The ARTE documentary The White Gaze - Expressionism and Colonialism examines German Expressionism for the first time in the context of colonial exploitation and racist anthropology. The film focuses on the two celebrated artists Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein as examples. In 1910, they traveled to »German New Guinea«, which by that time had already been destroyed by German colonialism. Their journey was intended to revolutionize German painting and take its cue from the original indigenous art. Pechstein and Nolde blanked out the demise of this foreign, »paradisiacal« world for them and painted with the »white gaze«, which was characterized by romantic, idyllic images of landscapes and racial images of people.
The film explores the smoldering »longing for the South« and the notion of the »stranger« people of the two painters, which they seemed to have internalized during their visits to the ethnological museums in Dresden and Berlin, following the example of Paul Gaugin. ARTE also focuses on the abrupt end of the debt-financed excursions, which came in 1914 with the onset of the First World War. The White Gaze - Expressionism and Colonialism is a documentary well worth seeing that provides an understanding of the background to German colonialism and allows us to grasp both old and current discourses.
