Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Synthesizing Gauguin: A Comparative Look At Cultural Contexts And Gauguin’S Tahitian Paintings, Joanna Miller

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

When a plethora of primary sources exist from an artist, a tendency persists for the art historian to focus on an artist’s personality when analyzing or interpreting that artist’s work. In the case of Paul Gauguin and his Tahitian works, his personality faults, extreme character, and uncouth notions and motivations become the concentration of much scholarship and can lead to a misjudgment of the artist’s depiction of the Tahitian natives and culture. This paper examines how Gauguin represented a foreign peoples and met the goals he pursued under Primitivism, Symbolism, and Synthetism by analyzing the cultural contexts of Fin-de-siecle France …