But while we talked, we might nevertheless find ourselves feeling somewhat icky. As the RA’s wall text remarks (and this is notable in itself, since very seldom does wall text wade in on issues of misogyny) Gauguin’s ‘depictions of Polynesian women often reflect his fantasies of a supposedly ideal “primitive” society’, fantasies which, ‘problematically, he also lived out.’
In New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018, a Gauguin was chosen for Michelle Hartney’s guerilla project Performance/Call to Action. Next to ‘Two Tahitian Women’ (1899), which depicts two topless figures, Hartney posted her own alternative wall text, quoting the American writer Roxanne Gay: ‘We can no longer worship at the altar of creative genius while ignoring the price all too often paid for that genius.’ It would seem that with the Royal Academy’s ‘problematically’, they have answered Hartney’s call — albeit in a watered-down way.
