Describe the characteristics of the Griselda Pollock's Avant-Garde Gambits in Spirit of the Dead Watching's Relation to Édouard Manet's Olympia.
In the 1992 Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, published as Avant-Garde Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History, the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock examines the problems faced by a white art historian in writing an art history that recognises the historical subjectivity of a woman of colour such as Teha'amana, known otherwise to art history only by her representations within the discourses of masculinity and colonial imperialism.
She attempts this by concentrating on a detailed reading of a single painting, the Spirit of the Dead Watching, advancing a new theory of avant-gardism as a kind of game-play involving first reference, then deference, and finally difference. In this case the object of reference is Manet's Olympia, the deference was to Manet as leader of the avant-garde treatment of the nude, and the difference (amongst other matters) was the colour of the subject and the role of the second figure in the painting, the whole a gambit by which Gauguin hoped to usurp Manet's place in the avant-garde.Pollock notes a structural correspondence between the two paintings. In Spirit of the Dead Watching, a viewer for the scene is invoked by Teha'amana's gaze on the bed, a viewer for whom Gauguin has to invent a narrative, while in Olympia the implied narrative is that of prostitution, as critics of the time such as Emile Zola clearly recognised.
In Gauguin's final version of his narrative, as published in Noa Noa, he makes the second subject of his painting, the spectre, a surrogate spectator within the painting, and then (with Teha'aman's gaze) relocates and displaces Teha'amana's fear and paranoia on him, the intruder. Thus, by formal reference to Manet's Olympia, Gaughin has reintroduced himself, taking his place in the avant-garde as artist, as owner, and as colonist.
colonist Emile Zola Teha'amana avant-garde Griselda Pollock Olympia Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture avant-gardism woman of colour colonial imperialism masculinity