Paul Gauguin is renowned for resplendent, mythic imagery from Oceania, for a life of restless travel, and for his supposed immersion in Polynesian life. But the artist has long been regarded ambivalently, and in recent years both his sexual behaviour and his paintings have been considered exploitative.
Nicholas Thomas’s new book offers a fresh perspective on the artist from the contemporary vantage point of the region which he so famously moved to. His argument foregrounds the deep eclecticism of Gauguin’s work, and his representation – alongside enigmatic and symbolic imagery – of Polynesia’s colonial modernity. Gauguin’s paintings, often at odds with his ‘explanations’ of his own art, are replete with signs of place and identity that acknowledge the life of the time and the presence and power of some of the Islanders he encountered.
This discussion, chaired by Dr Caroline Levitt, will explore the challenges of Gauguin’s art and its legacies. It will include Professor Elizabeth Childs (Washington University in St Louis), Maia Nuku (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the author Professor Nicholas Thomas (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge), and will address some of the core issues of the book.
Organised by Ketty Gottardo, Martin Halusa Senior Curator of Drawings The Courtauld Gallery & Caroline Levitt, Senior Lecturer; Head of History of Art Department, The Courtauld.
Chair
Caroline Levitt, currently Head of the History of Art department at The Courtauld and a member of the teaching and research faculty. She is a specialist in 19th and 20th century French art and literature, and has a particular interest in relationships between text and image/object in the broadest sense, and in relationships between modern art and the sacred. Caroline enjoys contributing to new developments and explorations of the Courtauld’s collections, and has been involved in short films to introduce Gauguin’s manuscript Avant et Après, and the book library’s collection of surrealist journals. Caroline’s main research is currently centred on the unstable word-image relationships that emerge when artists draw over existing printed materials, from maps to whole books, in an effort to annotate, illustrate or alter.
Speakers
Nicholas Thomas first visited Polynesia in 1984 to undertake research in the Marquesas Islands. He has since travelled extensively across the Pacific, and written on Indigenous histories, empire and art; his books include Islanders: the Pacific in the age of empire (2012), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. Oceania, which Thomas co-curated with Peter Brunt for the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris in 2018–19, was acclaimed as a landmark exhibition. Since 2006, he has been Professor of Historical Anthropology, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Elizabeth Childs is the Etta and Mark Steinberg Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St Louis. An expert on the art of Gauguin, she has authored many essays on the artist. Her book Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti (University of California Press) appeared in 2015. She has been working in recent years with the Saint Louis Art Museum on an online presentation of Gauguin’s manuscript L’Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme. She is currently researching a book, The Gauguin Effect (for Yale University Press) which considers political, critical and artistic receptions of Gauguin’s art and life by both Euro-Americans and Polynesians from 1903 to the present.
Maia Nuku, born in London of English and Māori (Ngai Tai) descent, is Curator for the Arts of Oceania at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Following doctoral research on eighteenth century collections of Polynesian art and two post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Cambridge, she has evolved a curatorial approach that centers indigenous Pacific perspectives, grounding the presentation of visual arts from Oceania in the unique conceptual and cosmological connections that make art from the region so compelling. Her exhibition The Shape of Time: Art and Ancestors of Oceania was shown at the Museum of Art in Pudong, Shanghai (June – August 2023) and the National Museum of Qatar (October 2023 – January 2024).
Praise for the book
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)
Refreshingly original… an impressive and deeply engaging dive into aspects of Gauguin’s oeuvre that have largely evaded discussions and analysis (Maia Nuku)
This brilliantly argued book offers new perspectives on a figure until now understood through a Western-centred history of art. (James Clifford)
