The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections

Colta Ives, Susan Alyson Stein, Charlotte Hale

ISBN 10: 0300093713 / ISBN 13: 9780300093711

Published by Metropolitan Museum of Art / Yale University Press, New York, 2002

About this Item

Blue cloth with glossy, color illustrated dust jacket, maps on flyleaves, 246 pp. with 88 bw and 134 color plates. Issued in conjunction with a 2002 exhibition of selected artwork by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), representing the places where he traveled and painted. Colorful illustrations. Seller Inventory # 103783

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York ...

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Yale University Press, New York

Publication Date: 2002

Binding: Hardbound

Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis:

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) was one of the most famous pioneers of Post-Impressionism. He had been a Parisian stockbroker, devoted family man, art collector, and Sunday painter for over a decade, when he set sail for the South Seas in 1891. Finding inspiration in the arts of ancient and primitive cultures, he began to create curiously abstract, vibrantly colored paintings and crude, carved reliefs. Few of these works were appreciated during Gauguin's lifetime, but their strange, innovative brilliance gradually became recognized and profoundly influenced twentieth-century art. This volume presents paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints by Gauguin that attest to his genius, all works drawn from public and private collections in New York, including more than fifty from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The text includes a consideration of Gauguin's exotic voyages and their reflections in his art; a history of the reception and appreciation of Gauguin's work on this shore of the Atlantic; and revelations arising from the recent examination of paintings in the Metropolitan Museum's collection. Each of Gauguin's works from these New York collections is in color with accompanying commentary.

Review:

His story is famous: brash Parisian banker-turned-artist leaves family to paint vivid scenes of indigenous people in Tahiti. Yet Paul Gauguin has been overlooked by the art world in recent decades. The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections, which accompanies a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition (through October 20, 2002), remedies this omission with lively overviews of his travels and innovative working methods, and more than 200 reproductions of his paintings, drawings, prints, and wood carvings. Gauguin's fascination with "primitive" cultures and blocky, simplified figures began during sojourns to Brittany in the late 1880s. A visit to Martinique whetted his appetite for tropical settings, and in 1891 he set sail for the South Pacific. Numerous excerpts from Gauguin's self-aggrandizing letters and other writings reveal the intense pleasures he found far from home: "I muse on violent harmonies amid the intoxicating fragrances of nature." --Cathy Curtis