Paul Gauguin (Paris, 1848–Atuona, 1903): Inventor of the Readymade?

Abstract

Anne-Lise Desmas and Anne Pingeot address arguments that disprove the attribution of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Head with Horns to Paul Gauguin. As an introductory essay, Desmas traces the sculpture through the historiography of Gauguin before its reappearance in 1997; she demonstrates that its attribution to the artist, already proposed—with no hard evidence—two decades after Gauguin’s death, quickly took hold among scholars, despite doubts expressed by certain specialists and arguments that could have disproved it as early as 1969. Pingeot recounts the contradictory opinions expressed by Gauguin scholars since 1997 and especially after 2002, when it was exhibited for the first time in the United States. Examining the sculpture from a perspective that reaches beyond conventional connoisseurship, she sheds light on Gauguin’s creative appropriation of objects and artworks that he absorbed and made his own. She proposes that while Gauguin was not the first author of Head with Horns, the sculpture became his own, and the artist could in turn be considered the inventor of the readymade.