Gauguin's Skirt

by Stephen F. Eisenman

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Editorial Reviews

Gauguin's Skirt is about contemporary Tahitians and a long-dead French painter, sex today and sex in the late nineteenth century, and colonialism new and old. It is concerned with Paul Gauguin's practices as an artist and with the practice of daily life in Polynesia. Written on the boundary between art history and anthropology, it reads like a biography and a mystery. Paul Gauguin traveled to Tahiti in 1891 in search of an exotic paradise. What he found was a French colony divided by race, sex, and class. At once, the artist began to explore the complexities of his world through the media of drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpting. His work depicts ancient and modern Tahitians at leisure and labor in the fecund landscape of Polynesia; it exposes as well the contradictory perspective of an avant-garde artist exiled both from the modern French metropolis and from the secrets and traditions of indigenous culture. Based upon extensive archival and ethnographic research in France and Tahiti, Gauguin's Skirt challenges interpretations of the political and gender content of the notorious artist's pictures. It compares fin-de-sicle European and Polynesian sexualities and spiritualities, and it argues that many of Gauguin's most famous pictures are far more knowing than had previously been supposed.

Customer Reviews

An expanded cultural study of Gauguin, 2004-05-01

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.