What links a dead paedophile painter with Paris 2024? Shame

Fifty years ago this month, France exploded six nuclear bombs in five weeks at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. During an orgy of testing, the French detonated more nuclear weapons in the atmosphere than the USA and the Soviet Union combined.

One week ago, the flag of French Polynesia – host of the Olympic Games surfing event – did not float down the Seine because French Polynesia is still not a country.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

Two days ago, the National Gallery of Australia spent $10 million on a painting by Paul Gauguin, a Frenchman who lived his most productive years in French Polynesia where he could paint and have sex with young girls.

Detached from their context, each item tells a divergent history. France had joined the nuclear arms race, started by the Americans and followed by the Soviets, for its security. In the South Pacific it set off 210 nuclear devices after 1960. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty stopped the Americans and Russians by 1992, but the French kept nuking Mururoa for another four years, and were only stopped by intense international pressure.

The Olympic surfing event in Tahiti has showcased the skill and courage of elite athletes at an almost superhuman level, with the Teahupo’o wave solidifying the sport’s place in the Games. It is the only Olympic event that is genuinely death-defying. Without question, these surfers deserve Olympian status.

The NGA’s Gauguin purchase, its first – running in parallel with its exhibition Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao – reopens the well-worn “master or monster?” debate about art and artists. In launching the exhibition last month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was “against cancel culture”, but had a bet each way by agreeing that Gauguin’s life was “problematic”.

French Polynesia is hosting surfing for this year’s Olympics, but its flag did not float down the Seine.Credit: AP

The value of the art, shaped by constantly evolving cultural norms and an ever-moving line of what is and what is not acceptable, is always subjective, and I’m not making it my main subject here. The National Gallery director Dr Nick Mitzevich said the acquired Gauguin – The Blue Roof or Farm at le Pouldu – “captures a key point in art history, the moment when the artist emerged as an intensely original master, taking impressionist colour schemes and transcending them to be bolder and more daring”.

Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas thought highly of Gauguin. Claude Monet, the impressionist’s impressionist, rated Gauguin more in the Rolf Harris category. Whatever Rolf Harris’ crimes, Gauguin’s were several degrees worse, just as his painting is rated several degrees better.

These are (mostly) arguments worth having. The gallery had its own covering bet by saying, in a separate statement, that “in today’s context, Gauguin’s interactions in Polynesia in the later part of the 19th century would not be accepted and are recognised as such”. That’s all well and good, but the artist’s artistic reputation was built on his Tahitian girls. If he’d stopped at painting French farms, there’d be no “Gauguin” and no $10 million price tag.

What is not in dispute, what is objectively true, and what links the nuclear tests with the Olympic Games with Gauguin’s legacy, is France’s centuries of exploitation of its island colonies.

Since 2004, France has termed the 121-island French Polynesia an “overseas country”, except it’s not. The United Nations calls it an “overseas collective”, of which France still has 10 around the world, more than any other of the European former empires. Situated in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans as well as the Caribbean, France’s colonies are the most stubbornly held. Measured by its extent, France’s is the last global European empire.

The sea close to the shore of Fangataufa Atoll in French Polynesia turns white following the detonation of an underground French nuclear test in 1995. Credit: AP

The cruelty behind this stubbornness was on show in the late 20th century when the international community tried and eventually stopped France from blowing up nuclear bombs in French Polynesia. The sinking of the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior in Auckland in 1985, an act of state terrorism approved by the French president François Mitterrand, grabbed global attention, but France kept detonating nuclear devices in the South Pacific for another 11 years.

Documents covered up until 2021, unearthed by brave French journalists, showed that more than 110,000 residents of French Polynesia have suffered cancers and other illnesses from direct exposure to ionising nuclear radiation. The most devastating single event was exactly 50 years ago this month, when the four-kilotonne “centaure” bomb was detonated in a balloon and a wind change carried its fallout over Tahiti, contaminating rainwater and irradiating people up to 10 times more severely than the French government had said when it released its own belated report in 2006. This remains one of the world’s deadliest nuclear accidents. According to the 2021 report, fewer than 70 Tahitian victims have received compensation.

The level of radiation in Tahiti today has been deemed safe, but as undeniably stirring as the Olympic spectacle has been, the controversial judging tower – built into the Tahitian reef for the event – is far from the most harmful act of environmental exploitation that the people of French Polynesia have suffered.

The link to the National Gallery’s acquisition and its Gauguin exhibition isn’t about whether Gauguin’s paedophilia and his painting of Tahitian girls can be supported or not on artistic grounds. (No, Rolf, it can’t.) The link is in the fact of colonial exploitation, of which Gauguin’s was just one small and nasty episode in an ongoing history.

France sent its first missionaries to French Polynesia in 1834, its first gunboats in 1838, and it began its military takeover six years later. Its interests were always more strategic than economic, and it maintains a military base – just in case France faces a threat before its island colonies go under rising sea levels. Politically, the Tahitian independence movement has been in open struggle with French loyalist parties for the past 20 years, and the question of its people’s freedom remains a hot one.

Most of us love things French, but it’s well to remember that when Marine Le Pen races for the presidency in 2027 against whoever the opposite pole throws up, they are not competing over wine and cancans; French presidents have their hands on an anachronistic empire and a stockpile of 290 nuclear warheads. Any French political meltdown goes far beyond French borders.

The line between a genocidal act of empire, religious indoctrination, through male painters abandoning their wives and children to practise their art among colonised people, through the use of these islands and their waters as nuclear dumping grounds, through the excesses of anthropogenic climate change, all the way to the showcasing of a Western idea of paradise for entertainment, is a continuous one.

Australia has been complicit to varying degrees all along, and the purchase of the Gauguin deepens our complicity by another $10 million: just a drop in the ocean until you think about it more deeply.

Malcolm Knox is an author and regular columnist.