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However Thoroughly Cooke's Moreau Is Embedded in His Social And BR.APR.pp.proof.corr_Layout 1 17/03/2015 13:27 Page 4 BOOKS However thoroughly Cooke’s Moreau is volume history of the United States, also carried embedded in his social and cultural milieu, the emotional baggage: a romantic entanglement author takes pains not to normalise the artist, with a married woman and, not unrelated, but rather to return us continually to the painful memories of his own wife’s recent excessive qualities of his work. Steering clear suicide by drinking the chemicals she used for of psychoanalytic theory, Cooke is nonethe- photography. This detail gains ironic force less sensitive to the psychodrama in Moreau’s given photography’s centrality to Childs’s art, its ‘repressed erotic and emotive charge’ argument, uniting the three foreign visitors’ (p.14). He locates sexual anxieties in the gen- experiences of what was by then a remarkably dered Spirit-versus-Matter conflict that struc- modernised Tahiti. tured Moreau’s imagination, and he offers a An early chapter helpfully traces the devel- compelling case for reading certain works as opment of Tahiti as ‘place-idea’, a theoretical ambiguous allegorisations of psychological concept taken from anthropology. From the conflict. The seductive and disturbing manner arrival of the first European sea captains, Wallis, in which the artist, aptly characterised as a Bougainville and Cook in the 1760s, Tahiti’s ‘fundamentalist of history painting’ (p.16), accretion of cultural myths necessarily pro- 45. Tahiti, late nineteenth century. Photograph by obsessively projected that conflict as a spirit ual duced a complex set of expectations in the Charles Georges Spitz. and artistic combat of epochal significance minds of each of the travellers, La Farge appar- retains its powers of fascination today, as ently being the best read of the trio. Separate Cooke’s absorbing new book demonstrates. chapters on each weave their parallel histories the spot were fresh and colouristically daring, around a common cast of Tahitian characters for this reviewer his later reworkings of these past and present, with particular emphasis on scenes from memory or blatantly using photo- the Teva clan, rivals of the more familiar graphs serve essentially as a salutory reminder Pomares who had opportunistically assumed of the path not taken by Gauguin, whose own Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in royal status in the 1840s during the troubled use of photography as source material is Colonial Tahiti. By Elizabeth C. Childs. 329 years of missionary in-fighting. More recent illuminatingly discussed by Childs. There are pp. incl. 15 col. pls. + 122 b. & w. ills. (Uni- Tahitian in-fighting, provoked or stoked by fascinating new details about the Polynesian versity of California Press, Los Angeles, 2013), colonial and missionary activities, complicates photographic displays at the Paris Universal £34.95. ISBN 978–0–520–27173–9. the picture: we learn that when the two Amer- Exhibition. icans arrived in Tautira in spring 1891, hard on A welcome and reliable contribution to the Reviewed by BELINDA THOMSON the heels of Robert Louis Stevenson (having, scholarship on Tahiti, with insights into both indeed, been furnished by the Scottish writer the entrenched and the changing perceptions with letters of introduction), they were given of the island during this high colonialist period, ELIZABETH CHILDS’S LONG-AWAITED book on a warm reception. To judge from his writings, Vanishing Paradise is particularly well docu- colonial Tahiti is the fruit of extensive a self-regarding snobbishness characterised mented on the period 1889–1900. It helps to research and several field trips to the Pacific. Adams’s attitudes. He was dismissive of an demystify the experiences of Gauguin, while While some of its scholarship has appeared in honorific Tahitian name offered by his Tautira offering in addition thoughtful, informed and earlier articles and essays, as a whole the book host, Ori-a-Ori, because the latter was a ‘lesser’ occasionally amusing asides about Tahiti’s offers a refreshing alternative to most publica- chief and the name was so similar to the one status today, no tropical Eden but a French tions on Paul Gauguin in the South Seas, previously bestowed upon Stevenson. Yet he territoire d’outre-mer admirably adapted to deliberately so, for it refuses to give him the and La Farge incautiously allowed themselves modernity and the demands of mass tourism. central role or to make Parisian Modernism its to be adopted into the ‘grander’ Teva-Salmon main cultural field. Instead Childs stresses the family, accepting similar titles from them. As ‘place-idea’ of Tahiti, offsetting Gauguin’s Adams became entangled in a web of favours experiences there with those of two Ameri- expected in return (writing up the family’s cans, the writer and statesman Henry Adams history with a view to legitimising their land Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, and his travelling companion, the artist John claims, and being touched for financial Bergson, Modernism. By Todd Cronan. La Farge, who narrowly preceded Gauguin to support), one begins to sympathise with his 336 pp. incl. 20 col. + 69 b. & w. ills. (Uni- Tahiti and Moorea, albeit staying for only plight. Clearly there was no such thing as a versity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, four months as against Gauguin’s eight years. disinterested Tahitian naming ceremony. 2013), $30. ISBN 978–0–816–67603–3. The comparison is well worth pursuing. All The naivety of these seemingly urbane three men, of roughly similar age and career Americans is not lost on the author. It makes Reviewed by LEE HALLMAN stage, brought to their time in the Pacific a telling contrast to the arguably more savvy mature, if somewhat disillusioned, individual behaviour of Gauguin towards his fellow THE TERM ‘AFFECT’, a philosophical concept outlooks reflective of their origins. Although islanders (Fig.45), espousing and idealising concerning pre-cognitive levels of feeling, has differently inflected, all three had accepted the the mythic savagery of the elite Ari’i for so pervasively entered the discourse of critical then prevailing belief that Tahiti was a ‘vanish- his artistic ends, yet simultaneously moving theory over the past two decades as to prompt ing paradise’ whose inhabitants, unlike the easily among both the ordinary Tahitians and some scholars to diagnose an ‘affective turn’ in more vigorous Samoan islanders, were irre- the rougher elements of colonial society the humanities. With no equivocation, Todd versibly in decline. We are given fascinating disdained by Stevenson, Adams and La Farge. Cronan announces his position vis-à-vis this glimpses of their personal stories. The notion Clearly written, the text nevertheless has critical shift in the title of his ambitious, that Gauguin, in pinning his hopes on this some unfortunate repetition and although polemical book, Against Affective Formalism: imagined tropical paradise, was seeking an generally well illustrated it would have bene- Matisse, Bergson, Modernism. When works of escape from recent disappointments in his fited from a detailed map. Aesthetic criteria sit art are perceived primarily as sensory vehicles – career as an artist, financial difficulties and uneasily within the socio-anthropological ‘affective machines stripped of knowledge and domestic chaos in Europe is familiar: he left context but at times it feels as though the context’ (p.43), as Cronan writes – then the behind a wife and five children, adamant that author had taken a self-denying ordinance, so balance of artistic exchange is transferred from he did so with their best interests at heart. But it determined is she to treat La Farge and Gauguin creator to beholder, diminishing the role of is surprising to learn that Henry Adams, taking evenhandedly and avoid qualitative judgments. the artist’s intention. The consequences of this a hard-earned rest after completing a nine- While La Farge’s first watercolours made on suppression of agency, Cronan insists, are not the burlington magazine • clvii • april 2015 273 BR.APR.pp.proof.corr_Layout 1 17/03/2015 13:27 Page 5 BOOKS only aesthetic, but political: ‘Without an authorial intentions feel didactic and inelegant, appeal to intention [. .] there are no grounds as if the sensorial pleasures of the writer’s craft for disagreement’ (p.17). As Cronan repeatedly are trapped within his own impressively informs us: you cannot argue with feeling. wrought conceptual scaffolding. You can, however, argue with the indiffer- Despite the organisational drawbacks and ence to intention and representation that such stylistic distractions, Cronan’s book is an a position entails, as Cronan emphatically does important contribution to the enormous when he declares his mission to ‘dismantle the corpus of Matisse studies and a bold counter- affective turn’ in the humanities at large, and claim to the dominant affective strand of in Matisse scholarship in particular. On the aesthetic theory. That said, a more confident roster of opponents in Cronan’s book-length integration of critical agenda and original debate are some of the more formidable voices visual interpretation would have rendered in contemporary critical theory, including Against Affective Formalism more effective in its Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and a disputatious aims. slew of recent Matisse interpreters including Yve-Alain Bois, Alastair Wright, Mark Antliff 1 H. Bergson: Matter and Memory, transl. N.M. Paul and J.M. Bernstein. ‘Against the claims of and W.S. Palmer, New York 1988; and G. Deleuze: affective formalism’, Cronan announces, ‘I Bergsonism, transl. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, will argue that the beholder’s affective New York 1988. response to a work of art is irrelevant except insofar as those affects are taken to be intended by the artist’ (p.27). To overturn the affective bias of Matisse studies – frequently predicated upon the artist’s own avowed fantasies of art’s 46. Carmelina, by Henri Matisse. 1903. Canvas, 81.3 The Curatorial Avant-Garde: Surrealism potential for direct expressive transfer – Cro- by 59 cm.
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