Gauguin's Skirt (Interplay) /anglais - Tapa dura

An exploration of contemporary Tahitians and a long-dead French painter, sex today and sex in the late 19th century, and colonialism new and old. Written on the boundary between art history and anthropology, it reads like a biography and a mystery. Paul Gauguin travelled to Tahiti in 1891 in search of an exotic paradise. He found instead a French colony ostentatiously 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. This work depicts ancient and modern Tahitians at labour and leisure and the Polynesian landscape; it also exposes the contradictory perspective of an avant-garde artist exiled 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, Eisenman's writing seeks to challenge interpretations of the political and sexual content of Gauguin's pictures.

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor of Art History at Occidental College, Los Angeles.