Gauguin's Skirt (Interplay)

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.