Gauguin and Polynesia by Nicholas Thomas ISBN:9781801105231

Gauguin and Polynesia by Nicholas Thomas

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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.


About the Author: 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 Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris in 2018-19, 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 Corbieres, in the south of France.

01 Feb 2024
 

Additional information

Format

Hardback

Genre

Art & design styles: c 1900 to c 1960

Readership Level

General (US: Trade)

ISBN

9781801105231

Publication Date

01 Feb 2024

Gauguin and Polynesia by Nicholas Thomas ISBN 9781801105231

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