Abstract

This paper investigates the act of “gazing” by examining the role of women in two paintings by Gauguin, “The Yellow Christ” and “Vision After a Sermon,” in order to determine how the physical act of gazing is controlled by a painter’s cues, what can be learned through gazing at a work of art, and how gazing can affect that which is gazed upon. This paper asserts that by examining the female characters in these two paintings, not only does the viewer learn how Gauguin controls physical gazes through his depiction of these women, but that the viewer also learns how these women function as mediators between the human and the divine through both their role as witnesses to the action happening within the paintings and through their physical placement on the canvases themselves. As they are simultaneously controlling the viewer’s physical gaze as well as functioning as intercessors between the spiritual and the physical, the women’s own gazes also foreshadow how Gauguin’s interest as a painter will move from spiritual subjects to the subject of the physical body in later work. In addition, this paper examines how the gaze of the women implicate the viewer of the painting itself, who becomes not just the gazer, but also the gazed-upon.