Gauguin and Polynesia: : Nicholas Thomas: Apollo

Gauguin and Polynesia

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 Gauguin's 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.

Product details

Published	30 Apr 2024
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	464
ISBN	9781801105231
Imprint	Apollo
Dimensions	234 x 156 mm
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Nicholas Thomas

Nicholas Thomas is a professor of anthropology at…

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 Gauguin's 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
An expansive and meticulously researched account of Gauguin's life and art ... a valuable contribution to art history.

Samuel Reilly, ArtReview
[Thomas's] portrait of Gauguin is scrupulously fair ... If not on Gauguin's side, Thomas is always on the side of the people and places Gauguin encounters. He writes with authority on the art, craft and textiles of the different island traditions and examines what Gauguin cherry-picked and co-opted for his purposes ... He writes evocatively and exactly about the paintings.

Laura Freeman, The Times
Thomas offers a nuanced version of Gauguin's works as at once obviously open to influence and highly attentive to the particulars of the Polynesian world.

Michael Kerr, Apollo
Rewarding ... offers plenty of new perspectives on Gauguin's later years

Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper
It is Thomas's expertise in Polynesian societies that brings many of the insights here ... The Gauguin who emerges is not suddenly a more attractive figure. But his pictures gain nuance and the man himself can be seen as more than merely a sexual predator gorging himself in paradise.

Michael Prodger, Literary Review