From eternity to here: Paul Gauguin and the word made flesh

The prevailing interpretation of Gauguin's religious art in Britanny at the close of the 1880s emphasises the supposed anti-materialist premises of his faith. Like the Cartesian cogito, these readings analogously assume the ability of the mind to transcend 'mere' matter. Yet what is transcended is not simply got rid of: whether in opposition to the privileged term, or as its residuum, its difference remains. Drawing on materialist critiques of Idealism, as well as contemporary theories of the somatisation of psyche, this article reexamines how even Gauguin's critique of materialism is itself irreducibly corporeal: how colour, as he says, is 'living matter; like the body of a living being'. Indeed, if the accent of Gauguin's art is always on the body, the emphasis of his early religious art - not on the mystery of Christ's divinity, but on the humanity of His Incarnation - is fully comparable. For, in these works, Gauguin both materialises his analogy of flesh to painting and, at once, rematerialises 'the Word made flesh' as painting.