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It is frequently noted by dix-neuviemistes and historians that Flora Tristan's grandson was the painter, Paul Gauguin. Somewhat less frequently, art historians point out that Paul Gauguin's grandmother was the feminist socialist, Flora Tristan.1 For the most part, the commentary begins and ends with this fact, as critics scrupulously avoid the dangers of crossing disciplinary and temporal boundaries to posit intergeneric comparisons. Indeed, the connections between the works of Tristan, who died in 1844, and Gauguin, born four years after his grandmother's death, may at first seem attenuated. But the intersections between the lives, the politics and the artistic production of this pair of inveterate travelers and self-designated pariahs reveal a parenté which transcends family relations and establishes a shared vision of the aesthetic and ethical necessity of deliberately crossing borders of nation, gender and genre in the construction of a public identity in the interstices between France and the colonial world.
Tristan (1803-1844) and Gauguin (1848-1903) each saw their art as a means of critiquing French society, and both turned to other cultures for personal and political ends. Acutely aware of the limitations imposed by contemporary ideologies of gender, class and nation, both Tristan and Gauguin foregrounded the question of identity in their works, using the genre of the portrait (among other techniques) to destabilize assumptions of the single and unified nature of the subject. Moving from the Parisian center to the peripheries, this pair of nineteenth-century voyagers challenged the hegemonic centrality of the European male subject, exposing the constructed nature of identity through a series of portraits that highlight the Other-female, foreign, proletarian-as an integral and inescapable component of the dialectical self. Inevitably, neither was fully able to escape the limitations of his or her own subject position, and their portraits are first and foremost self-portraits that privilege the artists' own particular experiences and points of view. But in their efforts to counter the dominant ideologies of high capitalism and colonialism in nineteenth-century France and formulate an alternative social vision, Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin sought to complicate the notions of individual identity, painting visual and verbal portraits of the Self that necessarily reflect collisions and collusions with the peripheral Other and thus render the very question of difference (of gender, class, nation)...