Author(s): Laura Cosendey

Art Craft Photography

Otherness and exploitation in the fraught oeuvre of Post-Impressionism's canonical painter

This book accompanies the first exhibition to investigate Paul Gauguin's (1848-1903) relationship with the question of alterity and the exoticizing of otherness in his paintings. Adopting an engagingly critical tone, Paul Gauguin: The Other and I deals with central questions within the celebrated Post-Impressionist's oeuvre, focusing on both his self-portraits and his works produced in Tahiti.
Alongside reproductions of relevant works, the book also features essays that examine the tensions between Gauguin's biography and the image that the artist assiduously created of himself, as well as the way in which his oeuvre reinforced an imaginary about otherness, addressing crucial and current issues such as the notion of primitivism, the "exotic" and the "tropics," and cultural appropriation, as well as matters related to the erotization of the female body, sexuality and androgyny.