Gauguin and Polynesia

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Gauguin and Polynesia written and read by Nicholas Thomas.

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 this life of Gauguin, Nicholas Thomas retells the artist's story for a twenty-first-century audience, giving greater consideration to the Pacific contexts of his experience, and to Pacific perspectives on his art and his legacy.

Critics Review

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.
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.
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.
Apollo
Rewarding ... offers plenty of new perspectives on Gauguin's later years
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.
Literary Review
Refreshingly original, Gauguin and Polynesia is an impressive and deeply engaging dive into aspects of Gauguin’s 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 Gauguin’s 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

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