ABSTRACT
Insofar as Paul Gauguin is credited with the invention of modernist primitivism in the visual arts, such an investigation needs to reckon both with Gauguin's own production— literary as well as artistic—and with the successive levels and layers of discourse generated around it. On the level of motif, Bretonism signals a new interest in religious and mystical iconography—Calvaries, self-portraits as Christ, Magdalens, Temptations and Falls. This subject matter is not separable from the emerging precepts of Symbolism itself, any more than Gauguin's self-portraiture as Christ or magus is separable from his personal monomania and narcissism. In this respect, Synthetism, cloisonnisme, primitivism and the larger framework of Symbolism all represent diverse attempts to negotiate what Pollock and others have termed a crisis in representation—a crisis whose manifestation is linked to a widespread flight from modernity, urbanity and the social relations of advanced capitalism.
