Gauguin's Skirt

by Stephen F. Eisenman

Book Overview

This work is about contemporary Tahitians and a long-dead French painter, sex today and sex in the late-19th century, and colonialism old and new. Paul Gauguin travelled to Tahiti in 1891 in search of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0500017662
• ISBN13: 9780500017661
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

An expanded cultural study of Gauguin

I read this just before reading Rebecca Solnit's "River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West," and the parallels were manifold. Like hers, this is more than even expanded biography: it places Gauguin's South Sea quest in a historical and social context, discusses the mythologies of exoticism and primitivism, two cultural phenomena of late nineteenth century Europe, and explores how they contributed to Gauguin's complex and often self-contradictory identity. Eisenman has taken care to become familiar with Tahitian culture and mores, both then and now, and gives us the locals' views of Gauguin into the bargain. As a painter, I was intimate with Gauguin's oeuvre and was familiar enough with his life (though I hadn't read Sweetman's definitive biography), and this both extended my understanding of the man and enhanced my enjoyment of the work. The writer, a polymath with a rather academic style, isn't the compelling writer that Solnit is (hence 4 rather than 5 stars) but his subject is no less fascinating, the challenge of showing his subject simultaneously in the context of fin-de-siecle colonialism and European Modernism no less daunting. A very interesting approach to understanding a unique artist, one who justifies it totally.