Gauguin and Polynesia

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

The Post-Impressionist artist and writer Paul Gauguin led an extraordinary, troubled and restlessly itinerant life; he came late to painting and spent most of his last decade in the Pacific islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas, where he produced paintings loosely based on Polynesian tradition that heralded the emergence of primitivism and would exert a profound influence on modernist artists from Picasso and Matisse to Jackson Pollock. But his art, despite its growing popularity following Gauguins death in 1903, has provoked mixed responses: although some praise his knowledge and understanding of the Polynesian world, others are censorious, regarding elements of his work as expressions of racism, misogyny and colonial sexual exploitation, which he is seen both to have engaged in and validated through his art. In Gauguin in Polynesia, author Nicholas Thomas retells Gauguin's story for a twenty-first-century audience, giving greater consideration to the Pacific contexts of his experience, and Pacific perspectives on his art and his legacy.

Reviews

Imagine a book about Gauguin written by someone who truly knows, first hand, the Pacific islands, their history, their cultures. Imagine an author capable of looking at Gauguins paintings not as illustrations of primitivism or colonialism but as attempts failures, successes, improbabilities to come to terms with another way of life. This is the book. There is no other like it. * T. J. Clark, art historian and author of The Painting of Modern Life *
Refreshingly original, Gauguin and Polynesia is an impressive and deeply engaging dive into aspects of Gauguins oeuvre that have largely evaded discussion and analysis. Guiding the reader through a crisscrossing series of historical trajectories and personal encounters, the author leans confidently into the puzzling contradictions and ambiguities that have intrigued Gauguins admirers and detractors alike, deploying paintings, people and places as sites of connection. A crucial addition to the literature, this remarkable volume draws on the unique vantage point of Indigenous histories and the powerful spiritual agency of the Islands to reveal a penetrating glimpse of life in Polynesia as it might have been for Paul Gauguin. Pointing to saliences and possible confluences, Thomas offers readers a compelling and imaginative analysis of Gauguin one that illuminates and heightens our understandings yet leaves things open, fugitive and deliciously unresolved (just as the artist himself would have it). * Maia Nuku, Metropolitan Museum of Art *
This brilliantly argued book by a distinguished anthropologist and historian of Oceania offers new perspectives on a figure until now understood through a Western-centred history of art. Drawing on ethnographic and historical sources, local knowledges and the experiences of Pacific artists, he reopens our response to many familiar paintings, complicating the ideas of primitivism, cultural appropriation, and sexual exploitation that currently frame discussions of Gauguin. By showing both Europe and Oceania in transformation, their histories dialectically linked, Thomas crafts a complex realism a model for studies of travelling art and artists in an uneven modernity. * James Clifford, author of The Predicament of Culture *
PRAISE FOR VOYAGERS 'Takes readers on a narrative odyssey' Wall Street Journal, Books of the Year 'Highlights a dizzying burst of new research' The Economist 'A refreshing addition to the canon of literature that contemplates Oceanic navigation' Noelle Kahanu 'I would not be surprised if, after reading this masterpiece, many readers are compelled to take up voyaging themselves' Science Magazine An elucidating, accessible, and well-illustrated guide to the long history of Oceanic settlement and connections' * Minerva Magazine *

Author Bio

Nicholas Thomas first visited Polynesia in 1984 to undertake research in the Marquesas Islands. He has since travelled extensively across the Pacific, and written on Indigenous histories, empire and art; his books include Islanders: the Pacific in the age of empire (2012), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. Oceania, which Thomas co-curated with Peter Brunt for the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Muse du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris in 201819, was acclaimed as a landmark exhibition. Since 2006, he has been Professor of Historical Anthropology, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He lives in London and in the Corbires, in the south of France.