Myths and Memories of Brittany: Reviewing Gauguin's Stereotypes

Abstract

This essay looks at the reception of Paul Gauguin's work in France between 1948 and 1953 by a surrealist group fascinated by histories of Brittany. This reflected a greater interest in post-war surrealism in the Celtic and medieval past of Brittany, which became a focus of writing and curating in the movement from that period. Critical accounts of Gauguin's stereotypes of Brittany by the New Art History and from elsewhere in cultural studies during the 1980s help to explain the flat and reserved tone that now accompanies most writing on the artist, and contrasts with the one of effusive admiration that took hold in surrealism. Reviewing some of those accounts, I argue for the inevitability and even necessity of such artistic, literary and cultural cliches. For the surrealists, such rememoration was the ground of myth, which they placed in the service of the struggle against what they called 'miserabilism'.