Gauguin and Polynesia

Imagine a book about Gauguin written by someone who truly knows, first hand, the Pacific islands, their history, their cultures. Imagine an author capable of looking at Gauguin’s paintings not as illustrations of ‘primitivism’ or ‘colonialism’ but as attempts – failures, successes, improbabilities – to come to terms with another way of life. This is the book. There is no other like it. * T. J. Clark, art historian and author of The Painting of Modern Life *
An expansive and meticulously researched account of Gauguin’s life and art … a valuable contribution to art history. – Samuel Reilly * ArtReview *
[Thomas’s] portrait of Gauguin is scrupulously fair … If not on Gauguin’s side, Thomas is always on the side of the people and places Gauguin encounters. He writes with authority on the art, craft and textiles of the different island traditions and examines what Gauguin cherry-picked and co-opted for his purposes … He writes evocatively and exactly about the paintings. – Laura Freeman * The Times *
Thomas offers a nuanced version of Gauguin’s works as at once obviously open to influence and highly attentive to the particulars of the Polynesian world. – Michael Kerr * Apollo *
Rewarding … offers plenty of new perspectives on Gauguin’s later years – Martin Bailey * The Art Newspaper *
It is Thomas’s expertise in Polynesian societies that brings many of the insights here … The Gauguin who emerges is not suddenly a more attractive figure. But his pictures gain nuance and the man himself can be seen as more than merely a sexual predator gorging himself in paradise. – Michael Prodger * Literary Review *
Refreshingly original, Gauguin and Polynesia is an impressive and deeply engaging dive into aspects of Gauguin’s oeuvre that have largely evaded discussion and analysis. Guiding the reader through a crisscrossing series of historical trajectories and personal encounters, the author leans confidently into the puzzling contradictions and ambiguities that have intrigued Gauguin’s admirers and detractors alike, deploying paintings, people and places as sites of connection. A crucial addition to the literature, this remarkable volume draws on the unique vantage point of Indigenous histories and the powerful spiritual agency of the Islands to reveal a penetrating glimpse of life in Polynesia as it might have been for Paul Gauguin. Pointing to saliences and possible confluences, Thomas offers readers a compelling and imaginative analysis of Gauguin – one that illuminates and heightens our understandings yet leaves things open, fugitive and deliciously unresolved (just as the artist himself would have it). * Maia Nuku, Metropolitan Museum of Art *
This brilliantly argued book by a distinguished anthropologist and historian of Oceania offers new perspectives on a figure until now understood through a Western-centred history of art. Drawing on ethnographic and historical sources, local knowledges and the experiences of Pacific artists, he reopens our response to many familiar paintings, complicating the ideas of primitivism, cultural appropriation, and sexual exploitation that currently frame discussions of Gauguin. By showing both Europe and Oceania in transformation, their histories dialectically linked, Thomas crafts a complex realism – a model for studies of travelling art and artists in an uneven modernity. * James Clifford, author of The Predicament of Culture *

PRAISE FOR VOYAGERS

‘Takes readers on a narrative odyssey’ Wall Street Journal, Books of the Year

‘Highlights a dizzying burst of new research’ The Economist

‘A refreshing addition to the canon of literature that contemplates Oceanic navigation’ Noelle Kahanu

‘I would not be surprised if, after reading this masterpiece, many readers are compelled to take up voyaging themselves’ Science Magazine

‘An elucidating, accessible, and well-illustrated guide to the long history of Oceanic settlement and connections’

Nicholas Thomas first visited Polynesia in 1984 to undertake research in the Marquesas Islands. He has since travelled extensively in the Pacific, and written on Indigenous histories, empire and art.

His books include:

• Entangled Objects (1991)
• Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2012) - Awarded the Wolfson History Prize
• Oceanic Art (2018)
• Gauguin and Polynesia (2024)
• Several collaborative books with artists including John Pule and Mark Adams.

Oceania, which Thomas co-curated with Peter Brunt for the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris in 2018–19, was acclaimed as a landmark exhibition. He has also written on contemporary art, museums, and heritage issues for publications such as the Financial Times, The Art Newspaper, Apollo, Artlink, and Art Asia Pacific.

Since 2006, he has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

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