The Art Centre Basel, in collaboration with the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and another international museum partner, are jointly creating this exhibition which 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. To better analyze this fascinating encounter between European and Polynesian culture, we will also be looking more broadly at the larger development of art in the Pacific in the era since European contact, and our presentation will trace 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, our exhibition brings Polynesian arts and culture into the centre of Gauguin studies. The exhibition will display about 70 works by Gauguin that fully reveal the extent of the influence of Polynesian art and culture on his work, while it will also highlight about 40 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 will separate this project from previous art exhibitions that have focussed more exclusively on the European-centred idea of modernist primitivism in the French avant-garde circles to which Gauguin belonged.
The catalogue will include essays and texts by an international team of prominent art historians and anthropologists.
