Paul Gauguin, né le 7 juin 1848 à Paris et décédé le 8 mai 1903 à Atuona, Hiva Oa, aux îles Marquises.
Paul Gauguin, peintre postimpressionniste, chef de file de l'Ecole de Pont-Aven, également inspirateur des Nabis, est un peintre français majeur du XIX e siècle et un des précurseurs les plus influents de l'art moderne aux côtés de Cézanne. C'est en 1886 qu'il fait la rencontre du peintre Emile Bernard, à Pont-Aven et son style évoluera sous son influence vers quelque chose de plus naturel et synthétique. En 1888, il tente vainement à Arles l'expérience de vivre avec Van Gogh. Gauguin produit des chefs-d'oeuvre mais reste sans succès. En 1891, ruiné, il s'embarque pour la Polynésie où il finit sa vie en insoumis et toujours inspiré.
« Au fond la peinture est comme l'homme, mortel mais toujours en lutte contre la matière. » Lettre de Gauguin à Emile Bernard.
Otherness and exploitation in the fraught oeuvre of Post-Impressionism's canonical painter.
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.
Un beau facsimilé correspondant à la première traduction anglaise publiée en 1921 des journaux de Paul Gauguin, écrits à la fin de sa vie et initialement publiés en français en 1918. Ce volume toilé comprend les textes ainsi qu?une sélection de gravures de l?artiste.
The life of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) is one of the richest and most mythic in the history of Western art. Abandoning a career in banking, a family and his homeland, in the last decade of the nineteenth century he sailed from France to the South Seas to seek a life «in ecstasy, in peace and for art.» During his years in Tahiti, Gauguin brought forth a wealth of astonishing paintings, culminating in this monumental meditation on what he called the «ever-present riddle» of human existence posed in the work's title. This compact introduction to Gauguin's masterpiece explores its relation to European models as well as to the artist's own companion pieces.
Featured image, "Manao tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching)" 1892, is reproduced from Paul Gauguin: Where Do we Come From? What Are We? Where Are we Going?
