Description
The works completed by Paul Gauguin during his first sojourn in Tahiti (1890s) make it very clear why he is regarded, along with Cezanne and van Gogh, as one of the founding fathers of modern art. Emerging from a phase of his life in Paris characterized by successive artistic failures and constant battles with depression, Gauguin first sought refuge in Pont-Aven in Brittany. It was here that the groundwork was laid for a life's voyage that would eventually take him to the South Pacific in search of the primal roots of expressive power in art. This gorgeous volume illustrates this pivotal stage of Gauguin's artwork with over fifty examples of his paintings, sculptures, watercolors, drawings, and prints. The book's extensive text and accompanying photographs reveal the ethnographic sources of Gauguin's fascination with the iconography of native Tahitian culture. The book shows how at the heart of both Gauguin's experience and the pastoral-exotic element of his art lies an attempt to reconfigure that demi-paradise which the artist felt lurking beneath the brutal reality of colonialism.
