Gauguin Tahiti

by Shackelford, George T. M.

• ISBN13: 9780878466665
• ISBN10: 0878466665
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-03-01
• Publisher: Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Summary

The life of Paul Gauguin is one of the richest and most mythic in the history of Western art. A banker and "Sunday painter," he left behind family and homeland and sailed to the South Seas, seeking a life "in ecstasy, in peace, and for art." Gauguin Tahiti, the first major retrospective of the artist's work in fifteen years, offers an in-depth study of the fabled Polynesian years that have so defined our image of the painter. Alongside essays by leading American and French critics on every aspect of Gauguin's art, from the legendary canvases to his sculptures, ceramics and innovative graphic works, are discussions of the Polynesian society, culture and religion that helped shape them; an in-depth biographical narrative of the artist's life, with the many epiphanies, frustrations and discoveries that make his time in the South Seas one of the most mythologically potent episodes in the history of Western art; and a chronicle of his changing fortunes in the century since his death. At the center of it all is Gauguin's 1897 masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, the summation and crowning glory of his mature career, presented with unprecedented depth and authority. Over one hundred years later, Gauguin remains one of the most enigmatic and attractive figures of 19th-century art, the very pivot of modernism, and Gauguin Tahitifinally portrays this crucial period of his life in all its color and drama.

Table of Contents

Director's Foreword
Acknowledgments
Lenders to the Exhibition
Introduction
The First Polynesian Sojourn, June 1891-June 1893	p. 15
The Paintings of the First Polynesian Sojourn	p. 17
Gauguin: Artist and Ethnographer	p. 47
Sculpture of the First Voyage	p. 67
The Return to France, August 1893-June 1895	p. 81
The Exhibition at Durand-Ruel	p. 83
Noa Noa: The Voyage to Tahiti	p. 91
"Shapes and Harmonies of Another World"	p. 115
Oviri	p. 135
The Second Polynesian Sojourn, September 1895-May 1903	p. 143
The Return to Paradise: Tahiti, 1895-1897	p. 145
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?	p. 167
"I Have Everything a Modest Artist Could Cold Wish"	p. 205
"Catholicism and the Modern Mind": The Painter as Writer in Late Career	p. 223
Splendor and Misery: Gauguin in the Marquesas Islands	p. 243
After 1903	p. 261
The House of Pleasure	p. 263
Koke and Tepeva: Victor Segalen in Gauguin's Footsteps	p. 273
Belated Recognition: Gauguin and France in the Twentieth Century, 1903-1949	p. 285
Appendixes	p. 303
Gauguin in the Vollard Archives	p. 305
Notes	p. 312
Chronology of Gauguin's Life, 1848-1903	p. 340
Checklist and Figure Illustrations	p. 350
Index to Works by Gauguin	p. 365
Subject Index	p. 368
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