Paul Gauguin

Hailed as a pivotal figure of early modernist art yet also long denounced for his personal conduct, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) remains an ambiguous figure. Recent intensified debate around gender and colonialism has placed him under renewed scrutiny for his alleged sexual relations with prepubescent girls and the part he played in colonialist misdemeanors during his French Polynesian sojourns. Yet top auction prices and undiminished interest in his oeuvre uphold Gauguin’s celebrity status.
Danish art historian and curator Flemming Friborg reveals the fascinating story of the artist’s life and times in and around the circle of Impressionists and Symbolists, as well as his travels in France, Denmark and Tahiti, by analyzing hitherto neglected material and themes. This handsomely designed volume visually maps Gauguin’s intricate web of influences, linking painterly, musical and literary traces throughout his artistic output and writings. It is an attempt to approach the artist and his work from new angles, in order to align the seemingly disparate traits in Gauguin and to present an image which accommodates both the Master and the Monster.

This book accompanies the first exhibition to investigate Paul Gauguin’s (1848–1903) relationship with the question of alterity and the exoticizing of otherness in his paintings. Adopting an engagingly critical tone, Paul Gauguin: The Other and I deals with central questions within the celebrated Post-Impressionist’s oeuvre, focusing on both his self-portraits and his works produced in Tahiti.
Alongside reproductions of relevant works, the book also features essays that examine the tensions between Gauguin’s biography and the image that the artist assiduously created of himself, as well as the way in which his oeuvre reinforced an imaginary about otherness, addressing crucial and current issues such as the notion of primitivism, the "exotic" and the "tropics," and cultural appropriation, as well as matters related to the erotization of the female body, sexuality and androgyny.

Drawn from the remarkable Ordrupgaard Collection of the Danish insurance broker and art lover Wilhelm Hansen, the masterpieces of 19th-century French painting in this volume represent the very best of French impressionism.

Joining an already impressive collection of Scandinavian art, one of the first French paintings Hansen acquired was Woman with a Fan, Portrait of Madame Marie Hubbard (1874) by Berthe Morisot. This gently ironic work set the tone for his perceptive and adventurous collecting style. A burst of acquisitions from 1916 to 1918, during which he took advice from the influential critic Théodore Duret, saw his collection grow to include works by Cézanne, Courbet, Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Renoir and Sisley.

With stunning reproductions of 60 works, the authors explore the history of the collection and provide detailed analysis of the works themselves.

Unappreciated in his own lifetime, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) is now recognized as one of the giants of French postimpressionism and a pioneer of early modernism. A rebel in both art and life, he rejected his bourgeois upbringing and comfortable stockbroker's job to devote his life to painting. Eventually, dismayed by the "hypocrisy of civilization" and in search of a primitive idyll, he left Paris and took up residence in the South Seas, first in Tahiti and, later, in the Marquesas Islands. He would never return to Europe. In the final months of his life, he wrote this witty, revealing autobiographical memoir with the request that it be published upon his death. It first appeared in the original French in 1918, and was translated into English three years later. As his son Émile wrote in the preface, "These journals are an illuminating self-portrait of a unique personality.… They bring sharply into focus for me his goodness, his humor, his insurgent spirit, his clarity of vision, his inordinate hatred of hypocrisy and sham."
Wide-ranging and elliptical, these candid reflections reveal Gauguin's thoughts about many subjects, including frank views on his fellow artists back in Paris, his turbulent relationship with Van Gogh and the charms of Polynesian women, while providing glimpses into his often far-from-idyllic life in the islands. This beautiful facsimile reproduces the first American translation of the journals, a rare limited edition privately published in New York in 1921 for a select group of subscribers. With full-page sketches by the artist, these entertaining and enlightening musings give us a unique insight into Gauguin the man and the artist.

Starr Figura is a curator with the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elizabeth Childs is Department Chair of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Hal Foster is an American art critic, historian and Guggenheim Fellow; he has taught at contemporary art and theory at Cornell University and Princeton University.

Erika Mosier is an associate conservator at The Museum of Modern Art.

Lotte Johnson is a curatorial assistant with the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art.

This catalog offers a retrospective of Gauguin’s entire artistic career, beginning with his early impressionist works through to his final masterpieces painted on the Marquesas Islands, where Gauguin was inspired to create artworks that are among the most vivid in the history of painting. “Gauguin had clearly decided to violate social norms, destroy consecrated artistic standards and create a scandal wherever he went, and he was successful. He wanted to be a dissenter, a rebel, an outsider and a renegade, but through art he also wanted to rebuild the fantastic images of a Golden Age that had dominated his mind from his first travels around the world.” (From the introductory essay by Eisenman.) This book features a magnificent sampling of the artist’s paintings and an absorbing introduction by Stephen F. Eisenman, a noted scholar on artistic movements of the twentieth century.

Stephen F. Eisenman teaches history of art at the Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He has published several critical studies on modern art and specializes particularly in artistic movements that developed at the end of the twentieth century.

A century after the death of Paul Gauguin, our knowledge of his life and work has made huge strides. The present work covers the youth and early maturity of this pioneering artist and attempts a summation. It also offers a complete catalogue of the paintings, in the process thoroughly updating the original Wildenstein catalogue of 1964. These first two volumes take the reader through to the end of 1888, a year of profound upheavel in French painting. That was the year in which Gauguin and his friends, by a collaborative effort, arrived at Synthetism and, by rejecting representation in depth, freed Western painting of laws that had governed it since the Renaissance.

Synthetism was also a form of primitivism. The society in which Gauguin lived was--already--a technical and materialist one, which contained the seeds of all that the 20th century became. Gauguin was one of the first to seek, in reaction to this civilization, a form of inspiration deriving from the timeless origins of humanity.

Although these two volumes are the product of rigorous research, they are studded with illustrations and are by no means intended for specialists alone. Commentary on each work offers a step-by-step analysis of Gauguin's artistic development, while reconstructing the artist's experience and the aesthetic and socio-cultural issues of his times.

The lively detail of the chronology describes the events of Gauguin's life, along with those of his friends; thanks to extensive research in unpublished archives, it also casts completely new light on Gauguin's ancestry. The introduction offers an analysis of the period and an in-depth portrait of this great artist. This exhaustive work is carefully designed so that each entry and insert can be read in isolation, though a system of cross-referencing ensures the continuity of the work and restores the overall trajectory of Gauguin's development.