At the end of the 19th century, as Europe expanded its empire across the world, post-impressionist painters sought a new creative drive. The European expansion becomes for them an aesthetic act: to flee industrial modernity, to find the ‘authentic,’ to paint the light that Paris has lost. However, behind this artistic impulse hides a more muted logic, that of a colonial gaze. Under the guise of exoticism and escapism, post-Impressionist painting has often reconstructed the “Other” in the image of the European fantasy.
Paul Gauguin is the most famous example of this. Leaving for Tahiti in 1891, he pretends to flee Western decadence in search of an original innocence. But the Tahitian women he paints, silent, offered to contemplation, are not subjects but symbols. In Manao Tupapau (1892) or Two Tahitian Women (1899), the softness of the colours and the simplification of the forms idealise a female body frozen in an eternal elsewhere. Tahiti becomes a projection of the Western imagination: a land without history, without colonisation, without indigenous speech. Beauty, here, operates as a form of gentle domination. His compatriot, Henri Matisse, half a century later, resumes this quest for the exotic in the Maghreb. He depicts women that he calls “Odalisques”, a French term for a concubine in a harem. Inspired by his stays in Tangier, he extends the Orientalist iconography of the harem. Behind the freedom of colour and the fluidity of the line hides the same hierarchy of the gaze: the white man contemplates, the ‘oriental’ woman embodies sensual otherness. To paint his female portraits, he installed in his studio in Nice North African rugs, fabrics, and Islamic ceramics, objects he collected during his travels, gradually transforming it into a real theatre of elsewhere. These elements became ‘props’ that he arranged around his models to recreate, within the studio’s enclosed space, the fantasised atmosphere of a domesticated Orient. The Odalisque was then born not from an observed world, but from a carefully constructed decor, a scenography of the Oriental dream. As Edward Said showed in Orientalism (1978), these images do not describe the world; they produce it, they affirm the centrality of the European spectator, master of vision and meaning.
To deconstruct this heritage today is to question beauty itself. Many contemporary artists are working to unveil the meaning behind the acrylics. Yinka Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist, whose work questions, with irony, the legacies of colonialism and the hybrid identities it has generated. He uses a faceless mannequin, often covered in textiles perceived as ‘authentically African’ but historically produced in Europe and Asia. Shonibare stages the complexity of cultural and economic exchanges born of the empire. His sculptures and installations replay emblematic scenes of Western painting and history, such as The Swing (after Fragonard), inspired by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing (Les hazards heureux de l’escarpolette), or his pivotal work Scramble for Africa, to reveal the fine line between art and appropriation. He transforms the European artistic tradition into a space of postcolonial criticism. As for Kent Monkman, an artist of Cree ancestry (North American indigenous people), he mimics a form of painting that usually celebrates colonialism to reveal the darker reality of history. He uses the ‘Old Masters’ style and depicts images of oppression and the suffering of indigenous people to challenge Western art with indigenous perspectives.
These visual rewritings do not seek to erase Matisse or Gauguin, but to unfold their ambivalence: to understand how European painting has transformed domination into beauty. By placing history back in the image, contemporary artists are shaking up the myth of the innocent elsewhere and restoring to painting its political charge.
Deconstructing colonial art does not mean giving up on admiring. It is learning to see differently, to recognise, behind the brilliance of the colours, the complexity of the power relations that they once concealed.
“E n d o f E m p i r e – Yinka Shonibare” by J a s o n B o l d e r o is licensed under CC BY 2.0.