Word: tahitians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...opium warlords in the nearby Golden Triangle, or catches the sense of Viet Nam as one floats along the Mekong. Other, less adventurous souls simply sink into one of Thailand's seaside dreams: Pattaya, the "sea, sand and sin" city just 90 minutes from Bangkok; or Phuket, a Tahitian strip of bungalows along the emerald-green Andaman Sea that is home to Club Med and a host of other beach resorts; or, for the bargain-seeking pleasure lover, the Crusoe simplicity of Ko Phangan, an island free of electricity, where beachside huts go for as little...
...early 1989 at the Grand Palais in Paris, is of this kind. When the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musee d'Orsay in Paris found they were all planning separate shows on different aspects of Gauguin -- his prints, his Brittany paintings and his Tahitian work -- it seemed obvious to merge the three. The result, thanks to its curators (Francoise Cachin and Claire Freches-Thory in France, Richard Brettell and Charles F. Stuckey in the U.S.), is both a curatorial masterpiece and the most complete view of its subject ever offered in a museum show...
...story of self-creation told by the early work is just as surprising as anything in his Tahitian years. By 1880 the Sunday painter in his 30s had become a tardy impressionist, imitating Pissarro's landscapes and Mary Cassatt's moppets. After ten years of work in Paris, Brittany and with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin was making his first real masterpieces, like The Ham, 1889, a still life that pays homage to Cezanne and Manet while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness, and Yellow Christ, 1889, with its startling extremes of yellow and orange. This painting of peasants...
...subsuming architecture, painting and sculpture -- hence the "Studio of the South Seas" that he set up in rue Vercingetorix in Paris after he got back from his first Pacific sojourn in 1893, and the "House of Pleasure," with its lewd carvings and mottoes, that he built in the Marquesas. Tahitian myth was as literal a gift from the gods to him as Valhalla had been to Wagner. Gauguin was no anthropologist but a romantic looking for pity and terror among the vestiges of a lost Golden Age. Certainly his flight to the Marquesas was inspired by a wide reaction against...
...incarnation drew to an end. Masons were finishing the limestone slabs on its wide steps up from the Quai Anatole France. On the parapet, a crane solicitously set down an allegorical bronze of Oceania by some 19th century pompier -- a colonial damsel with thick lips, melon breasts and a Tahitian war club, flanked by a kangaroo...