This latest Art Centre Basel exhibition will examine the complex and dynamic relationship between the artworks of Paul Gauguin and the Polynesian art he encountered after his arrival in Tahiti in 1891.
The exhibition has been created and organized for Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and Seattle Art Museum by Art Centre Basel.
To better analyze the fascinating encounter between European and Polynesian culture, we are also looking more broadly at the larger development of art in the Pacific in the era since European contact, and our presentation traces the development of that art both before and after Gauguin’s time in Polynesia in the fin de siècle.
Through a balanced contextual analysis of Polynesian art alongside Gauguin’s works, the exhibition brings Polynesian arts and culture into the centre of Gauguin studies. The exhibition displays more than 60 works by Gauguin that fully reveal the extent of the influence of Polynesian art and culture on his work, while it also highlights 60 works from the Pacific that exemplify the dynamic exchanges of Pacific Island peoples with Europeans throughout the nineteenth century. Our emphasis on the exchanges between these two cultures separates this project from previous Gauguin-related exhibitions that have focused more exclusively on the European-centered idea of modernist primitivism in the French avant-garde circles to which Gauguin belonged.
The catalogue Gauguin Polynesia (edited by Suzanne Greub and published by Hirmer Munich) includes essays and texts by an international team of prominent art historians and anthropologists: Suzanne Greub, Flemming Friborg, Douglas Druick, Peter Zegers, Véronique Mu- Liepmann, Carol S. Ivory, Marie-Noëlle Ottino-Garanger, Isabelle Cahn, Anne D’Alleva, Stéphane Guégan, Bronwen Nicholson, Elizabeth C. Childs, Caroline Vercoe.
Exhibition Curator: Suzanne Greub, Art Centre Basel
Exhibition venues:
Copenhagen (DK), Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (September 24, 2011 - December 31, 2011)
Seattle, WA (USA), Seattle Art Museum (February 9, 2012 - April 29, 2012)
