Gauguin's Skirt [Hardcover]

Stephen F. Eisenman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Simultaneously advances our comprehension of Gauguin and our awareness of the complex condition of today's Tahitian society. -- Art in America

About the Author

Stephen Eisenman is Professor of Art History at Occidental College. He is the author of The Temptation of Saint Redon, and the editor and chief contributor to Nineteenth Century Art (published by Thames and Hudson).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500017662
• ISBN-13: 978-0500017661
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #679,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor of Art History at Northwestern University . He is the author of seven books, including Gauguin's Skirt (1997), The Abu Ghraib Effect (2007), and The Ecology of Impressionism (2010). He is also the editor and principal author of Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History, the most widely-adopted textbook in its field. The fourth, revised edition of the book was published in January 2011. Dr. Eisenman has in addition curated major international exhibitions devoted to Gauguin, Impressionism, and William Morris. He is currently completing a book titled Meat Modernism and curating an exhibition titled Blake's Books for the Block Art Museum. Beyond his critical and scholarly work, Prof. Eisenman is engaged in the politics of prison reform in Illinois, and has published essays on the subject in the Chicago Sun-Times and Monthly Review.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An expanded cultural study of Gauguin, May 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Gauguin's Skirt (Hardcover)

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.

3.0 out of 5 stars Synthesis, March 30, 2010

By 

Jeffery Mingo (Homewood, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Gauguin's Skirt (Paperback)

Some look at Paul Gauguin as a portrayer of the Pacific and the essential window maker for the West to that region. Others see Guaguin as a disease-spreading colonist who profited off of Pacific exoticism. Here, the author tries to pave a middle ground in whic Guaguin's relationship to the Pacific is deemed "complicated," rather than being given a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Of course, Gauguin had European privileges, but the Polynesians didn't just bow to him in an unquestioned mannner, they ridiculed him at times. One blind Tahitian woman put her hands down the artist's pants, rolled her eyes, and said, "Hmph! European!" Gauguin is famous for his art, but the works were not well-received in Europe originally. Guaguin wasn't some naive neutral figure: he wrote publications blasting many European leaders on the islands.

The main area in which ambiguity is brought up is around gender. Paintings to me that clearly depict women are deemed gender-ambiguous by the author. Not only does the author add to burgeoning works about the mahu; he also emphasized that France had its gender- and sexuality-atypical people in that time as well. Some of the issues here almost surprisingly predate Freud. This discussion may be especially interesting in communities of color. The author mentions how mahu were mocked and deemed hypersexual, but at the same time embraced and played important roles in the lives of women and teens. In African America, there is much controversy about "the down low," but this work points to how subgroups in a culture can be mocked and celebrated at the same time. The author is very evasive about whether Gauguin kicked it with any of the atypical, and not just females.

When I was first learning how to write essays in junior high, we were encouraged to write an intro, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This book has an intro, 3 body chapters, and a conclusion, so seems unsophisticated in that way. Most of the painting reprinted are in black-and-white and they lose a ton of details this way. Scholarship on art travels a gray area, because anyone can deconstruct a work, but it takes a deep thinker to write pages and pages upon it. This book will be confusing to many, but still may be overly simplistic to some.

I'm fasciniated by race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, art, and revisionism. Those who are equally interested in these topics may get a kick out of this book. It didn't rock my world, but I'm glad it's been published.