word Te Moana Nui-a-Kiwa. I want them to know about Kupe. I want them to know about the cracks in the reef, about the jelly babies that have been born because of all the radioactive materials in the water. I want them to know that we're losing species of migratory birds, that we're losing our sea life because of the acidity in the water. I want them to know that over 10,000 sharks are killed per day. I want them to know that deep-fried food and the cheap, fatty meats that are sold to the Islands are giving our people diabetes. And unless we really can engage and talk about these things, we are going to disappear before the land does.

Tahiarii Pariente So I graduated from the Lycée Paul-Gauguin.

Sosefina Fuamoli That's Tahi. We met him back in Episode 2, and he just told us his high school was named after Paul Gauguin.

Tahiarii Pariente And obviously we all had to learn who he was, etc. so I could give you the answer that I learned about a French painter that came. Or I could tell you the taste that he left in this society here.

Sosefina Fuamoli Tahi is an artist. He's part of Rosanna’s SaVage Klub. But he wears a few hats.

Tahiarii Pariente My trade is wayfinding, okay. I'm a navigator.

Sosefina Fuamoli He takes tourists on voyages his ancestors took across Te Moana Nui-a-Kiwa, ancestors like Kupe.

Tahiarii Pariente And it's an allegory for your life. Your life is a voyage. You're born, you rise like the sun and you go towards your sunset. And during all your life, there are moments where you're more lost and moments are where you feel like you're really on track. And all that teaching of wayfinding is a philosophy that will help you through that voyage in life. And one of the most important elements is contemplation. Just feel: with no judgement, no rush, no itch. Just be with nature. Our society was based on something different. It was based on happiness and pleasure because that's what's important in life. And I meet a lot of people, basically, who tell me their story of life. I spend seven hours sometimes on a tour with somebody in the day. I always speak for the first hour, and then they will start talking to me about their life, because in fact, what they want is a friend. What they want is somebody you can trust. What they want is somebody who has a different access to reality that does not have a job, get married, get kids, and, you know, get sick and end up in a box. And I have the same chat with movie stars and big CEOs and everybody's human, and everybody has the same questions about what's going to happen. Here, every day is a blessing. And every day you need to be happy. You need to sing a song and do a dance. And it's very simple, but a lot of places today they forget that.

Sosefina Fuamoli What are some of the misperceptions that tourists have about Tahiti?

Tahiarii Pariente Oh, you know, there’s plenty. But, well, I think the most common one is that it's Paradise. It's not Paradise. I don't even know if there is a Paradise, but it's definitely not a Paradise because there is a lot of issues here. I mean, in paintings it's beautiful. But when you come here it's hot, it's humid, there's bugs. It's difficult.

Sosefina Fuamoli So, tourists, they come to Tahiti thinking it will be Paradise, which is not unlike Gauguin, in a way.

Tahiarii Pariente [Laughs] Well, it's an echo of all that. It's an echo of Bouganville, of the GIs in Bora Bora in 1945. It's generations of people thinking Wow, Tahiti! The women! Again, you know, and people are beautiful and yeah, it was true. But I tell you what – today half the population has diabetes and is overweight and malnutrition is everywhere because the society has changed and people have no respect for the ancestral food and they forget how to live in tune with the environment. So they try to be like the other, but it's not adapted to where they are. We're not in Paradise anymore. My work is to try and help my people to get better and to be better you need to understand that you're not good and you're not well. People you don't eat bananas anymore, they want to eat chips out of a pack! And it's getting worse and worse. And what I see in my community, everybody tells you Oh it’s just like that everywhere. I say, okay, it's too easy. Life became too easy and our elders used to teach us hardship. Now we don't know hardship anymore, so we tend to be lazy and always slide towards the ease. But the ease is not good for your health, let it be known. And most doctors, most psychologists, will tell you that if it's hard, you're probably on the right track.

Sosefina Fuamoli Are tourists sometimes upset when they arrive and the reality is different to what they thought Tahiti would be?

Tahiarii Pariente The more expectations you have, the more you set yourself to be disappointed, basically. And you know, the power of preconception is so huge that when you are programmed to go to Paradise, you will find it.

Sosefina Fuamoli Tahiti is a part of France, but it's also a world apart. There are high-end hotels and poverty side by side, and some tourists just refuse to see the complex reality of what's in front of them.

Tahiarii Pariente The French have a tendency of going places and telling people what to do, how to do it, and they know better. And so we grew up with that. And so after a while it becomes quite heavy. It's very philosophical for me, the experience of Gauguin, because there is love and hate with the French, obviously. And Gauguin is an illustration of that relationship. But it's way beyond Gauguin because it's bigger than Gauguin. I mean, Gauguin, you know, he comes here and thinks he's the shit and that his moustache and his way of speech. And that's how the French came and how they still do come when not the same moustache. But, you know, the attitude.

Sosefina Fuamoli Tahi says he's one of the lucky ones. He went to university abroad. He can speak multiple languages. He can hold his own in a debate with a French person. But for most Tahitian people, it's not like that.

Tahiarii Pariente Silence has been very harmful for our society, because all of a sudden, when people didn't express himself anymore, because they got scared and they got scared of retaliation and they got scared of seeming dumb and clumsy and stupid, which we became, eventually. They think they saved us from savagery. They think that without them, we are nothing. We can't do anything and… true! Today, that's the worst part of the whole story! I'm not for independence. I don't want France to go, because we are in such a state that we are not capable anymore of being autonomous, because we lost the ability, the strength and the knowledge. We are subsidised by France every day. That's how we eat and drink, because France took away our ability and capacity to be autonomous. Today we have to reconquer that we have so much we have to do to come back to a state where we can be able to live without France.

Sosefina Fuamoli When Tahi and Rosanna first crossed paths, they bonded over their taste for debate. They were living in London at the time, and they got talking about the history of gentlemen's clubs…

Tahiarii Pariente …where the gentlemen will meet and tell the stories of their last trip to Africa and what they brought back from India, etc. and then we thought, Wow, in fact, these people, they didn't want to be savage. So what they do is they share their stories about the savages that they met and they try to call themselves savages. And here we were and we thought, Well, we are 'savages'. So how about we get together and we have our own club, which is not like a gentleman's club. It's a SaVage Klub.

Sosefina Fuamoli In Samoan “Va” means “the space between”. And so, the the “Savage Club” – the SaVage Klub – became a space where…

Tahiarii Pariente …people drink and talk stories, dress up and also try to push the reflection a bit further and deeper. So 'savage' in the sense that we are not afraid and we will push in provocation, and we try through this very shocking savagery to move those molecules in your head and try to shake the foundation of what your reality is. So you can accept also the savage and you can say, Okay, savage is not synonymous of non-educated of or dangerous or something and you to be scared of. You can enjoy your time with the savages in time you might want to become one.

Sosefina Fuamoli At the end of our interview, I asked Tahi if there was anything more he wanted to talk about. Anything at all that he thought was important.

Tahiarii Pariente No, no, I'm pretty happy. And I'm happy that we, you know, that we went deeper than just Gauguin.

Sosefina Fuamoli Yes, yes.

Tahiarii Pariente Thank you. Thanks a lot for allowing us to have a voice and to be able to express ourselves. You know, I think, really that's what I'm grateful for.

Sosefina Fuamoli I wanted to know at what point did the tide start to turn against Gauguin? At what point did his problematic legacy come into the conversation?

Elizabeth Childs It's always been there. It's not… It's not a secret. Anyone who's written a biography has grappled with it. But I think the parts of his story that people find difficult now and the rise of 'blockbuster-ism' have coalesced for the past 40 years, especially the big one that was in 1988…

Sosefina Fuamoli May 1988, The Art of Paul Gauguin at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Elizabeth Childs That generated some very interesting critical scholarship by feminist thinkers. And they were asking very specifically the question about how do we reconcile the beauty of this work with the difficult nature of his life? And it was at that moment of the rise of feminist art history that some people stood back and said, Okay, what do we do with this? How do we reconcile this character? And one of the most interesting early critics, I remember her telling me she loved looking at the work and she didn't know how to reconcile it because it's very beautiful.

Sosefina Fuamoli So what do we do then? What do we do when beauty takes hold of us?

Elizabeth Childs If we want it to just make us feel good and comfortable. I guess you can choose some art that will do that, but if you want it to raise some big issues and you want to deal with the contradictions. I think that's a useful self-reflection as well.

Sosefina Fuamoli But what about those people who don't want to look at Gauguin through a critical lens? What if they just want to see beautiful colours that move them?

Elizabeth Childs There's no single way to understand one artist, and I don't think museums can force a particular line of interpretation. What they can do is lay things out for people to have a diversity of experiences; providing everything from kids colouring books to sketching opportunities to critical evaluations and symposia. And that's the magic of a museum. Just think what that could generate. It's not going to be one answer.

Sosefina Fuamoli Do you remember when, back in 2018, Banksy's Girl With A Balloon was sold. As soon as the auctioneer’s gavel came down for $US1.4 million, the painting started beeping. It was a packed auction room and everyone turned to look. No one knew it, but they were about to witness a painting self-destruct. Banksy had hidden a paper shredder inside the bottom of the picture frame. Girl With A Balloon was not stitched back together. In a way, it wasn't broken. The story of how the painting came to be shredded became part of the art. Three years later, the piece went to auction again. It sold for $25 million. So when I think about Gauguin, about what his legacy represents for so many Pasifika people today – image-based abuse, influencer culture, toxic masculinity, mass tourism, sex tourism, environmental collapse, and the lingering consequences of colonialism – I see those conversations as part of the art. Legend has it, Gauguin said, 'I shut my eyes in order to see'. In saying that, he liberated artists to paint from their imagination. But he gave birth to a myth that continues to this day. So long as we're still dealing with the fantasy of the Pacific Paradise, we need to keep talking about Gauguin. We can't just shut our eyes and imagine something better.

Sosefina Fuamoli My name is Sosefina Fuamoli and this has been an Audiocraft production for the National Gallery of Australia. The producer for this series is Marcus Costello. The associate producer is Olivia O'Flynn. The Gallery's Principal Content Strategist and Head of Digital is Marika Lucas-Edwards.