Walking stick with a female nude and a Breton sabot on the handle 1883 - 1895

Curator: Paul Gauguin created this walking stick between 1883 and 1895. The wood carving incorporates a female nude figure and a Breton sabot on the handle. Editor: It's intriguing, almost uncanny, this blending of practicality with these rather... charged symbols. The wood itself looks worn and smoothed by touch. Was it actually used? Curator: Probably! Walking sticks at the time were emblems of bourgeois society and wealth, which Gauguin simultaneously embraced and critiqued. The nude suggests a return to primal sensuality. Note how he's merged her form with the crook, symbolizing perhaps the eroticization and dominance inherent in such social structures. Editor: I find the carving itself more compelling than any narrative of dominance. Look at the way he’s worked the material. It speaks to me of labor – the meticulous shaping, the gradual revealing of form, from tree to object of use. And also an almost desperate longing for “authenticity.” I see the “primitive” here less as a symbolic mode than a material effect. Curator: Well, consider Gauguin’s deliberate engagement with Breton folk culture in relation to colonial structures. The incorporation of the sabot situates the user’s journey within the specific cultural landscape of Brittany. And the addition of the female nude evokes a much more complex cultural association. Editor: The combination certainly complicates it. But the question I keep returning to is the wood itself, its journey, its handling... it transcends merely symbol. How Gauguin handled that resistance is part of what's powerful here. The walking stick ceases to be just a representation and becomes its own entity, forged by physical action. Curator: Perhaps we both identify a journey there, just two very different ones. Editor: Maybe, each enriching the other, much like the disparate components in this remarkable piece.