Poe and Primitivism in Gauguin's Nevermore
A Post-Impressionist Painting Inspired by "The Raven"
Feb 14, 2009
European painters of the nineteenth century often looked to literature for subject matter and creative inspiration. Just as Shakespeare’s tragic character Ophelia informed British artist J.W. Waterhouse, the melancholy poetry of American writer Edgar Allan Poe influenced French painter Paul Gauguin’s iconic painting Nevermore.
Nevermore is a Post-Impressionist painting that features an adolescent girl on a bed, confronting the viewer as she reclines. Her right arm partially covers her breasts and her face is cupped in her left hand. Gauguin was an early proponent of using color for purely emotional effect, and this technique is evident in the vivid yellow of the pillow, the shades of aqua, blue, and green in the horizontal lines of the bedding, and the vertical pinks and violets of the background. While it is unclear whether or not Gauguin’s model was a prostitute, there is a sexual subtext in the painting which is impossible to miss.
The Poe Connection
Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem of 1845, "The Raven", was a key source of inspiration for Gauguin’s painting and is referenced in its title. In the poem, as art historian Dario Gamboni writes, “the continuous use of the [refrain] ’nevermore’ [is] the search for a ’key note’ expressing the sadness meant to produce poetical beauty.” The strongest themes in Poe’s work are centered on the subjects of beauty, melancholy, past lovers, longing, and efforts to commune with the dead.
Painted in 1897, Nevermore is a revision of the painting Mana’o Tupapa’u (1892) in which the shape of a raven appears prominently. In this later work, Gauguin could be commemorating the actual physical death of a lover or referencing the symbolic death of an affair. Perhaps he is lamenting the transient, ephemeral nature of love, erotic pleasure, and beauty in his life. Yet there is also the possibility that this is simply an homage to Poe.
Rebelling Against Traditional Beauty
Gauguin’s image is all the more provocative because the figure is a young woman who does not fit within Western definitions of beauty and sexual propriety. Gauguin's approach to art was not about tradition or reverting to Classical or Romantic styles. The female figure is beautiful, but decidedly exotic by nineteenth century European standards. The artist is bucking tradition with this painting—and perhaps stoking controversy—through his model’s obvious youth and cultural ethnicity.
Gauguin was interested in primitivism and used images such as the young native girl in Nevermore to illustrate, communicate, and (probably) celebrate his own primal, sensual appetites. But, more importantly, Gauguin’s work in Tahiti represents a concerted effort to establish another standard of beauty, another vocabulary, another realm of experience. With this painting—a compelling encounter with the erotic and the exotic—Gauguin creates an entirely new context for Poe's grievous reflection on lost love.
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