Gauguin and Polynesia

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What to expect

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 generously illustrated 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

  • 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

  • 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

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