Gauguin, Buffalo Bill, and the Cowboy Hat

Abstract

In this paper, I show how the French post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin absorbed Buffalo Bill’s dual cowboy and Indian mythologies from his visits to the Wild West show, which ran alongside the 1889 Paris international exposition. Gauguin brought to the Wild West in Neuilly his own recently-constructed identity as an American Indian (albeit Peruvian) and, in the years following—while in Brittany, Tahiti, and Paris—performed various aspects of the French interpretation of “Buffalo Bill” as applied to a pioneering modern artist. Gauguin’s New World context was extensive, and included his Peruvian and other South American relatives, his art world audience of American artists and collectors, and, finally, his expatriation to the Pacific islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas. His adoption of the long hair and cowboy hat, made internationally famous by Buffalo Bill, gives us a key to understanding how he wove together the French and American cultural notions of primitivism, sexuality, leadership, and the avant-garde. And in turn it sheds new light on Buffalo Bill himself as we see him through the lens of the French avant-garde art community. In Gauguin’s interpretation of both Buffalo Bill’s gender performativity and of the avant-garde scout, we gain a new appreciation of Cody’s daring embrace of androgyny and rejection of the narrowness of western civilization, all of which makes him more “modernist” than the twentieth-century cowboy mythology has previously led us to believe.