Gauguin: The Artist, Author, Ethnographer, and Promoter | Gauguin Tahiti

He was a man of amazing talent | Gauguin Tahiti | Paul Gauguin, Claire FrEches-Thory

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	• Gauguin Tahiti Paul Gauguin, Claire FrEches-Thory MFA Publications, 2004 - 372 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Gauguin fot the insider

This book gives a lot of informaton over the Tahiti-period of Gauguin, not only of his paintings but also of his his sculpture and graphic work. It's state of the art, but a bit dull. Beside, if you want to know more about the exoticism in Gauguin's oeuvre or the symbolism in his work I recommend Gauguin's skirt by Stephen Eisenman or Symbolism by Rodolphe Rapetti. On the other hand, if you are interested in the total output of the artist (and not only his paintings), this book is highly recommemded.

Gauguin: The Artist, Author, Ethnographer, and Promoter

Most art books give you lots of gorgeous plates and a view from 50,000 feet of the artist's entire life. Gauguin Tahiti was a pleasant and positive exception from that generalization.

The book does contain lots of gorgeous plates, but also shows a tremendous number of sketches and source materials backed with extensive notes on what the author wrote and said. This enables a careful reader to appreciate the development of icons, iconography, themes and cosmology. The number of interesting essays in the book is unexpectedly large: 17 by my count where the usual art book has perhaps 3 or 4. The essays come at Gauguin from slightly different perspectives, helping you to fill in a 360 degree view over time.

Most art books focus on the artist's best known work. I was very pleased to see this book deal thoroughly with Gauguin's relatively little known sculptures, wood carvings, unusual prints and experimentation with materials and processes. To me, that made this book a particularly rich experience.

If the book has a weakness, it's that the authors of the essays cannot quite bring themselves to describe the less attractive parts of Gauguin's life style and personal habits. So you end up with a partially sanitized package. Like so many artists, his ability to communicate visually was marred by a weak ability to relate to others in constructive and supportive ways.

Be prepared to spend time with this book. Each essay builds on insights from earlier ones with lots of cross referencing of images. As a result, your knowledge will build to a level similar to that of taking an MFA course for a semester on Gauguin's Tahitian and South Sea works.

If you read only one art book this year, you would do well to pick this one. This book will also make a wonderful gift for anyone who loves Gauguin's paintings and wants to learn more about his entire oeuvre.

Take a close look!

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He was a man of amazing talent

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) is one of 19th Century Europe's most mythic artists. He was a man of amazing talent, eccentric behavior, and controversial conduct. Leaving a career as a banker, Gauguin became obsessed with painting, eventually abandoning his family and sailing to the South Sea islands of Polynesia where he spent out the remainder of his life painting, sculpturing, producing innovative graphic works and unusual ceramics. Enhanced with 260 color and 80 b/w illustrations, Gauguin Tahiti is wonderfully presented, highly recommended, in-depth, 380-page biography of this gifted man's life and work as a European master artist who "went native" in the tropical paradise of Tahiti.

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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 Tahiti finally portrays this crucial period of his life in all its color and drama. You know that I have Indian blood, Inca blood in me, and it's reflected in everything I do. It's the basis of my personality; I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on savagery. --Paul Gauguin

Essays by George T.M. Shackelford, Claire Frèches-Thory, et al.

Clothbound, 9.5 x 11 in./372 pgs / 260 color and 80 b & w.

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