Avant-Gardism and The Yellow Christ

According to Griselda Pollock, argues for one to be a noted and successful avant-garde artist three characteristics must be present within their works of art. These characteristics are “reference, deference, and difference”. Keeping these characteristics in mind, one can easily see their presence in the painting The Yellow Christ  by Paul Gauguin. The presence of these qualities makes The Yellow Christ an avant-gardism painting.

Pollock states, it is important for an avant-garde artist, one had to produce a work of art that showed an awareness of what was really going on. This point is called reference. Gauguin, in my opinion was a very cultured man. His artistic style, called “Primitivism” takes a closer look at and is inspired by a less-modern more pure and simple way of life. In Gauguin’s lifetime he traveled to many places seeking inspiration and subject matter for his paintings. He worked in Brittany in the village of Pont-Avon, Breton, and famously for his years spent working in Tahiti and Polynesia. He was very well versed in the different cultures and peoples that occupy the earth. The Yellow Christ was based on Pont-Avon subjects and this painting represents and is able to evoke the simply, “primitive” life of Breton peasants. Gauguin’s The Yellow Christ exalted peasant and folk culture and his “primitivism” works regarded this way of life as more pure, which in Gauguin’s mind, lead to more innate forms of artistic expression based on his reference (knowledge of what is going on in the cultures and communities around him).

The next point, which I called deference calls for respect of the latest and most radical developments. I think The Yellow Christ easily suites this factor of Pollock’s formula because in my opinion Gauguin is one of the leading artists in the “Primitive” movement. His works are extremely radical and on the cusp of this newly immerging artistic style. Not only does The Yellow Christ’s subject matter convey primitivism but also so does the technique used in this painting. The subject matter depicts peasant and rural workingwoman. These images of woman were rooted in well-established associates between “woman” and nature, which was extremely prolific in the Nineteenth-Century literary and artistic culture. Gauguin included woman in this work, and many others because they could symbolize both the fertility of nature and the essential closeness of a simpler rustic life to that nature. Also the method used by Gauguin to construct his paintings gave his art a very simple, minimal, and sort of stained glass feel, which was a trademark of the “primitivisms”.

Pollock’s final requirement, difference called avant-garde artists to be involved in establishing a difference. I feel that Gauguin does a very good job of doing this in all of his works, especially in The Yellow Christ.  There is some theory that regards The Yellow Christ as a self-portrait of Gauguin. This perception of the artist as a superior being underpinned the notion of the artist as a courageous independent struggling against a modern philistine public. As such, it has contributed to the mythology of the “modern” male artist and was seen by many late nineteenth-century artists and critics as a condition of avant-gardism.