Several decades have now passed since postcolonial and feminist critiques presented the art-historical world with a demythologized Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), a much-diminished image of the artist/hero who had once been universally admired as “the father of modernist primitivism.” In this volume, both long-established and more recent Gauguin scholars offer a provocative picture of the evolution of Gauguin scholarship in the recent postmodern era, as they confront and consider how the dismantling of the longstanding Gauguin myth positions us now in the 21st century to deal with and assess the life, work, and legacy of this still perennially popular artist. To reassess the challenges that Gauguin faced in his own day as well as those that he continues to present to current and future scholarship, they explore the multiple contexts that influenced Gauguin's thought and behavior as well as his art and incorporate a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, from anthropology, philosophy, and the history of science to gender studies and the study of Pacific cultural history. Dealing with a wide range of Gauguin's production, they challenge conventional art-historical thinking, highlight transnational perspectives, and offer clues to the direction of future scholarship, as audiences worldwide seek to make multicultural peace with Gauguin and his art. Broude has raised the bar of Gauguin scholarship ever higher in this groundbreaking volume, which will be necessary reading for students and scholars of art history, late 19th-century French and Pacific culture, gender studies, and beyond.

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.

Scholars in art history, anthropology, history, and feminist media studies explore Western antimodernism of the turn of the 20th century as an artistic response to a perceived loss of ?authentic? experience.

Paul Gauguin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest modern artists. He is renowned for resplendent, mythic imagery from Oceania, for a life of restless travel and for his supposed immersion in Polynesian life. But he has long been regarded ambivalently, and in recent years both Gauguin's sexual behaviour, and his paintings, have been considered exploitative. Gauguin and Polynesia offers a fresh view on the artist, not from the perspective of European art history, but from the contemporary vantage point of the region – Oceania – which he so famously moved to. Gauguin's art is revealed, for the first time, to be richer and more eclectic than has been recognised. The artist indeed did invent enigmatic and symbolic images, but he also depicted Polynesia's colonial modernity, acknowledging the life of the time and the dignity and power of some of the Islanders he encountered. Gauguin and Polynesia neither celebrates nor condemns an extraordinary painter, who at times denounced and at other times affirmed the French empire that shaped his own life and the places he moved between. It is a revelation, of a formative artist of modern life, and of multicultural worlds in the making.

A study of the ways landscape was perceived in nineteenth-century Britain and France, this book draws on evidence from poetry, landscape gardens, spectacular public entertainments, novels and scientific works as well as paintings in order to develop its basic premise that landscape and the processes of perceiving it cannot be separated. Vision embraces panoramic seeing from high places, but also the seeing of ghosts and spectres when madness and hallucination impinge upon landscape. The rise of geology and the spread of empires upset the existing comfortable orders of comprehension of landscape. Reverie and imagination produced powerful interpretive actions, while landscape in French culture proved central to the rejection of conservative classicism in favour of perceptual questioning of experience. The experience of subjectivity proved central to the perception of landscape while the visual culture of landscape became of paramount importance to modernity during the period in question.

Vanishing paradise" offers a fresh take on the modernist primitivism of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the exoticism of the American John LaFarge, and the elite tourism of the American writer Henry Adams. Childs explores how these artists wrestled with the elusiveness of paradise and portrayed colonial Tahiti in ways both mythic and modern.

Although Vincent van Gogh's and Paul Gauguin's artistic collaboration in the south of France lasted no more than two months, their stormy relationship has continued to fascinate art historians, biographers, and psychoanalysts as well as film-makers and the general public. Van Gogh and Gauguin explores the artists' intertwined lives from a psychoana