Over the past twenty years or so, Paul Gauguin’s imagery has drawn a good deal of interest from scholars who have analyzed it from feminist, post-colonial, and socio-historical perspectives. Taken together, the contributions of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Griselda Pollock, and Stephen Eisenman have deepened our understanding of the ways in which Gauguin operated uneasily within Western, patriarchal, imperialist norms and structures. For her part, Debora Silverman has anchored his work in nineteenth-century Catholic theology and visual culture (Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” Art in America 77 [July 1989]: 119–128, 161; Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Color of Art History, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993; Stephen Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997; Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000). While this literature has provided much-needed context for interpreting Gauguin’s compositions, meaning in his work remains inscrutable. Perhaps enigma is appropriate for this follower of Stéphane Mallarmé who never tired of asking unanswerable questions and who cultivated dream and mystery as positive values. Can the secrets of Gauguin’s art be unlocked without falling into prosody and literalism? Can concrete meanings be assigned without violating this Symbolist artist’s insistence on ambiguity and allusion? Henry Dorra believed that they could, and devoted his book, Symbolism of Paul Gauguin: Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity, to unlocking the recondite mysteries of Gauguin’s works.

Sadly, Dorra (1924–2002) was not able to complete the work, which was published posthumously in 2007 with the assistance of his family, friends, and colleagues. One can only speculate what form the manuscript would have taken had Dorra been able to oversee the process of publication. The final book consists of twelve substantive chapters by Dorra. Richard Brettell supplies a foreword situating the work in relationship to Dorra’s career and Gauguin studies; in an afterword, Gabriel Weisberg writes a personal tribute to Dorra. Final editing of the manuscript was completed by Mary Dorra, Helen Dorra, and Hope Werness.

Dorra’s work on Gauguin, beginning with articles published during the 1950s, as well as his 1994 edited volume, Symbolist Art Theories (Berkeley: University of California Press), is characterized by close and searching readings of documents, in which he identifies and defines obscure aesthetic and historical references. Dorra employs the same methods in his book, which is organized chronologically, and covers Gauguin’s entire career from his early training with Camille Pissarro to his final, vitriolic outbursts on the Marquesan Islands. The book is not argument-driven, but rather takes a loosely narrative approach to Gauguin’s life and work, interspersing biographical information with close and sustained readings of individual artworks. Throughout, the author presents Gauguin’s work as deeply personal, motivated by the artist’s unbridled egoism and deep, metaphysical uncertainty. Some of this makes for difficult reading, as chapters often consist of minute descriptions of artworks bearing iconographical similarities. After reading a string of descriptive passages, this reader often lost a sense of why these connections matter. Dorra’s extremely careful and conscientious formal analysis would have been more effective if he had framed descriptive passages with more forceful argumentation and interpretation.

The range and variety of works Dorra examines is commendable, and he succeeds in expanding our understanding of Gauguin’s work beyond a small subset of well-known paintings. Dorra excels at establishing connections between Gauguin’s prints, pottery, drawings, sculptures, wood carvings, and paintings. However, in exclusively focusing on iconography, he overlooks how differences in medium contribute to meaning. What does it signify when the same motif appears on a design for a book shelf, a wood carving, a stoneware jug, and a painting? To what degree do materials and technique inform a work’s significance? Dorra mentions connections to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, but does not elaborate on Gauguin’s contribution to efforts in the 1880s and 1890s to break down boundaries between fine and applied art. His connections to French decorative arts movements similarly remain unexplored. Did Gauguin join contemporaries such as Morris and Henry van de Velde in placing equal value on painting and the applied arts? If Gauguin is primarily remembered today as a painter, how is one to weigh his work in the fine versus the applied arts?

While the range and ambition of Dorra’s study are to be commended, the work falls short on two fronts. First, he is too willing to connect specific forms to specific sources, the meaning of which he manipulates to constitute overarching narratives. Dorra thus preserves traditional narrative structures without truly engaging in the tensions and contradictions of Gauguin’s pictorial language. Even if one identifies the sources of individual elements, their relationship to each other remains radically undetermined. Dorra too often skims over the difficulty of Gauguin’s formal language in his drive to uncover specific references. In chapter 1, for instance, he admits that meaning in Gauguin’s work is elusive, but then contradicts this core principle by attaching concrete, narrative significance to specific objects. For instance, Dorra claims that Gauguin’s Jewelry Casket with Carved Reliefs of Dancers (1884) can be read on three levels: as a moral commentary on the “glorious, but seamy, aspects of Parisian night life . . . which are given a global dimension”; as “an allusion to the metaphysics of the evolution of matter and spirit”; and as a bitter commentary on the failure of his marriage (29). He tries to make sense of Gauguin’s eclectic references. To Gauguin’s long-acknowledged sources, including a Japanese netsuke mask, quotations from Edgar Degas’s paintings of ballet dancers, a carving of a mummy of a Bronze Age Nordic warrior at the National Museum in Copenhagen, and apples on an edenic tree, Dorra adds new ones. He draws attention to a South American woman seated next to abstract globules, which he identifies as representations of soul “atoms” or “primordial germs” derived from Theosophical texts. Rather than dwelling on the fragmentary nature of Gauguin’s references, Dorra forces these recalcitrant and seemingly dissociated motifs into a series of coherent narratives. He overlooks the androgyny of Gauguin’s mummy, for instance, reading it instead as the decomposing body of a wronged ballet dancer. The casket, according to Dorra, illustrates a moralizing tale, which he in turn connects to the feminist writings of Gauguin’s renegade grandmother, Flora Tristan. To this reader, Dorra is too quick to connect material fragments to specific moral and personal messages. He also leaves unanswered why Gauguin’s artistic process relied so heavily on appropriation. Why did this supposed follower of Charles Henry—who argued for the abstract, expressive nature of line and color—continually appropriate motifs from others? Might Gauguin’s appropriations foreground the difficulties inherent in reconciling the expression of what Gauguin perceived to be immaterial ideas and emotions with the material specificity of his artistic practice?

Not only Gauguin’s formal borrowings but also his words are too often taken at face value in Dorra’s book. Gauguin’s statements are frequently as obscure and fragmentary as the works of art they are taken to elucidate. This reader wanted the long quotations of Gauguin’s writings subjected to critical analysis, both in relationship to the texts from which they were excerpted as well as to broader discourses in aesthetics and history. Gauguin’s borrowings from Tahitian, Japanese, and Javanese traditions were not purely personal but took place within larger colonialist discourses on these cultures. Reconstructing these relationships would go a long way to understanding the distinctive and even oppositional character of Gauguin’s pictorial language.

Dorra’s refusal to directly engage with social and feminist art history represents the book’s second major shortcoming. His unwillingness to confront this scholarship has the effect of marginalizing his book. Confrontation of course does not mean acceptance, but by not acknowledging previous interpretations, Dorra leaves his reader with more questions than answers. For instance, whereas Eisenman interprets Gauguin’s 1897 painting of his Tahitian wife and newborn child, Te rerioa (The Dream), as a representation of contented dreaming (133–135), Dorra emphasizes instead the painting’s nightmarish qualities (251–52). Dorra opposes Eisenman’s interpretation without clearly refuting the earlier reading.

In general, there is a tension between representation and abstraction in Gauguin’s works that Dorra does not acknowledge. This reader would have liked to see more of Mallarmé in Dorra’s book, more attention to the slippage the poet and his generation of Symbolists introduced between sound (or form) and meaning. Such attention to form and composition would have mitigated Dorra’s tendency to relate a work’s purportedly narrative content to the artist’s biography and would have opened up the possibility for considering Gauguin’s painting in relationship to other bodies of Symbolist work, including that of Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler, and Edvard Munch, who also employed unstable iconography in order to awaken or lay bare instinctual life. Gauguin’s relationship to literary Symbolism also might have been more fully developed beyond specific pieces of correspondence or iconographical borrowings.

In his preface, Brettell suggests certain parallels between Dorra’s life and that of Gauguin. Both grew up between multiple cultures and continents and both came to art later in life after pursuing more pragmatic and lucrative careers (finance in the case of Gauguin, engineering in the case of Dorra). Fascination with Gauguin’s life and work certainly fueled Dorra’s scholarship. Such identification between scholar and artist explains Dorra’s tenacity in tracking down sources, as well as his limitations in moving beyond the sources themselves. In the end, Dorra’s quest to unlock the secrets of Gauguin’s iconography and sources appears to have been as single-minded, sustained, and unrealizable as Gauguin’s own artistic odyssey. There is something poignant to Dorra’s five-decade-long pursuit of Gauguin. Both men seem to have been motivated by a search for meaning in art, and in both cases the search proved immensely fruitful, if at times flawed and inconclusive.

Dorra has given future Gauguin scholars a wealth of information to process. The sources he uncovers and the connections he draws between individual works will prove useful. But Dorra left it to future interpreters to draw out the significance of Gauguin’s borrowings, and to view them in relation to broader aesthetic, social, and political currents.