Community Without Borders: Symbolism, Theosophy, and
Anti-Colonialism in France, 1880-1910
Marco Deyasi
In the late nineteenth-century, artists like Paul
Gauguin famously traveled the globe hoping to find a primitive refuge from the
modern world. But what was he looking for? What did he think he might find? The
answers to these questions lie in the rise of Theosophy and other syncretic
religions around the turn of the twentieth-century. Theosophy, founded in 1875,
aimed to unite all faiths, all peoples, and all knowledge. Its adherents
attempted to find aspects of divine truth in all religious traditions, including
Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Theosophists believed in equality
irrespective of race, gender, or national origin. In the context of the time,
this was a radical, ultra-left-wing position and they were virtually alone in
asserting it. Theosophically-inspired periodicals mixed anti-colonialism and
anti-racism with their articles on auras, numerology, and traveling on the
astral plane. As Leela Gandhi argued in her recent book, Affective
Communities, this position of radical equality relied on the cultural
politics of empathy, on the assumption that all human life was equal and
interconnected. As a result, it corresponds to the "wagon wheel" model of human
community proposed by Tom Yellowtail and Rodney Frey. While art historians have
studied the politically conservative strands of Symbolism, few have explored the
left-wing cultural politics of Theosophy and its French variant, Martinism, in
the art of Gauguin and his followers among the Symbolists. In this paper, I
analyse the art of Gauguin, Paul Ranson, Claude-Emile Schuffenecker and others
to reveal how their art is steeped in religious and cultural syncretism. I argue
that their art reveals both a yearning for a pre-modern golden age of human
connection with nature and the divine, as well as the anti-colonialism and
anti-racism that were characteristic of Theosophy and Martinism.
Marco Deyasi is the art historian at the University of Idaho.
He is a graduate of Duke University and has a held a number of awards for his
research: a Chateaubriand Fellowship, a SSHRC dissertation fellowship, and a
Kress Travel fellowship, among others. His research focuses on the reception of
Vietnamese and Cambodian art and culture in France, especially in relation to
the interplay between politicized modernism and colonial ideology. He is working
on a book, Modern Primitives and Primitive Moderns: French Visual Culture and
"Indochina", 1863-1968.