Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Dario Gamboni. Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious Centre of Thought. Trans. Chris Miller. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. 464 pp.

Review by Marnin Young

29 April 2016

In this densely argued and strikingly illustrated book, Dario Gamboni presents a fundamentally new reading of Paul Gauguin’s artistic project. His argument rests on two interrelated claims. The first is that Gauguin was consistently concerned with “potential images.” A central example is a hidden self-portrait in the negative space between the rocks in the 1888 Above the Abyss (Paris, Musée d’Orsay). The artist’s production of such cryptomorphs, as well as representations of metamorphosis and more generally aspectual doubleness (in a Wittgensteinian sense), has been hesitantly noted before. But the visual evidence on offer in this book and the subtlety of the author’s analysis makes a very strong case that the artist prioritized imaginative perception and visual ambiguity, which, like the forms we see in clouds, “explicitly appeal to the subjectivity of the spectator and interpreter” (p. 11).

The book’s second claim attempts to decrypt the artist’s comment that the Impressionists had searched “around the eye and not at the mysterious centre of thought.” Unlike those concerned with optical sensations alone, Gauguin sought instead to demonstrate and to realize in his art a quasi-Spinozist philosophy, one that claimed a continuity of artist and world, art and nature, animate and inanimate things. The two claims in the book are related, and they ultimately appear as one: Gauguin sought to parabolize his philosophy of art and nature—to show what it meant to create art like nature creates itself (Natura naturans)—through potential images. “Ambiguity and ‘multi-stability,’” Gamboni concludes, “are therefore plastic and psychological means of giving form to a vision of the world characterized by continuity and the permeability of modes of existence—by dynamism and metamorphosis. They are also suited to communicating this vision of the world thanks to the imaginative perception that they require and they thus possess an epistemological or even initiatory value” (p. 344). In these terms, Gamboni has come as close as anyone to grasping the distinctive core of Gauguin’s motivations and intentions. By that same token, however, certain major problems of interpretation persist, if not in this art historical account, then in the artistic project itself.

If potential images rely on the spectator to appear, as Gamboni asserts, then it is not clear why the specific images he finds in Gauguin’s works are the ones that should matter. Why, for example, would it not be perfectly acceptable, once we spot one cryptomorph to see endless numbers of faces, heads, eyes, and so forth in his various works? The simple answer is that claims for potential images require a tempering agent, one that prevents our wildly reading-in: the artist’s intentions. Whatever Gamboni believes, this is not something he seems especially concerned to admit. Indeed, while his second claim is fairly clearly an assertion of intentionality; the first is fairly clearly anti-intentionalist. His argument might have been rephrased simply to insist on Gauguin’s use of cryptomorphs to convey ideas to his selectively small intended audience—some evidence exists that Vincent van Gogh and others, for example, saw and recognized the significance of such images. And yet, Gamboni’s paradoxical argument—that Gauguin achieved his intentions by activating the subjective readings-in of his spectators—is in fact consistent with the artist’s stated desire not to create images of nature but to create like nature.

In the end, Gamboni’s book makes visible two very different Gauguins. On the one hand sits a rather isolated artist obsessed with controlling the meaning of his picture puzzles, and on the other hand appears an anti-artist, who in the deliberate undercutting of his own intentions demonstrates the deeper truth of his philosophy—that his productions are as meaningful as the clouds that pass in the sky.